Posted on 08/13/2003 7:22:18 PM PDT by WaterDragon
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice gave a speech last week to the National Association of Black Journalists, and she likened the struggle for freedom in Iraq and elsewhere with the struggle for freedom here in America:
We must never, ever indulge in the condescending voices who allege that some people in Africa or in the Middle East are just not interested in freedom, they're culturally just not ready for freedom, or they just aren't ready for freedom's responsibilities. We've heard that argument before, and we, more than any, as a people should be ready to reject it. The view was wrong in 1963 in Birmingham, and it is wrong in 2003 in Baghdad and in the rest of the Middle East.
One such condescending voice belongs to USA Today columnist DeWayne Wickham, who regularly holds forth on questions of race. In today's column Wickham allows as how "up to that point" in her speech, Rice "appeared to have avoided the verbal pitfall Republicans often stumble into when they talk to black folks. But then, in a closing remark, Rice tumbled headlong into the abyss that swallows up so many Republicans who clumsily try to link themselves or their issues to the civil rights movement."
As an aside, it seems worth noting that Rice is herself black and was born in segregated Alabama, so it's not clear why Wickham thinks he's qualified to lecture her on behalf of "black folks." But let's consider the substance of his argument, the reason he thinks likening Iraq in 2003 to the Deep South in 1963 is a "really bad analogy":
The people who waged this nation's civil rights campaign were not attacked by the folks they sought to free from Jim Crow's grip. The freedom riders and sit-in demonstrators of the 1960s didn't fear the people on whose behalf they put their lives at risk. The threat came from others.
But in Iraq it is mostly Iraqis--the people Bush now says this nation went to war to free from Saddam's despotic rule--who are suspected of carrying out the continuing attacks on American soldiers. As of Tuesday, 57 U.S. troops had been killed by hostile fire since the president told us on May 1 that the war in Iraq was all but over.
Accepting for the sake of argument that the enemy in Iraq indeed consists of "mostly Iraqis" (more on this in the next item), they are "the people" America is in Iraq to liberate only in the sense that the oppressors and the oppressed are of the same nationality. But this reinforces Rice's point, for the same was true in Birmingham in 1963. Jim Crow was a system under which Americans oppressed Americans, just as Baathism was a system under which Iraqis oppressed Iraqis.
The only obvious difference is that in the South, the oppressors and the oppressed were easily identifiable by skin color. Wickham's argument thus amounts to the assertion that because to him Iraqis all look alike, their oppression counts for nothing. What an appalling display of moral idiocy.
Sure, it's clear. In the eyes of the Left, Rice is "not really black."
To them, William the Impeached has a higher quotient of "blackness" than she does.
Which, given the stench of his ''argument'', he should try to obtain more frequently.
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