Matthew Duss

Muqtada's Got A Posse

From my review of Patrick Cockburn's Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq, now up at TAP:

Muqtada represents the Iraq we found, which was not what had been expected. Rather than work with that Iraq, the U.S. has continually tried to reshape reality to its liking. From the beginning, the U.S. occupation consistently treated Sadr's movement as a problem to be solved, rather than a genuine constituency to be accommodated, as demonstrated by Paul Bremer's shocking declaration, as recounted by Ali Allawi, that Bremer "didn't care a damn about the underclass and what they [the Sadrists] represented!" It was the inability and unwillingness of U.S. policymakers to deal with this Iraq, rather than the Iraq of neoconservative hallucination, that fed the chaos and led to the years of staggering violence and humanitarian catastrophe which have scarred a generation of Iraqis.

Better Service

Responding to the overwhelmingly negative reaction to Edward Luttwak's recycling of Daniel Pipes' garbage earlier this month, New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt concludes:

With a subject this charged, readers would have been far better served with more than a single, extreme point of view. When writers purport to educate readers about complex matters, and they are arguably wrong, I think The Times cannot label it opinion and let it go at that.

The Times' readers would have also been far better served by simply not allowing a conservative military historian with no apparent training in Islamic jurisprudence to hold forth on the finer points of sharia law on the Times' esteemed op-ed page in the first place. But it's good that there now seems to be some consensus about what unscholarly trash Luttwak's piece was.