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To: calgal who wrote (1045)	3/27/2003 12:08:00 AM
From: calgal	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3592

The Portents of Basra This is a war of liberation, as advertised. Thursday, March 27, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST URL:http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110003256 The city of Basra was mostly quiet after Tuesday's uprising, if that's what it was, by Shiite Muslims against the brutal Iraqi troops in their midst. By yesterday the British troops surrounding the city had largely neutralized the Iraqi fighters who had turned their mortars on their fellow citizens. Much of the media has portrayed the Basra scenes as proof that the war is going badly: American troops have been welcomed by bullets not flowers, the city is facing a humanitarian crisis with shortages of food and water, and it'll all be a hundred times worse when we get to Baghdad. (Sometimes we think that if today's media had been alive in 1863, we'd all have Southern accents.) But there's another way to look at Tuesday's uprising: as a portent of the Iraqi liberation to come, especially for that country's long-suffering Shiite population. Basra is Iraq's second-largest city and a center of Shiite culture. In a land of many brutalities, only the Kurds have suffered more than the Shiites under Saddam's rule. Basra was the center of the uprising against Saddam after the 1991 Gulf War, and thousands of that city's residents were slaughtered in the aftermath. It's certainly understandable that those same residents would hesitate to revolt again, at least not before they were certain that Saddam's regime was really and finally dead. All the more so when Saddam's Fedayeen enforcers have been lurking in the city's shadows to punish any show of pleasure or relief. One news report we saw told of a woman on the outskirts of Basra who made the mistake of waving to the Brits and was later found hanged. "It is important that we give support to those people in Iraq who are rising up to overthrow Saddam and his deeply repressive regime," Tony Blair told Parliament yesterday, and we couldn't agree more. But the allies have a special obligation toward the Shiites for more reasons than to make up for our Gulf War betrayal. We will also need the Shiites to remake post-Saddam Iraq. Unlike the Kurds of the north, they aren't a minority. Shiites make up 65% of Iraq's population, compared with 20% for Saddam's Sunni ruling elite. As Reuel Marc Gerecht points out in the current Weekly Standard, the Iraqi military is majority Shiite but its current officer corps is overwhelmingly Sunni. Having been oppressed for so long, they need to feel they have a stake in a new Iraq and that their American and British liberators want them to have that stake. All the more so because this week's Basra violence carries another portent: That getting to a post-Saddam Iraq is going to include some ugly scenes. One reason those Sunni elites are resisting Americans more fiercely than some expected is because they realize that they may lose their privileged place in Iraqi society. The Baath Party rulers realize they are fighting for their lives, because after many decades of oppression many Shiites will want to pay their Sunni overlords back in kind. Americans have to understand that some of this is inevitable, and that there is only so much we can do to prevent it. The Fedayeen in particular are war criminals, and are likely to be targets of frontier justice once their regime protectors are toppled. One way the U.S. and British can help minimize any retribution is by showing with words and especially with military force that we are on their side. For that reason, it may make sense now for the allies to liberate Basra even before they do Baghdad, though that was not in the original war plan. There is something to be said for showing the world scenes of cheering Iraqis, especially after this week. If the U.S. and Britain have miscalculated in their war planning, it is only in underestimating how deep Saddam's terror runs in Iraq. It is so pervasive that many Iraqis won't believe liberation until they see the whites of American eyes.