Iraq continues its long downward spiral into chaos, deathcount rising faster than the desert mercury.
The news today — 50 hostages seized from Iraqi Higher Education Ministry by masked gunmen masquerading as Interior Ministry commandos, the Iraqi police apparently complicit — is horrific, unbelievable. Yet is seems almost familiar in its way, as if we’ve heard it before.
And we have, in so many pemutations, in beheadings and kidnappings, roadside bombings and mosque attacks.
Three and a half years now into this ugly war and Iraq is in flames and American troops, ostensibly the best in the world, are helpless to stop the madness.
For too long too many were unwilling to admit this, unwilling to admit that the decision by an American president and his administration to send troops into a country that had not attacked us, a country with little capacity to defend itself and to send those troops in on the cheap could only result in a deadly blowback that will be with us for years and years to come.
Because, make no mistake, the forces that have been unleashed in the desert, the hatreds we have sown, the enmity we have engendered, will not go a away for a long, long time.
I am no expert on this, of course, just the editor of a pair of suburban weekly newspapers who watches the news and reads the paper, the headlines daily screaming of death and kidnapping and the occasional, but all-too-infrequent moments of kindness and joy.
I write this a week after an election in which American voters spoke out about this madness, chasing a Republican majority that has walked in lock-step behind the president and his administration for three-plus years. I write this having listened to voters in the towns my papers cover, upscale voters and working stiffs, offer comments similar to those I read in the national papers.
A small sampling (from The Cranbury Press):
- “Change is the only thing we can hope for to do anything.” — Steve Quidor, Jamesburg.
- “The Iraq War is taking a terrible toll on the country and on the people that are serving there admirably. It is time for a change and staying the course with the Bush administration is absolutely foolhardy.” — Sid Hausner, Monroe.
- “I’ve got to get rid of the Republicans, mostly because of the war in Iraq. Needless, needless — poor boys who were killed and maimed for nothing, absolutely nothing.” — Charlotte Rubin, Monroe
Admittedly, these votes were cast in a blue county in a blue state, but they differ very little from the sentiments being voiced around the country, where 30 or so Republicans were chased from the House of Representatives.
The national news media is painting this as a win for conservatives — Democrats have moved to the right to win — and there is some truth to this on some issues. But the key issue was Iraq and Republican control of Congress and it is why GOP moderates were whisked away in states like Vermont and Connecticut.
And it is why we have been hearing a new tune from Bush and his neocon allies (some, like Richard Perle, jumped ship before the election). The president is now open to new ideas, but not a timetable — something needed to extricate the United States from this mess.
Admittedly, there are no good options. But leaving and allowing the United Nations and the regional powers (with a significant monetary contribution from us) to come in and clean up the mess we created is the least worst option available.
I think we will eventually get there, but first the history of the war must be recast, with many of its early supporters engaging in a dangerous shifting of blame to the Iraqis and their “old hatreds, confessional violence, ethnic bigotry and a culture of corruption” (USA Today columnist Ralph Peters, quoted by Robert Fisk) — a ritual destined only to further enflame the situation. American troops, David Brooks argued in his New York Times column, were failed both by administration blunders and “by the same old Iraqi demons: greed, blood lust and a mind-boggling unwillingness to compromise, even in the face of self-immolation.”
Casting blame in this way is a convenient tactic that allows the folks who cheerleaded this disaster into being avoid responsibility. Yes, the Iraqis bear some responsibility for what is happening over there, but so do President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, efense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, all their minions in the administration and Congress, and a compliant press that includes more than just the dunderheads over at Fox News.
Robert Fisk, the legendary British journalist, responded to the current round of neocon blame-the-victim handwringing, by explicitly calling it what it is, a “racist assumption that the hecatomb in Iraq is all the fault of the Iraqis, that their intrinsic backwardness, their viciousness, their failure to appreciate the fruits of our civilization make them unworthy of our further attention.”
At no point does anyone question whether the fact that the U.S. is “the greatest power on Earth” might not be part of the problem. Nor that Iraqis who endured among their worst years of dictatorship when Saddam was supported by the United States, who were sanctioned by the United Nations at a cost of a half a million children’s lives and who were then brutally invaded by our armies, might not actually be terribly keen on all the good things we wished to offer them.
Many Arabs, as I’ve written before, would like some of our democracy, but they would also like another kind of freedom — freedom from us.
In many ways, that is why all the assumptions the Bush administation and its followers made were wrong. Assuming we would be treated as liberators, that our “exceptionalism” would be seen as anything more than a new colonialism, as an arrogant attempt to control the destiny of another nation was foolish — even if we did take down one of the most thuggish dictators of recent times.
We need to admit this if we want to avoid repeating this deadly mistake in the future.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
Hank Kalet 