Training an Iraqi army...

At the Iowa Straw Poll a few weeks ago, just about every Republican presidential candidate who mentioned the war in Iraq cited an op-ed piece in the "liberal" New York Times written by two military analysts from the "liberal" Brookings Institution. They had just returned from a brief tour of Iraq where they saw many of the same things I saw on a similar trip in June. They saw the success our military has had in turning Sunni tribes against extremists from al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) but then extrapolated wildly, saying this was a war we "just might win." Predictably, this had the impact of crack cocaine on neoconservatives, producing a euphoric and slightly violent high. The conservative Weekly Standard scurrilously announced that it had helped dash the "hope" of war opponents that Iraq was lost. The op-ed will be cited continually in the discussion of the war that will accompany the September reports of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Which is too bad, because it is fundamentally misleading about the next stage of the war.

To be sure, the success in the Sunni areas is real, but it may have greater long-term significance in the region than it does in Iraq. We've learned an important lesson in Anbar province: the Islamic-extremist message is a loser. Most Muslims do not want to live without music, television and, especially, tobacco. They don't want their daughters forcibly married to jihadis or their sons shrouded in explosive vests. That is certainly good news, but it's not enough. Indeed, the campaign against AQI may be among the last useful missions for the U.S. military in Iraq. We could drive out every last Islamic extremist, and the country would still be in the midst of a civil war that is trending toward chaos. And make no mistake: the U.S. colonialist insistence on dictating the shape of Iraq's future — framing a constitution, training an Iraqi army and the threat of a permanent U.S. military presence — has exacerbated the chaos.

It has been clear for months that Nouri al-Maliki's National Unity government is, as a senior U.S. official said, "none of the above." Senator Carl Levin called for it to be replaced after his and Senator John Warner's mid-August Iraq jaunt. And Ambassador Ryan Crocker told me, "The fall of the Maliki government, when it happens, might be a good thing." But replace it with what? The consensus in the U.S. intelligence community is that there's going to be lots of bloodshed, including fighting among the Shi'ites, before a credible Iraqi government emerges. It also seems that the U.S. attempt to build an Iraqi army and police force has been a failure. Some units are pretty good, but most are unreliable, laced with members of various Shi'ite militias. This was clear from my conversations with U.S. combat officers on the ground in Baqubah, Baghdad and Yusufia. It became clearer when seven enlisted men serving in Baghdad wrote a very courageous Op-Ed piece in the New York Times on Aug. 19 in which they said, "Reports that a majority of Iraqi army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric."

The military success against al-Qaeda in Anbar province has led to a certain incoherence in U.S. policy. We are working bottom up, from the tribal grass roots, with the Sunnis ... but top down, and not very successfully, with the Shi'ite majority. According to Crocker, tribes aren't as important among the Shi'ites, who tend to organize themselves in larger structures, especially around two dominant political families, the Sadrs and the Hakims. Each family has a militia. The Sadrs have the Mahdi Army, and the Hakims have the Badr Corps, and these two forces are now at war with each other in southern Iraq. In recent weeks, Hakim-leaning governors of two provinces were assassinated, most likely by special units associated with the Mahdi Army.

In the southern port city of Basra, the situation is complicated by a third party, Fadhila, which controls the local government. Basra may just be a metaphor for Iraq right now. There is no possible role for the U.S. military in the dispute there. The British are leaving, and the intra-Shi'ite battle is ramping up. The Iranians are trying to play all sides. "Under a different set of circumstances, you might argue — as some are now doing — that we need a Basra surge," Crocker told me. "But you'd need a fairly large force, and we don't have the troops. And if we even proposed it, the political element in the U.S. would go nuts."

