A Question For Tom

If I could engage Tom-Tom in a 'one on one,' I'd ask him this: "For someone who seems to understand so much about the Middle East, it's people, and it's internal conflicts, whatever possessed you to think that it would be possible to aggressively force democracy on Iraq? Even if you believe in the Neo-con vision, common sense, knowledge, and history would tell you that the vision -- based on an arrogant disregard for the realities of the people and the region -- is flawed and destined to fail. How can you continue to support this ideologic, fantasy-based strategy for American Empire?"

The Central Truth
By Thomas L. Friedman
The New York Times

To listen to the latest Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld speeches, you’d think that our biggest problem in Iraq is a violent minority of “extremists,” defying the democratic will of the Iraqi people. And you’d think that our biggest problem at home is a misguided group of Democratic appeasers, who want to cut and run in the great totalitarian struggle of the 21st century.

I wish it were so. Unfortunately, we are in trouble in Iraq now not because of what the “fringes” there, or here, believe, but because of what the center in both places has been willing to tolerate or unwilling to change.

We have a “center problem.”

Let me explain: We are stalled in Iraq not because of something some fringe antiwar critics said, or did, but because of how the Bush team, the center of U.S. policy, approached Iraq from the start. While it told the public — correctly, in my view — that building one example of a tolerant, pluralistic, democratizing society in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world was really important in the broader war of ideas against violent radical Islam, the administration acted as though this would be easy and sacrifice-free.

Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld told us we are in the fight of our lives against a new Islamic fascism, and let’s have an unprecedented wartime tax cut and shrink our armed forces. They told us we are in the fight of our lives against a new Islamic fascism, but let’s send just enough troops to topple Saddam — and never control Iraq’s borders, its ammo dumps or its looters. They told us we are in the fight of our lives against a new Islamic fascism, but rather than bring Democrats and Republicans together in a national unity war coalition, let’s use the war as a wedge issue to embarrass Democrats, frighten voters and win elections. They told us we are in the fight of our lives against a new Islamic fascism — which is financed by our own oil purchases — but let’s not do one serious thing about ending our oil addiction.

Donald Rumsfeld demonizes war critics as “morally confused.” But it is the “moral confusion” at the heart of the Bush policy — a confusion between its important ends and insufficient means — that has hobbled us from the start. It truly, truly baffles me why a president who bet so much of his legacy on this project never gave it his best shot and tolerated so much incompetence. He summoned us to D-Day and gave us the moral equivalent of the invasion of Panama.

But there is not only a problem at the center of U.S. policy. We are also failing in Iraq because of what the Shiite and Sunni mainstreams — not the fringes — are tolerating. Democracy fails when centrist forces either won’t stand up to extremists or try to use their violence for their own purposes.

The short history of the Iraq war is that the Sunnis in Iraq, and in the nearby Arab states, refused to accept one man, one vote, because it meant bringing the Shiite majority to power in Iraq for the first time. The Sunni mainstream, not the minority, believes Shiites are lesser Muslims and must never be allowed to rule Sunnis. Early in the Iraq war a prominent Sunni Arab leader said to me privately, “Thomas, these Shiites, they are not real Muslims.”

For two years, the Shiite center in Iraq put up with the barbaric Sunni violence directed against its mosques and markets — violence the U.S. couldn’t stop because it didn’t have enough troops, and because the Sunni center inside and outside Iraq tacitly supported it.

But eventually the Shiites snapped, formed their own death squads, turned to Iran for military aid, and focused more on communal survival than on making Iraq’s democracy work. Today we have Shiite and Sunni parties in the cabinet, but with their own private militias — exactly like Lebanon during its civil war. So, where the Iraqi center stops and the violent fringes start is no longer clear.

The dominant struggle in Iraq today, writes the Iranian-American analyst Vali Nasr in his provocative new book, “The Shia Revival,” is not “the battle of liberty against oppression, but rather the age-old battle of the two halves of Islam, Shias and Sunnis. This is the conflict that Iraq has rekindled, and this is the conflict that will shape its future.”

Just staying the course will not contain it. But before we throw up our hands on Iraq, why not make one more big push to produce a more stable accord between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds over how to share power and oil revenues and demobilize militias. We still don’t have such an understanding at the center of Iraqi politics. It may not be possible, but without it, neither is a self-sustaining, unified Iraqi democracy.

Photo credit: Thomas Friedman. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

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