Iraq’s New History
A long-suffering people gets a chance to reclaim its country from the purveyors of terror.
BY FOUAD AJAMI
Tuesday, June 29, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
No Iraqi poet will sit down to write stirring poetry in celebration of yesterday’s transfer of sovereignty from the Coalition Provisional Authority to the interim government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. No jihadist, it must be conceded, will see in the drama that has played out in Baghdad reason to call to a halt the campaign of holy terror let loose on Iraq’s cities. That fabled “Arab street,” we know, will insist that this is a quisling Iraqi government doing the bidding of the Pax Americana.
But the unadorned, brief ceremony that saw the American regent, L. Paul Bremer, to a C-130 at the Baghdad airport had a dignity and a power all its own. There had never been an American design to dominate and rule the Iraqis. This was not a charade that has just been pulled off in Iraq. We are eager to come out well from this expedition to Iraq, and the transfer of authority marks the beginning of a new relationship between Iraqis and their American liberators.
To be sure, it is not “normal” sovereignty that has come to Iraq. A country with 160,000 foreign soldiers on its soil cannot be said to be wholly free. It is idle to pretend that the American ambassador, John Negroponte, will run a standard diplomatic mission. He will dispose of a vast reconstruction package, and a formidable military presence will underscore his authority. But freedom can’t be a fetish. There are the needs of Iraq, and they are staggering. There is the nemesis of Iraq’s freedom, an insurgency drawing its fury and pitilessness from the forces of the old despotism, and from jihadists from neighboring lands who have turned Iraq into a devil’s playground. We should be under no illusions about this insurgency. Its war against the new Iraq will not yield. For their part, the jihadists have a dreadful animus for the “apostates” within the world of Islam who ride with the infidels.
Indeed, that prince of darkness, the jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian sowing death in the streets of Iraq, anticipated this shift, and warned that the war would continue. “We do not wage our jihad in order to replace the Western tyrant with an Arab tyrant. We fight to make God’s word supreme, and anyone who stands in the way of our struggle is our enemy, a target of our swords.” The interim prime minister, Mr. Allawi, is a principal target of the Zarqawi bigots. “We have prepared for you a vicious poison and a sharp sword, we have prepared for you a full cup of death,” Zarqawi warned the new Iraqi leader, in an audiotape released last week. The lines are drawn: A man of the Iraqi state against a drifter who has come to that country in search of a new battleground.
Zarqawi and his breed of militants know that a native Iraqi government can shelter behind the call of home and hearth and of Iraq’s right to a new political life. Americans can’t hunt down the restless young men thrown up by the chaos of Arab lands, perhaps encouraged to make their way to Iraq, to kill and be killed. This is a task for Iraqis. It is for them to reclaim their country from the purveyors of terror. It is one thing for Fallujah to pose as the citadel of Islam against the infidels; it is an entirely different matter for that town to take up arms against a native government–even one protected by a vast foreign force. Iyad Allawi can call the insurgents “enemies of Islam,” as he did after the transfer of authority. It is awkward, at best, for George W. Bush to insert himself into that fight over, and for, Islam. In the same vein, we warned Iraq’s neighbors to keep their fires–and their misfits–away from Iraq, but it was infinitely more convincing when Mr. Allawi told his neighbors that Iraqis would not forget those who stood with them, and those who stood against them.
If Mr. Bush and Tony Blair had dispatched a big military force in search of weapons of mass destruction only to end up with a humanitarian war that delivered Iraq from a long nightmare of despotism, the Iraqis will have turned out to be the prime beneficiaries of this campaign. They should not quarrel with their good fortune. In the course of a more normal history, Iraqis would have sacked their own despotism, overturned, on their own, the dictator’s monuments and statues, written their own story of rebellion against tyranny. They didn’t, and no doubt a measure of their rage, over the last year or so, was the proud attempt of a prickly people to escape that unflattering fact of their history.
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