A war of cultures: shame and honor, as always.(Iraq)

MOST Iraqis recognize that they owe a debt to the United States. They have never been so free and prosperous, and they expect things will get better still. There's been banking and currency reform, with lines of credit now readily available. Markets are thriving, property values are rising. Welcome novelties include free speech and almost 200 periodicals; Internet cafes, bloggers, and cellphones are everywhere. About 90,000 Iraqis are policemen or soldiers, a number growing all the time. In spite of provocations and opportunities, communal violence has not occurred, even when an Iraqi politician or a prominent ayatollah was murdered. The Iraqi Provisional Government is gradually acquiring power and capabilities, and one day in the not so distant future will become independent.

This pretty solid performance of peacekeeping and nation-building is called into question by hit-and-run attacks now numbering around 30 a day. As we see, a shoulder-fired missile is enough to bring down a helicopter over the village of Hasai, killing 16 soldiers and wounding another 20. Other attacks have hurt people or institutions whose work normalizes the situation, including Iraqi police posts, the United Nations, and the Red Cross.

Saddam Hussein has gone to ground but those committing these violent acts are still loyal to him. All of them have been dispossessed. Their only hope of recovering the absolute power and privilege they lately enjoyed lies in engineering a chaos so ugly that American public opinion comes to insist on stopping Operation Free Iraq and withdrawing the troops. They have to wage a war of cultures, and fast. Why should they care about the human costs to the majority of Iraqis who are doing all right, so long as they can rush afterwards into the political vacuum? Death and destruction also comes cheap. The going rate for an attack is said to be a thousand dollars. With his looted millions, Saddam can finance that for who knows how long? One of the recent car bombs in Baghdad also happened to wreck the private clinic of a doctor by the name of Jalal Massa. The U.S. occupation, Dr. Massa said, "has not been a success." Such a condemnation clarifies the unfolding political struggle. The whole trick of it is somehow to shift the blame for these outrages away from the Iraqi perpetrators on to the American defenders.

The war of cultures has only a slight Islamic dimension. With its Sunni minority and Shia majority, Islam in Iraq does not offer a monolithic identity. Saddam was always willing to play the Muslim card, inscribing "God is the greatest" on the Iraqi flag, and habitually drawing parallels between the great days of the Prophet Muhammad and his own one-man rule. At the start of Ramadan, coordinated car-bomb attacks killed three dozen people and injured another 200. Some Islamists welcomed this, for instance Yasser al-Sirri, who said, "Ramadan is a blessed time when good deeds are rewarded tenfold. If you are martyred in Ramadan, that's even better." He further explained that the fasting imposed by this holy month and jihad "go hand in hand." But al-Sirri is actually an Egyptian terrorist wanted for murder in his own country, and living in Britain where laws designed for other people at other times protect him. International jihadists of his type are reported to be in Iraq, but nobody seems to know what influence they have.

Nationalism was another uncertain vehicle for Saddam. Like everyone who has ever ruled Iraq, he did not attempt to weld a nation-state out of the country's disparate ethnic and religious elements. Instead he used the Baath party to run a party-state on the Nazi and Soviet model. This party-state was a criminal enterprise for Saddam and his fellow Sunnis and anyone else willing to lay aside all moral principles for the sake of a career. Nonetheless some sort of nationalism exists. Listen to one of the Hasai villagers after the helicopter was shot down there: "We are cheering because every American soldier we kill brings us one step closer to getting them out of the country for good." Another ...