Iraq: Time for the Obvious

Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times ran a story that should have been intuitively obvious, but badly needed saying: “Fed-Up Residents of Najaf Turn Against Rebel Cleric” (August 24, 2004).

So much pussy-footing, hand-wringing and needless ethical paranoia have gone into both American and Iraqi government calculations about how to deal with renegade thug Muqtada Al-Sadr and other security issues, common sense and basic psychological savvy have been checked at the door.

Of course the Iraqi people realize that it's Al-Sadr’s forces – not the U.S. nor the Iraqi interim government – who are traducing the sanctity of the Imam Ali shrine. “I blame the men of the Mahdi army . . . ,” begins one representative remark. But the follow-up highlights what should have been equally easy to anticipate. “I blame the U.S. government that was able to occupy Iraq in a matter of three days and hasn't been able to enter the shrine for the past several weeks.”

Oh, we were able. It's just that too much fevered imagination conjured too many wounded sensibilities.

In neutralizing foreign “insurgents” as well as cynical domestic nihilists and power-seekers like Al-Sadr, any nicety about the Iraqi populace or the international community (which latter is by and large rooting for American failure and Iraqi government paralysis anway, at least tacitly) has been fruitless. Delicacy to date has merely compromised needed military success, and purchased zilch in diplomatic or psychological advantage.

If the Imam Ali Shrine is damaged there will, of course, be regret. But no one will really be in the dark as to whom to blame. What counts is pushing through now with those tasks the absolute priority of which has been intuitively obvious from Day One: stop the chaos, destroy its fomenters, secure the peace, begin building the future.