Let me write about an Iraq that exists as more than a reflection of our anger and outrage at the Bush Administration; an Iraq that existed before the invasion, and will continue after the last US troops leave. I'll slip in some comments on where the US has gone wrong - no surprise there - but I'll also present a perspective on Iraq that is perhaps not as unrelentingly pessimistic as most diaries here on DailyKos. I read a front-page diary about how an Israeli military official had told settlers on the West Bank that the US should have left Saddam in power. The diary frustrated me, but the internet connection was too slow to respond. Who cares what an Israeli army officer has to say about Iraq, especially to a bunch of illegal settlers on Palestinian land? If this is what passes for expert opinion in our Daily Kos community, then surely there is room for more comments from Americans in Iraq. I'm a donkey in the desert, and donkeys are better adapted to conditions here than elephants. It's time I started writing diaries.
More below...
A storm passed across Iraq today, drenching the wheat fields around Mosul and dumping snow on the mountains of Kurdistan. The storm came on like some apparition from ancient Mesopotamian mythology; deep chocolate brown clouds kicked up a cloud of dust, and then the sky turned deep slate blue as heavy cold rain turned everything to mud. Small wet men in baggy pants and donkeys turned their backs to the rain. It flooded part of Tuz Khurmatu, a large town or small city of about 100,000. Tuz lies in the broken plains between the mountains and the river, between settled agricultural land and the desert, and is populated by a mixture of peoples thrown together by an almost unimaginably complicated history. Like nearby Kirkuk, Tuz is a microcosm of Iraq. The town is divided between Kurds, who have been in the area since they helped destroy the Assyrian empire in 660 BC, Turkomen, who entered the area at the time of Timurleng (Tamurlane) in the 15th century, and Arabs, who drifted northward from the desert and the rivers over the last couple hundred years. Further complicating matters is the fact that the town includes adherents to both the Shia' and Sunni branches of Islam, from each of the major ethnic groups, as well as persons who were either forced into the area by Saddam, or came voluntarily to occupy land of the many families who were deported in 1988 when all of the villages around Tuz were razed. Many of the people swept up at that time in the Anfal campaign - mostly Kurdish, but also some Turkmen - were loaded onto trucks and driven south into the desert. They were never heard from again. Tuz harbors fierce inter-communal rage on the one hand, and a long tradition of different ethnicities living side by side on the other. It is the sort of place where either civil war or peace could break out.
Tuz is also the sort of place that doesn't make the news. The media and most diaries here focus on the Baghdad and ignore the periphery, where change is happening. Except for a bombing attack on a Shia' mosque and a suicide attack against a restaurant, I have heard or read nothing about the city in any news reporting or security briefing even though some of our staff tell me there have been other periodic attacks that do not make the news. Tuz lies along the main road between the oil city of Kirkuk and Baghdad, but it has no permanent US troop presence. US convoys speed along the highway, forcing drivers off the road, but they rarely stop. The residents of Tuz have little interaction with the occupation - no substantive assistance, no military sweeps, no building projects, and the US has little real awareness of what goes on in the city. The military presence consists of Kurdish peshmerga forces of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Their leader, Jalal Talabani, is now President of Iraq. Talabani has pursued a deliberate policy of encouraging the Kurds to return to the lands from which they were expelled - including Kirkuk and Tuz Khurmatu - but has done a fairly good job of reigning in the more nationalistic and pissed-off elements in the Kurdish political spectrum, who would like to push the Arabs and Turkmen out of these tense border lands. Talabani is obese and in his 70's. Unlike Sharon, he actually is the indispensable Fat Man of Peace. A socialist and moderate, he is to the left of many others in the line of succession within his party. People joke about Talabani's immoderate love of turkey (the bird, not the nation). He is credited for having reduced the spread of bird flu by eating all of the turkeys in the area.
We read a lot of stories about the incompetence of the Iraqi army, but the peshmerga are not to be messed with. They are disciplined, motivated and formidable, second only to the American behemoth in terms of strength. Without them, the nascent Iraqi army could not function. But this comes with a price - even in ethnically mixed Iraqi army units, the Kurds answer to their political leadership. That leadership has proved to be more or less responsible, and one of the reasons there is not a full-scale civil war is that the Kurds have acted with restraint. As I vacillate between fear that a wider civil war may yet come, and hope that the Iraqis will eventually find a way to co-exist, the experience of Tuz gives me some hope for the future. The PUK has not engaged in mass deportations of Arabs or Turkmen, and there's been no Balkan style meltdown. Instead, the violence has been more focused and less noticeable. The insurgents exhibit their trademark brutality, sending a dupe to blow himself up in a restaurant. The peshmerga respond in kind by capturing, torturing and sometimes killing people they suspect of being with the insurgents. Like much of rural Iraq, the war in Tuz is not a constant, crushing burden, but a matter of uncertainty; occasional violent, unpredictable events punctuated by long periods of tranquility. Tuz lies midway along a continuum between the prosperity and peace of Suleymaniya and the poverty and violence of Baghdad. A sort of equilibrium is being reached: The Turkmen are realizing that their status will not materially diminish now that the PUK is calling the shots rather than Saddam. The Arabs are realizing that the Kurds are not going to massacre them, despite a grim history between the two peoples and ample provocation. Neither Arab nor Turkmen communities are happy with the new reality, but the US needs to back off a little and let this gradual process of accommodation continue. A large US force does have some impact on encouraging moderation on the part of militias and the leaders - either in the south or in the north - but the US military's role should be to remain just over the horizon and out of sight in areas like Tuz where things are neither getting worse nor improving. The US can pull back to its bases, reduce its numbers considerably, and spend less time kicking up dust and tempting bomb-makers with the endless convoys along the main road through Tuz.
