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COMMENTARY
July 20, 2005
Baghdad again
I have used the bombing of London as a point of departure in a few recent columns, because it presented an opportunity to review what we should know, about the international Islamist menace. I did so, however, guiltily remembering that what the people of Iraq are enduring is much worse than what Britain has experienced. Indeed, the shock for Londoners was in being hit at all. For notwithstanding years of bother from the IRA, terrorist bombings remain unusual for them.These have been as ordinary in Baghdad, since the liberation, as they have been in Jerusalem, from not quite the same causes, but something similar. A comparison of the situation in Iraq to the Vietnam War is meaningless. The situation is more like the Hamas and Fatah Intifada on the West Bank. Israel’s Jews are a majority in a tiny patch of the Middle East, and therefore can be presented by malign media as “imperialists” oppressing an Arab minority, by focusing the camera exclusively on that patch. Back the camera up, and you see a vast region, in which Israel -- with perhaps three percent of the region’s population -- occupies a fraction of one percent of its land. Something similar is true of Shia versus Sunni Muslims in the larger Arabic-speaking world. The Shia are a convincing majority within Iraq, but a small minority of the Arabs over all. There are more Shia Muslims along the south coast of the Persian Gulf, including a majority in the very parts of Saudi Arabia that cover the richest oilfields. There is a tiny scattering of Shia among the rest of the Arabs. Like Christians and Jews, they are a detested minority, more or less universally subject to persecution. Under Saddam Hussein, they were persecuted in Iraq, too. And they continue to be targets of Islamist terror after Saddam’s fall -- from cells operating out of the “Sunni Triangle”. In just this last week, the attacks included a car bomb detonated intentionally to kill dozens of Baghdad schoolchildren, and an oil tanker that was blown up in the market at Musaib, killing one hundred. Yesterday, the animals managed to assassinate two prominent Sunni participants in the panel drafting the Iraqi constitution -- the way Palestinians who want to make peace with Israel get assassinated. (The deaths in these attacks only begin to tell the story. For each person killed, in Iraq as in Israel, there are several permanently maimed; and then the effect on all the victims’ families. Only the suicide bomber is guaranteed a painless death, and a “ticket to heaven”. We are right to call them cowards.) There is a two-fold purpose in these attacks. The shorter-term one has been to make Iraq ungovernable, and drive American and other foreign troops away, thus (in the Islamist imagination) setting the stage for the emergence of a Taliban-style dictatorship, building upon the same constituency that served Saddam Hussein. This goal has not been abandoned, but neither is it near to being achieved. The larger ambition has emerged from the desperation of Islamist setbacks, since the U.S. went into Afghanistan and Iraq, forced the Syrians to retreat from Lebanon, and thereby triggered the “democracy fever” that has since infected all the Arab countries. That larger ambition is to ignite a civil war in Iraq, between Sunni and Shia Muslims, in which (again, in the Islamist imagination) Sunni Arabs from across the region will fly to the defence of fellow Sunnis in Iraq; and in the subsequent convulsion, Islamist fanatics may create the new caliphate by seizing power all over. It is a fat chance. As the Palestinians will tell you, the Arabs of recent history do not have a reputation for scurrying to each other’s aid; only for fishing in troubled waters. But in the Islamist enemy, we face a worldview steeped in psychotic fantasy. They believe in djinns. Whether in Baghdad or in London, it is not what’s in their minds but rather, what is in their satchels that makes a difference. I am less confident than other observers that the Islamists have goals that we can translate into English (such as, “divide and conquer” the British and Americans by terrorizing London; or even, undermine the moderate Shia grand ayatollah of Iraq, Ali Sistani, by attacking mosques under his protection). But it is clear enough that where we retreat, they advance. This is why any and every Western call for disengagement from Iraq serves the terrorists’ interests directly, not only in Iraq but internationally. And why we in the West must stand shoulder to shoulder with the Shia of Iraq. The allies (of the Iraqis, especially the Americans) are struggling in Iraq not only for negative reasons, however. Despite all that has happened, and remains to be learned, Iraq is the single most promising theatre of Arab political life. By its high-stakes experiment in democracy, it presents the only alternative to a future seeped in blood and fanaticism. Only by an ambition so large as “Arab democracy” can the ambition of Islamism be confounded. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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