Guarded Hope
The Hidden Columnists--Tom Friedman Edition (21 Dec)

In which Mr. Friedman notes it's not the measure of Iraqi troops that will signal whether to stay or go, but how the Iraqi people voted last week that will determine our length of stay in Iraq (the full column for Measure of Success if available to Times Select subscribers):

This incessant Bush babble about training the Iraqi Army is so much wasted breath. After all, who is training the insurgents? Nobody, as far as we know - yet they have proved to be a smart, adaptable and lethal fighting force. Because in war, motivation always matters more than training. The insurgents know who they are and what they are fighting for. I think who they are is horrendous and what they are fighting for is apartheid - the right of Iraq's Sunni minority to rule permanently over the country's Shiite and Kurdish majority. But they have the will, and therefore they have the way.

The Iraqi Army will be effective only if it has a will to go along with the way we are training it. And the Iraqi Army will have the will to fight only if its soldiers have a government they believe in and are motivated to defend. And that brings us back to citizenship.

It is terrific that Iraqis just had another free and fair election and that some 11 million people voted. Americans should be proud that we helped to bring that about in a region that has so rarely experienced any sort of democratic politics.

But what's still unclear is this: Who and what were Iraqis voting for? Were they voting for Kurdish sectarian leaders, who they hope will gradually split Kurdistan off from Iraq? Were they voting for pro-Iranian Shiite clerics, who they hope will carve out a Shiite theocratic zone between Basra and Baghdad? Were they voting for Sunni tribal leaders, who they hope will restore the Sunnis to their "rightful" place - ruling everyone else? Or, were they voting for a unified Iraq and for politicians whom they expect to compromise and rewrite the Constitution into a broadly accepted national compact?

If they were voting for Iraqi sects, then it means that there are no Iraqi citizens - only Shiites, Kurds, Sunnis etc., trapped together inside Iraq's artificial borders. If, however, they were voting for a unified Iraq and Iraqi leaders who will make that happen, we still have a chance for a decent outcome.

Because if there are Iraqi citizens, and national leaders, then we have partners for the kind of Iraq we hope to see built. In that case, we must stay the course. If there are no Iraqi citizens, or not enough, then we have no real partners and staying the course will never produce the self-sustaining Iraq we want.

[...]

Everything now rides on what kind of majority the Iraqi Shiites want to be and what kind of minority the Sunnis want to be. Will the Shiites prove to be magnanimous in victory and rewrite the Constitution in a way that decent Sunnis, who want to be citizens of a unified Iraq, can accept? Will the Sunnis agree to accept their fair share of Iraq's oil revenue and government posts - and nothing more?

My own visits to Iraq have left me convinced that beneath all the tribalism, there is a sense of Iraqi citizenship and national identity eager to come out. But it will take more security, and many more Iraqi leaders animated by national reconciliation, for it to emerge in a sustained way.

Unlike many on the left, I'm not convinced that this will never happen and that all of this has been for naught. Unlike many on the right, I'm not convinced that it will inevitably happen if we just stay the course long enough. The only thing I am certain of is that in the wake of this election, Iraq will be what Iraqis make of it - and the next six months will tell us a lot. I remain guardedly hopeful.