History Forum / General / British History / January 2007

Fouad Ajami on The American Iraq.

Perceptive -- And Essential Reading -- For The Cognoscenti.

Multi-Textured & Written By Someone Who Actually Knows What He Is Talking
About & Who Speaks, Reads & Writes Arabic -- Contra Pogue Gans.

DSH
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<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fouad_Ajami>
Fouad Ajami (Arabic:فؤاد عجمی; b. September 9, 1945) is a Lebanese-born American university professor and the Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University. Ajami was a 1982 winner of a five-year MacArthur Prize Fellowship in the arts and sciences. He is arguably one of the most politically influential Arab-American intellectuals of his generation, and has been an advisor to United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as well as a friend and colleague of Deputy United States Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Ajami is a member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Board of Advisors of the journal Foreign Affairs. Ajami also sits on the editorial board of Middle East Quarterly, a publication of the Middle East Forum think tank.

In recent years, Ajami has been an outspoken supporter of the Iraq War, of whose "nobility" he believes there "can be no doubt", which has drawn some criticism from others in academia.

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Of COURSE -- because he is NOT a Knee-Jerk, Angry Loony-Left, College Professor Like Our Own Pet Marmot -- Pogue Gans The Chemist.

DSH
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AT WAR

The American Iraq
Not the stuff of glory, but with a power and legitimacy all its own.

BY FOUAD AJAMI
Tuesday, January 30, 2007

So this government in Baghdad, fighting for its life, has not mastered even
the grim science of the gallows, and has no knowledge of the "drop charts"
used for hangings around the world. The Tikritis had been much better at
this sort of thing. They had all the time in the world to perfect the skills
and techniques of terror; they had done it against the background of
relative indifference by outside powers. And they had the indulgence of the
neighboring Arabs who gave their warrant to all that played out in Iraq
under the Tikriti despotism.

Pity those men now hunkered down in Baghdad as they walk a fine, thin line
between the yearning for justice and retribution in their land, and the
scrutiny of the outside world. In the annals of Arab history, the Shia have
been strangers to power, rebels and dissidents and men on the run hunted
down by official power. Now the ground has shifted in Baghdad, and an Arab
world steeped in tyranny reproaches a Shia-led government sitting atop a
volcano. America's "regional diplomacy"--the name for our earnest but futile
entreaties to the Arab rulers--will not reconcile the Arab regimes to the
rise of the Shia outcasts.

In the fullness of time, the Arab order of power will have to come to a
grudging acceptance of the order sure to take hold in Baghdad. This is a
region that respects the prerogatives of power. It had once resisted the
coming to power of the Alawites in Syria and then learned to accommodate
that "heretical" minority sect and its conquest of Damascus; the Shia path
in Iraq will follow that trajectory, and its justice is infinitely greater
for it is the ascendancy of a demographic majority, through the weight of
numbers and the ballot box. Of all Arab lands, Iraq is the most checkered, a
frontier country at the crossroads of Arabia, Turkey and Persia. The Sunni
Arabs in Iraq and beyond have never accepted the diversity of that land. The
"Arabism" of the place was synonymous with their own primacy. Now a
binational state in all but name (Arab and Kurdish) has come into being in
Iraq, and the Shia underclass have stepped forth and staked a claim
commensurate with the weight of their numbers. The Sunni Arabs have recoiled
from this change in their fortunes. They have all but "Persianized" the Shia
of Iraq, branded them as a fifth column of the state next door. Contemporary
Islamism has sharpened this feud, for to the Sunni Islamists the Shia are
heretics at odds with the forbidding strictures of the Islamists' fanatical
variant of the faith.

Baghdad, a city founded by the Abbasid Caliph al-Mansour in 762, was sacked
by the Mongols in 1258: The invaders put it to the sword, and dumped its
books and libraries in the Tigris. In the (Sunni) legend, a Shia minister by
the name of Ibn Alqami had opened the gates of the city to the invaders.

History never relents here. In a commentary that followed the execution of
Saddam, a Palestinian commentator in the West Bank city of Jenin wrote in a
pan-Arab daily in London that a descendant of Ibn Alqami (read Nouri
al-Maliki) had put to death a descendant of al-Mansour.

These kinds of atavisms cannot be conciliated. The truth of Iraq will assert
itself on the ground, but the age of Sunni monopoly on power has passed. One
of Iraq's most respected scholar-diplomats, Hassan al-Alawi, has put the
matter in stark terms.

It is proper, he said, to speak of an "American Iraq" as one does of a
Sumerian, a Babylonian, an Abbasid, an Ottoman, and then a British Iraq.
******

BINGO!  -- DSH

Where Iraq in the age of the Pax Britannica rested on an "Anglo-Sunni"
regime, this new Iraq, in the time of the Americans, is by the logic of
things an American-Shia regime.

The militant preachers railing against the fall of Baghdad to an alliance of
the "American crusaders" and the "Shia heretics" are the bearers of a dark,
but intensely felt conviction.

We should not be apologetic, in Arab lands seething with bigotry
and rage, about our expedition into Iraq. We shouldn't fall for Arab rulers
who tell us that they would have had the ability to call off the furies had
we had in place a "process" for resolving the claims of the Palestinians,
and had we been able to "deliver" Israel.

