Tribal identities in a modern world

GENERAL David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker have gone back to Baghdad with all the time they want, but with no clear plan other than carrying on as before and muddling through. "Our patience is not unlimited," said Senator John Barrasso, but apparently it is. Congress has not the will to be decisive, and so we fight on, with an illusion of progress always dangling before us like a mirage of water in a desert wasteland.

Petraeus and Crocker were masters at obfuscation as they tried to thread their way between congressional hawks and doves last week. A straight answer was as rare as a day without death in Baghdad. But Petraeus did admit: "We haven't turned any corners. We haven't seen any lights at the end of the tunnel."

There was an effort among certain senators to blame our problems on Iran, and Crocker was quick to take it up. But there were no Iranians or Shi'ites in the suicide planes of Sept. 11, 2001. Al Qaeda considers all Shi'ites apostates. Barack Obama got it right when he said that if the Iraqi government "can tolerate as normal neighbor-to-neighbor relations (with) Iran, then we should be talking to them as well. I do not believe we're going to be able to stabilize the situation without them."

This may not be possible in the Bush administration that has gone to such lengths to demonize Iran as "evil." But it should be a priority of the next president, Republican or Democrat.

All but forgotten in the congressional testimony were the "benchmarks" that only last fall were supposed to be met by the Iraqis. Originally, the United States was going to stand down when the Iraqis stood up. But the government's feeble effort in Basra shows how little the national army has achieved in five years.

Petraeus said that "recent operations in Basra highlight improvements in the ability of the Iraqi security forces to deploy substantial numbers of units, supplies, and replacements on a very short notice." But does delivering soldiers to a battlefield quickly really matter if they take off their uniforms and join the enemy once they get there? Some Iraqi soldiers performed OK, but, clearly, the motivation to break out of tribal and ethnic loyalties to form a national whole is wanting.

There is a theory going around that posits that reconciliation at the top of Iraqi society doesn't really matter. It's reconciliation at the bottom that counts. This conveniently side steps the "benchmark" that reconciliation at the national level should happen if the United States is to continue its support.

The theory is that Iraq is not really a modern society, but a tribal one, and therefore shouldn't be held to Western standards. It is enough if some tribes make accommodations with each other to reduce internecine violence. And if enough of these provincial accommodations are made, maybe stability will spread.

In the modern world, however, you need national institutions at the top and power-sharing, not just tribal accommodations whereby one group promises to stop stealing camels one day, only to change its mind the next. Moqtada al-Sadr used to have an accommodation with Nouri al-Maliki, after all, and may again. Basing your hopes on tribal accommodations is to accept that Iraq has returned to where it was in the distant, Ottoman Empire past. Gertrude Bell, who had so much to do with forming the Iraqi state for the British, found, according to historian David Fromkin, "that outside the towns, Ottoman administration vanished, and the local sheikh or headman ruled instead. There were districts, too, where brigands roamed at will. The rickety Turkish government was even incapable of collecting its own taxes, the most basic act of imperial administration."

There is danger in arming tribes that, as the Financial Times put it, "is a policy that, willy-nilly, empowers more and more warlords to pull Iraq to bits."

Tribal identity may be the reality in today's Iraq. It has always had a powerful role. And, in the end, the country may break up into ever-smaller tribal, religious, and ethnic entities. But do they need us for that?

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.