Don't know much about history--Yon Kippur edition

Tom Friedman:

Having recently returned from Egypt, I have the Suez Canal on my mind. And looking at Iraq from Cairo, the thought occurred to me that maybe the Iraqis have just crossed the Suez Canal. If so, that’s good news.

What am I talking about? There is no way that Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat could have ever made peace with Israel had he not first launched his lightning strike across the Suez Canal on Yom Kippur, 1973. “The crossing,” as that surprise attack became known in Egyptian lore, was as psychologically important as it was militarily important. It wiped away Egypt’s humiliating loss in the 1967 war and gave Egyptians the dignity and self-confidence to make peace with Israel as military equals. While the military reality was more complex, Egyptians nevertheless felt they had liberated the Sinai themselves.

One of the first things I realized when visiting Iraq after the U.S. invasion was that the very fact that Iraqis did not liberate themselves, but had to be liberated by Americans, was a source of humiliation to them. It’s one reason they never threw flowers. When someone else has to liberate you in your own home, that is humiliating — and humiliation, I believe, is the single-most underestimated force in international relations, especially in the Middle East.

That also helps explain why Iraqis initially never took ownership of their governing institutions, like the Coalition Provisional Authority, or C.P.A. They never fought for it. It was handed to them. People have to fight and win their own freedom, and that’s what gives their institutions legitimacy.

What seems to have happened in Iraq in the last few months is that the Iraqi mainstream has finally done some liberating of itself. With the help of the troop surge ordered by President Bush, the mainstream Sunni tribes have liberated themselves from the grip of Al Qaeda in their provinces. And the Shiite mainstream — represented by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and the Iraqi Army — liberated Basra, Amara and Sadr City in Baghdad from both Mahdi Army militiamen and pro-Iranian death squads.

We may one day look back on this as Iraq’s real war of liberation. The one we led five years ago didn’t count.

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It helped that Al Qaeda and Iran both went too far. I’ve always believed that there is only one good thing about extremists: They don’t know when to stop. Al Qaeda in Iraq went on murderous rampages against any Sunnis who opposed them, severing heads, forcing marriages, mowing down tribal leaders and slaughtering Shiites by the hundreds. Meanwhile, pro-Iranian Shiite extremists tried to impose a Taliban-like order in Basra and Baghdad — from head scarves to bans on liquor — on what is still a mostly secular-oriented Shiite majority.

Eventually, this Muslim-on-Muslim oppression seemed to spark the “we’re-not-going-to-take-this-anymore” rage, which prompted both the Sunni and Shiite mainstreams to liberate themselves from their own extremists and, in so doing, actually take ownership of their own country.

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The Egyptians did cross the Suez, but what Friedman left out is that the Israeli counterattack included its own crossing of the Suez with Ariel Sharron's tanks headed toward Cairo before a cease fire was called. In the end, the Egyptians suffered another humiliating defeat despite their early victories.

What is happening in Iraq is the effect of a sound counterinsurgency strategy and a President willing to buck the conventional wisdom to implement it. It is not surprising that Friedman is not willing to give President Bush the credit he deserves for recent events in Iraq, but it is clear that the Iraqis would never have been in a position to accomplish the "liberation" he hails if Barack Obama's policies had been followed instead of Bush.

That is an important point to remember when choosing between McCain who had pushed for the surge and Obama who wanted to call retreat. Unfortunately, Obama is so willfully ignorant of the facts on the ground in Iraq that he still pushing to lose despite the great success of the surge. Such a person should not be trusted with US national security.