Thursday's butchery throughout Iraq in which more than 100 people died and 300 were maimed defines for all decent Iraqis the future they must aim for, a future in which these brutal men of violence have been exterminated and Iraq can at last be at peace.
The gunmen and the bombers offer nothing except death and misery. They have no political platform. They are motivated by revenge, bloodlust and a wish to plunge the country into chaos. They have no cogent arguments. They have no manifesto. All they proffer is death and fear. This utterly nihilistic program contains within itself the seeds of its own defeat.
Slowly the gunmen will die. The communities in which they hide, which have supported them through misplaced conviction or out of sheer terror, will turn against them. Meanwhile for the majority of Iraqis, every new outrage will strengthen the certainty that these ruthless killers represent Iraq’s past, not its future.
There is of course an irony here. During the long years of Baathist rule, people became used to living with fear and intimidation. The midnight knock on the door by the secret police, the disappearances, the mass graves, the poison gas attacks were the stuff of everyday life in Saddam’s Iraq. People got on with their lives as best they could. What they did not have then but do have now is hope.
The gunmen and the bombers stand between them and a better future salvaged from dictatorship, sanctions and occupation. But the barrier these terrorists have erected is as nothing compared to the steel net of oppression that Saddam once cast over the whole country. The horrors the terrorists bring pale into insignificance beside the oppression of the Saddam era.
In just a few days Iraqis will take back a measure of control over their own destiny. That is not a hope that they could ever relinquish willingly. No sane Iraqi wishes to return to the awful past, and it is only the past that these people have to offer.
The blunders of the US-led coalition, not least on security, have until now fanned the flames of terrorism. But the tide is turning. Intelligence is improving. Increasingly the butchers will find themselves compromised. Informers will be more prepared to talk to fellow Iraqis. There will be an increasing determination among those Iraqis who have joined the new police and security forces and saw so many of their colleagues slain and injured.
There will be mavericks like Moqtada Sadr — who has just spurned an invitation to take part in the Iraqi national conference because he did not believe his militia was being accorded enough prominence — but they cannot and will not be allowed to deflect the advance toward a better future from violence and fear. There will also be further tragic outrages and pointless loss of life, but Iraq has already been in a nightmare for over three decades. If it can endure a little longer it can prove that once freed from all oppressors, foreign and homegrown, it has the will and the resources to build a peaceful society.
