In his Washington Post column yesterday, David Ignatius quoted a perceptive observation by new Iraqi president Ghazi Yawar.
In their interview, Yawar was “wearing the traditional costume of flowing white robe and a gold-edged black cape.” Nevertheless, Ignatius wrote,
Yawar speaks in a distinctly modern voice. Though his own tribe is a potent force, with about 3 million Iraqi members split about evenly between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, he argues that these ancient tribes must be harnessed to make Iraq a truly modern state. “Our tribe is Iraq,” Yawar says. “What makes the U.S. a superpower is that all the ethnicities melt together.”
By contrast, in the U.S. these days anyone who suggests that tribalism — known here as “multiculturalism” — undermines the common good and that ethnicities should “melt together” into an all encompassing tribe of Americans would be branded a politically incorrect racist.
