Hope in Iraq

As suggested, if we want a better sense of what to do in Iraq, it makes sense to listen to Fouad Ajami, to whom PBS did talk to as part of its “America at the Crossroads” series. Ajami has recently returned from Iraq. This is what he found:

A traveler who moves between Baghdad and Washington is struck by the gloomy despair in Washington and the cautious sense of optimism in Baghdad. . . the sense of deliverance, and the hopes invested in this new security plan, are palpable. . . there can be discerned, through the acrimony, the emergence of a fragile consensus. . . Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. . . has come into his own. He had not been a figure of the American regency in Baghdad. Steeped entirely in the Arabic language and culture, he had a been a stranger to the Americans; fate cast him on the scene when the Americans pushed aside Mr. Maliki's colleague in the Daawa Party, Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari. . .

Mr. Maliki had taken [Saddam’s] execution as a warrant for a new accommodation with the Sunni political class. A lifelong opponent of the Baath, he had come to the judgment that the back of the apparatus of the old regime had been broken, and that the time had come for an olive branch to those ready to accept the new political rules. . . he is increasingly independent of the diehards in his own coalition--another dividend of the high-profile executions of Saddam Hussein and three of the tyrant's principal lieutenants. He is surrounded by old associates drawn from the Daawa Party, but keeps his own counsel.

. . .the Sunnis have lost the battle for Baghdad. The great flight from Baghdad to Jordan, to Syria, to other Arab destinations, has been the flight of Baghdad's Sunni middle-class. It is they who had the means of escape, and the savings. . . [A]mong the Sunnis there is a widespread sentiment of disinheritance and loss. . . As matters stand, the Sunni Arabs are in desperate need of leaders who can call off the violence, cut a favorable deal for their community, and distance that community form the temptations and the ruin of the insurgency.. . . In their grief, the Sunni Arabs have fallen back on the most unexpected of hopes; having warred against the Americans, they now see them as redeemers.

Of the Shiites, Ajami writes:

the Shia Arabs had never governed--and Mr. Maliki and the coalition arrayed around him know their isolation in the region. This Iraqi state of which they had become the principal inheritors will have to make its way in a hostile regional landscape. . .

The Mahdi Army, more precisely the underclass of Sadr City, had won the fight for Baghdad. [Now] perhaps [it’s] time for the boys of Moqtada al-Sadr to step aside in favor of the government forces. . . There is a growing Shia unease with the Mahdi Army--and with the venality and incompetence of the Sadrists represented in the cabinet--and an increasing faith that the government and its instruments of order are the surer bet. . . To the extent that the Shia now see Iraq as their own country, their tolerance for mayhem and chaos has receded. . . It hasn't been always brilliant, this campaign waged in Iraq. . . But this current re-alignment in Iraq carries with it a gift for the possible redemption of modern Islam among the Arabs. . . A Shia-led state in Baghdad--with a strong Kurdish presence in it and a big niche for the Sunnis--can go a long way toward changing the region's terrible habits and expectations of authority and command.