False premises lead to false conclusions

John Hulsman and Anatol Lieven write

Iraq is a disaster today partly because of the neoconservative fantasy that democratic nationhood can be built from scratch, at the point of a gun. This is crazed nationalist utopianism - and it is wholly alien to core Republican traditions.

According to Shiite observers like Vali Nasr, Iraq is not a disaster, and will be one only if we abandon the majority of the population to be oppressed by yet another Sunni regime, which seems to be the Saudi Plan if we bail out. Doing so would be another betrayal of the Shia Arabs, and a cause for shame.

With all the brouhaha over civil war and sectarian violence, we seem to forget that the divide between Sunni and Shiite is over a thousand years old and has been fueled more by Sunnis trying to excommunicate Shiites when they mourn the murder of their early Imams and celebrate them as martyrs. Americans don't understand this, because we believe in freedom of religion, but for the Shiites, it has meant a millennium of oppression, violence and denial of human rights. Now that we have given them their best chance in 100 years to take power over their own land, and their leading religious authority is counseling them to support most of what we have proposed in the way of elections, service in the military, constitutional government, critics are urging us to run out because the Middle Eastern cultures seem to resolve matters by tests of strength including violence. This is a fight that has been brewing for a long time, and probably needs to burn itself out, but the al-Sistani (may he live long) position is as neo-con as anybody could ask for.

I have had a hard time making my mind up on this issue, but if there is a George Washington/Martin Luther King for Iraq, it could be Ayatollah al-Sistani. We should recognize that and give him more time to lead his people. That won't guarantee that Iraq will be friendly to us, but it would be the right thing to do.