BINGO!  -- DSH

Those furies have a life of their own: In truth, they are aided and abetted
by these same rulers in the hope of tranquilizing their own domains and
buying off the embittered in their midst.

The Sunni Arab regimes, it has to be noted, are not of one mind on Iraq.

Curiously, the Arab state most likely to make peace with the new reality of
Iraq is Saudi Arabia; those most hostile are the Jordanians, the Egyptians
and the Palestinians.

The Saudi monarch, King Abdullah, has read the wind
with accuracy; he has a Shia minority in his domain, in the oil-bearing
lands of the Eastern Province, and he seems eager to cap the Wahhabi volcano
in the Najdi heartland of his kingdom.

There is pragmatism in that realm, and the place lives by its own coin. In
contrast, Jordan and Egypt present the odd spectacle of countries heavily
invested in an anti-Shia drive but with no Shia citizenry in their midst.

The two regimes derive a good measure of their revenues from "strategic
rent"-- the aid of foreign powers, the subsidies of Pax Americana to be
exact.

PRECISELY!  -- DSH

The threat of Shiism is a good, and lucrative, scarecrow for the rulers in
Cairo and Amman. The promise of standing sentry in defense of the Sunni
order is what these two regimes have to offer both America and the oil
states.

The Palestinians, weaker in the scale of power and with troubles of their
own, are in the end of little consequence to the strategic alignment in the
region. But to the extent that their "street" and their pundits matter, they
can be counted upon to view the rise of this new Iraq with reserve and
outright hostility.

For six decades, the Palestinians have had a virtual monopoly on pan-Arab
sentiments, and the Arabic-speaking world indulged them. Iraq--its wounds,
and the promise of its power and resources -- has been a direct challenge to
the Palestinians and to their conception of their place in the Arab scheme
of things. A seam is stitched in Palestinian society between its Muslim
majority and its minority Christian communities.  Palestinians have little
by way of exposure to the Shia. To the bitter end, the Palestinian street
remained enamored of Saddam Hussein. Iraq's Shia majority has returned the
favor, and has come to view the Palestinians and their cause with
considerable suspicion.

THAT's A KEY PARAGRAPH.  -- DSH

For our part, the Pax Americana has not been at peace with the Shia genie it
had called forth. We did not know the Shia to begin with; we saw them
through the prism of our experience with Iran. Moqtada al-Sadr in Baghdad
and Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut: This was the face of the new Shiism and we
were spooked by it. And we were susceptible as well to the representations
made to us by Arab rulers about the dangers of radical Shiism.

This was odd: We had been in the midst of a searing battle with al Qaeda and
the Taliban, zealous Sunni movements, but we were still giving credence to
the Arab warnings about the threat of Shiism. Nor were the Shia who would
finally claim power in Iraq possessed of an appreciable understanding of
American ways. Nouri al-Maliki speaks not a word of English; with years of
exile in Syria behind him, he was at considerable disadvantage in dealing
with the American presence in his country. He and the political class around
him lacked the traffic with American diplomacy that had seasoned their
counterparts in Cairo, Amman and the Arabian Peninsula. Without that
intimacy, they had been given to premonitions that America could yet strike
a bargain, at their expense, with the Sunni order of power.

It's a GOOD THING the Iraqi Shia FEAR that.  -- DSH

We held aloft the banner of democracy, but in recent months our faith in
democracy's possibilities in Iraq has appeared to erode, and this unnerves
the Shia political class. President Bush's setback in the congressional
elections gave the Iraqis legitimate cause for concern: Prime Minister
Maliki himself wondered aloud whether this was the beginning of a general
American retreat in Iraq.

And there was that brief moment when it seemed as
though the "realists" of the James Baker variety were in the midst of a
restoration. The Shia (and the Kurds) needed no deep literacy in strategic
matters to read the mind of Mr. Baker. His brand of realism was anathema to
people who tell their history in metaphors of justice and betrayal.

He was a known entity in Iraq; he had been the steward of American foreign policy when America walked away, in 1991, from the Kurdish and Shia rebellions it had called for.

Keep That In Mind.  -- DSH

The political class in Baghdad couldn't have known that the
Baker-Hamilton recommendations would die on the vine, and that President
Bush would pay these recommendations scant attention. The American position
was not transparent, and there were in the air rumors of retrenchment, and
thus legitimate Iraqi fears that the American presence in Baghdad could be
bartered away in some accommodation with the powers in Iraq's neighborhood.

GOOD!  They NEED to FEAR that.  FEAR is an Excellent Motivator for the Slackers & the Laggards.  -- DSH

These fears were to be allayed, but not put to rest, by the military "surge"
that President Bush announced in recent days. More than a military endeavor,
the surge can be seen as a declaration by the president that deliverance
would be sought in Baghdad, and not in deals with the rogues (Syria and
Iran) or with the Sunni Arab states. Prime Minister Maliki and the coalition
that sustains his government could not know for certain if this was the
proverbial "extra mile" before casting them adrift, or the sure promise that
this president would stay with them for the remainder of his time in office.