Here's why all this verbiage about Tuz is relevant to DailyKos: There is a very good chance that Iraq will not be in full-scale civil war in 2006 or 2008, and things may very well improve or at least stabilize in large parts of the country, even if the insurgency is likely to continue. The doomsday predictions on Iraq have not come true. The scale of conflict is less than in the Balkan wars, not more - despite the fact that similar factors could easily have led to a conflict much larger and more intense than what happened in Yugoslavia. Places like Tuz illustrate why we Democrats should be a little cautious of claiming defeat in Iraq, despite one disastrous Bush administration mistake after another. The Bush Administration is always shifting the goalposts on the definition of "success", and they will proclaim a half-formed Iraq in transition as a success and chide us for defeatism. I think we should be precise and explicit in terms of defining their failures. Rather than call Iraq a defeat, and use the rhetoric of total meltdown, or Iranian takeover, or other such exaggerations, we Democrats should focus on Iraq as a concrete example of astounding GOP profligacy and incompetence. This is NOLA writ large. NOLA is what happens when you put people who hate government in charge of government. Iraq is what happens when you put people who hate nation building in charge of nation building. There's the tremendous expense, corruption, lies, scornful unilateralism, shifting rationales, contractor scandals, unconscionable US use of torture, gross financial mismanagement and inefficiency, ignorance of Iraqi history, and Halliburton profiteering. Aren't those specific enough failures? That should be enough fodder for a dozen election cycles. But please, people, we won't win over voters by proclaiming a US defeat - especially when it is not at all clear to this particular Democrat on the ground that we are defeated.
We won't win over voters by blaming the Iraqis, either. All these posts about the new government being just like the old one gloss over the incredible bravery of so many Iraqis, and the restraint exercised by so many Iraqi leaders. Sistani and Talabani have prevented a civil war so far, and they deserve the Nobel Prize, not our cynicism and scorn. Trust me (and Juan Cole), people in the US have no clue how much worse Iraq could be. So what if Mishan al-Jibouri stole money to protect the oil pipeline and then sent his men to blow it up at night? He's a Sunni shaykh and the US pressed for his inclusion in the government, despite the fact that he and his people support the insurgency. Of course he is going to game the system and enrich himself. What did the US think? But consider the Iraqi government's response: they indicted him and he fled to Syria. Had this happened under Saddam, al-Jibouri would have been fed into a wood chipper and all of his villages bulldozed. (In 1992, Saddam had a Jibouri general shot for treason. The next morning I witnessed hundreds of terrified Jibouris camping in tents in Kurdistan, fearful that they would be executed for being his relatives.) So yes, there is some progress. People are negotiating, assessing relative strength, and sorting out a system in very old-school middle-eastern way. That process goes on behind closed doors and is hardly democratic, but that's the way business is done here. Khalilzad understands this much better than Bremer or Negroponte, and despite my reluctance to say anything nice at all about the Bush Administration, this particular appointment was smarter than most. (I don't know about you, but I tend to go a little easier on foreign-born Republicans - there is usually some trauma or mitigating factor in their choice of political affiliation.) Lord knows after three decades of insanity followed by three years of Bush administration blunders, it is a miracle that this country has neither a dictatorship nor a full-scale civil war. In the upcoming campaigns, I would avoid claiming that Iraq is a total loss. The only thing that's a "total loss" is our federal budget deficit, and we know where to put the blame for that.
One final lesson from Tuz - don't assume that the US has no positive role to play in Iraq, provided we finally get a competent government at home. Contrary to what you often read, the US is not uniformly hated. If we had an assistance program in Iraq that was efficient and effective, rather than the train wreck we have now, we could still foster positive change here. I still don't know how "liberal" became a dirty word, and "nation-building" is something we should be proud of as Democrats. Remember the Marshall Plan? The US stabilized Iraqi Kurdistan and the Balkans during the Clinton Administration, and we Democrats need to stop for a minute and reflect on what a truly competent government can accomplish. Kurdistan is the one unqualified success story in Iraq. It started as a gutted, impoverished landscape of a million homeless people camped on thousands of destroyed villages, passed through a period of internecine conflict (which Clinton helped resolve) and is now a prosperous, safe and pro-western quasi-nation of 5 million people, bigger than Israel. That's due more to Clinton's diplomacy and perseverance than anything either of the Bushes have done. Tuz drifts halfway between Kurdistan's sense of optimism, and Baghdad's sense of despair. It needs a nudge in the right direction. We need a patient, multilateral, Clinton-style approach to nation building in Iraq, not a petulant Boy King who flings around billions of dollars, whines when things don't go his way and threatens to cut off all assistance. We Democrats know how to do this. We like government, and we govern competently. This is as true in Iraq as in America, and we should not be the party to give up on Iraq. I hope to write more in a future diary about why it is important that we continue humanitarian and reconstruction assistance, but also how we can do it more effectively and efficiently.
Well, this has been more political analysis than a postcard from Iraq. I tried to avoid discussing the issue of whether we should have invaded in the first place, because there have been thousands of diaries and comments on that already. From my small-scale view here, the only thing that really matters to me is that fewer people end up dead, and that the future here is better than the past. I'm respectful of different opinions and I have the sense that I'll get them in the comments section. Just don't equate me with Joe Lieberman - I've got a thick skin, but that's just too insulting.