Power Shift in Iraq

There are no U.S. elections impending so folks here no longer care too much about Iraq, but that country now has a Kurdish President and a Shiite Prime Minister. It's obviously a rough analogy, but we can imagine the sense of progress if we suddenly woke up to a Black U.S. President, an Asian Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and a Latino Speaker of the House. As far as disenfranchised/unprivileged people groups, it's not so different. What is different is that the Kurds and Shiites in Iraq represent an overwhelming majority (80%) of the total population--and still they were brutally kept from power by the well-armed Sunni minority, whose oppression was more brutal than most Americans can fathom. Saddam's put down of the Kurds (which included the use of WMDs) was the Montgomery fire hoses to the tenth power. So this is a significant and great development in Iraq.

Yes, the Sunni 20% isn't loving it. But then how many white South Africans living after apartheid said "This new combined governance ROCKS!!" People that have had a stranglehold on power don't like losing it. Sometimes they'd even rather blow themselves up in a crowd of empowered minorities applying for work than live to see those people take the jobs.

We overestimate how much the residual turmoil in Iraq is about us and our President. Clearly he set the whole thing in motion and initiated the present situation. But the real conflict now in Iraq is between people groups who have suddenly switched places, since power is now derived more from raw population than weaponry.

Here's what people don't get: they saw the insurgency and decided the aggression was the result of Anti-American sentiments held by super-Muslim Iraqis who wanted the infidels gone. The fact is there is no country on earth where the indigenous population is comfortable with foreigners roving their town with machine guns. They want us gone, plain and simple. Everyone wants us gone. But this is not an Arab vs. Infidel thing. Much more so, it is an internal Sunni-Shiite feud, which somehow even very well read people seem to be missing as the all-important element in current events there. Let's spell this out simply...

Iraq is 80% Kurdish and Shiite, 20% Sunni. The Sunni's had a brutal stranglehold on the country's power. The rest of the Muslim world, however, is almost entirely Sunni. So what is minority in Iraq is the Islamic status quo in every other Arab country. Why are we confused then, when large numbers of Arabs come streaming into Iraq to try to disrupt the new provisional government? They just don't want Shiites running Iraq. An insurgent gives his life to shoot a bunch of unemployed Iraqis trying to become police officers and we think it's about us? Do we think they're just too disgusted to see their fellow countrymen working for the big bad Americans? No way. They're mad because those other people are now running the country. We have seen similar resentments on a smaller scale time and again in America as different waves of immigrants came. Never did they acquire jobs or rise to political influence without harsh violent resistance from those who were giving these finite things up. The scene in Gangs of New York where the newly elected Irishmen gets the axe thrown in his back by Bill the Butcher (native Anglo-American) offers a pretty good idea of the sentiment behind many of the insurgent attacks.

We need to stop thrusting our own goodness or badness into everything that takes place in Iraq and start seeing the country for what it is and the people who comprise it. And then we need to figure out the best ways to ensure safety and justice.

But it is a good day there today, and I have the greatest hopes for the new government. Power to the people.