Defacto reconciliation on local levels in Iraq

Brian Bresnahan:

In yet another step forward this week in Iraq, Karbala became the 8th province to be turned over from Coalition to full Iraqi authority.

It is now well documented that reconciliation has been taking place between Iraqi’s at local and provincial levels. Cooperation between different sects and religions is occurring in several areas of the country.

Local people and their leaders have been finding ways to bring about stability and peace to more and more neighborhoods, eventually into whole villages and towns.

Many Iraqi’s have rejected the radical form of Islam that Al Qaeda is so desperately trying to import. Their brutality has finally brought many of the Iraqi people together, standing in opposition to the tyranny terrorists have tried to impose.

At the provincial levels, local governments have found ways to function. They’ve allocated assets and put them to use for necessary public works projects and economic stimulation.

At local levels, and sometimes even at the provincial level, the Iraqi people have begun to shake off a generation of oppression. It can not go without notice that the present day Iraqi has lived under dictatorship and brutality for the majority of their lives. Yet they understand and are making strides toward the freedom of self-rule.

They are doing this as individuals. They are growing in the knowledge of liberty at the personal and local levels. They are beginning to exhibit the actions of free people.

They do all this despite their national government struggling to find its identity and its way.

While personal freedom, local, and provincial governments grow, the influence the Iraqi national government has on their lives grows proportionally smaller and smaller.

Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be?

Interestingly, some Americans view the weakness of the Iraqi national government as a “failure” for their country. They project their own ideas for a powerful federal government upon the Iraq situation, neglecting the progress of local governments.

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He goes on to contrast that with some of the problems we have in this country with too much power in the central government. It would be easy for those of us from the south to blame Abraham Lincoln, but we have all had a hand in ceding power and some of the most responsible in recent history have been from the south, like Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

While Lincoln fought to preserve the union, he did not fight for central control of all activity. What we are seeing in Iraq is a very healthy bottom up movement by people who want to take charge of their destiny and appreciate the help we are giving them to accomplish that goal.

BTW, I have almost finished Bruce Catton's The Coming Fury, about the lead up to the civil war. It is an outstanding book, published in 1961 along with Terrible Swift Sword, and Never Call Retreat.