The next leader of Iraq and the shape of the next Iraqi government and its armed forces will probably be determined by how the Sadr-Hakim battle turns out, as will the decision about how or whether to reconcile with the Sunnis. The Kurds will prefer the aristocratic Hakims to the populist Sadrs, and so will we. But aristocrats seldom win battles of this sort; a strongman who is no fan of democracy or the West might emerge. In any case, the choice will be made by the Iraqis, not us.
by David Furst

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the Sunni-Shi'a Peace

Pleasantries have barely been exchanged — the tea hasn't even been served — before Haji Kaadam Jabbar Hamsa al-Qarghuli lets Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Rohling have it. "I am very angry," says the leader of one of the area's Qarghuli tribes to the commander of the U.S. Army unit in charge of the area surrounding the town of Yusufiyah, which is about 10 miles south of Baghdad. "We are trying to work together," he says, "but dignity comes first."

The colonel had known this was coming. He is here to soothe some tensions that have broken out between the Shi'a-dominated Iraqi Army and the local, Sunni-dominated Sons of Iraq armed security organizations that the U.S. Army also supports. While the area has enjoyed a striking decline in overall violence over the past year, Colonel Rohling now spends an increasing amount of time managing the complex and fragile relationships that have made this peace possible — and making sure this detente does not unravel every time a partisan crime is committed.

The most recent crime the colonel is dealing with was particularly provocative. On May 14, a woman passed several Sons of Iraq checkpoints as she made her way to the front gate of an Iraqi Army patrol base. She asked to see the company's commander, Captain Wassim Abdul Hadi Saaud al-Sertani. She was a suicide bomber and when the commander arrived, she detonated her explosive vest and killed him and herself.

The event set off waves of accusations and recriminations. Convinced that the Sons of Iraq were to blame for lax security, if not for active participation in the plot, Captain Sertani's men fanned out immediately after the blast, roughing up Sons of Iraq members and hauling several into hours of custody. This, Haji Kaadam insisted to the American colonel, was an affront. "If there is an IED or an armed attack, that is our responsibility," he says. "But a lone woman? That is out of our hands. Yet the Iraqi Army came down here and began hitting our people, blaming them." Without ruling out that some Sons of Iraq individuals may have been involved, Colonel Rohling's intelligence officers and the Iraqi Army continue to investigate the woman's identity and motivation. He has no proof yet, but Rohling suspects the attack was a personal vendetta against the captain because the woman targeted him so specifically. "She could have done so much more damage to the Iraqis, or the Americans, for that matter, if she had chosen to," he says.

Colonel Rohling has been circulating throughout the area ever since the bombing, talking to sheiks and Iraqi Army units, encouraging them not to let emotions escalate, making sure everyone is seeking answers, not vengeance. "This week has been about throwing a wet blanket on things, just trying to calm everyone down," says Major Bill Kuttler, the unit's operations officer. Today, Colonel Rohling has arrived with the wet blanket in full effect, telling Haji Kaadam that the soldiers reacted strongly because they loved their commander, but the Iraqi Army commander realizes "seeking justice does not involve trampling on the rights of the Qarghuli people."

At the Iraqi Army base where the captain was killed, Rohling drives this point home. "You need to strike a balance when you deal with the Qarghuli," he tells two junior Iraqi Army officers. "I understand that you can't demonstrate weakness, but you can't come on too strong, either. Today is the hottest day of the year so far, but I need cool heads, okay?" They nod in agreement.

Everyone the colonel speaks to on his rounds today, whether Qarghuli or Iraqi Army, affirms that life is better now than it was even a few months ago, and they pledge that peace will be maintained. But tensions, distrust and resentments roil beneath the surface, and they can erupt quickly and intensely. Haji Kaadam says Iraqi Army vehicles scream past his checkpoints at reckless speeds and says some Army officers have been demanding that the Sons of Iraq salute them. The Iraqi Army officers, meanwhile, sneer that the Sons of Iraq are either incapable of maintaining security or, worse, provide it selectively.

