Friday, June 02, 2006
Had Enough?
The military massacre in Haditha has been getting a lot of press lately, although I have the feeling that this is just tabloid news in another form.
24 civilians were killed in the massacre, if it was indeed a massacre (the investigations are still pending, to be fair), but that is a small number compared to the 100,000 civlians who have perished in the occupation so far. Something like 12,000 civilians die in Iraq every year.
Haditha certainly is yet another PR disaster for the military, if that matters at this point in history. This is something that Thomas Friedman points out in his editorial today in the New York Times.
Friedman also asserts that the insurgency was in its “last throes,” as Cheney put it, but that the nature of the insurgency has changed into that of the anarchy of competing militias.
Friedman is an irritating pundit. The Sunni insurgency has not disappeared, Mr. Friedman, nor have sectarian militias just joined the violence in the last year. The level of violence in Iraq has gone nowhere in three years. By no convoluted logic is it possible to justify Cheney’s lie.
Friedman insists on setting deadlines to force intransigent factions in Iraq to compromise without the luxury of knowing an eternal US presence will guarantee the country will not descend into total chaos while somehow simultaneously pointing out that the factions in Iraq don’t care what happens to Iraq.
Nowhere is the will of the Iraqi people mentioned in Friedman’s work. I can only assume that Friedman thinks the Iraqi people, like their leaders, don’t know what’s best for themselves.
Ahh, the sorrows of empire. It is difficult to bring civilization to the little brown people, is it not?
US forces should leave Iraq because the people of Iraq don’t want them there, and Iraq is their country. This argument supercedes America’s desire to baby sit and shape Iraq’s government until it is in a form to our liking.
Friedman, and our administration, has always been of the mind that an Iraqi democracy would be a great example to it neighbors. Administration supporters still argue that this goal was worth $320 billion dollars, 2,500 American lives, the violation of international law and the opprobrium of the world.
Nevermind that no one can predict what Iraq’s democracy will look like in ten years, or how much longer the chaos will last, or what concrete changes in the region will follow the establishment of an Iraqi democracy. What if Iraq’s democracy devolves into a clone of Egypt’s “democracy?” What if civil war continues for decades, spawning violence and terrorism in the region, as it did in Guatemala after the CIA overthrew its government in 1954?
They just don’t know. They didn’t even have any remotely accurate idea of how much Iraq would cost or how long it would take. They actually punished officials who were most accurate in their predictions: Paul Krugman, in a neighboring column, highlights the fate of Larry Lindsey, the administration economist who pointed out that the Iraq War would probably cost far more than official estimates (though even his estimates were low). He was promptly fired.
Not only does the administration not know, but they can’t be trusted to tell the public the truth even if they did know.
Republicans will still argue that the War must be won, which is ridiculously false. No one knows what it will take to win the war, or if an Iraqi democracy will last or mean anything on a regional scale. They are asserting certainty about a subject in which there is absolutely no certainty, but instead of telling the truth they have made the Iraq War an article of faith that must be believed in, because they consistently refuse to admit error, acknowledge the truth, or honestly debate ideas. Dissent is considered treason or cowardice.
But it is your taxpayer dollars they are spending in Iraq, and your sons and daughters they are putting in harms way for geopolitical strategies so poorly thought out they would have given Johnson pause. They don’t have a right to do anything the American people don’t want them to do.
Of course, it is difficult for the American people to make informed decisions when their leaders are constantly lying to them. Some democratic oversight in Congress will go a long way to improving this situation.
Republicans are running to their base this summer, proposing the red meat cultural conservative positions that they always do in election years. They are wise to do so, as they have already lost the center of the country, and their base is largely composed of people easily swayed by jingoism. They warn their base, ominously, that democrats in control of congress will launch investigations. Oh no!
Most voters want investigations, and most experts are warning the public of the dangerous expansion of federal power and secrecy that has taken place over the last five years. Republicans’ success this Fall will not be a measure of the effectiveness of their leadership, but instead of the ignorance and apathy of the public. Newt Gingrich proposed a motto for the democrats this Fall that is very appropriate:
Had enough?
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 4:05 PM 
