A new Iraq is emerging from five years of American invasion and occupation, and at first glance it looks distressingly like the old Iraq: Its people are still bound by the barbed wire of suspicion and hatred as much as by any sense of common purpose and history.
But the new Iraq is clearly a nation in ways that the old Iraq — long considered by experts as an artificial creation that would fly apart under the pressure of outside intervention — was not. It did not fly apart, and has in fact undergone significant, positive mutations as a result of a soon-to-subside U.S. presence.
The provincial elections held a week ago were far from perfect, and personal relationships among the country’s Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds still range from malignant to murderous. In Anbar province, disgruntled Sunni sheiks didn’t ask for recounts or fire their political consultants. They unleashed threats of new mayhem unless they were immediately declared the winners. Old habits die hard in Iraq, too.
But by the standards of the past — and of the rough neighborhood in which they still live — the two general elections that Iraqis have held in four years stand as paragons of progress and adaptation that others in the region should aim to emulate. That development should not be ignored or minimized, particularly as the U.S. and Europe wrestle with analogous problems that confront a newly besieged Afghanistan.
Another signpost suggests that Iraq is closer today to being a source of regional stability than it ever was in its pre-American era, when Saddam Hussein repeatedly threatened (and at times tried) to annihilate Iraq’s Arab and Iranian neighbors as well as Israel. That signpost is the growing acceptance by the region’s Sunni Arab regimes of the central Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose Shiite-based State of Law coalition scored the biggest victories in the election results.
And yet President Obama must be aware that while American power was able to shock Iraqi, it did not awe them. They are returning quickly to old habits, to their own moral and social compasses.
But they do not return unchanged by the experience. Nor do their neighbors.
