The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship?

...Saddam's triangle—the Sunni Arab zone stretching from Baghdad west to Ramadi and north to Mosul—was not methodically invaded once Saddam's loyalists gave up and faded away in Baghdad...

...This isn't at all an easy task, and could not have been done before the Anglo-American invasion, since the Shiites themselves are only beginning to understand their own post-Saddam identity...

...Americans just don't like to thump on foreigners, even when they are palpably of the worst order...

...Reading too much of the Western press before and especially during a visit to Iraq is mentally unbalancing...

...occupation...

...As important as these individuals may be to the various missions in Yemen, Egypt, or Algeria, their presence in Iraq would be vastly more important to America's future in the region...

...Small changes by the American administration like lifting or modifying the curfew in peaceful areas can have enormously beneficial repercussions...

...There is no reference work through which a U.S...

...actions in the country...

...Most critically, in the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, Arabic-speaking American officials from Baghdad and Hilla are slowly but surely improving their access and communication with Iraq's great clerical families, who compose the Howza, the seamless but hardly unified body of senior religious jurists resident in Najaf, Iraq's preeminent Shiite town...

...The ties that bind us and the Shiites are getting stronger, not weaker...

...And some were worried that the Americans might develop a "British mentality," publicly embracing the idea of Iraqi democracy but privately working to undermine the right of the Shiite majority to gain the upper hand politically...

...Indeed, in the opinion of CNN's Middle East correspondent Ben Wedeman, a "divorce" has already taken place between the Iraqis and the Americans...

...officials see that, for example, an Iraqi town or city is functioning normally, without violence toward U.S...

...The Shiites will undoubtedly give us time to correct our "Sunni" mistake...

...In the long run, however, the United States and the fractious, often peevish, "ungrateful" Iraqi people could give enormous hope to the politically retrograde Middle East...

...Though the problems in Iraq are enormous and the isolation of many U.S...

...Contrary to what has already become accepted wisdom, the increasing casualty rate among American soldiers is a sign, at least in the eyes of our sincere and de facto Shiite allies, that things are getting better, not worse...

...The Arab Shiites, who represent at least 60 percent of the population, will either make us or break us in Iraq...

...Among the few highly talented Arabic-speaking civilian administrators who are quite literally responsible for the United States' future in the Middle East, it appears to be the working creed...

...Though the Shiites, particularly the prickly mullahs of Najaf, may not publicly thank the Americans for these aggressive actions against the old order, they undoubtedly now view the occupation forces more fondly...

...The State Department ought to embrace this responsibility and start playing for keeps...

...The ruling Sunni cliques appeared to be exhausted...

...Traveling through Iraq in mid to late June, the New York Times writer found "looters" and "bandits" but, alas, no weapons of mass destruction...

...The team is slowly compiling a useful understanding of the Shiite tribes, which will inevitably produce, once the tribal leaders themselves determine the number and relative loyalties of their followers, more than a few of Iraq's future key parliamentarians...

...officials—for all their clumsiness, lack of language skills, and enthusiastic ethos of "force protection"— appeared to be drawing closer to the Iraqi population, not farther away...

...If U.S...

...In most places in Iraq, outside of Saddam's triangle, things are calm...

...The Americans may have fought a quick, nearly painless military campaign (though while it was happening, many of these same critics found the war quite rough), but the Bush administration is getting its comeuppance in postwar Iraq, for which it had so skimpily and belatedly planned...

...The hardest test for them will be whether they can quickly learn from their errors, or accurately assess the pivotal sentiments of the Iraqi people...

...Productive energy and commerce are slowly returning to the streets, which is impressive given how long it is taking to rebuild a functioning nationwide telephone system...

...As I walked the streets of Baghdad at night, which in most districts of the city isn't a particularly dangerous thing to do, as I visited mosques and clerics in the Sunni and Shiite lands to the north and south, I picked up a fairly acute case of cognitive dissonance...

...Add up the fatwas, the juridical decisions of Iraq's senior clerics, aimed at the "patronizing" Americans and they are very few compared with those that attempt to answer the awful, compelling questions about what to do religiously with mass graves and unidentified body parts...

...One can find in Washington Iraq analysts who believe that the Iraqi Shiites are quite content to lie back and let their Sunni Arab compatriots bloody the American occupiers, destroying patience and popular support back home...

...For the Americans in Iraq, it may occasionally seem to be hell on earth...

