Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

No Muslim outrage at mass murder of other Muslims by Sunnis in Iraq

Thomas Friedman:

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...in the same newspapers one can read the latest reports from Iraq, where Baathist and jihadist suicide bombers have killed 400 Iraqi Muslims in the past month — most of them Shiite and Kurdish civilians shopping in markets, walking in funerals, going to mosques or volunteering to join the police.

Yet these mass murders — this desecration and dismemberment of real Muslims by other Muslims — have not prompted a single protest march anywhere in the Muslim world. And I have not read of a single fatwa issued by any Muslim cleric outside Iraq condemning these indiscriminate mass murders of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds by these jihadist suicide bombers, many of whom, according to a Washington Post report, are coming from Saudi Arabia.

The Muslim world's silence about the real desecration of Iraqis, coupled with its outrage over the alleged desecration of a Quran, highlights what we are up against in trying to stabilize Iraq — as well as the only workable strategy going forward.

The challenge we face in Iraq is so steep precisely because the power shift the United States and its allies are trying to engineer there is so profound — in both religious and political terms. Religiously, if you want to know how the Sunni Arab world views a Shiite's being elected leader of Iraq, for the first time ever, think about how whites in Alabama would have felt about a black governor being installed there in 1920. Some Sunnis do not think Shiites are authentic Muslims and are indifferent to their brutalization.

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If the Arab world, its media and its spiritual leaders, came out and forcefully and repeatedly condemned those who mount these suicide attacks, and if credible Sunnis are given their fair share in the Iraqi government, I am certain a lot of this suicide bombing would stop, as happened with the Palestinians. Iraqis themselves would pass on the intelligence needed to prevent these attacks, and they would deny the suicide bombers the safe houses they need to succeed.

The attackers can be defeated in Iraq by continued military operations. The mathmatics of killing non combatants while the insurgent forces are being attritied leads inexceribly to their defeat. Right now the Sunnis are acting like an abusive spouse who has been rejected. To the extent that they have a strategy, it appears to be that if they brutalise those who reject them then they will be accepted. It is not working, so they rachet up the abuse and it still does not work making them more frustrated. Their ability to rachet up the violence more has about reached its limit.

The NY Times has indicated that starting in the late summer they will start charging for their op-ed page. While I think that is a mistake, it could lead to more of their writers being syndicated like Mr. Friedman. It could also lead to some of their writers getting the obscurity they deserve like Krugman, Dowd and Rich. Since they are selling so much of their content to other papers already it is hard to see how the move will be financially rewarding.