Against The Wall

The controversy over a 12-foot-high concrete wall, topped with barbed wire coils, to divide Sunni and Shia neighborhoods of Baghdad is a depressing benchmark for America's liberated Iraq. But it also presents an opportunity for the US to disentangle itself from the past four years and step ahead with greater clarity.

The Adhamiya wall is one of many military ideas to come from the "surge," or Baghdad Security Plan that began in mid-February, aimed at stemming violence to give negotiation a chance.

It was to have stretched three miles to divide the middle-class Sunni suburb of Adhamiya from adjoining Shia communities in an area that has suffered some of the worst sectarian killing and bombings. The 400,000 people living inside Iraq's first walled Sunni enclave would need to show biometric identity cards at checkpoints every time they moved in and out.

But the project was condemned not only by the Adhamiya residents, but also across Iraq's political leadership -- from the Sunni-run Adhamiya District Council to the Imam of the suburb's Abu Hanifa mosque, Sheikh Samir al-Ubaidi, to Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, leader of the Shia-dominated Iraqi government.

Iraq's warring factions saw a future of partition and didn't like it.

On each side of the wall are elements of US foreign policy that extend far beyond Iraq. The most violent insurgents operating from inside Adhamiya draw their inspiration from the brutally-achieved 9/11 goals of Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda. The militia-controlled Shia areas outside have direct support from the Islamic government in Tehran, also no ally of the US.

America's long war against Islamic extremism will only end once those forces are no longer perceived as threats. How power is balanced between Iraq's rival communities and the factions within them will determine how quickly peace will come to the country and, possibly, to the wider Middle East.

But this balance may not be determined for months, or even years. So for the US to remain constructively involved, American leaders must adopt a changed mindset.

First, they must rid themselves of the back-story of the invasion, its aftermath and the temptation to blame. Bloodletting between the Shia and Sunni communities probably would have happened whichever way Saddam Hussein was removed. He was too powerful and his institutions too biased, corrupt and inflexible to have survived smooth transition.

Second, the next stage must be about Iraq and not America, although with a presidential election coming up, this might be asking the impossible.

The Middle East moves at an untidy pace, and American deadlines, too often dictated by the electoral cycle, can jeopardize the complex and textured deal-making that could bring a first uneasy peace.

The October 1st deadline set by the Democrats to start troop withdrawal is based on a perception that US public opinion wants closure on Iraq, but ignores the truth that Iraq is now a key theater for Al-Qaeda-inspired operations. Bomb attacks that are still rare elsewhere in the world are daily occurrences here.

To learn from its post-9/11 mistakes, America must revert its focus completely to the Al Qaeda fight, forensically separating the group and its ideals from any other form of Islamic hostility.

Put against the history of Indo-China, the Shia forces could be compared to the Vietcong and North Vietnamese government, a functioning state with whom the US eventually did a deal. Whereas, Al Qaeda resembles Cambodia's genocidal Khmer Rouge, a group with unworkable ideas that was never capable of building a functioning society.

Since the "surge" began in February, Shia clerics have ordered their militia to keep a low profile, while the wing of the Sunni insurgency led by Al Qaeda has upped the stakes with a devastating series of bombings. That in itself suggests endgame deals could be made with the Shia militia while with Al Qaeda that would be unconscionable.

Into this comes an initiative to bring back into government senior members of the now-defunct Sunni Baath Party that before 1990 ran Saddam Hussein's institutions with a fair degree of efficiency. While the Baathist and Al Qaeda insurgents have been working together, clashes have begun to break out between the two in Sunni strongholds such as Fallujah. It's hoped that with a voice in government, Baathist fighters might turn against Al Qaeda to deny them safe-haven in Iraq.

That would leave the question of the Shia, who unlike the Sunni, have identifiable, albeit religiously motivated, leaders and a functioning UN-member state, Iran, as an ally.

If America wants to win the "long war," it cannot contemplate taking on Shia and Sunni extremists at the same time. Both Hitler and Napoleon fell foul of opening up second fronts in their European campaigns. Doing the same in Iraq carries parallel dangers.

The US will therefore have to settle for a very different kind of society than the one it envisaged in 2003. Far from being democratic, the Iraqi government will be a tribal and religious horse trade, with basic human rights under threat ï'½'ï'½" but no more than they are now or were when Saddam Hussein was in power.

The US has gone through this before when acting as midwife to the East Asian democracies, building a security umbrella against Soviet communism while those societies, particularly in South Korea and Taiwan, strengthened their institutions enough to emerge peacefully from their dictatorships. The process took almost 50 years.

For East Asia the result has been stability and economic growth, with Vietnam part of a global supply chain that Iraq and Iran might one day also join.

But if America now implements a deadline for an early Iraq withdrawal, it will have lost. Not only is the Al Qaeda-inspired insurgency on an upswing, but the United Nations also paints a picture of Iraq as a nation of extreme poverty that violates human rights. In its latest report, the UN talks of torture and detention without trial, while 54 percent of Iraqis live on less than a dollar a day and annual inflation runs at 70 percent.

With trust eroding in their new institutions, people find protection in the gunmen from their own communities."Two Taliban snipers came to our neighborhood," explained a young Shia who scrapes a living as a computer technician."We asked the police to help and they did nothing. We asked the Americans and they did nothing. We asked the Mehdi Army and they came and killed them."

In the hunt for an acceptable end to the Iraq campaign, the US should take heed of a joke doing the round in Baghdad."ËœBe nice to the Americans or they will punish us with democracy."

Iraqis understand that whatever emerges here will not be a beacon of freedom. America has to accept that, too, and decide what level of non-democratic rule is acceptable. It will also have to create a relationship of detente with Iran in order to work with the majority Shia communities and their religious leaders.

None of that constitutes failure, because it would enable America to concentrate on the far more immediate challenge of defeating AlQaeda.

Humphrey Hawksley is a BBC foreign correspondent and author, most recently ofThe History Book. His reports from Iraq can be seen on BBC World. Rights:© 2007 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. YaleGlobalOnline