I have been reading more and more of this, and more and more commentary upon it, recently; it seems the right has decided that the problem in Iraq is . . . the Iraqi people! There was more than some of that in the Cal Thomas piece I quoted below, and over at Alternet.org, Joshua Holland has this piece quoting a George Will column that sums up the new blame-shift. As Holland points out, this view is neither new nor typically American. It has long been the conceit of colonial powers that they are offering the great gift of civilization to those who are bereft of true enlightenment. How ungrateful of these lesser breeds without the law to refuse to acknowledge not just the soveriegnty but the supremacy of their betters?
The rhetoric of democratization (a horrible neo-logism that carries baggage that undercuts the ideal it claims to support) should have been a warning to anyone who heard it that we were engaged in a task destined for failure. One does not "democratize" a country, especially through force of arms. Political form follows history, tradition, accident and contingency, and a whole host of other factors that create a calculus dooming imposition to dismal defeat. This is not to say that democracy is not preferable to other forms of governance; nor am I saying that those forces in authoritarian and dictatorial regimes that work towards democratization, often at great personal risk and cost, are illegitimate. I am saying that imposing a foreign form of governance upon other people distorts their whole political outlook. In other words, if democracy is to come to Iraq, or Saudi Arabia, or Myanmar, it has to be an Iraqi form of democracy, a Saudi form of democracy, a Burmese form of democracy, flowing from their own struggle, their own social history, and the social and civil infrastructure that exists in these societies.
Arthur Silber has written long and often on the concept of American exceptionalism, and his pieces bear thinking through. The roots of this notion, expressed best in recent history by Ronald Reagan's acceptance speech at the 1984 Republican National Convention in a speech now known as "The Shining City on a Hill", quoting from a speech given by Governor John Winthrop just before he landed at the Plymouth Bay Colony in the 1620's, lie deep in the American psyche, and are not easily dislodged. It is often spoken of in non-religious terms by those who insist that "America is the greast country in the world," while ther reasons for this greatness usually devolve to questions of economic, military, or social power. We delude ourselves when we think we are somehow immune to the forces of history.
As Iraq descends further into civil war, and as the American people clamor for our troops to leave sooner rather than later (despite the wisdom of our Washington-based elders), there has been an attempt to find a scapegoat for the "situation". For those who have supported this war since before it began, the easiest culprits are the lazy, shiftless, ungrateful, maniacal Iraqis, who would rather kill one another than toss flowers at American troops and bureaucrats who freed them from the horrors of a latter-day Adolf Hitler. This ignores the fact that, again as Holland points out, Iraq was a stable, indeed flourishing secular society prior to the 1991 Gulf War, and an at least stable one until the American invasion. When Paul Bremer de-Baathified the Iraqi government and idsbanded Sadaam's army, he essentially stripped the social and civil infrastucture of Iraq of those who had both the understanding and the competence to run the country. We Americans make a fetish of disliking bureacracy, but the oldest civilizations, China, Egypt, and Sumer, thrived precisely because they developed a civil infrastructure that maintained socio-economic order even in the face of myriad political crises. While Egyptian and Sumerian greatness has waned, China is still going strong, four thousand years after unifying under the Ch'in Dynasty. we may call their form of government communist, but in fact there is a reasonable argument to be made that it is a modern extension of the Chinese genius for maintaining civil order on a grand scale.
The worst thing, of course, is totally ignoring the truth that the only ones to blame for the situation in Iraq are us. We invaded a country that had neither the military capability nor the political willingness to threaten us; we stripped it not only of its top leadership, but of all those functionaries necessary to keeping a modern state humming along. We removed the army and police from authority, creating a vacuum that has yet to be filled in a way that is acceptable to all Iraqis. There is no way social and civil order can be restored in Iraq in a short enough amount of time to rescue George W. Bush's legacy as the breaker of the Iraqi nation. There are no military solutions. There are no short-term political solutions. There is only the grief that should come from knowing that all of us, whether we supported the war or not, are complicit in the destruction of a highly urbanized, cosmopolitan society for no reason whatsoever. The finger of blame points at us; the only thing worse is that, by denying it so vehemently for so long, things have descended to a point that matters are beyond anyone's capacity to control or influence.
Virtual Tin Cup
