Anne Barnard
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It pursues policies on Israel that, by
tolerating the expansion o Jewish
settlements in the West Bank and adopt-
ing an increasingly one-sided approach
to negotiations, have enshrined the
indeÄnite occupation o the Palestinian
territories. And by supporting or
tolerating repressive governments, it
has given a green light to the suppression
o the very forces in the region—the
young and educated and motivated—
who brieÁy had the temerity to believe
in and act on the universal ideals o
freedom, human rights, and dignity that
American rhetoric promoted, only to be
crushed. Victory via maximum violence
against both militants and civilians is no
recipe for stability. What’s worse, the
example from Assad and others in the
region has oered authoritarians around
the world a grisly playbook for how to
win. It also spurred a wave o refugees
that sent racist identity politics rippling
through Europe and the United States.
So Verini is right to talk about an
entwined Iraq and America. Indeed, it
is not too far a stretch to see versions
o Iraqis’ dilemmas within U.S. borders.
How can armed fanatics and gunmen,
who make common cause in the dark
corners o social media and capitalize
on its blurring o facts, be stopped? Are
Americans facing their own apocalypse,
from the climate? How can grievances
and divisions be healed in a country, in
a world, where people don’t agree on
the nature o reality? And after years o
fear, what concerns are shared? Who is
“them,” and who is “us”?∂As for the rest o Iraq, short o real
trust, the best hope is the sharing o
spoils and power. The country has a
semblance o real politics—debate on
governance that transcends sect—after
the Äght against created at least a
partial sense o shared purpose. The
absence o violence is a kind o success;
in the city o Samarra, for instance, the
Shiite militia run by Muqtada al-Sadr,
who rose to prominence Äghting Ameri-
can troops, is now keeping peace with a
mostly Sunni population, partly by
oering lucrative business opportunities
to local Sunnis. In Syria, however,
relative quiet has come through Assad’s
wholesale doubling down on repression.
Elsewhere in the Middle East, Leba-
non’s rickety yet durable system, with
sectarian maÄas sharing rents a genera-
tion after the country’s own civil war
ended, somehow passes as a decent
outcome. But it depends on perpetuat-
ing sectarian mistrust and precludes
basic infrastructure investment, let alone
a functional state, a shared political or
physical public space, or meaningful
levers for ordinary citizens to eect
change. And that is in a country that is a
fraction o the size o Iraq.
More important, instability and
extremism will rear their heads in the
Middle East as long as its people are
denied a voice in how they are governed.
The biggest long-term threat in the
region is neither nor Iran but the
continued de facto insistence by its own
leaders that the path to security and
stability is through rule by force.
Decades o U.S. policy have implicitly
endorsed that view. Washington main-
tains so-called counterterrorism alliances
with despotic rulers in Egypt, Saudi
Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.