The Better Angels of Our Nurture
This looks interesting: former terrorists-turned-politicians from Northern Ireland and South Africa have been meeting with leaders of Iraqi Sunni and Shia factions in Helsinki about how to accomplish the hard work of genuine reconciliation. A couple of thoughts:
First, this flies in the face of the narcissism of the American political class, the sense that if Americans don’t do it, especially if they don’t do it with shooting and bombing, it can’t happen.
Second, there is a subsidiary irony to the first note: the conference recommends that Iraqis adopt the Mitchell Accords that became the basis of the pretty successful cease-fire in Northern Ireland.
Third, there’s a countervailing irony to that point too: George Mitchell was able to contribute meaningfully to reconciliation in Northern Ireland without American troops.
Fourth, people may need to take back some of those bad things they said about the Iraqi parliament last month. The article is very informative about the identities of the western participants, useless when it comes to learning the names of the attending Iraqis. But if the Iraqi attendees were parliamentarians, the August recess may prove to have been a better use of their time than all the days the Iraqi legislature has met in session.
I don’t have high hopes, because my impression is that government institutions in Northern Ireland and South Africa at the times of transition were not as stupendously corrupt as Iraq’s institutions are today. Corruption – theft, murder, fraud – is the business of the Iraqi government. That’s a spectacularly unpromising incubator of reform. Also, the US wants only so much of this “nonviolence” business from its would-be client. All that “ally in the war on terror” code means Iraqis need to be ready to facilitate military pressure and outright war on their neighbors. The US government’s concept of “reconciliation” always seems to entail one group of Iraqis attacking another group of Iraqis in the short term – that’s what the “Anbar Awakening” entails; that’s what calls for the nominal Iraqi government to “confront” the Mahdi Army mean. The long term never quite arrives. Now, AQI are bad folks and someone needs to defeat them, yes. But it remains that our most-trumpeted successes and ardently stated goals center around fratricide. It shows the limits of the American government’s imagination and capacity for action.
But any Iraqi resolution that can happen probably starts with something like the Helsinki Agreement. I hope it works.
