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COMMENTARY
April 7, 2004
Pear shaped?
One of my most fondly held principles is that there is no easy way out -- of anything. Anything worth doing will take blood toil tears and sweat. That is how things are in Iraq. The project from the U.S. and allied entry into Iraq was to leave it if not a full-fledged bourgeois democracy at least a "normal" country under the rule of some sort of law a place which has ceased to breed threats to civilization far beyond its borders. The great majority of Iraqis would be mightily pleased with such a result after living many decades through the hell of totalitarianism. They will quietly cheer if the U.S. military and its principal ally the new large and still quickly expanding Iraqi police force ruthlessly suppress the chief threats to the new order. They are horrified by the spectacle of the Saddamites in Fallujah and the fanatic Shia "Mahdi's Army". Not horrified so much by what they are doing to Americans as by what they are already doing to fellow Iraqis who stand in their way. But at the first sign that instead of ruthlessly exterminating these people the Americans may cut and run average Iraqis will change sides. They will begin to accommodate themselves to the fanatic likeliest to emerge with power. Personal safety will require it. For when it comes to civil war -- which it must come to if the good guys can't take the bad guys out of play -- they will just have to choose between the bad guys. This is the old story in the Middle East where democracy and rule of law have proven again and again to be desert mirages -- it is victory to the most ruthless. Therefore if the Americans and their friends want to create a constitutional order they must be the most ruthless. They cannot possibly "negotiate" with the fanatics the only practical option is to slaughter them. It is also the only moral option for the alternative is to leave Iraq 's innocents to be ploughed under fresh killing fields. Despite the usual media misrepresentation there is no uprising in Iraq -- yet. It is still only an attempted uprising. In fact the scenes in Fallujah don't even amount to that. The Sunni Triangle cannot export its worldview beyond the minority of Sunnis who did well out of Saddam's regime. U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police now have Fallujah surrounded. The attempt to foment a Shia uprising is more worrying. Its leader Moqtada al-Sadr is not even a credentialed ayatollah. He is a 30-year-old nutjob an incendiary preacher whose claim to allegiance is that his father was an ayatollah murdered by Saddam. But al-Sadr himself is despised by the legitimate hierarchy and almost certainly in the pay of Iran's revolutionary ayatollahs. They in turn have taken advantage of the opening of Iraqi society to Muslim charities and religious festivals to smuggle weapons and Revolutionary Guards into the country. The "Mahdi's Army" (named for the legendary "twelfth imam" who will appear to lead Muslims in the endtime) was assembled with weapons in radical mosques and in an obviously well-planned exercise suddenly appeared fully armed to take over Kufa and most of a Shia ghetto in Baghdad and do violence in Najaf and elsewhere. It did not help that the new Iraqi police almost immediately abandoned their stations. But this "uprising" -- which has emphatically not been joined by the Shia masses -- is that enemy's best shot. The good news is that they came out shooting now rather than waiting until after the handover of power to the Iraqi provisional government on June 30th. They have exposed themselves at a time when the full strength of U.S. and allied military power can be applied to them. The break-out could alas have been prevented if the Americans had been more ruthless earlier. There will be a lot of bloodshed putting it down over the next few weeks and anger over civilians caught in the crossfire. But no time can be wasted now nor punches pulled. One is unfortunately reminded of the Tet offensive in Vietnam in 1968 when the Viet Cong after setbacks in the field threw everything into a wild assault on South Vietnamese cities. The U.S. and South Vietnamese armies quickly trounced them once they were exposed; but by presenting this victory as a debacle and a defensive war as a quagmire the American media turned the tide at home. Domestic support for the defence of Vietnam against Communist aggression began to evaporate. God help us all if the media succeed in doing that again. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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