Hitchens on Chalabi and Sunday's election.
More and more, meanwhile, the media mantra about Iraq being divided among Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd is looking illogical and asymmetrical. It reminds me of that other misleading shorthand about Bosnia a decade or so ago, where the contending forces were identified as Serb, Croat, and Muslim. Obviously, one of these three categories is not congruent with the other two. In the Bosnian case, the "Muslims" were not ethnically or confessionally fundamentalist, whereas the Catholics and Orthodox Christians, or at least their leaderships, were. In the case of Iraq, it is scarcely ever pointed out that the majority of Kurds\ufffd20 percent of the population\ufffdare formally Sunni, while the "insurgents" are based on a minority of a minority\ufffdthe Tikriti and other clan groups who were the clientele of the Baathist regime. No "insurgency" based on a minority of a minority has ever succeeded militarily, even if regularly resupplied from a friendly neighboring state. And this group has further isolated itself by making an alliance with imported Bin Ladenists: an alliance that (however often it is denied) was in fact the signature of the declining days of the Saddam dictatorship.
I think this is another strong indictment of the popular press. Too few foreign reporters have any real understanding of the cultures they cover, and too few have any respect for the intelligence of their readers. They dumb complicated issues down to pablum that a first-grader can understand and it becomes the truth. If I hear one more incredulous question on NPR asking whether the elections are going to be held on January 30 I think I'll scream...
IOW, Hitchens is right on target there.
The best rumor of the week, maybe slightly too good to be true, is that after the vote the Shiites will support a leading Sunni Kurd for the presidency, with the prime ministership going to Adel Abdul-Mahdi, Chalabi, or another prominent secular Shiite. Remaining senior posts would go to men like Ghazi al Yawer, or other prominent Sunni social and tribal elements, who can help extend a hand to those many Sunni Iraqis who do not feel themselves represented by religious gangsterism and who see that the "Party of the Return" and other ex-Baathists offer only a dead end. (In this category, by the way, would belong the so-called "Association of Muslim Scholars," oft-quoted as authoritative but well-known to Iraqi Sunni bloggers as a clerical front group set up by Saddam himself.)
All this may seem optimistic in a week's time, but it is the way in which brave Iraqi democrats are actually talking. It's also mixed news for the Bush administration, which has identified itself far too closely with Prime Minister [link|http://slate.msn.com/id/2104662/|Iyad Allawi] and his group. Not only has the CIA's hand-picked candidate been caught exporting vast quantities of cash in U.S. dollars, he has also been spreading no-bid contracts around the place and has used Iraqi media as if they were his own personal property. The recent boast of Allawi's defense minister\ufffdthat he will arrest Chalabi if he goes on making a fuss about this\ufffdis likely to prove an empty one.
Hitchens has been a vocal Chalabi supporter for a long time. I don't know enough about him to know whether he's a crook or a George Washington, but I get suspicious when the prevailing opinion is so negative about someone in politics. It's another failing of our government to identify too strongly with particular people (Putin is another obvious example), so his statement about being too close to Allawi may be correct.
I'm hopeful that people will turn out in large numbers and that violence will be low on Sunday (as it was in Afghanistan during their recent election). But we'll see what happens.
Cheers,
Scott.
