After a throat-clearing opening paragraph, yesterday's New York Times editorial--entitled "Facing Facts About Iraq's Elections"--got to the point:
It's time to talk about postponing the elections.
The Gray Lady's pronouncement--delivered with the gravity of a principle calling the parents of a disobedient child failing in school--is in keeping with the paper's disapproving attitude toward the war, which in turn reflects the prevailing opinion of northeastern liberal elites, including the CIA, State Department and other "realist" critics of neo-conservative idealism. The editorial, in short, represents the reasonable, cautious, non-ideological side of American foreign policy--the side Europeans prefer--which, while not entirely wrong, is dangerously misguided when it comes to the January 30th elections and, more importantly, the nature of the Sunni "insurgency" that threatens them.
After noting that violence is likely to depress turnout in Iraq's western, and predominately Sunni, provinces, the Times calls for a postponement of voting for a "fixed period of only two or three months," during which time the Allawi government "should convene an emergency meeting" to develop a "revised election timetable." In return, Sunni leaders "would have to promise to take part in the elections that followed." In other words, the Times and the "realist" establishment it represents, counsels the Iraqi government to answer the fascist insurgency by delaying elections, calling a meeting and holding Sunnis to their word. We've witnessed this sort of "realistic" betrayal of democracy and reliance on paper agreements and the pledges of criminal thugs before, only it didn't take place in Baghdad--but in Munich.
The Times is aware of the specter of appeasement.
Worrying about whether the Sunnis will be included in the government does not mean sympathizing will their baser resentments...the Sunnis simply have to accept the fact that they will never again enjoy their old enormous share of the [Iraqi] pie.
Right. And as soon as Hitler sees the light and realizes his bellicose policies will only pitch the continent into war, he'll come `round to being a good European...Placed in the Middle East, this same "realistic" thinking is as dangerously naive as Neville Chamberlain's 70 years ago. Bottom line: the Sunni radicals are not going to accept defeat and they are not going to permit elections. If their participation in the democratic process hinged upon their acknowledgment that the days of Saddam's patronage was gone, they would have already come to the negotiating table. This is the weakness of the Times' school of "reasonable" thinking: it cannot conceive of an enemy who does not also act reasonably, rationally and in it's own self-interest. The irrational power of Fascism paralyzes the realist.
As I've argued many times before, the Sunni counter-liberation is not based in a clear-eyed assessment of needs, goals or realistic objectives: rather, driven by fear, tribalism and grandiosity, it is a plunge into the suicidal vortex of the shame-honor dynamic, increasingly fueled by religious fantasy. And while not all Sunnis are infected with this malignant narcissism, the more radical leaders are--and these men will never negotiate, never surrender and never allow their fellow Sunnis to submit to a Shia-dominated government no matter how many postponements of elections take place. For their own precious honor--and that of their families, clans and tribes--they would rather kill and be killed. If they can't run Iraq--then Iraq will cease to exist.
Recently, Jawad Hashim, an Iraqi intellectual and writer who advised Saddam during the 1970s told me a chilling story. "The dictator would often say to me, 'If there ever comes a time when my regime goes down, I will make sure that not a single stone in Iraq remains intact.'"
The "realist" school can't grasp such frightening irrationality; rather, it must find rational reasons for Sunni intransigence. Thus the Times notes how the U.S. made a grave error in disbanding the Iraqi army (a charge Paul Bremer deftly refuted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed which also ran on January 12, surely no coincidence) and failed to protect decent, law-abiding Sunnis from criminals and terrorists. It also criticizes the U.N.'s "mistake" (for which the Times ultimately censures the Bush Administration) of designing elections for national candidates, rather than for local district or provincial representatives, thus allowing the Sunnis more representation in the government. In the end, many of the Sunni grievances
could have been avoided if the American invasion had been conducted more wisely...
No doubt. But the Times overlooks one dreadful irony of the Sunni counter-liberation: America's successful liberation and "occupation" of Iraq has allowed it to exist and flourish. If U.S. troops had never patrolled the streets of Ramadi, Falluja and Baghdad, never stood as a shield between the Sunni minority and a vengeful Shia and Kurdish population, what would have happened? Peshmerga and Badr Brigade militiamen would have flooded the Sunni Triangle and done what the American army cannot bring itself to do--search out and destroy insurgent leaders, along with thousands of innocent civilians. For all their "hatred" of the American "occupation," Sunnis know full well that without the G.I.s they castigate, denounce and murder, they themselves would fall prey to a worse enemy, enraged by decades of political and religious oppression, unconstrained by public opinion or the nightly newscasts of Al Jazeera. The Sunnis get it both ways: an enemy to despise, a reason to remain aggrieved and Americans to kill to reclaim their honor.
This is why the "realist" school is wrong and elections must proceed on schedule, even with the risks of civil war. At base, the Sunni counter-liberation is not a rational struggle that politics can mitigate or end. It has only one true goal: to kill American soldiers and their allies. It can only be met by force (and the Sunnis better pray to Allah that such force remains under American control). As we see in Europe today, concession to the radical Arab tactics of insularity, non-cooperation and grievance only leads to further demands, further weakening of democracy, further danger to the world. We must draw a line in the sand and say, you either cooperate with us on our terms, or you will be lost.
The Times understands this, but in typical fashion, can't draw the hard conclusion.
Many Americans--and many Iraqis--worry that if the elections were postponed, the terrorists would feel empowered by having won. That might indeed be the case for a few months.
A few months? And after experiencing the intoxications of bringing to naught the plans of the hated Shia and Kurds, and more importantly, the all-powerful United States, Sunni radicals are then supposed to discard their mujaheddin robes for the business suits of statesman? Can the Times be this naive? Not quite:
[T]hat outcome would be far outweighed by the danger that would come from a civil war.
Perhaps. More likely, though, postponing elections will not delay such a conflict. Instead, it will only empower the Sunni radicals to increase their demands, raise the level of the insurgency and force a second, and a third delay, until the election process collapses. The slim hope we have of saving Iraq from deeper misery is to present the Sunnis with an unyielding option: either get on board the democracy train now, or be forever left at the station. If they need an object lesson, we should direct their attention a few hundred miles to the west to see what happened to the Palestinians when they made their choice in the matter.
As Times columnist David Brooks wrote yesterday, "The U.S. tried to hand a new Iraq back to the Iraqis. We failed." Yes, we did. Badly. But so did the Iraqis. The unwritten story of this conflict is how each side expected the other to take up the bulk of the responsibility for reconstructing the country, and when neither did, chaos ensued. Because of those mutual failures, the nation is embroiled in an incipient civil war. While elections may not save Iraq, postponing them will almost certainly doom it. The Sunnis must understand that they either come to the democratic table, or face a perpetual Palestian-like hell with only a ever-diminishing line of American troops standing between their people and the Kurdish and Shia militias, whose knives are as long as their memories.
UPDATE: The NRO's James Robbins weighs in on the issue. (Credit: Arthur Chrenkoff)
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