Iraq May Survive, but the Dream Is Dead


 

New York Times, May 26, 2004

By FOUAD AJAMI

Professor of Middle Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University, is author of "Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey."


It was high time President Bush spoke to the nation of the war in Iraq. A year or so ago, it was our war, and we claimed it proudly. To be sure, there was a minority that never bought into the expedition and genuinely believed that it would come to grief. But most of us recognized that a culture of terror had taken root in the Arab world. We struck, first at Afghanistan and then at the Iraqi regime, out of a broader determination to purge Arab radicalism.

No wonder President Bush, in the most intensely felt passage of Monday night's speech, returned to Sept. 11 and its terrors. "In the last 32 months, history has placed great demands on our country," he said. "We did not seek this war on terror. But this is the world as we find it." Instinctively, an embattled leader fell back on a time of relative national consensus.

But gone is the hubris. Let's face it: Iraq is not going to be America's showcase in the Arab-Muslim world. The president's insistence that he had sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, "not to make them American" is now - painfully - beside the point. The unspoken message of the speech was that no great American project is being hatched in Iraq. If some of the war's planners had thought that Iraq would be an ideal base for American primacy in the Persian Gulf, a beacon from which to spread democracy and reason throughout the Arab world, that notion has clearly been set aside.

We are strangers in Iraq, and we didn't know the place. We had struggled against radical Shiism in Iran and Lebanon in recent decades, but we expected a fairly secular society in Iraq (I myself wrote in that vein at the time). Yet it turned out that the radical faith - among the Sunnis as well as the Shiites - rose to fill the void left by the collapse of the old despotism.

In the decade that preceded the Iraq expedition, we had had our fill with the Arab anger in the streets of Ramallah and Cairo and Amman. We had wearied of the willful anti-Americanism. Now we find that anger, at even greater intensity, in the streets of Falluja. Iraqis had been muzzled for more than three decades. Suddenly they found themselves, dangerously and radically, free. Meanwhile, behind concrete walls and concertina wire, American soldiers and administrators hunkered down in an increasingly hostile land.

Back in the time of our triumph - that of swift movement and of pulling down the dictator's statues - we had let the victory speak for itself. There was no need to even threaten the Syrians, the Iranians and the Libyans with a fate similar to the one that befell the Iraqi despotism. Some of that deterrent power no doubt still holds. But our enemies have taken our measure; they have taken stock of our national discord over the war. We shall not chase the Syrian dictator to a spider hole, nor will we sack the Iranian theocracy.

Once the administration talked of a "Greater Middle East" where the "deficits" of freedom, knowledge and women's empowerment would be tackled, where our power would be used to erode the entrenched despotisms in the Arab-Muslim world. As of Monday night, we have grown more sober about the ways of the Arabs.

It seems that we have returned to our accommodation with the established order of power in the Arab world. The young Jordanian monarch, Abdullah II, has even stepped forward to offer the age-old Arab recipe for the mayhem in Iraq's streets: a man on horseback, an Iraqi "with a military background who has experience of being a tough guy who could hold Iraq together for the next year." No foreign sword, however swift and mighty, could cut through the Gordian knot of a tangled Arab history.

In their fashion, Iraqis had come to see their recent history as a passage from the rule of the tyrant to the rule of the foreigners. We had occupied the ruler's palaces and the ruler's prisons. It was logistics and necessity, of course - but that sort of shift in their world acquitted the Iraqi people, absolved them of the burden of their own history, left them on the sidelines as foreign soldiers and technicians and pollsters and advocates of "civic society" took control of their country.

And now, in a familiar twist, President Bush proposes - with the approval of a sovereign Iraqi government, of course - the demolition of the Abu Ghraib prison. We would cleanse their shame - and ours. Iraqis had not stormed their own Bastille, as it were; their liberty remains an American gift. And no surprise, they shall see through the deed, and discount it. If and when our bulldozers go to work at Abu Ghraib, it will be just another episode in which the Iraqis are spectators to their own history.

Back in our time of confidence, we had (rightly in my view) despaired of the United Nations and its machinery and its diplomatic-speak. But we now seek a way out, and an Algerian-born envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, is the instrument of our deliverance. So we are all multilateralists now, and the envoy of a world organization entangled in its own scandal in Iraq - the oil-for-food program it administered and is now investigating - will show us the way.

Iraq is treacherous territory, but Mr. Brahimi gives us a promise of precision. The Iraqis shall have a president, two vice presidents, a prime minister and 26 ministers who will run the country. We take our victories where we can. In Falluja, the purveyors of terrorism - nowadays they go by the honored name of mujahedeen - are applying the whip in public to vendors of wine and liquor and pornographic videos. (A measure of justice, it could be said, has finally come to Falluja.) But there is the consolation lamely offered by our president: Iraq today has an observer who attends the meetings of the World Trade Organization!

Imperial expeditions in distant, difficult lands are never easy. And an Arab-Islamic world loaded with deadly means of destruction was destined to test our souls and our patience. This is not "Bush's War." It is - by accident or design, it doesn't matter now - our biggest undertaking in the foreign world since Vietnam. We as a nation pay dearly every day. We fight under the gaze of multitudes in the Arab world who wish us ill, who believe that we are getting our comeuppance.

The gains already accomplished in Iraq, and the gains yet to be secured, are increasingly abstract and hard to pin down. The costs are visible to us, and heartbreaking. The subdued, somber tone with which the war is now described is the beginning of wisdom. In its modern history, Iraq has not been kind or gentle to its people. Perhaps it was folly to think that it was under any obligation to be kinder to strangers.

 

 


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