Iraq: the country of perpetual "sahel"?

A story by Edward Wong in Sunday's New York Times about what seems to be an Iraqi predilection for tyrants and violent endings seems to have generated a lot of buzz.

Some excerpts:

PERHAPS no fact is more revealing about Iraq’s history than this: The Iraqis have a word that means to utterly defeat and humiliate someone by dragging his corpse through the streets.

The word is “sahel,” and it helps explain much of what I have seen in three and a half years of covering the war.

It is a word unique to Iraq, my friend Razzaq explained over tea one afternoon on my final tour. Throughout Iraq’s history, he said, power has changed hands only through extreme violence, when a leader was vanquished absolutely, and his destruction was put on display for all to see.

Wong goes on to report:

Most famously it happened to a former prime minister, Nuri al-Said, who tried to flee after a military coup in 1958 by scurrying through eastern Baghdad dressed as a woman. He was shot dead. His body was disinterred and hacked apart, the bits dragged through the streets. In later years, Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party crushed their enemies with the same brand of brutality.

“Other Arabs say, ‘You are the country of sahel,’ ” Razzaq said. “It has always been that way in Iraq.”

But in this war, the moment of sahel has been elusive. No faction — not the Shiite Arabs or Sunni Arabs or Kurds — has been able to secure absolute power, and that has only sharpened the hunger for it.

As he goes on to observe:

Caught in the middle of the civil war are the Americans. To Iraq’s factions, they are the weakest of all the armed groups in one crucial respect: their will is ebbing and their time here is limited. That leaves Iraqis more motivated than ever to cling to their weapons, preparing for what many see as an inevitable plunge into the abyss.

“Everyone — the Sunni, the Shia — is playing the waiting game,” an Iraqi leader told me over dinner at his home in the Green Zone. “They’re waiting out the Americans. Everyone is using time against you.”

So how did the Iraqis Wong interviewed think this would all pan out?

A Shiite neighborhood leader - and supporter of democracy - seems to have summed up the general sentiment:

“In the history of Iraq, more than 7,000 years, there have always been strong leaders,” he said. “We need strong rulers or dictators like Franco, Hitler, even Mubarak. We need a strong dictator, and a fair one at the same time, to kill all extremists, Sunni and Shiite.”

With this, Wong concludes:

I was surprised to hear those words. But perhaps I was being naïve. Looking back on all I have seen of this war, it now seems that the Iraqis have been driving all along for the decisive victory, the act of sahel, the day the bodies will be dragged through the streets.

I wonder if Wong's right about this. Are Iraqis really doomed to perpetual sahel? Is it really as bad as Fakhri al-Qaisi, a Sunni Arab dentist in Baghdad, told Wong it is? "We've changed nothing," he was reported as saying. “It’s dark. There will be more blood.”

Maybe this Baghdad dentist should talk to his fellow Sunnis in Anbar Province for a check on another Iraqi reality. While the guys in Anbar haven't had to fight a sectarian war like he perhaps has, they have had to reclaim their territory from no less formidable a foe than Al Qaeda.

They apparently reached their tipping point when Al Qaeda insisted they would now have to segregate their vegetables by gender or they couldn't sell them in the "Islamic State of Iraq" Al Qaeda had just declared. The Sunni tribes united and in just a few months have succeeded in largely kicking the AQ boys out.

Let's say that for now, I'm an agnostic when it comes to the idea that Iraqi Muslims are doomed to fight perpetual civil war and are only capable of wishing for sahel.

Four years after Saddam's fall

Iraqi ambassador Samir Shakir Sumaida'ie describes what's at stake in Iraq four years after the fall of Saddam. From today's Wall Street Journal:

The struggle in Iraq is the sharpest visible part of a monumental, world-wide confrontation between forces committed to the values of an open society and those opposed to such values. The former are characterized by human rights, participatory politics and the rule of law; the latter by despotism -- institutional and ideological, theocratic and autocratic. The camp of despotism includes some states (irrespective of their public declarations), as well as non-state actors. Religious and sectarian extremism are merely components in this deadly mix. They are aided and abetted by organized crime, arms and oil smugglers, kidnapping rings and the like.