...For those historically inclined, echoes of the 1920 rebellion against the post-World War I British administration of Mesopotamia can already be heard...

...But we ought to prevent the worst case by crushing the hardcore Sunni Baathist opposition and transferring as soon as possible much-needed Arabic-speaking, culturally savvy personnel to Iraq...

...Despite an unsteady postwar beginning by the Bush administration, things in Iraq could be vastly worse...

...No serious attempt was made to march through the area, town by town, searching for Baathists and senior military, security, and intelligence officers...

...Even in pro-war neoconservative, conservative, and liberal circles, it isn't hard to find doom-and-gloom sentiments...

...This improved communication does not necessarily make the dialogue happier—the differences in style and objective between American officialdom and the various Shiite religious players are sometimes substantial—but it does ensure that grievances, preferences, and orders are understood more clearly...

...That is, that the United States wasn't going to annihilate the old Arab Sunni Baathist order...

...Baghdad is "a city in thrall to fear and violent crime," the British weekly informs us...

...Yes, some complained of American heavy-handedness and ignorance in the national and, more acutely, local administrations...

...soldiers or local strife, there is no reason why curfews cannot be made more lenient...

...Having unwisely chosen not to equip the American military with a larger number of Iraqi auxiliaries—the Iraqi National Congress, among other exile groups, was urging this approach months before the invasion—the U.S...

...If the Bush administration has made one giant strategic error so far in Iraq, it was the decision by the Pentagon to ease up on the Sunni backbone of Saddam Hussein's regime once Baghdad fell in early April...

...Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's decision to reduce the number of military police was unquestionably a serious mistake, but it is of much less significance than the Pentagon's failure to treat the Arab Sunni regions as hostile territory that needed to be thoroughly pacified by combat troops...

...They emphatically understand that unless the old Sunni power structure is completely emasculated, the survivors from the ancien régime will inevitably try to kill their way back to power, leaving dead Shiites, as well as dead American soldiers, in their wake...

...It also appears to have believed it just didn't need to...

...This diversity will probably work in favor of democracy...

...In the meantime, the BBC can be counted on to keep us apprised of all the little ways in which we are failing to fulfill our mission...

...The United States must now bear the price for this long-standing delinquency...

...The credibility of American power in the eyes of the Shiites hinges first and foremost on whether Washington is willing to sustain the causalities for as long as it takes to reduce the violent Sunni opposition to Washington's new order...

...This process undoubtedly won't be pretty...

...officials...

...Many clerics clearly understood that the United States needed to remain in Iraq at least for two or three years...

...As a rule, the lack of air conditioning makes Western journalists politically more cranky than it does Shiite clerics or young men living in Baghdad's Shiite slums...

...Iraqi Shiite politics are likely to be complex and contradictory, reflecting the diverse nature of the Shiites...

...Indeed, in the entire country "none feels safe...

...Scratch through the nationalist pride and sense of Islamic honor—and the two are tightly welded together among the Shiite ulama—and there was often a real foreboding within the clergy that the United States wasn't going to interfere enough in postwar Iraq...

...Iraq will likely continue to produce migraines for its American administrators and for Washington's foreign-policy officials who must track and ultimately approve U.S...

...There are still numerous scenarios worse than a "lengthy" U.S...

...Some but by no means all were worried about "street morality" in Najaf and Karbala, fearing that the American presence might provoke a little too much independence and sartorial free expression among Iraqi women...

...Poor American administration of the country, per this reporting—as always, most trenchantly expressed by the BBC—is producing an ill-tempered, ever more anti-American Iraqi population whose thankfulness for the destruction of Saddam Hussein's rule is probably ending...

...This self-correcting disposition appears to be present, if not always dominant, among Americans in Iraq...

...soldiers, and even more distressed congressmen and anonymous U.S...

...An 11 p.m...

...Three months after the war's end the Economist, too, finds Iraq frightfully messy...

...The American team at Hilla, led by an intrepid Arabic-speaking foreign service officer who operates wisely with minimum security, is doing the ground-breaking, democracy-building spadework of figuring out what is the real power-matrix among the Shiites...

...And among them, the American administration is by no means cocking it up...

...At the American headquarters in the town of Hilla, which is where the front-line administrators reside for the southern Shiite zone, a small cadre is learning the ABCs of the Shiite community...

...the Shiite clergy have no desire to fight a battle themselves against the Sunni hard core, a battle they probably believe they'd lose, given the preeminence of military training among the Sunni Arabs...

