Iraqis are not ready for democracy; it was an error for Bush ever to imagine that the U.S. could impose Western values on an Arab (or Muslim) state.
As for the notion that democracy is incompatible with Islam, tell it to the hundreds of millions of Muslims in Turkey, India, Indonesia, and Europe who have embraced it. As for the notion that democracy is inappropriate for Arabs, the enthusiasm with which the liberal elite that insists on the universality of its own moral relativism engages in such overtly racist argumentation is astounding. More concretely, the millions of Iraqis who risked their lives to vote in previous elections and the polls showing that upwards of 90 percent of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs intend to vote in upcoming provincial elections suggest that Iraqis don’t agree. Many of the other counts of the inevitability argument spring from some version of this hyper-sophisticated racist viewpoint — Iraqis are too corrupt for legitimate government; they won’t fight because they’re weak, lazy, or just would rather have us do it; they won’t take responsibility for their state or security; and so on. To each argument there is an on-the-ground rebuttal (like the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have died fighting al-Qaeda and Iranian-backed militias, for instance), but this talking point isn’t really about on-the-ground realities; it’s about preconceptions that can be very hard to sway.
Recent Progress Really Has Little To Do with the Surge Anyway
This has become one of the favorite talking points of the antiwar party, and it has three major components:
The Anbar Awakening began before the surge, had nothing to do with the surge, and will continue (or not) with or without U.S. forces present. This argument is a bit like saying that the French people, finally tiring of the Nazis’ occupation, rose up of their own accord in 1944, engaging in increasing partisan and insurgent activities culminating with the re-appearance of the Free French military units that liberated Paris — and that none of this had anything to do with the Normandy invasion, since the Free French movement and partisan activity within France predated that invasion. One interesting thing about this argument is that it requires a real detachment from the scene to believe in — Anbaris don’t say this, American troops and leaders who were in Anbar in 2006 don’t say it, Americans who oversaw the full blossoming of the Awakening in 2007 don’t say it. It’s a good argument to make from 6,000 miles away, but it isn’t true. Resistance to al-Qaeda in Iraq’s presence had been growing steadily throughout 2005 and 2006, and local leaders had begun both developing resistance movements and reaching out to Coalition forces for help before the surge. But al-Qaeda in Iraq had responded with fearsome brutality that greatly slowed and restricted the speed and scope of the movement. American forces in Ramadi in 2006 fought hard to establish the preconditions in the city for a clearing operation that would make possible the dramatic turn of the tribes in 2007, but they were not able to conduct that operation until reinforcements arrived with the surge. The exponential expansion of the Awakening movement — and particularly its spread to areas outside of Anbar that had shown no inclination to resist al-Qaeda before the surge — is testimony to the synergy between these two phenomena.
The violence in Iraq has fallen not because of the surge’s success, but because of its failure: sectarian violence is down only because the sectarian cleansing has largely been completed. This argument doesn’t even work from 6,000 miles away. There has been sectarian cleansing in and around Baghdad, but it has not resulted in homogeneous cities, let alone provinces, and it has not generated stable dividing lines between communities. Traditionally, Shia have dominated Sadr City, of course, as well as its various neighboring areas of Shaab, Ur, and much of 9 Nissan. Shia have also predominate in Khadimiya, west of the Tigris River, around an important Shia shrine there. Sunni have historically been the majority in the Mansour and Rashid Districts west of the river and in parts of Adhamiya to the east. The central areas of Karkh, Rusafa, and Karada have generally been mixed. This sectarian division of the city remains stable today — the Sunni are still in Adhamiya; Shia still in Khadimiya; the center of the city is still mixed; and there remain Shi’a enclaves in Rashid and Sunni enclaves in 9 Nissan. In other words, the river does not form a sectarian boundary, individual districts remain mixed, and there are plenty of sectarian edges to create the basis for sectarian fighting if anyone wanted to engage in it. The same is true in areas south and northeast of Baghdad, such as the former “triangle of death” (that is now a triangle of relative peace where Sunni and Shia both live) and up the Diyala River into Baquba, still a mixed city despite ferocious fighting in 2007. The completion of sectarian cleansing did not occur.
< Back 1 2 3 4 5 6 Next >