And they NEED to REMAIN UNSURE about that until they Get Their ACT Together and demonstrate RESULTS.  -- DSH

But there can be no denying that with the surge the landscape has altered in
Baghdad, and that Mr. Bush is invested in the Maliki government as never
before. Mr. Maliki's predecessor--a man who belongs to the same political
party and hails from the same traditional Shia political class--was forced
out of office by an American veto and Mr. Maliki could be forgiven his
suspicion that the Americans might try this again.

It was known that he had never taken to the American envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, and that he fully understood that American officials would rather have other Shia contenders in his post -- our old standby Ayad Allawi, the current vice president Adel Abdul Mahdi, both more worldly men at ease with American ways.  So if this is America's extra mile in Baghdad, it has to be traversed with a political leader whose abilities and intentions have been repeatedly called into question by American officials.

That's another KEY PARAGRAPH. -- DSH

This marriage of convenience may be the best that can be hoped for.  Mr. Maliki will not do America's bidding, and we should be grateful for his displays of independence.

INDEED!  He needs to build up DOMESTIC CREDIBILITY as well.  -- DSH

He straddles the fence between the things we want him to do--disarming the militias, walking away from Moqtada al-Sadr--and the requirements of political survival. We have been waiting for the Iraqis to assume responsibility for their own affairs and we should not be disconcerted when they take us at our word.  The messages put out by American officials now and then, that Mr. Maliki is living on borrowed time, and the administered leaks of warnings he has been given by President Bush, serve only to undermine whatever goals we seek in Baghdad.

With Saddam's execution, this prime minister has made himself a power in the
vast Shia mainstream. Having removed Ibrahim Jaafari from office last year,
the American regency is doomed to live with Mr. Maliki, for a policy that
attempts to unseat him is sure to strip Iraqis of any sense that they are
sovereign in their own country.

He cannot be granted a blank check, but no small measure of America's success in Iraq now depends on him. If he is to fall, the deed must be an affair of the Iraqis, and of the broad Shia coalition to be exact.

He may now be able to strike at renegade elements of the Mahdi Army, for that movement that once answered to Moqtada al-Sadr and carried his banners has splintered into gangs led by bandit warlords.

BINGO!  -- DSH

In our concern with Moqtada al-Sadr and the Mahdi Army, we ought to understand the reluctance of Mr. Maliki's ruling coalition to take on the Shia militias.

The terror inflicted on the Shia--an unrelenting affair of the last three
years--makes it extremely difficult for a Shia-led government to disarm men
who pose as defenders of a community still under brutal siege.

Boldness and despair may have come together to carry forward this new drive
in Baghdad. Fear of failure often concentrates the mind, and President
Bush's policy could yet find its target right as the skeptics have written
off this whole project in Baghdad. Iraq has had its way of meting out
disappointments at every turn, but the tide of events appears to be working
in the president's favor.

INDEED!  Fear Of Failure Often Concentrates The Mind.  -- DSH

There is a "balance of terror" today between the Sunni and Shia
protagonists. More and more Sunni Arabs know that their old dominion is
lost, and that they had better take the offer on the table--a share of the
oil revenues, the promise that the constitution could be amended and
reviewed, access to political power and spoils in return for reining in the
violence and banishing the Arab jihadists.

The Shia, too, may have to come to a time of reckoning. Their old tormentor was sent to the gallows, and a kinsman of theirs did the deed with the seal of the state.  From the poor Shia slums of Baghdad, young avengers answered the Sunni campaign of terror with brutal terror of their own. The old notion--once dear to the Sunnis, and to the Shia a nagging source of fear and shame--that the Sunnis of Iraq were a martial race while the Shia were marked for lamentations and political quiescence has been broken for good.

KEY PARAGRAPH.  Read It Again. -- DSH

The country has been fought over, and a verdict can already be
discerned--rough balance between its erstwhile Sunni rulers and its Shia
inheritors, and a special, autonomous life for the Kurds.

Against all dire expectations, the all-important question of the distribution of oil wealth appears close to a resolution. The design for sharing the bounty is a "federal" one that strikes a balance between central government and regional claimants. The nightmare of the Sunni Arabs that they would be left stranded in regions of sand and gravel has been averted.

This is the country midwifed by American power.

BINGO!  And NO other NATION on EARTH could have DONE it.  -- DSH

We were never meant to stay there long.  Iraq will never approximate the expectations we projected onto it in more innocent times.

But we should be able to grant it the gift of acceptance, and yet another dose of patience as it works its way out of its current torments.  It is said that much of the war's nobility has drained out of it, and that we now fight not to lose, and to keep intact our larger position in the oil lands of the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf.

No One Intelligent, Well-Educated and Well-Informed Ever Expected Iraq to turn into a JEFFERSONIAN DEMOCRACY.  -- DSH

This may not be the stuff of glory, but it has power and legitimacy all its
own.

BINGO!  -- DSH

Mr. Ajami is a 2006 recipient of the Bradley Prize, teaches at Johns Hopkins
and is author of "The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the
Iraqis in Iraq" (Free Press, 2006).