This past weekend's Washington Post Book World contains reviews of two books on Iraq. I am struck by contrasting accounts of the relationship between Sunni and Shia Iraqis prior to the war in these two reviews.

One review is of Peter W. Galbraith's The End of Iraq, by the Post's David Ignatius.

The other is of Fouad Ajami's book The Foreigner's Gift, by R. Steven Humphreys, a professor of ME history and Islamic studies at UC Santa Barbara and author of Between Memory and Desire: The Middle East in a Troubled Age.

Galbraith argues there is no good solution to the mess. He believes if the US scales back its ambitions it can help stabilize parts of the country and contain the civil war, if it acts quickly. He believes that, looking at Iraq's 80 year history, it has been the effort to hold it together that has been destabilizing.

Ignatius pushes back on letting go of the idea of an Iraqi state: "...the reality is that the old Iraq was a genuinely heterogeneous society, with Sunnis and Shiites sharing neighborhoods, inter-marrying, even being members of the same tribes. Saddam Hussein's regime was built on the idea of 'Arabism', a shared identity that transcended religious and ethnic fault lines--by force, if necessary. Still, this ideology was remarkably successful. It's common now for analysts like Galbraith...to say that this Iraqi Arab identity was fused at the point of a gun, but that misses the yearning for modernism and secular society that animated the educated middle class in the old Iraq. The only group that always remained outside this national consensus, in my experience, was the Kurds."

Ajami is a professor at Johns Hopkins University. He is described by Stevens as an alienated Arab intellectual, born to a Shiite family in south Lebanon.

Stevens: "Throughout, Ajami emphasizes the way that his fellow Shiites (in Iraq in particular and the Arab world in general) are seen by Sunni Arabs--as a foreign, unassimilated element in Arab society and culture. They are not real Arabs but quasi-Iranians, Persian stalking horses characterized by dissimulation, un-Islamic heresies and emotional religiosity. They are regarded with condescension and contempt but also with fear and sometimes (as among Sunni jihadists like the murderously anti-Shiite Abu Musab al-Zarquawi) virulent hatred. For Ajami, the Sunni-dominated insurgency is simply a Sunni refusal to accept the inevitable democratic consequences of empowering Iraq's Shiite majority."

So which is it? Have Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq in recent decades tended to get along remarkably well...or not so well? How full was the glass?

Ignatius has been to Iraq many times. A not so wild guess is that, where he has stayed in homes, he has tended to stay in the homes of journalists and other middle class professional types--a significant but still small minority of Iraqis prior to the war, no doubt. He does not say the heterogeneity was typical of Iraq as a whole, just this subset of its population. What he may not have sufficiently appreciated is that a small number of people committed to terror can get a very large snowball rolling rapidly when there is no government security presence to deter or reign in matters in their early stages.

Ajami's perspective on Sunni treatment of Shiites is no doubt strongly felt and driven by many personal experiences. I am left to wonder when was the last time he lived in Iraq, or visited for some stretch of time?