Regarding the sectarian violence in Iraq:

The cause of this violence is not an incurable enmity between Sunnis and Shiites. Most Iraqis are victims not perpetrators of violence, and have every interest, given a chance, in stopping it.

Partitioning Iraq, he argues, is not the solution:

Iraq is far too integrated for that. Any sectarian "borders" would have to go through millions of living rooms and bedrooms.

The solution in his view is to win this war - and for that, American help is still needed:

Iraq is a young democracy, but Iraqis are an old and proud people. We have the courage to face the terrorists and defeat them in our land. America is an older democracy, with a younger people. Yet, even in your own relatively brief history, Americans have answered the call several times, and millions around the world owe their freedom in part to your sacrifices and bravery. My countrymen and I are grateful to be counted in that number. America is standing by Iraq, and one day Iraq will stand by her. Right now, we have a war to fight, and together, we must fight and win it.

Another Sunni tribe joins the fight against al Qaeda in Iraq

Zeyad Kasim at Iraqslogger posted this news today:

Sot Al-Iraq reports ongoing clashes between Zoba’ tribesmen and insurgents affiliated with Al-Qaeda in Iraq or the Islamic State of Iraq in Abu Ghraib, Al-Zaidan and Amiriyat Al-Fallujah west of Baghdad. The clashes were in response to the assassination attempt against Deputy Prime Minister Salam Al-Zobai, who is a member of the tribe, several days ago and a failed assassination attempt against a Zoba’ tribal leader in Mosul yesterday.

Again Al Qaeda missed their mark, but they did manage to kill the tribal leader's 24-year-old son. As if this wasn't enough, as Kasim goes on to report:

Local sources and the state-run Al-Iraqiya TV reported that two suicide bombers attacked the residence of another Zoba’ tribal leader at Abu Ghraib west of Baghdad this morning. The attacks targeted Sheikh Dhahir Al-Dhari, a cousin of Sheikh Harith Al-Dhari, the head of the Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq.

Now why if all the violence in Iraq is related to sectarian differences are we seeing these clashes between the Sunni tribals and their coreligionists and why would Al-Dhari have recently joined the Anbar Salvation Council against Al-Qaeda in Iraq? As Kasim reports, up to recently, the Zoha' tribe had "strongly supported the Sunni-led insurgency against the U.S."

Could the tide be turning in Iraq?

Popular misperceptions about Iraq?

Jay Nordlinger, in the NRO, pokes some holes in popular perceptions:

The conventional line is that this is a Sunni-Shiite civil war; but the news pages often tell us that it’s a war by terrorists on any and all wanting a decent life.

As an example of a story that doesn't fit into this narrative, Nordlinger cites the case of the attempted assassination of Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Salam al-Zubaieas on Saturday.

If Iraq has truly descended into a sectarian civil war, why then, as Nordlinger points out, were Al-Zubaieas' would-be assassins not Shiite? Shouldn't they have been given that he is the ranking Sunni leader in the Iraqi goverment?

So why do you think his would-be assassins turned out to be his fellow Sunnis? Yes,that's right, the folks at Al Qaeda. In addition to seriously wounding the Deputy PM, they killed nine people in the car bombing timed to go off while the men were praying. Among the dead was al-Zubaieas' brother.

This news clearly took Nordinger's breath away:

I have said it before, and must say it again: Those who serve in the Iraqi government are among the bravest people in the world. They are constantly ducking murder, and their loved ones are having to do the same. But these officials get nothing but grief, from all quarters. They should really have our gratitude and admiration, whatever the mistakes they have made.

Then there is the myth of the noble insurgents in Iraq, those who are only resisting occupation as the conventional thinking would have it. But as Nordlinger points out, these noble insurgents, who he calls terrorists are, to quote him, "[now] using children in their suicide bombings — leaving them in the backseats of cars, to be blown to bits, along with other innocents." As Nordlinger asks:

What does it take to awaken the world at large to the nature of this enemy? A lot, apparently. Many people in this country are convinced that George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Al Gonzales are the enemy. One should be so lucky.

And, by the way, above, I should have said “terrorists in Iraq,” rather than “Iraqi terrorists.” The terrorists in that country are as likely as not to be foreign — fighting one, everywhere jihad.