THE DEMOCRACY SECT:

Dangers Of the '80 Percent Solution' (David Ignatius, November 23, 2004, Washington Post)

When you push Bush administration officials to explain America's strategy for the new year in Iraq, you get an answer that I'll call "the 80 percent solution." This analysis is at the root of the administration's hopes for the future, so it's worth giving it a careful look.

President Bush's strategists argue that no matter how bloody the insurgency in Iraq may seem, it will never grow beyond the 20 percent of the Iraqi population that is Sunni Muslim. The rest of Iraq -- roughly 60 percent Shiite and 20 percent Kurdish -- may dislike the U.S. occupation, but it will never unite with the Sunnis, who dominated the former regime of Saddam Hussein that brutalized them.

Thus the quiet in the rest of Iraq as U.S. forces pounded the Sunni insurgent stronghold of Fallujah this month. You could almost hear Iraq's Shiites and Kurds muttering: "They had it coming." An Arabic expression conveys the schadenfreude emotion: "The misery of some is for others an advantage." In that phrase lies the cold logic of the 80 percent solution.

It's all well and PC to fret about sectarian violence, but why should 80% of a people, who want democracy, not deal harshly with the 20% who don't? After all, 70,000 Loyalists fled Revolutionary America--why would driving a similar proportion of Ba'athists out of Iraq not be appropriate?

MORE:
'Sons of Liberty' explores gray areas of war (HEDY WEISS, November 23, 2004, Chicago Sun-Times)

Few works for the stage (aside from the popular musical "1776") have made the American War for Independence their subject; maybe it's just the problem of the powdered wigs. But Kampf and Oswalt, obviously propelled by current events -- yet wanting to do something more ambitious and thoughtful than agitprop -- have found an intriguing way to mix past and present.

With a nod to Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia," they have created a play that simultaneously unspools in a single place (a popular Boston tavern) yet lives in two very different eras. The time periods are the years from the mid-1760s to the battles of Concord and Lexington in 1775 that triggered the Revolutionary War, and the eve of a contemporary election when the Liberty Safeguard Act (a thinly veiled version of the 2001 USA Patriot Act) has become a major focus of controversy.

The play opens as the Sons of Liberty -- the often-violent underground organization formed to oppose the hated Stamp Act -- begins to act. This also is when the British instituted the Quartering Act, which made it mandatory for public houses to provide free food and shelter for the king's army.

In any case, the tavern becomes a hotbed of activity, with its managers -- the free-spirited Tench Chapman; his pragmatic wife, Martha, and their pretty, independent-minded niece Tildy (Cortney McKenna, a lovely actress with a most appealing singing voice) -- trying above all to make ends meet. Tildy gives her young but devoted admirer Jesse (Brad Lawrence, who makes a fine transition from naive boy to formidable young revolutionary) a hard time of it at the start, but he will become the story's tragic hero.

Meanwhile, the colonists' grievances pile up and debate rages about how to deal with the situation. Should laws be defied? Does anyone have the stomach for violence? In one particularly powerful scene, a Redcoat who wanders into the tavern alone becomes a scapegoat for the Sons of Liberty and is brutally beaten and then tarred and feathered. It is enough to make many think again about the revolutionaries' tactics.

-Gunmen assassinate second Sunni cleric (MAGGIE MICHAEL, November 23, 2004, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Masked gunmen assassinated a Sunni cleric north of Baghdad on Tuesday-- the second such killing in as many days. Insurgents hit a U.S. convoy with a roadside bomb near the central Iraq city of Samarra, drawing return fire that killed one man.

Sheik Ghalib Ali al-Zuhairi was a member of the Association of Muslim Scholars, an influential Sunni clerics group that has called for a boycott of nationwide elections scheduled for Jan. 30.

He was shot as he was leaving a mosque in the town of Muqdadiyah and died in the local hospital, said police Col. Raisan Hussein. Muqdadiyah is about 60 miles north of Baghdad.

A day earlier, unknown gunmen assassinated another prominent Sunni cleric in the northern city of Mosul-- Sheik Faidh Mohamed Amin al-Faidhi, who was the brother of the group's spokesman. It as unclear whether the two attacks were related.

Opposing democracy apparently has a price.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 23, 2004 10:25 AM