Pryceless Fool

Writing in The Spectator, author David Pryce-Jones takes to task British Foreign Office Arabists who, he says, are favoring Iraqi Sunnis. That's not a good idea, because:

A straight line of Sunni tyranny leads from the unscrupulous [former Iraqi King] Faisal to the mass graves of Saddam Hussein and the Baath party. Sunni resistance today comes down to the simplest of statements: in case you?re thinking of treating us the way we treated everyone else, here?s a bomb. For these Sunnis, the current political process spells surrender of their Ascendancy.

Pryce-Jones is irate at British efforts to address Sunni fears: "Were it feasible, the driving of a wedge between Saddam loyalists and other Sunnis would be politic, but there is little or no chance of any such thing; the Sunnis huddle for protection in tribal collectivity."

If you musn't placate the Sunnis, then what must you do?

Today the Shia are educated, organised and armed very differently from 1920. Loose among them are also hundreds of Iranian agents, for the moment daubing anti-Western graffiti on walls but otherwise biding their time… Any attempt to discriminate against Iraqi Shia or in favour of Sunnis can only mobilise the killer bands in a competition in violence far more destructive than anything yet seen.

So, the moral of the story is that one should placate the violent Shiites, but not the violent Sunnis--who will eventually be silenced by superior force. Funny how Pryce-Jones, who claims to write about the Middle East, hasn't a clue as to how minority politics actually work.

Comments

[fyodor]

I don't claim to know any more than anyone else about how the Mid East or minority politics work, but I would hope the best reason not to favor the Iraqi Sunnis is simply that no Iraqis should be "favored" in the way that phrase seems to imply.

[Zathras]

Actually, Pryce-Jones has put his finger on a central problem of postwar Iraq. Non-Sunnis have ample reason to regard Sunni Arabs with bitterness, and that bitterness is likely at some point to find expression in some pretty unpleasant ways. The one refuge for the Sunnis -- unconditional cooperation with the Americans in building a state where those who have committed no crime are protected by the law and institutions committed to the law -- doesn't do anything for the thousands of Sunnis who actually have committed crimes over the years, and has been rejected by too many of them in the last six months anyway.

Is this our problem? I suppose it depends on whether you think a liberal Iraqi democracy established over the course of a few months -- the Bush administration stated objective -- is a realistic one. If you think it is, then obviously reprisals against Sunni Arabs have to be prevented. If you think it isn't, and you are just looking for a government better than Saddam Hussein's was, keeping former Baathists safe from their former victims is not something worth risking American lives for.

I myself would have preferred a policy of seeking Sunni cooperation by threatening to empower their enemies, on the theory that Arabs respond better to fear than to reassurance. That is water over the dam at this point, and the coalition's current policy may work better. My point is only that if it does not work completely, and Sunni Arabs have to endure some level of persecution after coalition forces leave, it is a crop they spent many years cultivating. The responsibility for limiting the harvest is primarily theirs, not ours.

[pduggie]

I think its odd that you take Pryce-jones statement about not favoring Sunnis, and avoiding discrimination against Shiites as a claim that Pruce wants to FAVOR Shiites.

He doesn't say that anywhere does he?

So it sounds like he wants to treat everyone equally.

What's wrong with that?

[Michael Young]

pduggie,

Point well taken, and Pryce-Jones does call for a power-sharing arrangement in Iraq incorporating both Sunnis and Shiites. Who can disagree? However, part of the bargain when dealing with any worried minority, particularly Iraqi Arab Sunnis (as opposed to Kurdish Sunnis), is to reassure them that they have a stake in the new system. That's rather difficult when you off the bat tell them that they are tainted by a legacy of generations of tyranny and that they are somewhat odd for huddling "for protection in tribal collectivity." Who didn't in Saddam's Iraq in recent years?

P-J might not have overtly stated that the coalition must favor the Shia. However, it's difficult to imagine a system in Iraq which reflects present demographics that will not, in some way, favor the majority community. This is implicit in P-J's argument and you can bet the Sunnis are worried about it.

[acewhiplash]

It seems hard to figure out what exactly Pryce Jones is trying to say, especially in his last paragraph, quoted in full in the post, which simultaneously says "The Shiites are okay to lead Iraq" and "they have many subversive elements in their midst". However, isn't his main thrust that choosing a minority to govern a majority has proven disastrous, so maybe we shoul help the majority to govern the minority this time--which is also a good idea because it is inevitable. Such a move likely prevents a Popular Uprising (read: majority involved) and our past efforts to bring about a majority rule gives us credibility in helping the Shiites to get a grasp on minority politics. If we try to solve the minority problem for them, we will only earn their anger and disregard.

On a different note, Young's incendiary headline for this post, contrasted with his reply in the comments, which basically concedes that Pryce is tackling a difficult issue and not doing a completely "foolish" job of it, points out the tendency it seems of the type of people who run this joint to jump all over an idea and/or author as stupid and ridiculous, and then being forced later to admit that things aren't as cut and dried as they would like to think. This tendency is highly annoying and no doubt contributes to a suspicion that the otherwise intelligent and well rounded writers who contribute to this site seem to have a maturity problem. While blogging encourages getting things out there quickly, and allows ample space for corrections, it seems that Reason writers, because they are skeptics more than anything else, tend to be overly derisive of ideas which at first blush they don't agree with.

[Andrew]

Before finally condeding majority rule, South Africa dicked around with formulas for cantons, reserved ethnic slates of representatives, and affirmative action...then finally just caved to majority rule. Things aren't great, but it hasn't been so bad.
Conservatives and libertarians get hung up on federalism for 25 million Iraqis...hell, California has more people.
Most ethnically engineered states are a fiasco-- Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Canada. Switzerland wasn't designed...it grew.

[Andrew]

Libertarians rightly esteem personal liberty as the highest political good, but in fact majority rule has held up nearly as well. Why not just try it, rather than attempt to thwart it at the outset.

A moderate Shia regime might do more to undermine the authority of the Mullahs than a smaller and more purely Shiite state with a hostile Sunni neighbor.

I think the way out of the Algerian impasse is to just let the Islamicists win in elections (if, indeed, they can).

[Jack]

Maybe the administration is actually working for the Iranian ayatollahs. They've removed Saddam Hussein and their insistence on keeping the country in one piece while holding democratic elections is almost certain to produce a Shi'a dominated government that is heavily influenced by clerics, if not an outright theocracy. As I recall, that was the Ayatollah Khomeini's goal after driving the Iraqis back across the border in 1983-84.

[John Munro]

Iraqi, Sunni Arabs make up approximately 15%-20% of the population of Iraq. Turcomen(ethnic Turks) about 5%: Kurds 15% and Arab Shias 65%.
The Arab Sunnis and their few Arab, Christian allies are rightly mistrusted and hated by the rest of the population for their atrocious behaviour in the past.They did not just offer large scale support to the Ba-athists but were responsible for many atrocities against other ethnic/confessional groups in earlier examples of Iraqi civil strife.
The Arab Shias; probably in association with the Kurds, are going to run Iraq. Since most of Iraq's oil wealth lies in non Sunni, Arab areas the Sunni Arabs better cut the best deal they can or reconcile themselves to long-term poverty-stricken decline.