Chris Kulczycki
has written a cogent diary on The Winds of Change in Iraq, read it
thoroughly. Pain is an effective
schoolmaster. Some sense has been beaten into Bush and his
crew.
Today's diary is an extended response to his wise words. This shift has
been underway for a long time and should come as zero surprise to
anyone studying this problem. The USA, as I have said elsewhere,
has alternately bullied and cosseted the Sunnis, and lured them into
the political process with blatant payoffs and concessions. This
is, in fact, a return to the policies of Jay Garner, the American
general who set up shop with the SF in the Kurdish areas after Gulf War
One, and is an entirely sensible concession to the political realities
of Iraq. .
The Bush administration grew tired of Garner's techniques of endless
palaver, which had endeared him to the Iraqis of all flavors, and
replaced him with a Man of Action, that pathetic buffoon Bremer.
The policy of Marja Sistani and Shiites generally has advocated a
unified non-confessional
religiously tolerant Iraq. Bremer did not heed Sistani's wise
advice,
and there has been hell to pay
Iraq's elections, as I reported in
yesterday's diary, have not gone to
any one "fundamentalist" party in toto. The issue of Islamic law
is far more complex than the dreaded hudud laws: Iraq's forms of
Islam are not Deobandi or Wahhabi, and have surprisingly little impact
on the lives of ordinary Iraqis. The Kurds are barely Muslims at all,
and their sects are generally considered idolatrous. I am a
particular fan of the Kurdish culture and their Qadiri and Naqshbandi
forms of Sufism, a holdout of a far more ancient religion,
Zoroastrianism, which would affect all forms of mystical Christianity,
Judaism and Islam. For centuries, Baghdad had the largest
community of Jews in the world. It was not the Islamists who
drove out the Jews, it was the secular Ba'athists, who are equivalent
to Nazis, as I have said before. The politicization of Islam is a
modern thing, for centuries, Islam was
its laws, and little more. It is true Islam has now become highly
political, but this phenomenon appears in the USA, witness the
ludicrous Intelligent Design debate, and the Prayer Breakfasts, so
fashionable in our own fair land. True, Religion may attempt to
meddle in
politics but history has more generally shown the politicians wrapping
themselves in the borrowed mantle of Religion to buttress their own
stances.
Saddam turned to Islamic rhetoric only when his war against Iran was
going badly. It was never terribly sincere. Saddam's own
Islam was highly suspect: he had an entire Qu'ran lettered in his
own blood, drawn from his veins over several months. This curious
artifact was on display for years, and still exists, I am told.
There's just one problem, Islam has so many prohibitions against the
use of blood, especially human blood, Saddam's Qu'ran is an incredible
act of haram sacrilege. Saddam was a thoroughgoing secularist,
and murdered hundreds of Islamic scholars and clerics. We should
not be surprised to see the Iraqis turn to Islam as the bedrock
of their moral/political underpinning, Islam has been under
assault in Iraq since Ba'athism first appeared, this reaction is as
much an exercise in intellectual and religious freedom as anything
else, the Iraqis are exhilarated to finally declare their clan and
religious identity without fear of retribution. Wahhabism never
got a toehold in Iraq: Saddam killed off Wahhabism's missionaries
as they appeared. Sunnism was the official faith of the Ottoman
Empire, but it has
predictable decayed into factions, correlate the miserable doctrinal
debates of the Protestants to envision the state of affairs in the
Sunni religious community.
The Sunni "insurgency" is by no means a single thing, nor does it
represent Sunni policy in any substantive way. There are several
different insurgencies going on, all at once. I call it the Three
Insurgencies.
Insurgency One: everyone hates the Americans: the Sunnis hate
them because they overthrew Saddam. They are fearful. The
Kurds are not exactly pleased with the Americans, for now they look
like American toadies. The Shii hate the USA most of all:
they once rose against Saddam at the urging of the USA and were
slaughtered for their trouble. Now the Shii view the Americans
with contempt for failing to secure Iraq: especially the Oct 25
bombing of a Shiite mosque, killing 25 and wounding more than 80.
The Shii have endured some godawful treatment after the invasion, only
their strong leadership has kept the ordinary Shii from rising in
entirely justifiable revenge.
Insurgency Two: the Zarqawi-esque terrorism, now widely
discredited. This second insurgency is in serious trouble, in
Maoist terms, they have lost the support of the peasants. The
Iraqis will not become the tools of terrorists, as the unfortunate
Palestinians became the pawns of Arafat: there is too much to
lose. See Insurgency One
Insurgency Three, the last, and least understood insurgency is the one
within the Sunni and Shii clans: you didn't really think they
were monolithic entities, did you? Well of course not.
There are at least a dozen major Sunni clans, and no less than fifty
subclans. The Sunni sheikhs have come,
hat in hand,
to do their deals with the oil-rich Kurds, and mend fences after
Saddam's policy of evicted Kurds and installing Sunnis. Stern
warnings against election violence were issued from the Sunni
camps: though they may quite properly hate the American soldiers,
especially in towns like Ramadi, the Sunnis are far too integrated into
Iraqi society to ever demand more than political coexistence. The
Sunni sheikhs are no fools. The Shii factions have been killing
each other forever. The murder of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq
al-Sadr, Moktada Sadr's father, in 1999 was followed by the murder
of Ayatollah Majid al-Khoei in April of 2003. The Americans
were too stupid to see what was happening: arrest warrants were
not issied until August of 2003. The Americans may have defeated
Moktada Sadr's Mahdi Army, but they left Moktada Sadr to create more
trouble. To a lesser extent, the Kurds have been feuding among
themselves, too.
The USA has until quite recently stupidly conflated the Three
Insurgencies. Thanks to Zalmay Khalilzad and other wise heads,
we're finally sussing these insurgencies out. The Sunnis cannot
be extirpated any more than Saddam could extirpate his enemies in
toto. We have learned to our lasting disgrace in places like
Ramadi and Fallujah, we cannot really do away with Insurgency Two:
confronted in battle, the Zarqawis of this wicked world run away,
leaving the wretched townspeople to endure our attacks with white
phosphorus and 500 pound bombs. Such hamhanded tactics only feed
Insurgency One.
Insurgency Three is absolutely beyond our control, and is best solved
in poliical terms. The USA has quite inadvertently solved
Insurgency Three through the elections, even a blind pig may find an
acorn from time to time.
The Three Insurgencies can be coopted into the broader geopolitical
strategies of the United States quite neatly. By enabling an
honest debate among the Iraqi factions, and the creation of a free
press, the USA has set in motion a juggernaut of genuine reform in
Iraq. Today's Arab headlines are breathlessly reporting the Iraqi
demands for a new honest election. The commentary from Al Ahram,
Egypt's largest state controlled media outlet is slyly intimating the
Arab world's most populous nation should do the same.
Egypt's status-quo party system is completely irrelevant. It's
time for grass roots democracy in the Arab world, even if it wears the
face of Islamic parties like the Muslim brotherhood. It's a
damned good start, and we should not fear it overmuch. We have more to fear from backing the status-quo.