Left Out

World Magazine ^ | December 18, 2010 | Mindy Belz

[Retain Mike]

Three years ago I attended a meeting outside Washington with a NATO adviser recently returned from briefings with commanders of the war in Iraq. The question had been posed to them: If there should be a targeted massacre of Christians in Iraq (the word actually used was genocide), would the U.S. military respond? The answer from the commanders: No.

It was December 2007. Gen. David Petraeus had arrived in Baghdad 10 months earlier bearing orders to carry out his new counterinsurgency strategy with a thrust of 20,000 additional troops throughout the city. Until then, U.S. forces were bogged down in Iraq's sectarian warfare—with civilian and military casualties sometimes topping 100 a day. That year U.S. casualties hit their all-time high, 904, but fell steadily after Petraeus' arrival to a low of 59 (over 11 months) in 2010. Decades from now historians will study Petraeus-style warfare launched in 2007 and how it catapulted the U.S. military from its post-Vietnam malaise.

[Retain Mike]

This article reminded me of Mindy Belz’s former article titled Too Legit To Quit, which I have kept, and at the time, sponsored the attached letter to the editor I wrote.

TAL was wrongly marginalized

Iraq Study Group recommendations falsely assert essential U.N. expertise in crafting a constitution for national reconciliation. An Iraqi interim council of 25 ethnically and religiously diverse members produced the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) to form the basis for a new constitution. Its 39 articles were unique in the Arab world for conceiving a republican, federal, democratic and pluralistic government guaranteeing rights for speech, religion, private property, etc. for all including Christians, Jews and former Baathists. In 2004 the United States marginalized this extraordinary indigenous effort when approving a new interim government, and favoring a U.N.-brokered scheme compatible with traditional Arab authoritarian rule.

The roughly 130 countries emerging from the implosion of colonialism provide U.N. expertise in crafting validations for the pursuit totalitarianism. The countries forming the majority of the General Assembly create useful political devices from ideologies such as democracy, socialism, communism, and more recently the Bolivarian movement and Islamic fundamentalism. Too often people unwrapped the gift of independence expecting freedom, only to rediscover pre-colonial norms of crushing civil wars, murderous political intrigues, and pandemics of disease and starvation.

The tragedy of marginalizing the TAL was obscuring individuals, such as a Jawaharlal Nehru and Nelson Mandela, who might have instilled a national awakening. Instead U.N. assistance reliably provided, and provides, an environment compatible with the violent, charismatic leaders who dominate most emerging countries.

[Retain Mike]

Here is a link to her previous article Too Legit To Quit:

http://www.worldmag.com/articles/9301