IN THE FACE OF MEDIA indifference, the facts on the ground in Iraq have changed–dramatically and for the better. The deaths of Iraqi civilians over the past two months have declined precipitously. Before the surge and its accompanying change in tactics took effect, often 3,000 Iraqis would die violent deaths in a month, directly victimized by the sectarian violence. In September, that number dropped below 900. In October, the plunge continued to below 700, the lowest figure for any month at any point during the war.
One of the fears regarding the surge is that its change in tactics, a wholesale transformation that would put greater emphasis on engaging the enemy and less emphasis on force protection, would bring with it intolerable American casualties. Not intolerable to the men and women who have chosen to go to Iraq and want to win there, but surely intolerable to certain elements of our media and political establishments that would opportunistically seize on each piece of bad news as another reason to end “George Bush’s war.” Happily, this scenario hasn’t transpired. American fatalities due to hostilities have declined each month since May. In October, there were fewer than thirty American hostile fatalities, the lowest such figure since February 2004.
Yet war opponents and President Bush’s foes are nothing if not determined. They’re not likely to take this good news lying down. In the past, the media and the Democratic party have preferred to paint Iraq as an irretrievably violent place where we’ve already lost. The New York Times not long ago infamously editorialized that genocide was preferable to our current situation.
Even for lefty dead-enders, this narrative has become increasingly untenable. In order to avoid embarrassing themselves, the war’s opponents in the press and politics will have to make a tactical adjustment of their own. Look for them in the coming weeks to try to shift the debate to the one area where Iraq has not progressed dramatically since the start of the surge–its stumble-prone central government.
If they are allowed to do this, then the American people will miss the real miracle that has occurred in Iraq over the last several months. Peace is breaking out through Iraq and the sectarian violence declining because that is the demand of the Iraqi people. Iraqi society has tired of bloodshed, and has opted for tolerance. It is the most amazing and inspiring story of the admittedly still-young 21st century. And yet few in the media have deigned to tell it, and many in our body politic refuse to hear it.
A FEW YEARS AGO, conservative commentator and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan wrote an article that harshly responded to President Bush’s idealistic second Inaugural Address. Noonan posited that Bush was overreaching in trying to eradicate tyranny, and even argued that tyrants have their proper role in history.
“Certain authoritarians and tyrants whose leadership is illegitimate and unjust have functioned in history as–ugly imagery coming–garbage-can lids on their societies,” she wrote. “They keep freedom from entering, it is true. But when they are removed, the garbage–the freelance terrorists, the grievance merchants, the ethnic nationalists–pops out all over. Yes, freedom is good and to be strived for. But cleaning up the garbage is not pretty.”
Noonan’s imagery was no less repulsive because she acknowledged its ugliness. Dismissing entire populations as “garbage” who need tyrants to keep them in their place is not the sort of language that her former boss, Ronald Reagan, would have countenanced.
Noonan was every bit as misguided in terms of realpolitik. By the start of this century, the age of the “successful” tyrant had long since passed. In Saudi Arabia, in spite of a ruthless, illegitimate regime that attempted to smother its society, a movement led by an embittered millionaire had “popped out” and toppled America’s two tallest buildings. Long before then, our tyrant in Iran, the Shah, lost his place atop Iranian society. The totalitarian Fundamentalists who replaced him have been killing Americans and other free people for over a generation now.
It’s important to note that the regime that replaced the Shah was popular; thirty years ago, it reflected the will of the Iranian people. Surveying the rest of the Islamic world after 9/11, we had and still have cause to fear the rise of more regimes cut from the Iranian cloth. Brutal Wahabism dominates Saudi society; the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood is ascendant in Egypt.
President Bush’s plan regarding the Iraq war was audacious and risky. He wanted to prove that an Islamic country could be peaceful and democratic. In order for the project to succeed, the demands for peace and tolerance had to necessarily flow from the Iraqi people.
It’s amazing how poorly our media and politicians have grasped that last point. It’s also more than a little odd. On the left, the most political muscle currently originates with the progressive “Netroots,” a group that endlessly extols the importance of “people power.” And on the right, the notion of an all-powerful central government dictating the way a society should function has long been anathema. And yet on all points along our political spectrum, there’s an often explicit agreement that unless the Iraqi government rapidly transforms itself into an Arabic-speaking version of our Constitutional Congress, the surge will have been for naught.
This is rubbish. Indeed, it’s un-American rubbish. Imposing a strong central government that would have served as a “garbage can lid” on Iraqi society would have been a lot easier than what the Bush administration is on the verge of accomplishing. We could have easily replaced a hostile SOB (Saddam) with one who had a more pro-American outlook. We could have left the Baath infrastructure intact, and with 150,000 American troops on the ground, our SOB would have had an easy time keeping a veneer of order and lawfulness in Iraq.
But in the end, that would have been a hollow “accomplishment.” Unless the people of the Islamic world decide to look past their “grievance merchants” and “ethnic nationalists,” we are in for a war without end.
SO WHAT’S HAPPENED the past several months? One thing’s for sure–you wouldn’t know the story by reading the New York Times.
While the military progress has been undeniable, the leaders of the American mission in Iraq continue to under-promise and over-deliver. Indeed, the contrast in the cautious rhetoric issued by the Petraeus/Odierno team could hardly differ more from the statements that their predecessors made. The administration in its rhetoric now allows for the fact thaxt the enemy gets a vote. The possibility of counter-offensives by Al Qaeda or Shiite militias can’t be dismissed. But the greatest progress hasn’t been on the military front, impressive as those strides have been. The real breakthrough has been with the Iraqi people. Throughout Iraq, Iraqi citizens have decided that the fighting must end. They have tired of the sectarian strife that made swaths of their country a killing field. Having sampled something that could be called a civil war, they have collectively decided that they would rather live in a peaceful society. This means that each sect will have to tolerate the other sects’ presence.
Throughout Iraq, ordinary citizens have tipped off American troops to the presence of not only al Qaeda forces but members of their own sect bent on violence. They have also tipped off American troops to the presence of hundreds of IEDs, saving countless American lives. And they have done all of this knowing that they were risking death by doing so.
Although grassroots politics in America is of a less perilous sort, this too is a form of grassroots politics. Ordinary people have involved themselves with the fate of their nation, and made an enormous difference. While the Iraqi government remains mostly dysfunctional and enmeshed in squabbling, the Iraqi people have chosen the course their country will take.
Over the coming months, congress will be debating Iraq. It is too late for the American left to acknowledge victory or even progress there. For years now, Iraq as a latter-day Vietnam has been a fixed part of the left’s conceptual software. In the Democratic party’s efforts to sell the case for Iraq being a failure, they will settle on the central government as their target of choice.
It may take a little time, but a democratic Iraqi people will someday get a government that reflects their new, hard-earned values. While it has been an often bumpy road, the Iraqi experiment now looks like it has a real chance of success. Hopefully George W. Bush, before his time in office expires, will be able to travel to Baghdad and deliver a speech that publicly recognizes the Iraqi people’s will to join the family of civilized nations. Yes, American blood and treasure have given Iraq its freedom, but Iraqis have had to bleed to keep it.
When George W. Bush addresses a free Iraq, a heterogeneous Islamic nation that America freed and that the people of their own volition opted for a peaceful and tolerant democracy, it will represent one of America’s greatest accomplishments. Iraq will truly serve as a beacon to other nations of the region. Its very presence will strike perhaps the lethal blow in the war of ideas we are fighting with fanatics across the region.
Not acknowledging the progress the Iraqi people have made is unconscionable. Abandoning them would be unforgivable.
Dean Barnett is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