...Baghdad fell with a whimper...

...The four grand ayatollahs of Najaf have so far shown no intention of elevating the political capital of Muhammad Bakr or the potential power of the military wing of his Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI...

...Reuel Marc Gerecht, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, is a residentfellow at the American Enterprise Institute...

...Are we really teetering then on the edge of the "Big Mess...

...Knowing how the Shiite equation will likely balance is certainly as important for America's future in the country as the reliability of Baghdad's poorly constructed electrical grid, on which many journalists seem to believe hinges America's fate in Mesopotamia...

...The collapse of this profession parallels the deterioration of Islamic and Arabic studies in the American academy, which in any case often disdains government service for its graduates...

...One old Middle East hand sees an Iraqi population increasingly "emasculated" and "patronized" by American power...

...The American administration in Iraq has already searched and depleted the benches of the Near East Bureau at the State Department in Washington...

...In most of Iraq—in the key areas of the country, in the Shiite south, the Kurdish north, and in Baghdad—just the opposite is happening...

...curfew, which seems to be standard throughout much of the country, does not sit well with many in the summer months, when the heat induces rest in the afternoon, and evening prayers don't end until past 10 o'clock...

...But I didn't meet a single cleric in this crowd who really wanted the Americans to leave right away...

...Throughout the Shiite regions of Iraq, there is probably not a single mosque that isn't plastered with dozens, often hundreds, of little notes about and pictures of still-missing loved ones...

...The American military is now much more aggressively searching for its enemies in Saddam's triangle...

...And it means that personal poli-tics—the long, shoes-off, derriere-to-the-carpet conversations that give depth and honesty to professional relations—become stronger...

...Yet the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency have produced woefully few first-rate Ara-bists...

...With a very small staff—unquestionably too small—a handful of Arabic-speaking officials is successfully building ties to this community, which is slowly, fitfully, and still quite timidly developing political legs to stand on...

...We and the Iraqis still have a better than decent chance of creating a functioning democracy within a few years...

...The United States—under President George W. Bush, especially adolescent and hubristic—is thus rubbing raw an ancient people and culture, with its ill-managed and ill-planned democratic nation-building...

...Contrary to so many left-wing and European depictions of the United States under George W. Bush, Americans in general, and military officers in particular, don't like using their power...

...And they have so far shown no desire to cut any deal with the old Sunni order in an effort to remove the Americans from their soil sooner rather than later...

...military didn't have the eyes and ears to move quickly and forcefully against the remnants of the regime...

...Yet on the ground in Iraq this view makes no sense...

...With rare exceptions, Western newspapers, magazines, TV news, and radio uniformly tell the story of increasingly effective guerrilla movements, random violence, theft, rape, rising religious extremism, Shiite clerical dissatisfaction, Sunni Arab bitterness, antidemocratic tribalism and nationalism, angry and despairing U.S...

...The American administration in Iraq certainly realizes that it paid too little attention to the troublesome potential of the Sunni establishment behind Saddam's power...

...After spending several days talking and dining with numerous clerics aligned with Najaf's two most influential grand ayatollahs, Ali al-Hoseini as-Sistani and Muhammad Said at-Tabatabai al-Hakim, I couldn't see at all a desire on their part for a divorce...

...In mid to late June, U.S...

...official could have acquired the slimmest working knowledge of who the Iraqi Shiites really are...

...Trying to keep some Wilsonian idealism afloat, he feared the Bush administration's "mistakes and poor planning" were "miring America in Iraq . . . [and would] unfairly discredit humanitarian intervention" elsewhere...

...officials in the Jumhuriyah Palace headquarters in Baghdad is surreal, neither the country nor its American administrators appeared to be sliding downhill into chaos...

...BY REUEL MARC GERECHT Najaf Iraq's chaos gives intervention a bad name," reads the International Herald Tribune headline above a Nicholas Kristof column...

...The Shiites, particularly Najaf's clerics, have been watching America's actions vis-à-vis the Sunnis closely...

...embassies and consulates of their fluent Arabic speakers for assignment to Iraq...

...This was especially true in the Shiite regions of Iraq, which are essentially everything from Baghdad south...

...Indeed, contemplating the future without the Americans is probably very unpleasant for the Howza...

...The Shiites have no military power beyond the Badr Brigade of Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, the famous Iranian-aided wayward member of the al-Hakim family of Najaf...

...It would be a very good idea if the department and the CIA now stripped U.S...