As the day's meetings conclude, Colonel Rohling says, "The important thing, in the aftermath of something like this, is that we don't move backwards. We can't move forward every day, but on the days we don't, I need to make sure everybody is just taking a pause and not gearing up for a giant leap backwards."
By JIM FREDERICK/YUSUFIYAH

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the notion of community, culture and civilization

The wars arise in part from very secular fears about identity and survival. Two factors, sometimes contradictory, are at work: 1) deep, real, material interests lie just beneath the surface of most of today's ostensibly religious conflicts; 2) religion, not as a doctrinal crusade but as an identifying birthright, a heritage, is persistently present to complicate every issue, to enforce an "us-them" hostility. Religion, always a receptacle for ultimate aspirations, can enlist the best and worst in its congregations. In conflict, religion can be used—or perverted—to call up supernatural justifications for killing. In 1915 the Bishop of London asked his congregation to "kill Germans, to kill them, not for the sake of killing, but to save the world, to kill the good as well as the bad, to kill." The dark side of religious conviction can be a violent intractability, an avenging angel's note of retribution. As Martin Luther wrote, "He who will not hear God's word when it is spoken with kindness must listen to the headsman when he comes with his ax." Religion can provide a warmth of certitude and belonging. When its energy is turned outward, it may express itself in acts of mercy and even saintliness. But piety can also be lethal when directed against strangers and infidels. William James, writing 75 years ago, defined the problem: "Piety is the mask, the inner force is tribal instinct."
One writer, Miriam Reik, has claimed, "Were Ireland an African island and its natives black, no one would doubt that Ulster's troubles show the classical symptoms of a colonial struggle." That is true enough. Since the 17th century's Scottish and English Protestant settlers came to Ulster under the protection of the British Crown, the native Catholic minority has been relegated to permanently inferior status. Yet the conflict has a strong tribal aspect, with religion serving as the identifying element, even though groups such as the I.R.A. are now more likely to quote Marx than Jesus. Protestants like the demagogue Ian Paisley have kept the "religious threat" alive by constantly referring to the dangers of "popery" and "Romanism."
It is interesting and perhaps a bit mystifying that most of the religious struggles around the world involve Moslems. Some scholars believe such conflicts may be an expression of a resurgent Islam. Says Duke University Political Scientist Ralph Braibanti: "This may be the moment in history when money, diplomacy and strategy join together in providing a new context for the renaissance of Islamic identity and perhaps of Islam itself." Islam makes no distinction between the secular and the religious. The Moslem doctrine of jihad (holy war) has an immediate, literal significance. As the Vatican's guidelines on Islam observe, "Islam is a religion, yet it is also inextricably bound up with the notion of community, culture and civilization."

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DOCTRINE..

Moslem doctrine accounts for much of the intractability of the Middle Eastern situation. The Koran specifically sanctions religious war: "When ye encounter the infidels, strike off their heads until ye have made a great slaughter of them." The Grand Sheik of Al Azhar in Cairo, a leading center of Islamic learning in the Middle East, has flatly said, "The struggle against Israel is jihad, and if all Moslems did their duty and took a weapon, there would be no problem." Moslem theology distinguishes between dar-al-Islam (the region already conquered for Allah) and dar-al-Harb (the region of Holy War, still to be conquered). Israel lies in dar-al-Islam and as such is seen as an alien presence in land already belonging to Moslems.
But the struggles involving Moslems are more complicated than that intransigent doctrine. Arab leaders like Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Syria's Hafez Assad are not encouraging the rhetoric of holy war. Arabs are not theologically blinded to the larger secular issues of international power. In Lebanon, for example, a tangled social history has preceded what might seem at first glance an essentially religious struggle. The roots lay in the creation by the French in 1920 of a greater Lebanon from the remnants of the defeated Ottoman Empire. This Lebanon combined a predominantly Maronite Christian area, which had had a semiautonomous status in the past, with Moslem regions. The country's Moslems have tended to identify with the Arab Orient, while the Maronite Christians looked to the West. The Christians' special relation with the French and the rest of the West gave them enormous advantages. Lebanon was slow in developing a state system of education, but the Maronites became the best-educated community in the Arab world because of the large number of French Catholic mission schools in their area. Through such advantages, many of them created a thriving entrepreneurial class and gained control over the economic life of Lebanon, the commercial and financial center of the Middle East. The country became a pattern of haves and have-nots—with the line drawn between the religious communities. But again, as in Ireland, the religious identifications have served as a deeply embittering factor. Observes Ralph Potter, professor of ethics at Harvard Divinity School: "We pick out that factor which puts most things into immediate order for us. Where religion satisfactorily encompasses the whole logic, it becomes the prime identifier. At the same time, that shorthand also traps people into a primarily religious identity."
Other conflicts involve longstanding secular grievances. They are perhaps primarily not religious so much as they are exertions for recognition and even survival. Yet the element of religion gives all these wars an odd phosphorescence. What is important is usually not a deep spiritual faith but rather an intense loyalty to the religious community. The phenomenon has something to do with a clinging to identity, especially in such enclaves as Northern Ireland and Lebanon, whose national identities are fractured and cannot in themselves command patriotic followings. One of Egypt's leading intellectuals, Political Scientist Magdi Wahba, sees signs everywhere of "a disintegration of the national fabric and a religious revival taking its place."

