Four years after the fall of Baghdad to American forces, current pictures from Iraq show us a culture seething with tribal rivalries and violence that was once kept in check by the even greater violence of a regime headed by Saddam Hussein.
The sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites has created a river of blood that reaches back to the first century of Islam. The tribal violence never ceased as it transformed into conflicts among the successor states of the Ottoman Empire created by the British-French agreement following World War I.
It is the West’s loss of confidence in itself and its contribution to the making of the modern world—its ideals enshrined in the United Nations Charter—that raise blinders to seeing things for what they are in the Middle East, and speaking about them plainly without insulting the memory or experience of victims of that region’s political culture.
In observing the Middle East now for some time, I am reminded of what Umar ibn al-Khattab, the prophet’s companion and second caliph, said about his people. Umar remarked, as it is recorded, “The Arabians are truly an unruly camel and, by God, I am he who can keep them on the right path.”
Saddam Hussein and his like, who ruled the Arab-Muslim world with undisguised cruelty, imagined they had the warrant of Umar to tear apart limbs of men, make women widows and children orphans in order to perpetuate their rule indefinitely through their clans.
As I write, Darfur burns and the Arab-Muslim rulers shrug their shoulders dismissively for this is the way of their world.
Terrorists are the cruel progeny of the Arab-Muslim rulers, and their excesses in savagery recorded daily in Baghdad and elsewhere are lessons they learned in societies run by these rulers.
But people in Egypt, Darfur, Syria, Iran and much of the Arab-Muslim world want to escape from their rulers. They dream of the possibilities inherent in freedom.
Four years ago, Americans and their coalition-partners brought freedom for Iraqis. Historians in the future, not contemporaries with their blinkered views and partisan politics, will assess how much of that freedom was sold short by mistakes made by the liberators of Iraq.
Four years later much of Iraq, except for Baghdad and its neighbourhood, has been slowly progressing to acquire the culture of freedom where it never existed.
Kurds were denied by the British to have a state of their own while being mercilessly abused by Saddam Hussein, yet they have turned the page on their past to build a society with much promise of civility and basic decency.
Similarly, Iraqi Shiites—haltingly and without any precedent of self-rule to guide them into the future—have been making gains even as terrorists without any reprise batter them daily.
In these four years we have also seen a people, deeply troubled and abused, defiantly defend their newly won freedom.
Violence failed to intimidate Iraqis as they ratified their constitution and elected their government, nor did the recent bombing of the parliament stop the elected members reconvening to discharge their responsibilities.
These four years have shown, lest we forget, how fragile and difficult is the birth of freedom anywhere. These years have also shown how irresolute and unmindful of history are an increasing number of people in the West taking their own freedom for granted.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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