While we may not get the multi-ethnic democracy we are trying to give birth to in Iraq, this does not mean we won't get democracy. Failure to get a multi-ethnic democracy surely doesn't mean that the Sunnis can claw their way back to power. And it doesn't mean that Sadr's Iranian-backed thugs will win. It just means there won't be a lot of Sunni Arabs in whatever Iraq emerges after the insurgencies are ended and the large-scale crime is suppressed.
Yet as we contemplate the Iraq War, the burden on the civilians is commonly the metric for concluding we are losing the war.
But two-thirds of the dead are Sunni Arabs dying in revenge attacks by Shias and not an increase in Sunni terror victims of Shias and Kurds. The Sunni Arabs are losing and heading for the big dirt nap.
Which is why so many are fleeing Iraq now. This is another metric of failure as defined by some. As the New York Times reports (and I am still on my linking boycott):
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated in a report released last month that more than 1.6 million Iraqis have left since March 2003, nearly 7 percent of the population. Jordanian security officials say more than 750,000 are in and around Amman, a city of 2.5 million. Syrian officials estimate that up to one million have gone to the suburbs of Damascus, a city of three million. An additional 150,000 have landed in Cairo. Every month, 100,000 more join them in Syria and Jordan, the report said.
Better to have fled than be dead.
I called this interpretation of the Sunni flight back in June and stick by it.
The reason these Sunnis flee now is that these backers of the former regime of Saddam are probably losing hope that their killers can sweep them back into power with their campaign of terror and intimidation.
The fact that backers of the Baathists are now leaving Iraq is not a sign that we are losing. It is a sign that the enemy is losing. They see little hope of running things any time soon and are getting out of town before the new cops come around with war crimes and human rights violation charges in hand. They see that even Saddam is in the witness stand with his own life on the line and have no desire to follow him to the gallows.
So don't transform the fleeing Sunnis into poor oppressed victims. They are former neck-stompers who have given up on their dreams of continuing their neck-stomping. This is a good thing.
Not that I celebrate this development. Innocent Sunnis must flee, too. Remember, only a minority of Sunni Arabs were on the Tikrit gravy train. Although much like poor Southerners in slave states who received no material benefit from slavery as an institution but did get some psychological benefit of being in the "superior" class of Southerners, all Sunni Arabs were dominant and expected to be dominant.
But the Shia militia retribution campaign against Sunni Arabs that started after the February Samarra Golden Dome mosque bombing wouldn't have happened if the Sunni Arabs had come on board the new Iraq long ago. For years, we've been trying to coax the Sunnis into the government and society and to stop supporting or tolerating the killers among them. They have not done so. They persisted in their fantasy world of returning to their "natural" role of running Iraq and oppressing the lesser Shias and Kurds who sadly shared the same real estate.
And so the Sunni Arabs will flee and the Sunni-based insurgency will flop about starved of oxygen as the Maoist "sea" they need to swim in is drained from central Iraq. And then we will work on building a democracy with the Shias, Kurdish minority, and a dim shadow of the Sunni Arab community.
The Sunni Arabs have been obstructing democracy in Iraq and without them there may simply be one less obstacle to achieving that goal. That is the reality of Iraq today.
And let me add that the Shia minority (the Allawites) that runs Syria surely can't be real happy with so many Sunnis running around Damascus. Assad may be working to destabilize Iraq but his actions have a reaction. One would think we could take advantage of this. Why are we the ones acting all jittery? Others have much more to lose.