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The scenes are macabre

The scenes are macabre.
Religious images adorn vehicles and guns as Christian soldiers, some of them wearing crosses around their necks, storm Moslem strongholds. Moslem soldiers, in their turn, strip or mutilate the bodies of dead Christian soldiers, tie them to cars and drag them through the streets. In the vicious war in Lebanon, religion is a palpable presence—though allegiances are complex and contradictory; some Christians are backing the leftist Palestinians, while the Syrians, mainly Moslem, support the rightist Christian forces. Still, the air crackles with a certain primitive energy of zealots in a holy war.
Fighting and dying under religious flags go on with a violent persistence elsewhere around the world. Protestants and Roman Catholics in Ulster trade killings in a kind of perpetual motion of futility. Arabs and Israelis stand tensely at borders of territorial, cultural and religious dispute. In the Philippines, Moslem separatists are in rebellion against a Christian majority. Greek-Cypriot Orthodox Christians confront Turkish-Cypriot Moslems across a sullen truce line. Pakistan separated from India because Moslems feared the rule of a Hindu majority.
Why, at this point in the 20th century, the strange vitality of what seem to be religious wars? Westerners tend to regard them as something anachronistic—an offense against the heritage of the Enlightenment, spasms of violent superstition. If war is often enough inexplicable, religious conflict at least seems to carry war's inherent irrationality into an even uglier, throwback realm of absolutes, beyond the reach of compromise. Or perhaps it is simply that agnostic societies find it difficult to understand why anyone would think religion worth fighting about.
These conflicts are, of course, more complicated than religious fanaticism; they have a great deal to do with economic discrimination, battles for political power, questions of deeply laminated social difference. Nor do the wars involve religious doctrine—except in oblique, complex ways. A Belfast pub is not blown up to assert the Real Presence or the Virgin Birth. Many of the terrorists are atheists anyway. In such places as Ireland and Lebanon, religious leaders on all sides have prayed and pleaded for an end to the fighting. The I.R.A. is filled with the excommunicated, whose religious observances are limited to theatrical funerals for its martyrs. But the violence persists with a life of its own, like a hereditary disease. It is an anomaly of such conflicts that organized religion is powerless to stop them—as if a war involving religion were too important to be left to churchmen.
By LANCE MORROW

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KARMA...

The two natural disasters struck just days apart, yet their aftermaths were strikingly different. When cyclone Nargis swept through Burma on May 2-3, leaving roughly 134,000 people dead or missing, the world reacted with deep sympathy and immediate promises of aid. International generosity, so far reaching nearly $230 million in relief aid, stood in sharp contrast to the callousness of the ruling junta, which unilaterally slowed the flow of aid to a trickle and essentially ignored the plight of millions of suffering Burmese.

