REALITY MEETS LEGEND:

Iraqi Tribes, Asked to Help G.I.'s, Say They Can't (SUSAN SACHS, November 11, 2003, NY Times)

As a tribal chieftain in Iraq's most rebellious city, Sheik Khamis el-Essawi has met more American commanders in the last seven months than he can remember.

They all make the same polite yet firm demand. He must, they say, exert his legendary tribal authority to stop guerrilla attacks on their troops.

Sheik Khamis, a dapper man whose Buessa tribe still controls a fine swath of fertile land along the Euphrates, says he keeps responding that, alas, his influence is just not what it used to be.

"Every time a new general comes, they call us to a meeting and say the same things," he said after conferring Saturday with the latest high-ranking visitor, Gen. John P. Abizaid, commander of American forces in the Middle East. "But they don't understand that the sheiks have no control over those people doing the attacks. Believe me, those people are not going to listen to me."

In Iraq's Shiite-dominated south, a cohesive group of Shiite Muslim clergymen, quickly established themselves as the new authority figures when official hostilities ended and they urged their followers to tolerate the occupation.

There has also been virtually no violence in the north, where the majority Kurds had long built up their own institutions.

But in restive Falluja, and places like it across the Sunni Muslim heartland of central Iraq, Saddam Hussein had so decimated the natural social hierarchy, Iraqis say, that no group could fill the political vacuum left by his ouster.

Though certainly a pain in the short run, the destruction of tribalism anywhere is a good thing in the long run. You'd think though that it would be possible to unite everyone else in opposition to Saddam's tribe, which we've always been told he took good care of.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 11, 2003 2:08 PM