Reconstruction redux

I was reading a book review by James McPherson in the November 30, 2006 issue of the New York Review of Books when I came across an unexpected comparison: 'Violent resistance by ex-Confederates to the efforts of Congress to reconstruct the South on the basis of equal civil and political rights for freed slaves produced a level of "peacetime" violence unparalleled in American history until the Iraq adventure.'

The Reconstruction is the period in American history about which I have always had the strongest feelings. For my readers abroad I should point out that the period covers the years 1865 to 1877, i.e. immediately after the U.S. Civil War. After the Southern states seceded from the Union and were defeated in war, they were not immediately let back in. Each state's seats in Congress and the electoral college were left unoccupied until they ratified the Constitutional amendments that the Northern states had passed in their absence. The Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery; the Fourteenth guarantees equal protection of the law; and the Fifteenth extended the right to vote to all 'citizens' regardless of 'race'. It's scary to think that these amendments might never have been ratified had the South been allowed to vote on them.

In the meanwhile, U.S. troops occupied the Southern states as they tried to re-organize themselves into functioning governments with equal rights of political participation for blacks and whites alike. Many Americans have forgotten that African-American men could vote and hold office all across the South during this period. The number of high offices achieved by African-Americans during Reconstruction—two U.S. senators, one lieutenant governor—have barely been equalled in the one hundred thirty years since then.

But the period was also characterized by rampant terrorism on the part of Southern whites to bring down the regimes of civil society that Reconstruction was meant to usher in. Southern whites, as a community, simply did not want to go from having 100% of political power to any dispensation in which they had to share it with the people they had once enslaved. And you know the rest: it took another century for African-Americans to enjoy the rule of law.

Which brings me to the Sunni Arabs of Iraq. Before I go any further, let me say that I am not excusing the barbarity that we daily witness in the news from Iraq. I am simply trying to explain for my readers the motives of the non-jihadist Sunni insurgents in Iraq.

Demographically, Iraq has three main population groups: Shiite Arabic-speakers (60%), Sunni Arabic-speakers (20%), and Sunni Kurdish-speakers (20%). But under the rule of Saddam Hussein's Baathist party, the Sunni Arab minority dominated civil and professional life. A group with 20% of the population enjoyed nearly 100% of the power.

Groups with strongly tribalist mentalities and monopolies on power generally do not give up that power willingly. The referendum in South Africa in March 1992, when whites basically voted to end apartheid and share power, may be a singular exception in human history, but even that was preceded by decades of activism and struggle. For the Sunni Arabs of Iraq, what's in it for them? Why would they want to accept a democratic order in which the people they once oppressed will outnumber them in the halls of government by four to one? Ay, there's the rub.

Here in the States, the Southern white majority after the Civil War would not even let the black minority participate. Ultimately, the Sunni Arabs will have to accept the rules of democracy, but have the choices made by the Bush administration eased that transition? Was the anti-Baathist purge that laid off Sunni civil servants in every government agency from the military to the DMV meant as a confidence-building measure for a future democracy?

The jihadist insurgency is another question entirely, but it's the Sunni nationalist insurgency that is causing most of the violence and mayhem. At least that's my impression of who's responsible for what. Could much of this have been avoided if smarter people had been calling the shots in Washington? Perhaps, but that day is past. If any progress is to be made now, it won't be by sending more American troops. It will be by smarter people apprehending the basic political realities on the ground. And it wouldn't hurt to see how similar the Iraqi insurgents' anxieties are to those of our own misguided insurgent countrymen not so long ago.