[Mb-civic] EXCELLENT AND IMPORTANT: Face Iraq's Past - Jim Hoagland - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Face Iraq's Past
Phony National Reconciliation Is a Bad Choice

By Jim Hoagland
Thursday, March 2, 2006; A21

Iraq has endured civil war for 30 years. It has not suited Western 
policymakers or the media to call it that, nor to face up to the 
implications of the appalling sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing 
that this long conflict has generated. That must change.

What peace there was in Iraq before the U.S. invasion of 2003 was the 
peace of the graveyard. Saddam Hussein's forces conquered Kurdistan in 
1975 and launched the genocidal campaign code-named Anfal against the 
Kurds in 1987. The Shiite south was the target of mass murder and 
environmental warfare throughout the following decade.

That may sound like ancient history to Americans rightly concerned about 
the latest casualties in the continuing mayhem that the invasion helped 
magnify and beam around the world. But that history of violence lives on 
in today's bomb blasts destroying Shiite shrines and the equally 
despicable "retaliatory" butchering of Sunni civilians.

The past reaches deep even into the defining of what is happening in 
Iraq today. When Sunnis kill Shiites on a wholesale basis, American 
front pages, news broadcasts and official policy statements call it 
insurgency. When Shiites kill Sunnis, we call it civil war or, more 
teasingly, imminent civil war.

There is an unacknowledged psychological basis for this seemingly 
irrational differentiation of massacres. Diplomats and reporters know 
that if the Shiite majority, which may make up 60 percent of the 
population, were to rise in a sustained onslaught against the 20 percent 
Sunni minority, the resulting bloodbath would be horrendous -- and could 
spark regional intervention.

The neighboring Arab states have helped shape the perception that Shiite 
violence directed at Sunnis is somehow different -- and more dangerous 
-- than the violence used at first by Hussein and now by Sunni 
guerrillas, whether they are Baathist remnants, the Wahhabist fanatics 
of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or a combination of the two. In this view, 
Sunni-originated violence can be tolerated or even rewarded; Shiite 
violence is "civil war" that must be prevented.

The Sunni regimes of these Arab states kept quiet or actively helped in 
Hussein's long reign of terror over the Kurds and Shiites. The burning 
of thousands of Kurdish villages or the draining of the marshes in the 
south to inflict death and force huge population movements was not 
"civil war" to these regimes or to their official and corporate friends 
in Washington, London and elsewhere. No, these were unfortunate 
incidents that should now be subject to the statutes of limitations that 
Ramsey Clark and Hussein's other lawyers indirectly invoke in a Baghdad 
courtroom.

The Kurds and Shiites are determined that there will be no statute of 
limitations on these crimes and that their populations will never again 
be subjected to organized brutality from a strong central government in 
Baghdad. Their determination needs to be taken into account more 
thoroughly by the Bush administration, which pursues an unrealistic 
vision of peaceful national reconciliation in Iraq that today is out of 
reach.

The principal actors are not available for that vision. The Kurds take a 
Garbo approach: They want to be left alone. The Shiites increasingly see 
the same degree of autonomy and separation from the center as the answer 
for the south as well. A genuine decentralization of power -- a loose 
federalism that maintains Iraq as a concept for today and a real 
possibility for tomorrow -- is both inevitable and desirable at this point.

That means in turn that the United States has every interest in 
maintaining a strategic relationship with the Kurds, who will need 
American help to keep Turkey from taking them over, and a tolerable 
working relationship with the mainstream Shiite forces, whatever is 
happening in Baghdad.

To promote an enforced phony national reconciliation built on 
concessions to Sunni extremists to wean them from violence, as 
Washington has repeatedly attempted, is self-defeating.

The Bush administration has made increased Iranian influence in the 
south a self-fulfilling prophecy by misunderstanding and mishandling 
Shiite nationalism. The normally adept U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, 
Zalmay Khalilzad, continued that pattern by publicly threatening the 
Shiites directly with the halt of U.S. aid to Iraq if they do not agree 
to a "cross-sectarian" -- code word for Sunni -- interior minister in 
the new cabinet.

That was overreaching, as the turmoil ignited by the demolition of the 
Shiite Askariya shrine in Samarra last week quickly demonstrated. The 
blast was apparently carried out by professional sappers in another 
attempt to provoke the "civil war" that has thus far been avoided -- at 
least in the headlines and presidential statements, if not in fact.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/01/AR2006030101936.html
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