Stop Coddling Iraq's Sunnis

Somewhere, T.E. Lawrence is smiling. The man now mythologized as "Lawrence of Arabia" was the British officer who helped recruit the sheiks of Arabia to the Allied side in the First World War. After the war, Lawrence accused the victorious British and French of breaking faith with the Arabs, shortchanging and cheating them.

Lawrence died in 1929, but his teachings prevailed. It didn't hurt that those Sunni Arabs turned out to be parked atop the world's largest oil reserves--or to harbor some of the world's deadliest terror groups. Guilt, greed, and fear: These three emotions came together to infuse first British and then American elite opinion with vague but powerful feelings of special obligation to the Sunni Arabs of the Middle East and North Africa.

Those feelings of special obligation may explain much about Iraq--and this past weekend's constitutional referendum.

The big idea behind both the constitution and the referendum was to find some way to entice Iraq's Sunnis to accept the new regime.

As in Iran, a majority of Iraq's population are Shiite Muslims. But most of Iraq's insurgents are recruited from the minority Sunni population, and the towns that support the insurgency are Sunni-majority towns. The suicide bombers who do most of the killing of civilians are believed by U.S. intelligence to come mostly from outside Iraq--but they are Sunni Arabs too, and they are supported and aided by Sunni populations and Sunni-dominated governments throughout the region.

As the story is often told, these Sunni Arab groups have turned to violence because of their anger at foreign intervention in Iraq. But there's another way to understand the situation in Iraq--a way that is both closer to the truth and more useful to discovering a solution.

The Sunni Arabs of the Middle East and North Africa inherit one of the world's proudest traditions of conquest and dominance. An Israeli intelligence officer told me this story:

Many years ago, this officer had responsibility for a section of the West Bank. A dispute erupted between local Arabs and nearby Jewish settlers over access to a religious site in the area. He decided in favor of the Arabs and personally visited the local sheik to deliver the good news. He added: "I hope you will see this decision as proof of our good faith toward minority groups." The sheik exploded: "How dare you call us a minority group--we belong to the ummah of Sunni Islam!"

Underneath that sheik's anger lay a grand self-perception: He belongs in his mind to a vast global community (which is what the word ummah means) that possesses an inherent right to rule. Nor is this sheik's perception unique: Half a century of war and violence throughout the Middle East can be traced to the adamant refusal of local Sunni Arab elites to accept the right of non-Sunni, non-Arab communities to exercise power even when they form a local majority: not in Lebanon, not in Israel, not in Kurdistan, and--now--not in Iraq.

Western governments and political elites have acceded to this presumption dangerously often. They are doing it again in Iraq.

After the end of apartheid in South Africa, nobody dared suggest that the country's new constitution institutionalize special protections for the white minority. The South African constitution did not attempt to mollify whites by declaring South Africa part of a "global community of white nations." Nor did anyone say that the new post-apartheid regime would be legitimate only if whites accepted it. The constitution protected property rights, civil rights, freedom of speech and religion--but did so equally for everybody. And if South African whites had responded to this new equality by launching a campaign of terrorist murder against the black majority, they would have found zero sympathy. Nobody would have called them "insurgents" or demanded endless rounds of new concessions to them.

But this is just the situation in Iraq.

Those Sunnis who support the insurgency fear, however, that they will lose the power and privilege they enjoyed under the former regime. The new constitution guarantees the Sunni minority a share in the country's oil wealth. It grants the minority an effective right to veto this constitution and future constitutional changes. It declares that membership in Saddam Hussein's Baath party will not disqualify Sunnis from holding office in the new government. In other words, the constitution as amended under U.S. pressure is the culmination of two years of attempted conciliation of the country's former rulers.

If the Arab Sunnis vote to accept the constitution, and if terrorist violence then stops, this strategy of appeasement will at least be able to justify itself as effective. If not, it will be past time to consider a new approach. Until now, the communities that support the insurgency have been treated as constituencies to be wooed. If the constitution fails--or if the constitution succeeds but terrorist violence does not abate--the new Iraqi state will have no choice but to recognize those communities as enemies to be defeated.