Timothy Noah of Slate has noted the same phenomenon I commented upon in yesterday's post. Namely, that many former war supporters now want to blame the Iraqis for the chaos in their country. Here's Noah nailing Charles Krauthammer:
In the Dec. 1 Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer writes that the Maliki government's failure “is rooted in an Iraqi political culture that makes it as yet impossible for enough of the political leadership to act with a sense of national consciousness.” What's remarkable is that the people now saying things like this are the same ones who, early on, criticized skeptics who fretted about post-Saddam instability for failing to recognize that Iraq had a stable middle and professional class and that these stout burghers would keep the country running smoothly after Saddam got the boot. Here's Krauthammer in Sept. 2003: “With its oil, its urbanized middle class, its educated population, its essential modernity, Iraq has a future.... Once its political and industrial infrastructures are reestablished, Iraq's potential for rebound, indeed for explosive growth, is unlimited.” Well, which is it? Is Iraq a bourgeois nation, or a dysfunctionally tribal one? It can't be both. More likely, it's neither.
I also liked Noah's conclusion:
It may feel good for Americans to say that postwar Iraq is a failed society because of the Iraqis themselves. Ingratitude is a common lament of embittered visionaries, because it's usually too painful to blame oneself. But it's rarely true that the people whose lives we try to transform are at fault when we can't transform them, and it certainly isn't true in the case of Iraqis. We just have to live with that.
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This "Iraqi political culture that makes it as yet impossible for enough of the political leadership to act with a sense of national consciousness" was part of the program from the day we went in, like a herd of bulls into a china factory. We broke it, we gotta pay for it. Easier to say, of course, if you're a politician who's kid is at Brown, not riding around Fallujah underarmed.
"whose" kid. Sorry, I really am literate. Just posting at 2am from Paris.
Krauthammer apparently thinks that American foreign policy should be guided by his own hubris and delusions rather than by the lessons of history. Iraq was created by the British during the heyday of their colonial empire, and was always held together by autocrats (first the British approved cronies, then the Baathist regime after their ousting after WWII). The British, of course, had to occupy Iraq twice in the early 20th. century just to keep to lid on. Anyone with a smidgen of knowledge of mideast history could have predicted the Iraq clusterfuck with startling accuracy, but as with most imperial powers we reserve the right to attempt to historically impossible, only with our own brand of triumphal swagger.
"We broke it, so we gotta pay for it"? As in "We gotta fix it"?
What makes you think "we" can pay for it, or rather fix it? We've set up three(?) American-style governments in a row - which is to say, three pseudo-democratic puppet assemblages of shia groups. And none of them were taken seriously by the Iraqis - they weren't fooled for a moment.
What makes you think they can be made to trust the occupiers, after so many failures, betrayals and killings?
No, Iraq can't be fixed with the same tools that smashed it.
Sounds like he is engaging in spin doctoring before the fact. This must mean they are coming to believe that a withdrawal is inevitable. What a pity for them that they can't just rewrite the archives to reflect the new truth, as in 1984.
Anyone here familiar with "rain dance psychology"?
1. You perform the rain dance; it rains. The rain dance worked.
2. You perform the rain dance; it doesn't rain. You did not perform the rain dance properly.
I repeatedly refer to Iraq as Vietnam in my conversations, a Freudian slip.
And these commentators, O'Reilly and Krauthammer, as with the current executive of our government share a similar problem with President Johnson. We see the world through our glasses and ignore that others may not and frequently do not view the world the same way.
Vietnam saw us as foriegn invaders, a colonial power replacing the on ethey had just kicked out, France. So while we were saving Vietnam from Communism, they were saving their county from a western colonial control.
And in Iraq we again are being seen by a vast majority of Iraqis as just another colonial invader, and infidels as well, ignorant of their views, and arrogntly trying to put our values on them.
So it's no suprise we ended up where we are.
O'Reilly and Krauthammer are right in a way. Iraq can't be westernized if the Iraqis don't want to do it. But it's our fault for so misjudging the situation in advance.