A Baghdad Dispatch

Fouad Ajami has published his latest update on the war in Iraq in today's Washington Post. Ajami is a professor at Johns Hopkins and is author of The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq. I greatly admire his work and his personal insights into the Middle East since he is a Shia from Lebanon who has long lived and worked in the US. When he talks and writes of 'us' and 'we' he invariably means 'us' Americans.

I do not know what to make of his political judgement. He is, to some extent, a prose poet of Shia triumphalism and it worries me that he is a close friend of the Chalabis. Still, his prospective on the situation is almost unique. If I understand his dispatch, the civil war for Iraq has just been fought, and the Shia have won. The US should not pull out, but allow the moderate Shia to forge some type of compromise with the more realistic Sunni who can accept no longer being in charge. Ajami's writings on Iraq always seem to me to be laced with an inexpressible sadness, but this dispatch ends on an upbeat note, perhaps too upbeat at this late date. Please see for yourself.

The crackdown on the Mahdi Army that the new American commander, Gen. David Petraeus, has launched has the backing of the ruling Shia coalition. Iraqi police and army units have taken to the field against elements of the Mahdi army. In recent days, in the southern city of Diwaniyya, American and Iraqi forces have together battled the forces of Moqtada al-Sadr. To the extent that the Shia now see Iraq as their own country, their tolerance for mayhem and chaos has receded. Sadr may damn the American occupiers, but ordinary Shia men and women know that the liberty that came their way had been a gift of the Americans.

The young men of little education--earnest displaced villagers with the ways of the countryside showing through their features and dialect and shiny suits--who guarded me through Baghdad, spoke of old errors, and of the joy and dignity of this new order. Children and nephews and younger brothers of men lost to the terror of the Baath, they are done with the old servitude. They behold the Americans keeping the peace of their troubled land with undisguised gratitude. It hasn't been always brilliant, this campaign waged in Iraq. But its mistakes can never smother its honor, and no apology for it is due the Arab autocrats who had averted their gaze from Iraq's long night of terror under the Baath.