FRIEND OF THE DEVIL:

'Who the Devil Really Was': Is this the European left's response to elections in Afghanistan? If so, it had better brace itself for even worse news: elections in Iraq. (Fareed Zakaria, 12/20/04, Newsweek International)

I arrived in London the day after Hamid Karzai's inauguration as Afghanistan's newly elected president. Britain's most serious left-of-center newspaper, The Guardian, reported on the event in detail, noting that after decades of war, coups and bloodshed, this was a historic day. Its op-ed page had a somewhat different interpretation. It carried a huge, lurid cartoon of Dick Cheney, surrounded by Bush, Rumsfeld and Karzai, all looking drunk or mad or both, and singing, "Ashghanistan! Ashghanistan! From Sea to Shining Sea!!!" Is this the European left's response to elections in Afghanistan? If so, it had better brace itself for even worse news: elections in Iraq.

We have gotten used to bad news from Iraq—and there will be more. But there is good news as well. Elections are likely to go ahead as scheduled. In November, as the attack on Fallujah began, I argued that it would be a turning point, one way or another. It now appears that Fallujah altered the dynamic for the better. It's not simply that it was a military victory—everyone expected that. Far more important, the victory did not seem to generate a high political cost (something I was worried about). The uproar that was expected across Iraq in response to the operation simply did not happen. The Shia and Kurds did not complain, and even the "Sunni street" was much quieter than anticipated.

The best evidence for this comes from the audio tape released by Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, one of the insurgent leaders, on Nov. 24, in which he laments that the clerics, leaders and people of Iraq abandoned him: "You have let us down in the darkest circumstances and handed us over to the enemy... You have quit supporting the mujahedin... Instead of implementing God's orders you chose safety and preferred your money and your sons."

Iraq remains unstable and highly unsafe. But if al-Zarqawi is reading the public's mood right, the insurgency is losing popular support. It will try to disrupt the elections. The bigger problem remains Sunni participation. But assuming substantial Shia and Kurdish turnout, if 30 percent of the Sunnis vote—and that is quite possible—it's enough to give the new government some real national legitimacy. And that will make it easier to tackle the insurgency. [...]

The current issue of Foreign Affairs has an exchange between two scholars, Tony Smith and Larry Diamond. Smith accuses Diamond, a longtime supporter of human rights, of making a "pact with the devil" by working (briefly) for the United States in postwar Iraq. Diamond, who had opposed the war, responds: "I do not regard the post-war endeavor as a pact with the devil. Let Smith and other critics visit Iraq and talk to Iraqis who are organizing for democracy, development, and human rights. Let them talk to the families that lived under constant, humiliating, Baathist rule. Let them see some of the roughly 300 mass graves of opponents of the regime who were brutally slaughtered in the hundreds of thousands. Then they will find out who the devil really was." I can't say it better.

Is there a requirement that major media columnists on foreign affairs be bipolar?

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 14, 2004 11:56 PM