Posted on 07/19/2003 6:14:05 PM PDT by Pokey78
Forgive Me, Dear Reader, The Use of what the historian Edward Gibbon once called the "most disgusting of the pronouns." Some months ago, in these pages, as our nation worried about the war to come in Iraq, I wrote: "Wars of liberation are never simple, gratitude is never guaranteed."
Those words were written from a hawkish view on the menace posed by Saddam Hussein. I believed, and still do, that our war was just, our means clean. In recent days, as the dispatches bring news of soldiers struck down on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the matter of gratitude (or, rather, the lack of it) has come to haunt this war. Each day the Department of Defense issues the names of soldiers killed in the "Iraq Theater of Operations." On July 14, it was Roger Rowe, an Army sergeant from Bon Aqua, Tenn., 54 years of age, and Jason Andrew Tetrault, a Marine lance corporal, of Mareno Valley, Calif., 20 years of age. In another dispatch, a soldier was shot in the back of the head in a Baghdad shopping district while trying to buy DVDs from a sidewalk vendor. The bleeding never stops, and the question arises as to the nature of the society that American power is now pledged to reform. Can a decent bond be forged between the American liberators and the society to which they have given the rare gift of deliverance?
"Normalcy." After liberation, there has come a subdued reckoning with Iraq's hard realities. The establishment of a 25-member Governing Council reflective of Iraq's communities--13 Shiites, five Sunni Arabs, five Kurds, a Christian, and a Turkmen--is a wise and timely adjustment to the truth of Iraq. The new mix of American supervision and native responsibility lays bare for Iraqis to see that there are no American designs on their country, no appetite for dominion. To be sure, some Iraqis will see this council as an American quisling. But this council is made up of men and women possessed of genuine standing in the ruin and desolation of Iraq, both exiles who worked tirelessly against Saddam Hussein and others who endured his brutality at home. In the next phase, these leaders will be called upon to lay the foundations of a new Iraqi polity.
Americans don't know Iraq and can't really heal it. The obstacles of language and culture are too deep. Grant Saddam Hussein his due: He created a monstrous world in his own image. The toxic atmosphere in today's Iraq bears witness to his terrible handiwork and to the difficulty of moving Iraq beyond his terror. Because we had overthrown not only a man but a religious and ethnic sect as well--the Sunni Arabs--it stood to reason that elements of that community would strike back. For the Sunni Arabs of Iraq, "normalcy" meant hegemony, veritable ownership of the country, the monopoly rule by a community that comprises somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of the country's population. We stripped them of dominion, and their response is the guerrilla war we now see there. Opinion in America has begun to shift both on the war and on the new American burden in Mesopotamia. There is no rush to the exits--yet. Deep down, most Americans still believe in the prudence of this war. But as American blood and money ($1 billion a week) are being expended in Iraq, it would be helpful if Iraqis were to show some measure of gratitude. So far, only Ahmad Chalabi, an American-educated mathematician who headed the Iraqi National Congress, has been forthright enough to acknowledge the debt Iraq owes its liberators. More Iraqis will have to embrace their new liberty and come to believe in the good faith and intentions of the Anglo-American coalition that toppled the old tyranny.
Societies cannot live on mass anger. Nor is there wisdom in asking foreign liberators for instant remedies to a society slowly and systematically poisoned by political terror. There are burdens for America in Iraq. But the real burden rests with Iraqis. Around them, there are neighbors who wish them ill, who prophesy for the new Iraq failure and heartbreak and a return to the ways of despotism. There are Arab regimes eager to prove that tyranny is the only workable arrangement in Arab life. It is up to the new leaders of Iraq, and to the communities from which they hail, to prove that liberty and a modicum of order are not alien to the soil of those lands.
It should be redesigned.
We may not have a choice. This is a society based on anger, frustration, and hatred. Reform may not be possible. That leaves only destruction.
Specifically, the capture of Osama and Sadam. Bump that reward up from $25 million.
Offer $500 million or $1 billion and let the House of Saud pay the tab.
And if American Soldiers happen to find these scumbags, pay them the reward, by God!
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