Wednesday, May 26, 2004

Posted here Wednesday, May 26, 2004 at 9:10:09 AM     From NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/opinion/26AJAM.html But gone is the hubris. Let's face it: Iraq is not going to be America's showcase in the Arab-Muslim world. The president's insistence that he had sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, "not to make them American" is now — painfully — beside the point. The unspoken message of the speech was that no great American project is being hatched in Iraq. If some of the war's planners had thought that Iraq would be an ideal base for American primacy in the Persian Gulf, a beacon from which to spread democracy and reason throughout the Arab world, that notion has clearly been set aside. We are strangers in Iraq, and we didn't know the place. We had struggled against radical Shiism in Iran and Lebanon in recent decades, but we expected a fairly secular society in Iraq (I myself wrote in that vein at the time). Yet it turned out that the radical faith — among the Sunnis as well as the Shiites — rose to fill the void left by the collapse of the old despotism. The problem for me is that he believed that. A small amount of history reading and anthropology and a brief trip to north Africa a long time ago gave me enough to feel profoundly that the cost of the war in terms of the families of Iraq soldiers killed would leave a legacy that would come to haunt us. Given that we are already fouling up Afghanistan, how could Iraq be different? And worst, why did anyone think that Bush and his staff ever had the diplomatic skill and character to be able to enter into the world in a way that would leave us with more friends, not fewer?  It is important to realize the depth of the resistance to the war, based on understanding. the way the US treated Blitz and the other weapons inspectors was cruel and insulting. We already had the US record on Kyoto, the environment, and Florida. The US was not ready for an idealistic adventure, because we were already acting without ideals, only fading symbols, "freedom, democracy" insincerely repeated over and over. The whole approach of the US, with a few good colonels, and a symbol strategy that did not understand that using the palaces, the prisons, the failure to support the bureucracy... just deep ignorance. And the impact on the military, the military that wanted above all to avoid Vietnam: where were the lessons being remembered? ********