“I will have no choice but to pull back if I can’t depend on you”
Michael Totten’s latest report from Baghdad, Iraq is well worth reading. There’s something very important in there, said by an Iraqi. An excerpt and some of my comments on politics come after the jump.
“The soccer field you’re building,” said our host to the lieutenant, “is great for the kids, but it also helps with security. Insurgents were using that area as a base. Thank you, thank you.” He put his hand on his heart.
“Listen,” said another Iraqi, who wore a long black beard as well as a dishdasha. “I have something to tell you, but it has to be away from the children.”
He said this in English so the children would not understand. A young man led them outside and suggested they play with their new toys on the lawn.
“When you came and liberated this country,” he continued, “Iraq had 25 million Saddams. America is turning us back into human beings. That soccer field is not for a specific person. It is for everybody. We appreciate that. We believe that if Americans have something that is ours, they will return it to us. If the Iraqi government has something that is ours, we forget it.”
Our host for the evening nodded in agreement.
“We support you,” the man continued. “You support our back, we support your back. But you must understand: If you pull back, we will pull back. I will have no choice but to pull back if I can’t depend on you. It will be much harder for us to stand together. But as long as you stand firmly behind us we will support you against Moqtada al Sadr and the other bastards in the area.”
“Are they Sunnis?” I said to Lieutenant Pitts. Moqtada al Sadr leads the radical Shia Mahdi Army militia.
“No,” he said. “They are Shias. But they don’t like any of the idiot groups, regardless of sect. They want peace.”
This is exactly what Michael Yon was talking about when he said “the American military has managed to establish a moral authority in Iraq”. There are two things at work on the ground in Iraq right now and both of them are incredibly important.
1) Iraqis remember 1991, when we abandoned them to the predations of Saddam Hussein. They have been watching us very carefully for the past few years to see if we will stand and take the body blows from the folks who would destroy and enslave them. Our efforts and our patience is seeing fruit. Our soldiers are finding allies where just a year ago, or less, they were finding bombs and snipers’ bullets. Iraqis are trusting us, slowly, but if we leave before they are ready – if we drop them into the hands of tyrants once again – we will lose them forever and there will be hell to pay.
2) Iraqis are figuring out how to govern themselves much in the same way that we had to after 1778. It took us until 1789 to ratify our own Constitution and we were far from a safe and idyllic society during that time. But we figured it out and so will they. What they have at the beginning will hardly be a perfect democracy, but neither was ours. We didn’t really get the “all men are created equal” bit of the preamble until the 1860s.
Why are these two things so important? As I’ve said before, democracies are not built from the top down but from the bottom up. They come about as people learn how to peaceably settle their differences as neighbors, then as communities, then as cities, states, and finally, as a nation. Some things work and make their way up the chain of government. Other things are discarded. That’s what we’re seeing in Iraq right now. While the feckless Congress in Washington rails about Iraq’s national government, Iraqis are building the sorts of communities they want to live in, slowly but surely. In time, the leaders from those communities will come to Baghdad and lead the whole country, but not if we keep blackmailing them with threats of leaving.
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Category: Fighting the Islamists, General
