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COMMENTARY
November 12, 2005
Baghdad/Paris
Iraq is a hard enough slog, but the long-term outlook from Baghdad is better than the view from Paris of France. Things can and do get better in Iraq, as the forces in support of the new democracy get the upper hand over the demons trying to bring it down. In Iraq, there is no intention to abandon any enclave of the country to autonomous rule my Islamist insurgents. There will be no police “no-go” areas in that country. Not like in France.Overall, the security position is still better in France, but it’s a close run thing, and the trend there is towards constantly escalating violence. The “Clichy-sous-Bois” riots began to subside this week, as riots do even on the West Bank, after a good fortnight’s run, but from a peak of far over 1,000 major incidents per night of arson, focused vandalism, and looting -- supported by rock-throwing and shooting at police in several hundred urban locations. As in Iraq, the police discovered at least one bomb-making factory (while not particularly looking for it), and are mum on what else they’ve found. This is a clear indication that “the fire next time” will be grimmer. Iraqi-style carbombs and Palestinian-style suicide bombers are likely to emerge soon. But even before the serious rioting began, in France, there were an average of 80 car-torchings per night around the country’s 751 “sensitive urban zones” (the euphemism for Muslim ghettoes); and almost every Jewish graveyard, school, community centre, and synagogue had been vandalized or more seriously attacked more than once over the last few years. And now, Catholic churches also need special security. This is, incidentally, part of the reason the French media and authorities were so slow to acknowledge the riots. It was because the background crime rate is so high, that it is difficult to distinguish “a typical night” from “an Islamic Revolution”. The effective autonomy of France’s Muslim communities -- in which any integration that had begun is now being reversed -- makes it all the more difficult for the French establishment to guess what is coming on. On the average night in Iraq, there are no riots, and the background crime rate is, by any Western standard, extremely low. With a few dramatic exceptions, which the world’s TV cameras are eager to relay, terrorist strikes are shrinking in number, and happening in progressively more remote locations. If you study the sequence of named U.S. military operations against Iraqi insurgents over the last two years, you will see that their general movement is from around Baghdad towards places along the Syrian frontier. The terror strike on three hotels in the centre of Amman, Jordan, this week, might just be good news from a narrowly Iraqi point of view. This is because the perpetrators (a credible claim to have done it was made by Abu Musab al-Zarkawi’s “Al Qaeda in Iraq”) have implicitly acknowledged that the security conditions in Iraq have improved to such a degree, that neighbouring Jordan has become easier to hit. It is also worth reporting that the blasts were ill-received, in Jordan itself (where there were open demonstrations telling the Jordanian-born Zarqawi to, “Burn in hell!”). And likewise, ill-received across the Arab world, judging from Arab media -- the same media who report with relish and seeming approval each terror strike in Iraq. Here again, the prospects for France are much worse. It took eleven nights of general violence in practically every Muslim enclave in France, before the French state was able to cajole a few French Muslim imams to utter ambiguous fatwas against street violence. The celebration of these fatwas in the French mainstream media betrayed too much relief. Nowhere in Iraq does the government currently have much trouble finding imams and mullahs to condemn violence. But the key difference between the two countries -- redounding to the credit of Iraq -- is in the public theatre. Iraqis are openly talking about their problems, and how they might be solved. The key problem of fanatical Islam, and its unquenchable thirst for human blood, is an open topic. You may see this wherever you look in Iraqi media -- the optimistic spirit of a young democracy. Turning the pages of Le Monde, and Le Figaro, you will see the opposite. You will see, to often comical extreme, the “culture of taboo and avoidance”, in which the realities of Islam and demography are ignored, and euphemisms are uneasily employed to mask even the fact that the rioters are Muslim. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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