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Article
appeared in
NewYorkPost.com
October 20, 2006
By Amir Teheri
October 20, 2006 -- TALK to Iraqis
these days, and you'll likely hear one thing: What are the Americans and
Brits up to? The worry is that the U.S. and U.K. political mainstreams now
regard the Iraq project as a disaster, with cut-and-run, or
whistle-and-walk-away, the only options.
Most Iraqis regard the
toppling of Saddam Hussein, the dismantling of his machinery of war and
oppression and the introduction of pluralist politics to Iraq as an
historic success. The issue is how to consolidate that victory, not to
snatch defeat from its jaw. Those challenging this historic victory are
enemies of both the Western democracies and the Iraqi people.
 Iraq
today is the central battlefield in the global war between two mutually
exclusive visions of the future. Yet the jihadists now know they can't win
on that battlefield. After three years of near-daily killings, often in
the most horrible manner imaginable, they've failed to alter Iraq's
political agenda. Nor have they won control of any territory or even
broadened their constituency.
The jihadists have suffered
thousands of casualties, with many more captured by Coalition forces and
the new Iraqi army and police. Despite more than 120 suicide operations,
and countless attacks on civilian targets, the jihadists have been on the
defensive since they lost their chief base at Fallujah last year. Their
strategic weakness: They can't translate their killings into political
gains inside Iraq.
They kill teachers and children, but schools
stay open. They kill doctors and patients, but hospitals still function.
They kill civil servants, but the ministries are crawling back into
operation. They kidnap and murder foreign businessmen, but more keep
coming. They massacre volunteers for the new army and police, but the
lines of those wishing to join grow longer.
They blow up pipelines
and kill oil workers, but oil still flows. They kill judges and lawyers,
but Iraq's new courts keep on working. They machine-gun buses carrying
foreign pilgrims, but the pilgrims come back in growing numbers. They kill
newspaper boys, but newspapers still get delivered every day.
Since
liberation, an estimated 45,000 Iraqis have been killed, largely by
insurgents and terrorists. Yet there are few signs that a majority of
Iraqis are prepared to raise the white flag of surrender.
Recent
events highlight the growing isolation of the jihadists and their
Saddamite allies:
* A tribal alliance has joined together all Arab
Sunni clans of western Iraq in a united front to "chase al Qaeda out of
Iraq."
This was partly a response to a split inside al Qaeda's Iraq
branch. Members of the terror group recently published an appeal to Osama
bin Laden to dismiss  , the group's " commander" in Iraq.
Why? Al-Masri, an Egyptian terrorist, has tried to push the group's
violence to new depths of perfidy by planting mines in primary schools and
hospitals and organizing rackets against shopkeepers, both Shiite and
Sunni. The statement calling for his dismissal calls him a "deviant" - a
label that indicates the willingness of some al Qaeda members to liquidate
him if he's not replaced.
* Iraq's National Assembly gave
near-unanimous approval to a new plan for peace and reconciliation. Backed
by all ethnic and religious communities through their political parties,
the plan furthers the marginalization of the jihadists and Saddamites.
Under the plan, the different ethnic and religious groups would come to
one another's help whenever needed in the battle against the insurgents.
This would end a de facto 
situation in which Arab Sunni areas have been no-go areas for Shi'ite and
Kurdish forces and vice-versa.
More, the plan envisages the
creation of a unified information office to harmonize the sermons
delivered at mosques, regardless of their affiliations. The idea is to use
the mosque as a forum for a unified and democratic Iraq, rather than a hub
of sectarian agitation.
* A third event is set to take place in
Mecca next week at the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. This
will bring together prominent Sunni and Shiite clerics from Iraq and eight
other Muslim countries to discuss and approve a declaration demanding an
end to sectarian feuds in Iraq. An initiative of the Organization of the
Islamic Conference, the gathering reflects growing impatience with the
jihadists throughout the Muslim world.
The proposed draft categorically states that bloodshed motivated by
sectarian considerations is haram (forbidden) - and that its
perpetrators are waging war on Islam as a whole. (Iraq's Grand Ayatollah
Ali-Muhammad Husseini Sistani wants the gathering to go further by
labeling as haram any incitement to sectarian
hatred.)
The Mecca gathering represents the first major effort by
Sunnis and Shiites toward mutual recognition as acceptable versions of the
same faith since 1947. It is strongly supported by the Al-Azhar seminary
in Cairo, the Council of Ulema in Mecca and Medina, the Shi'ite seminaries
of Najaf (Iraq) and Qom (Iran) and all five associations of Iraq's Sunni
clerics.
* Despite the dramatic increase in terrorist attacks in
recent weeks, new Iraq is holding its own because Iraqi morale is holding.
That morale, however, is under constant attack from two sources.
The first is the part of the international (especially pan-Arab) media
that depicts Iraq as a wayward train racing ahead with no light at the end
of a dark tunnel.
 The second threat to Iraqi morale is by far the
most serious. It concerns uncertainty about the commitment of the United
States and its allies to new Iraq.
Just as Rome was not built in a
day, creating a pluralist democracy on the ruins of one of the nastiest of
Arab tyrannies takes time. It took the United States and its allies 10
years to hand over the government of post-war Austria to Austrians. In
Bosnia, the United States and its allies are now scheduled to hand over
the reins of government to the Bosnians themselves - after a decade. In
Iraq, the handover came just two years after liberation.
Iraqis are
puzzled when they hear prominent Americans speaking of carving Iraq into
three or more mini-states, as if Iraq were a blank sheet on which anyone
could draw whatever he wanted.
The key to the future of Iraq lies
in the United States. The Iraqis will not run away in the face of jihadism
and Ba'athism. Is the same true of the Americans and their allies?
Amir Taheri is a member of Benador Associates.
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