Fouad Ajami On Iraq

Fouad Ajami marvels at the "naivete" and "innocence" of the American project in Iraq. I think he should marvel more at the mismanagement and miscalculations of the post-war pre-insurrectionary US policymakers like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and L. Paul Bremer, to mention three of the most culpable and malfeasant.

Fouad came from a Shi'ite family originally from South Lebanon, but even further back from Iran ["Ajami" means "Persian" in Arabic], so his thoughts on the new Shi'ite ascendency in Iraq are particularly insightful:

The case against the war makes much of Iran's new power in Iraq. To the war critics, President Bush has midwifed a second Islamic republic in Iraq, next door to Iran. But Iran cannot run away with Iraq, and talk of an ascendant Iran in Iraqi affairs is overblown. We belittle the Iraqi Shiites--their sense of home, and of a tradition so thoroughly Iraqi and Arab--when we write them off as instruments of Iran. Inevitably, there is Iranian money in Iraq, and there are agents, but this is the logic of the 900-mile Iranian-Iraqi border.

True, in the long years of Tikriti/Saddamist dominion, Shiite political men persecuted by the regime sought sanctuary in Iran; a political party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and its military arm, the Badr Brigade, rose in those years with Iranian patronage. But the Iraqi exiles are not uniform in their attitudes toward Iran. Exile was hard, and the Iranian hosts were given to arrogance and paternalism. Iraqi exiles were subordinated to the strategic needs of the Iranian regime. Much is made, and appropriately, of the way the Americans who prosecuted the first Gulf War called for rebellions by the Shiites (and the Kurds), only to walk away in indifference as the Saddam regime struck back with vengeance. But the Iranians, too, averted their gaze from the slaughter. States are merciless, the Persian state no exception to that rule.

We should not try to impose more order and consensus on the world of Shiite Iraq than is warranted by the facts. In recent days a great faultline within the Shiites could be seen: The leader of the Supreme Council for the Revolution in Iraq, Sayyid Abdulaziz al-Hakim, has launched a big campaign for an autonomous Shiite federated unit that would take in the overwhelmingly Shiite provinces in the south and the middle Euphrates, but this project has triggered the furious opposition of Hakim's nemesis, the young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Hakim's bid was transparent. He sought to be the uncrowned king of a Shiite polity. But he was rebuffed. Sadr was joined in opposition to that scheme by the Daawa Party of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, by the Virtue Party, and by those secular Shiites who had come into the national assembly with former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. A bitter struggle now plays out in the Shiite provinces between the operatives of the Badr Brigade and Sadr's Mahdi Army. The fight is draped in religious colors--but it is about the spoils of power.

A recent article by the New York Times claims that Moqtada al-Sadr is losing part of his militia which is peeling off into ad-hoc Death Squads. This bodes ill for any reconciliation in the near future. Also very troubling is PM al-Maliki's close ties to the al-Sadr contingent in the elected Iraqi government. Fouad ends with a coda dismissing the importance of Iranian influence over a Shi'ite-led Iraq:

For their part, the Iranians will press on: The spectacle of power they display is illusory. It is a broken society over which the mullahs rule. A society that throws on the scene a leader of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's derangement is not an orderly land; foreigners may not be able to overthrow that regime, but countries can atrophy as their leaders--armed, here, by an oil windfall of uncertain duration--strut on the world stage. Iran's is a deeper culture than Iraq's, possessed of a keen sense of Persia's primacy in the region around it. What Iranians make of their own history will not wait on the kind of society that will emerge in Iraq. On the margins, a scholarly tradition in Najaf given to moderation could be a boon to the clerics of Iran. But the Iranians will not know deliverance from the sterility of their world if Iraq were to fail. Their schadenfreude over an American debacle in Iraq will have to be brief. A raging fire next door to them would not be pretty. And, crafty players, the Iranians know what so many in America who guess at such matters do not: that Iraq is an unwieldy land, that the Arab-Persian divide in culture, language and temperament is not easy to bridge.

At the same time, the only thing worse than staying in Iraq until a resolution would be to leave Iraq in a state of anarchy:

We needn't give credence to the assertion of President Bush--that the jihadists would turn up in our cities if we pulled up stakes from Baghdad --to recognize that a terrible price would be paid were we to opt for a hasty and unseemly withdrawal from Iraq. This is a region with a keen eye for the weakness of strangers. The heated debate about the origins of our drive into Iraq would surely pale by comparison to the debate that would erupt--here and elsewhere--were we to give in to despair and cast the Iraqis adrift.

Bush and his subordinates have taken far longer and over a much more nasty set of road bumps---often by poor navigating on their part---than they expected. But let's leave the place in a reasonable state of order. Or else Iraq will be an historical landmark of American lack of leadership and will.