The Good News Bush Left Unsaid

Written by David Frum on Tuesday July 5, 2005

Had he wished, President Bush could have filled his entire speech last week with good news from Iraq.

He could have cited the latest economic statistics that show the Iraqi economy growing at a 17% annual rate, that unemployment has dropped by as much as one-half, with per capita income rising from less than US$700 at the liberation to a projected US$1,200 in 2007.

He could have made the point that 4.3 million Iraqi children are now enrolled in school, that teacher pay has been raised by more than 600% over prewar levels.

He could have talked about the rebirth of an independent media in Iraq: some 23 commercial television stations, 80 radio stations, 170 newspapers and magazines.

He could have mentioned Iraq's environmental recovery, as U.S. engineers blow up the dikes that drained and poisoned the marshes of southern Iraq and allow the Marsh Arabs to return to their ancient homes.

The President did point with pride to the Jan. 30 elections, the first fully free and fair elections in Iraq's history. But he could have gone on to describe the emergence of a responsive, representative and accountable government through negotiation rather than violence or fraud. And he could have referenced the opinion polls that show strong optimism about the future amongst Iraqis themselves: solid majorities now say that Iraq is headed in the "right direction" and that they expect their own lives to be better a year from now than they are today.

That would have been quite a speech. And there is much more that the President could not say -- but that we are free to notice.

The point is often made that Iraq's election was a shock to the stagnant politics of the region. The great Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis has described the elections as potentially the most significant challenge to the region's inherited order since Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798.

But the Iraq war is transforming the region in ways less easy to talk about, but no less potentially profound.

The vast majority of the victims of the insurgents' terror war are not American or coalition soldiers, but fellow-Iraqis and fellow-Muslims. The death toll by now numbers in the thousands, including bombings of the holiest site in Shiite Islam on Shiism's holiest day. The use of suicide bombings and jihad terrorism on such a large scale by Muslims against fellow-Muslims has triggered a perceptible reaction throughout the Islamic world.

In November, 2004, a group of 26 Saudi clerics issued a communique urging jihad against U.S. forces in Iraq. In the months since, coalition forces have apprehended a number of young Saudi men. Others have been identified after they carried out their terrorist attacks. As the toll has mounted, an unusual surge of self-criticism has been expressed in the tightly controlled Saudi media.

"...The propagation of [Islamic] words of wisdom and the good preaching have turned into propaganda for murder, abductions, and car bombs," complained a columnist in the official Saudi daily Al-Jazirah. "They [the preachers] have even turned suicide from something absolutely forbidden [by Islam] into something which, according to their religious law, is a means of becoming closer to Allah." (All quotes thanks to Memri.org, the Middle East translation service.)

A columnist in another official daily, Okaz, agreed:

" ...Instead of adding fuel to the fire in Iraq, these 26 clerics should have made clear the Sharia's stand concerning a Jihad of beheadings, the kidnapping of innocent [people] and blowing up booby-trapped cars and roadside bombs against pedestrians -- children, women and the elderly ... what is going on today in Iraq is madness that feeds every day on the lives of innocent Iraqis and quenches its thirst with the forbidden blood that flows mercilessly through the streets of Iraq."

Meanwhile, Sunni clerics in Iraq have issued fatwas urging young Sunni men to join the Iraqi defence forces, and Muslim intellectuals resident in the West have been speaking out against the incitement preached in many of the mosques of Europe and America.

Ahmad Abu Motar, a Palestinian living in Norway, posted an article on the Arab reform Web site, www.elaph.com, in April 2005, condemning European imams for condoning extremism and terrorism on the European continent: "None of the Arab or Muslim religious legal authorities responded to them or cast doubt on their legitimacy as representatives of Islam. On the contrary, there are fatwas from scores of ulama supporting these actions...."

European governments too -- including many that opposed the Iraq war -- have been jolted into a tough new realism by the news that some of their own nationals have been caught waging a terror war in Iraq. It was argued at the time that the Iraq war would irretrievably divide the United States from France and Germany. Instead, intelligence co-operation between the United States and France -- always surprisingly close -- has become nearly as intimate as that between the United States and its English-speaking allies. The Washington Post reported Friday that French security officials have worked on at least 12 major cases with U.S. officials, including that of Christian Ganczarski, a German-born convert to Islam who ranked as one of the most important al-Qaeda terrorists in Europe -- until he was arrested in Paris in June, 2003.

It's too early to say that the West is winning in Iraq. But it's way past time to acknowledge that the West will win or lose the war on terror in Iraq.