An Iraqi Sea Change
- 03.04.2008 - 9:44 AMQuestion: What is the most extraordinary thing about the following extraordinary sentence?
BAGHDAD — After almost five years of war, many young people in Iraq, exhausted by constant firsthand exposure to the violence of religious extremism, say they have grown disillusioned with religious leaders and skeptical of the faith that they preach.
Answer: It is the lead of a story in today’s New York Times. The paper of record, which for the past few years could accurately be described as a body count with a styles section, is now acknowledging the realization of the most ambitious goal of the Iraq War: the de-radicalization of Muslim citizens. This is, in its way, more important than political reconciliation and even more important than hunting down al Qaeda. This is the long war stuff, the hearts-and-minds stuff.
The goal was to offer freedom as an alternative to extremism; the criticism was that it was a dream; the reality is that it is happening. From the Times:
Such patterns, if lasting, could lead to a weakening of the political power of religious leaders in Iraq. In a nod to those changing tastes, political parties are dropping overt references to religion.
And the revelations don’t end there. Sabrina Tavernise, who wrote the piece, notes that the extent of Iraqis’ wholesale rejection of jihad is unique in the region:
The shift in Iraq runs counter to trends of rising religious practice among young people across much of the Middle East, where religion has replaced nationalism as a unifying ideology.
It is impossible not to infer that the Bush Doctrine and the commitment of the men and women in uniform has facilitated this shift. Far from “creating more terrorists” as the failed cliché goes, the war has helped to nurture an appreciation for liberty among Iraqi youth. A 24-year-old Iraqi college student is quoted as saying she loved Osama bin Laden at the time of 9/11. Now, after seeing the efforts of religious leaders to curtail her daily freedoms, she rejects extremism entirely. While George Bush’s critics can make no useful connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq, this young woman has no problem doing so.
Ms. Tavernise rolls out another shocker with the admission that Saddam Hussien was not the simple secular player that the war’s detractors had always claimed:
Saddam Hussein encouraged religion in Iraqi society in his later years, building Sunni mosques and injecting more religion into the public school curriculum, but always made sure it served his authoritarian needs.
Well, what do you know? Someone should tell Senator Carl Levin, who in 2005 described Saddam’s regime as “intensely secular.”
This Times piece represents a tectonic shift in the Iraq War and in the larger ideological struggle. From this date on, the War cannot be talked about in quite the same way. Those opposed to it can no longer snicker so easily when recalling the President’s assertion that people everywhere want freedom, and they may have to check their rage before declaring we’ve created more terrorists. There are some who understood that changing hearts and minds was the only way to triumph in the long run, but felt that Iraq was a huge setback in that pursuit. Martin Amis, a critic of the war, said of Islamism:
I think it will atomize. And also there will be sectarian strife within it. Also, I think that it is so fantastically poisonous that in its most millennial form, Islamism, not Islam, Islamism is so poisonous that it will burn itself out.
Amis may have thought going into Iraq was the wrong move, but there is little question that the embers have started to cool in Mesopotamia.
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March 4th, 2008 at 10:03 AM
For some reason, you don’t think the visit of the President of Iran to cement his country’s alliance with the Iraqi government is significant.
March 4th, 2008 at 10:09 AM
It’s an interesting article. i wonder who they now look to for guidence. most of the shias i happen to know are still quite fond of sistani and nasrallah.
March 4th, 2008 at 10:13 AM
Carl Levin and his ilk will be remembered as turncoats against their own country someday, in much the same way as the Copperhead Democrats of the Civil War era.
March 4th, 2008 at 10:15 AM
trent- some of us admire the copperheads
March 4th, 2008 at 10:30 AM
Perhaps Lester has a soft spot for slavery.
March 4th, 2008 at 10:39 AM
I’m skeptical. Not because I have any reason to doubt the reporting, but because there’s nothing novel about using Islam to oppress. The violence and curtailing of freedom of Iraqis by clerics, *that* is what’s finally provoking a backlash against Islam? Not three decades of oppression by the Iranian mullahs. Not decades of totalitarianism from the Saudi religious police. Not sixty years of self-destructive religious war against Israel. No, this violence in Iraq… *this* is the thing that causes the first-ever backlash. I doubt it.
March 4th, 2008 at 10:48 AM
Abe raises a good point. Like it or not, the NY Times sets the agenda for the entire left-of-center media and virtually all Dems. The piece is significant mostly for that reason, although whether other segments of the liberal media will push back remains to be seen. Hillary and Obama will ignore it, b/c their narrative of a failed war is central to their foreign policy ideas.
One small tweak: Carl Levin was quoting a DIA report that said Saddam’s Iraq was “intensely secular,” but as the article you cite points out, the DIA made no claim that this fact disproves Saddam’s working relationship with al-Qaeda affiliates and other Islamic terror groups. Levin twisted and misused a single DIA data point, which the DIA never intended to mean that Saddam could not or had not worked with Islamists. In fact, as Tenet testified around the same time for the entire IC, secular Saddam and radical Islamists did indeed have a relationship aimed against both the US and the Saudi royal family.
March 4th, 2008 at 11:03 AM
Shorter Abe Greenwald: a genocidal civil war is a good thing if it leads Iraqis to question religion.
The fact that the failed surge has made sectarianism even worse apparently is off the radar, but that’s not surprising; what’s amazing is that conservatives are actually happy that America plunged Iraq into “almost five years of war,” since hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis are a small price to pay to… well.. bring Iraq closer to being a secular dictatorship again.
And as “Yoda” pointed out, the fact that Iraqis are disenchanted with religion doesn’t mean they love Americans. As we see from the fact that Iran’s leader can visit without being shot at (though he was protested by Sunnis, since Iran is an enemy of Al-Qaeda; the “Bush Doctrine” basically consists of waging war on the enemies of Al-Qaeda like Saddam and the Mullahs, thereby appeasing Bin Laden), Iraqi Shi’ites still prefer their co-religionsts to the hated American occupiers, further proof that Iraq will never truly improve until America pulls out.
But to Bush Cultists, the occupation is a good thing because it leads to dead Iraqis and dead Iraqis lead to Iraqis becoming secular. Just like Saddam.
March 4th, 2008 at 11:13 AM
AK, the difference between Iraq and the other states is that now in Iraq people are *free* to reject the mullahs and imams, or to demand that they not rule so strictly. Youn people in Iran hate their mullahs just as much, in fact, they riot about it frequently - just last week there was a spontaneous riot when the police tried to arrent a young woman whose head scarf wasn’t concealing enough, people came to her aid and drove the police back.
As for Egypt, Syria, et al., perhaps if they didn’t have such autocratic governments they too would feel free to reject fundamentalism.
March 4th, 2008 at 11:18 AM
If the NYTimes is finally acknowledging the success of the surge and Saddam’s relation to Islamists, perhaps they will soon acknowledge that we deposed Saddam because the sanctions were eroding and that he would begin to restart his WMD programs, not that he was an “imminent danger” and had WMDs. Maybe they will acknowledge that building democracy was always part of the program, not a reason Bush made up once the WMDs were not found.
Of course to understand those policies all you had to do was read Bush’s speeches.