NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
COMMENTARY
July 7, 2004
Better
The question To what degree is Iraq now actually sovereign? -- is a good one. I've been trying to find the answer to that myself. On the day Canada got its old government back Iraq finally got a new one fully sworn in and recognized about as universally as every other country in the world (except Taiwan and Israel). The American proconsul Paul Bremer got smartly aboard a plane and flew out. We have seen Saddam Hussein arraigned before an Iraqi judge and walked away in chains by Iraqi keepers. We are now seeing the first signs that Iraqis are taking charge of their own terror war. But the new American embassy in Baghdad is on a scale with the old one in Saigon. The ambassador John Negroponte has a brief well above the merely diplomatic and there remain tens of thousands of U.S. troops in forward deployment with orders that don't come down from Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. Most conspicuously when the prime minister's spokesman pre-announced an amnesty plan to receive turncoat terrorists -- even if they had participated in attacks against Americans -- the plan did not materialize. It was almost as if someone had a talk with the new prime minister and corrected the wrong impression his spokesman had left. What did materialize quicky was a U.S. airstrike on another Fallujah safe house in which we were given to understand (by Mr. Allawi himself) that the U.S. was executing an Iraqi request. A south Baghdad car-bomb factory was then discovered and destroyed several dozen terror cells loosely affiliated with the Sunni jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi were rooted up and according to my unconfirmable information an unsuccessful police attempt to capture Moqtada al-Sadr the leader of the radical Shia blackshirts at least put a scare into him. (His "Mahdi Army" has all but collapsed; the man himself delivers contradictory utterances from day to day.) And in an act of which I'm still trying to make sense an ostensibly pro-Baathist native Sunni Iraqi terrorist front calling itself the Salvation Movement put masked members in a video onto Dubai-based Al-Arabiyya TV. These gentlemen declared that if Zarqawi and his foreign jihadists did not immediately leave their country they would hunt them down and kill them as a gift to the Iraqi people. (As a friend with Pentagon connexions wrote Was that our psy-ops, or somebody else's? ) The general impression of bulls being grasped by horns was confirmed in a breathtaking development on Monday. A joint Iraqi-U.S. special forces operation nabbed two known Iranian intelligence officers right in Baghdad in the act of handing over explosives for a local bombing. This and most of the previous arrests and hits on terrorist targets depended on information voluntarily brought in from the street by people previously content to be "innocent bystanders". (That there is no such thing as an innocent bystander is a philosophical point we will leave for another day.) This will be a breakthrough if the Iraqis or Americans can somehow get the truth out over the objections of Arab and international media. Foreign sponsorship is crucial to probably all the new Iraqi government's present underground opponents. There is no sign whatever of mass public sedition outside a tiny handful of neighbourhoods which the foreign correspondents and their photographers exclusively watch looking desperately for proof of a "colossal American failure". Granted terrorists in Khalis near Baqouba in the "Sunni Triangle" yesterday succeeded in car-bombing the funeral for victims of their previous car-bombing killing about a dozen more defenceless people and thus grabbing a few cheap headlines. And there are continuing hits and tries on Iraq's vast network of oil pipelines. But the story throughout Iraq seems to be the edifying one: of a people who overwhelmingly recognize the legitimacy of their new government and are beginning to step forward and help. The opposite thus of the story next door in Saudi Arabia where the Jihadi International is gaining more purchase on the national psyche from day to day and where owing to the extreme unpopularity of the Saud's own corrupt autocratic and religiously crazy regime no one has a motive to rat them out. While the media are portraying an Iraq and Saudi Arabia ("two American allies") in the same boat sinking under waves of Islamist hysteria I am confidently telling my reader that this isn't true. We have instead radically contrasting regimes and while the situation in Iraq should get better and better that in Saudi Arabia can only get worse and worse. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top