more on Kaplan

Oh yes, and lets not forget Mr. Kaplan’s shock that Bush failed to mention the disgruntled Sunni’s in his catalogue of who we are fighting in Iraq. K agrees that it is mainly former regime holdouts and Jihadists, but feels it an unforgivable lapse in nuance that Mr. Bush failed to mention the plain garden variety Sunni tribesmen that don’t particularly like the fact that, at 20% of the population, the Sunnis will no longer call the shots in a new democratic Iraq. Notice the sly way he puts it: "driven by Sunni fears." They are worried that the Shiites won’t treat them right, you see.

Now that is a nice circumlocution. No need to ask if there is any basis to these fears. No need to actually catalogue any mistreatment of the Sunnis by the new government. You just have to refer to their ‘fears’ that they might be. So, having no choice in the face of such fears they do what any other reasonable group with such fears might do and launch a campaign of murdering civilians, a great many of whom are Sunnis too.

He cites Sunni fears because there is no actual mistreatment. The fact is that the Shiites and Kurds have acted with amazing forbearance and the holdout Sunnis that Mr. Kaplan is so solicitous of aren’t even a majority in their own minority. And what does it mean to point out that some of the Sunnis fighting now were not in Sadaam’s regime? Have they made any demands? Have they put forward any constructive proposals for constitutional reform or safeguards for Sunni interests? Can you remind yourself how extraordinary that is, to be fighting without any list of demands? How can you fight without saying what it is that you want? Of course they do say one thing they want, the Americans and other international forces out. Is there any reason to think that if they got what they wanted, the removal of American troops, they would do anything other than set up a new dictatorship of a Sunni strongman? That is when you fight without making a list of demands for the kind of government you want: when the kind of government you want is so morally unacceptable that it can’t be defended in public. Not even with the UN crowd.

So what if some or even most of them did not serve in the former regime? A lot of Clansmen spent the real civil war behind the lines and only decided to join the fight when it could be waged against civilians instead of armed men. Does that make them somehow more legitimate? Here again in his ignorance of some details I think bush has grasped the nettle better than his more informed intellectual critics: we are fighting for democracy against people that want a dictatorship. We cannot give up just because the people that want to rule their society by force are willing to murder.