The remarkable thing about the terror in Iraq is the silence
with which it is greeted in other Arab lands. Abu Musab al-
Zarqawi has exposed the pitilessness and the moral emptiness
of so much of official Arab life. Zarqawi is a bigot and a
killer. In the way he rails against the Shiites (and the
Kurds) he expresses that fatal Arab inability to take in "the
other."
Zarqawi kills and maims, he labels the Shiites rafida
(rejecters of Islam), he charges them with treason as
"collaborators of the occupiers and the Crusaders," but he is
perceived as a holy warrior on behalf of a wider Arab world
that has averted its gaze from his crimes, and that has given
him its silent approval.
What is one to make of the Damascus-based Union of Arab
Writers that has refused to grant membership in its ranks to
Iraqi authors? For more than three decades, Iraq's life was
sheer and limitless terror, and the Union of Arab Writers
never uttered a word. Through these terrible decades, Iraqis
suffered alone.
Unreason, an indifference to the most basic of facts, and a
spirit of belligerence have settled upon the Arab world.
Those who, in Arab lands beyond Iraq, have taken to
describing the Iraqi constitution as an "American-Iranian
constitution," give voice to incoherence. At the heart of
this incoherence lies an adamant determination to deny the
Shiites of Iraq a claim to their rightful place in their
country's political order.
The drumbeats against Iraq from the League of Arab States and
its Egyptian apparatchiks betray the panic of an old Arab
political class afraid that there is something new unfolding
in Iraq—a different understanding of political power
and citizenship, a possible break with the culture of tyranny
and the cult of Big Men disposing of the affairs— and
the treasure—of nations.
The Egyptian autocracy knows the stakes. An Iraqi polity with
a modern social contract would be a rebuke to all that Egypt
stands for, a cruel reminder of the heartbreak of Egyptians
in recent years.
We should not be taken in by warnings from Jordan, made by
King Abdullah II, of a "Shia crescent" spanning Iran, Iraq,
Syria and Lebanon. This is a piece of bigotry and
simplification unworthy of a Hashemite ruler, for in the
scheme of Arab history the Hashemites have been possessed of
moderation and tolerance. Of all Sunni Arab rulers, the
Hashemites have been particularly close to the Shiites, but
popular opinion in Jordan has been thoroughly infatuated with
Saddam Hussein, and Saddamism, and an inexperienced ruler
must have reasoned that the Shiite bogey would play well at
home.
The truth of Jordan today is official moderation coupled with
a civic culture given to anti-Americanism, and hijacked by
the Islamists. Verse is still read in Saddam's praise at
poetry readings in Amman, and the lawyers' syndicate is
packed with those eager to join the legal defense teams of
Saddam Hussein and his principal lieutenants. Jordan has yet
to make its peace with the new Iraq.
It was luck that the American project in Iraq came to the
rescue of the Shiites—and of the Kurds. We may not
fully appreciate the historical change we unleashed on the
Arab world. We have given liberty to the stepchildren of the
Arab world. We have overturned an edifice of material and
moral power that dates back centuries.
The Arabs railing against U.S. imperialism and arrogance in
Iraq will never let us in on the real sources of their
resentments. They can't tell us that they are aggrieved that
we have given a measure of self-worth to the seminarians of
Najaf and the highlanders of Kurdistan. But that is precisely
what gnaws at them. The Sunni political and bureaucratic
elites, and the Christian Arab pundits who abetted them in
the idle hope that they would be spared the wrath of the
street and of the mob— were overturned in Iraq.
And America, at times ambivalent about its mission, brought
along with its military gear a suspicion of the Shiites.
For the Sunni Arabs, this new war in Iraq was a replay: the
fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258. The great city of
learning fell to savages, and an age of greatness had drawn
to a close. In the legend of that tale, the Mongols sacked
the metropolis, put its people to the sword, dumped the books
of its libraries in the Tigris. That river, chroniclers
insist, flowed, alternately, with the blood of the victims
and the ink of the books.
A tale of betrayal is told. A minister of the caliph, a
Shiite by the name of Ibn Alqami, opened the gates of Baghdad
to the Mongols. In his call for a new `holy war' against the
Shiites, Zarqawi dredges up that history, dismisses the
Shiite-led government as "the government of Ibn Alqami's
descendants."
Zarqawi's jihadists have needed the harbor given them in the
Sunni triangle and the indulgence of the old Baathists. Iraq
is now a "stolen country" delivered into the hands of subject
communities unfit to rule. Though a minority, the Sunni Arabs
have a majoritarian mindset and a conviction that political
dominion is their birthright.
The project in the burning grounds of the Arab-Muslim world
remains, and we must remember its genesis. It arose out of a
calamity on 9/11, which rid us rudely of the illusions of the
'90s. In Kabul and Baghdad, we cut down two terrible regimes;
in the neighborhood beyond, there are chameleons in the
shadows whose ways are harder to extirpate.
Our work has been noble and necessary, and we can't call a
halt to it in midstream. We bought time for reform to take
root in several Arab and Muslim realms. Leave aside the
rescue of Afghanistan, Kuwait and Qatar have done well by our
protection, and Lebanon has retrieved much of its freedom.
The three larger realms of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria are
more difficult settings, but there, too, the established
orders of power will have to accommodate the yearnings for
change.
The claim that our war in Iraq will have hatched a Shiite
theocracy is a smear on the war, a misreading of the Shiite
world of Iraq. In the holy city of Najaf, at its apex, there
is a dread of political furies and an attachment to sobriety.
I went to Najaf in July; no one of consequence there spoke of
a theocratic state. The new order shall give them what they
want: a place in Iraq's cultural and moral order, and a
decent separation between religion and the compromises of
political life.
It has not been easy, this expedition to Iraq, and for
America in Iraq there has been heartbreak aplenty. But we
ought to remember the furies that took us there, and we ought
to be consoled by the thought that the fight for Iraq is a
fight to ward off Arab dangers and troubles that came our way
on a clear September morning, four years ago.
Mr. Ajami teaches International Relations at Johns Hopkins
University. These are excerpts from an article that
originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal.