Then on May 12, an earthquake in the central Chinese province of Sichuan razed hundreds of villages, killing at least 65,000 people. While battalions of Chinese People's Liberation Army soldiers clawed through rubble to rescue people buried alive and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao rushed to the disaster scene to comfort victims, the Western reaction was far more muted.

Yes, nearly $160 million in cash was pledged by foreign nations, and the quake helped shift media attention from Beijing's harsh crackdown on Tibetan riots earlier this year. But, all in all, the Chinese earthquake didn't elicit the same groundswell of popular international compassion as the Burmese cyclone — much less the activist urgency of the genocide in Darfur. Indeed, significant amounts of aid to China seemed to be from multinational corporations with an eye to economic relations with the People's Republic rather than from an outpouring of populist sympathy. In an extreme indication of prevailing Western attitudes, Hollywood actress Sharon Stone suggested that the Sichuan temblor could have been the result of bad "karma" for China's recent campaign in Tibet.

Certainly, there are few victims as beleaguered as the Burmese. Oppressed by a military junta for more than four decades, the people of Burma seemed to expect little from their government when Cyclone Nargis tore through the Irrawaddy Delta. The government duly met those low expectations, for weeks keeping nearly all foreign aid workers out of the devastated delta and even confiscating private donations from Burmese horrified by their rulers' inaction. Nearly a month after the storm, the United Nations estimated that 1 million victims still had not received any help at all. Then, just two days after U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon left Burma following a donors' conference in the commercial capital, Rangoon, the generals yet again proved their disregard for international sentiment by extending by another year the house arrest of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. The figurehead of Burma's strangled political opposition, she has been under detention for much of the past two decades. With the exception of the North Koreans, few nationalities feel as downtrodden as the Burmese do.

Survivors of China's earthquake have faced a different kind of international scrutiny. While there's no questioning the overwhelming tragedy faced by the people of Sichuan, the narrative of sympathy is more complicated. In the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, many foreigners were alarmed by what has been perceived as a burgeoning Chinese nationalism, which manifested itself most fervently after the Olympic torch relay was disrupted by foreign activists calling attention to Chinese human-rights abuses. The same national pride was what prompted thousands of ordinary Chinese citizens—not normally known for their sense of volunteerism—to rush to the aid of the Sichuan earthquake victims, loading up their own cars with food and water to distribute to the needy.

But the flip side to this Chinese patriotism—jingoistic rants on the Internet against any foreigner daring to question, say, Tibet's status as an inalienable part of China—has raised concerns in the West. Add to that the slew of bad press linked to Chinese workshops, which have churned out cheap but potentially dangerous products. Sichuan is one of the leading sources of the migrant labor that is powering China's factories. Perhaps it's harder to feel concern for the very workers who may have been toiling at factories producing toxic baby toys or dog food.

But people in need are people in need. True, it may be easier to cheer for an underdog like Burma than a behemoth like China. But when U.S. President George W. Bush condemned Suu Kyi's continuing detention, he also stressed that the junta's political intransigence would not affect American aid to the victims of Cyclone Nargis. The same calculus should be used for Sichuan. Yes, China is richer than Burma, and it may not need as much international aid as a country widely regarded as an economic basket case. But Beijing has urgently appealed for more tents and supplies from foreign donors. And the lessons of past natural disasters are instructive: After the 2004 tsunami, the international community poured money into the Indonesian province of Aceh, where civil strife had been simmering for years. The reconstruction effort, in part, helped galvanize a peace that holds to this day.

China as a potential superpower is not going to disappear anytime soon. Already, China's state-controlled press, which just weeks ago was castigating the outside world for harping on human-rights abuses instead of cheering the upcoming Olympics, has acknowledged with gratitude the aid provided by foreign countries. A few more donations could generate a lot more goodwill. That, with apologies to Sharon Stone, is the true meaning of karma.

by Michael Urban

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