PrintWhen the Bush Administration emailed to reporters an article by Eliot Cohen that appeared in The Wall Street Journal, for me that was the final indication that their Iraq policy had reached rock bottom. Cohen, the director of the Center for Strategic Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies wrote, “A junta of military modernizers might be the only hope of a country whose democratic culture is weak, whose politicians are either corrupt or incapable.”
In other words our problems in Iraq are ultimately not our fault, they are the fault of “a country whose democratic culture is weak.” When there is no one else left to blame, blame the victim. The hubris and racism of support for such a statement coming from an administration that this summer tried to kill this country’s own Voting Rights Act and then proceeded to force through a law suspending habeas corpus will rank as one of the most hypocritical in our history. What’s more I do not remember hearing such a statement about the struggles of the former Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union, or even the former fascist past of Spain, Italy and Germany.
Many people who have read my book The Strange Death of Liberal America or visited the blog assume that my definition of Liberal America is only domestic. As a first-generation American whose family fled political tyranny, I find that curious. In Strange Death I defined the main belief of Liberal America as the conviction that government exists to keep the playing field level. That principle is as important to foreign policy as it is to domestic. When this country has exercised force overseas in support of that principle it has not only been universally welcomed but lauded. As my relatives is Germany tell me, when the Cold War ended many people around the world assumed that the principle of the level playing field would become the center of what some were calling at the time the Pax Americana.
How far they were from the truth. In Iraq we have not fought to keep the playing field level, we have screwed it up so badly that every faction in the country thinks we are tilting the playing field in the direction of their enemies. This may be the first time in history that America is seen supporting no leader and no principle. In Vietnam we supported gun-twirling generals, but in Iraq nobody seems to like us.
Part of this may be because in Strange Death I noted that the level playing field depended on four cornerstones: social and economic justice, educational equity, voting rights and media fairness. In Iraq we have violated all these. Abu Ghraib, secret CIA prisons, and the deliberate murder of civilians are hardly social and economic justice. Turning education over to corrupt subcontractors is hardly educational equity. Having chaotic elections that fail to adequately protect voters or those who are elected is hardly voting rights. As for media fairness it is hard enough to find that here let alone in Iraq.
If the Bush Administration truly believes the Iraqi people are incapable of freedom, then what are we doing there? Do you think Colin Powell would have been emailing reporters with such an excuse? If it sees the very people we are supposed to be trying to help as inferior then the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their Bush Doctrine are no different then the 19th century colonialists who justified their depredations in terms of their supposed cultural and racial superiority. If George Bush is convinced that Iraq has a weak democratic culture then it is him and his neocon allies who are cutting and running on the most despicable of excuses.
To American women, many of whom have been at the forefront of the anti-war movement, the “blame the victim” excuse must seem especially appalling, considering that in many eyes around the world we have committed the equivalent of rape in Iraq. What is next, “They asked for it?”
NOTE: This post has no picture. Were I a good cartoonist I might be able to think something, but the idea is so repulsive that no stock picture could adequately portray it.
Print Posted by: liberalamerican
