Liberal Talk Radio

Iraq’s Shiite Interior Minister — the one with ties to the thuggy Badr organization claims that torture allegations are exaggerated:

Interior Minister Bayn Jabr suggested some making the torture allegations were supporting the insurgency or had a personal score to settle and were using the U.S. Embassy to exert pressure on him. He also said the Interior Ministry facility in the capital’s Jadriyah district had held “dangerous terrorists,” including one man accused of building six car bombs, he said.

. . .

Jabr said only seven detainees showed signs of abuse “and the people behind the beatings will be punished according to the law.” He also said the group included Shiites as well as Sunnis, although he gave no breakdown.

“I reject torture and I will punish those who perform torture,” Jabr said. “No one was beheaded, no one was killed.”

Well, as long as no one was beheaded — since of course only the other side does that and we have to remember who are the real bad guys here . . . where have we heard that before? Ah, yes — voices like this, for example! (“Hmmm … are sexual humiliation and beheading morally equivalent?”)

Cheap and easy rhetorical points aside, stuff like this makes me wonder whether (torture allegations notwithstanding) things — perversely — might be on the right track in Iraq, especially at a crucial point such as this, so close to the December 15 elections:

Some ordinary Sunnis saw the hand of Shiite-dominated Iran, which offered sanctuary to many Iraqi Shiites during Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-led regime.

“Some government officials want to keep the Sunnis away from the next elections by terrorizing us,” Saad Farhan, a Sunni merchant in Ramadi, said, adding his brother and cousin had been held in Jadriyah. “We believe that Iran’s agents are behind it because normal and genuine Iraqis never do this.”

In other words, the possibly-not-so-bad silver lining here is that where before Shiites and Kurds gave the big purple finger to terrorists and voted, now the Sunnis seem determined not to let another kind of terrorism discourage them from voting. Possible public service announcement concept for the Independent Electoral Commission in Iraq: It’s manly to vote!

Which brings us to John F. Burns’ visit to PBS’s News Hour last night, in which in typical Burnsian Brilliance, the Times correspondent deftly showed what’s probably behind these allegations:

GWEN IFILL: Is there any fear in a larger sense that these allegations, should they prove to be true, would it further exacerbate Sunni Shiite tensions which exist anyway?

JOHN BURNS: Well, yes. I mean, that’s the headline in all this. And that is certainly what we were hearing today even from moderate Sunni Arab political groups, including some of those who have agreed to participate in the Dec. 15 elections and already named and fielded a slate of candidates.

But there’s another side to this, and that is that according to Gen. William Webster, who commands the Third Infantry Division with 30,000 troops in Baghdad, his troops within the last 24 hours since the prime minister announced the investigation at the insistence of the American command, his troops, American soldiers are hearing on the streets for the first time a kind of flood of approval from Sunni Arabs who are saying, well now, now you are showing us you are here not to favor one side, that side being of course the Shiite majority who have taken power under the transitional government.

Gen. Webster, and he is not alone in this in the American command feels that, as the Chinese say, out of all things bad something good, that there may be an undercurrent here that will actually bear fruit in terms of Sunni Arabs perhaps thinking again what America is really up to here. [Emphasis added]