Liberating Anbar

Fouad Ajami:

"We liberated the Anbar, we defeated al Qaeda by denying it religious cover," Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Reisha said with a touch of pride and impatience. This was the dashing tribal leader who emerged as the face of the new Sunni accommodation with American power, and who was assassinated by al Qaeda last week. I had not been ready for his youth (born in 1971), nor for his flamboyance. Sir David Lean, the legendary director of "Lawrence of Arabia," would have savored encountering this man. There was style, and an awareness of it, in Abu Reisha: his brown abaya bordered with gold thread, a neat white dishdasha, and a matching headdress. "Our American friends had not understood us when they came, they were proud, stubborn people and so were we. They worked with the opportunists, now they have turned to the tribes, and this is as it should be. The tribes hate religious parties and religious fakers."

We were in Baghdad, and the sheikh gave me his narrative. There was both candor and evasion in the story he told. Al Qaeda and its Arab jihadists had found sanctuary and support in the Anbar; they had recruited the "criminal elements" and the "lowly," they had brought zeal and bigotry unknown to the Iraqis. Initially welcomed, they began to impose their own tyranny. They declared haram (impermissible) the normal range of social life. They banned cigarettes, they married the daughters of decent families without the permission of their elders. They violated the great code of decent society by "shedding the blood of travelers on routine voyages." The prayer leaders of mosques were bullied, then murdered.

Abu Reisha and a small group of like-minded men, he said, came together to challenge al Qaeda. "We fought with our own weapons. I myself fought al Qaeda with my own funds. The Americans were slow to understand our sahwa, our awakening. But they have come around of late. The Americans are innocent; they don't know Iraq. But all this is in the past, and now the Americans have a wise and able military commander on the scene, and the people of the Anbar have found their way. In the Anbar, they now know that the menace comes from Iran, not from the Americans."

Abu Reisha spoke of the guile of the Iranians: They have schemes over the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, he said. He said the Anbar was in need of money, that its infrastructure was shattered. He welcomed a grant of $70 million given the Anbar by the government, and was sure that more was on the way.

An Iraqi in the know, unsentimental about his country's ways, sought to play down the cult of Abu Reisha. American soldiers, he said, won the war for the Anbar, but it was better to put an Iraq kafiyyah than an American helmet on the victory. He dismissed Abu Reisha. He was useful, he said, but should not be romanticized. "No doubt he was shooting at Americans not so long ago, but the tide has turned, and Abu Reisha knew how to reach an accommodation with the real order of power. The truth is that the Sunnis launched this war four years ago, and have been defeated. The tribes never win wars, they only join the winners."

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This post indicates the movement is becoming more widespread and includes the Shia. Contrast these reports which actually support what Gen Petraeus was saying in his testimony to what the BBC told its audience as reported by Stephen Pollard in the UK's Times.

It was Matt Frei that put me right. On Monday afternoon I watched General David Petraeus testify before Congress. I listened as he went through the facts of the military action in Iraq. I learnt as he outlined the improvements brought about in recent months.

But it wasn’t until I heard Frei’s take on General Petraeus’s words that I realised what had really been going on. The BBC Washington correspondent told us that he had listened “very carefully” – as opposed to his usual half-cocked approach, perhaps? – and gleaned what was actually being said: “Having tried to resist the fragmentation, the creeping partition, ethnic cleansing, the White House now seems to have bowed to that.”

Forget the reams of pages and the hours of testimony about military strategy and dealing with terrorists. The real story of the general’s report is that the White House is to start ethnically cleansing Iraqis.

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Pollard exposes more of the nuttiness of the BBC report. He probably could have done the same thing with some reports in the US where the desperation for defeat is strong among some media. But when you hear what the Iraqis themselves are saying, it is very different from the projections of the BBC. What I see is support for the bottom up approach across all sects. You see the rejection of radicalism. We have reached the point where al Sadr has become irrelevant and his walk out of the government deserved to be among the bottom stories of the day.