I hope DKos readers will forgive this long diary (in extended copy!!) consisting of Thomas Friedman's column today and my comments in brackets along the way. As the war careens out of control, I must say that while I am angry at Bush and the neocons, I am most angry at the liberals, who should have known better, and enabled them. And most angry of all at Thomas Friedman as the most influential of them. So I have vented my spleen as they say. It also reminds me of the moral heroism of Howard Dean who, for all his flaws, was able to see and willing to speak the truth about the war, even though he, like I, was not even of the left, but just one among an increasing number of angry moderates.
Are There Any Iraqis in Iraq?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: April 8, 2004
we are at a perilous juncture in Iraq. Two things are clear, and there's only one question left to be answered. What's clear is that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and there are no Viet Cong in Iraq. The key unanswered question is: Are there any Iraqis in Iraq?
When I say that there are no Viet Cong in Iraq, I mean that the Iraqi "insurgents" opposing the U.S. today cannot plausibly claim to be the authentic expressions of Iraqi nationalism -- as the Viet Cong claimed to be in the Vietnam War. The forces killing Americans and Iraqi police are primarily Sunni Muslims who want to restore the rule and privileges of their minority community and Baath Party, or foreign and local Islamists who are trying to undermine any prospect of modernism, pluralism and secularism in Iraq.
[The surest sign of a bankrupt policy is when you start to blame the nation you're there to help. Those damn Iraqis, no sense of nationhood, neither among the quiet majority, nor among the insurgents, not like the good ol' Viet Cong. But what was a Thomas Friedman of 1965 saying - and believe me, there were legions of them: "The forces killing American and South Vietnamese soldiers are primarily Communists who want to spread the rule of a dogmatic and totalitarian minority throughout SE Asia, who are trying to undermine any prospect of modernism, pluralism and liberalism in Vietnam."]
Virtually every poll taken since the fall of Saddam indicates that neither of these groups -- who have tried to disguise their real objectives behind a mask of anti-Americanism -- represents the vast majority of Iraqis, who want to elect their own government, free of intimidation.
[A "mask of anti-Americanism"? I see, so that's not a real motivating factor. I wonder what polls Friedman is relying on for this particular gem of an insight.]
But wars are not won by polls. They are won by those ready to fight and die in the alleys for their cause. Armed, masked young Arab men -- motivated by the toxic mix of radical Islam, anti-Americanism and humiliation, and high on the drug of defeating the hated foreigner, even if it will be ultimately self-defeating for them -- can be turned back only by an Iraqi army motivated by a sense of nationhood and a desire for self-determination.
[Yes, we can agree that wars are won by armed men, and Friedman has happily now acknowledged they are motivated by "anti-Americanism", not just masking themselves in it. Ah, "and humiliation". What, pray tell, is this "humiliation"? Is it just shared by the armed, masked men or is it - as all the polls state - shared by the overwhelming majority of Arab Iraqis (the Kurds are another thing). Might this "humiliation" not be linked to the "anti-Americanism" expressed by the insurgents? Might it not be an expression of Iraqi nationalism, humiliation that foreigners had to rid us of Saddam, and now foreigners are running the country and deciding what is an acceptable and unacceptable regime for Iraqis? Just asking...]
We cannot want a decent Iraq more than the Iraqi silent majority. Because this is an urban war, and U.S. soldiers having to fight house to house inside Iraqi cities cannot win it. Only Iraqis can. If we try to fight this war ourselves, we will kill too many innocent Iraqis, blow up too many mosques and eventually turn the whole population against us -- even if they know in their hearts that what we're trying to build is better than what the insurgents want.
[They're letting us down, those damn Iraqis, they're letting us down. No sense of nationalism, just like the south Vietnamese...]
In fairness to Iraqis, though, asking the silent majority there to stand up right now is asking a lot. After decades of Saddam's brutal rule, civil society there was just beginning to come back, and the first threads of trust between the different communities were just beginning to be tied. The whole purpose of the U.S. occupation was to build a constitutional framework in which this center could be developed.
[Ah yes, but of course, Saddam is to blame; they would support us, they would be good nationalists, if only their souls had not been perverted by Saddam. And we were getting there; they were coming around - based on what evidence does Friedman see "the first threads of trust between the different communities beginning to be tied" would be interesting to know; instead, they seem to be arming for civil war - but the Baathists and Islamists are ruining it all]
This was always a long shot. But, I believe, after 9/11, trying to build a decent state in the heart of a drifting Arab-Muslim world -- a world that is manufacturing millions of frustrated, unemployed youths -- was worth trying. But it takes resources and legitimacy, and the Bush team has provided too little of both.
["A long shot"!! A long shot!? You send a hundred thousand troops into a country that you understand nothing about, without making any preparations for the day after the war, without thinking through in any way the politics of how you are going to get there, against the advice of the populations of virtually every liberal democracy on the planet, and against the advice of every country in the region except one (including democratic Turkey) - and you did this as a long shot!! You risked the emergence of a new radical totalitarian theocracy for a long shot! You risked civil war and the deaths of hundreds of thousands for a long shot! You risked greatly invigorating terrorist Islamist groups for a long shot! Is there any more clear and unambiguous statement of moral bankruptcy that that? With these outcomes at stake, you'd better be damn sure.]
From the start, this has always been a Karl Rove war. Lots of photo-ops, lots of talk about "I am a war president," lots of premature banners about "Mission Accomplished," but totally underresourced, because the president never wanted to ask Americans to sacrifice. The Bush motto has been: "We're at war, let's party -- let's cut taxes, forgo any gasoline tax, not mobilize too many reserves and, by the way, let's disband the Iraqi Army and unemploy 500,000 Iraqi males, because that's what Ahmad Chalabi and his pals want us to do."
[In the winter of 2002-03, was Thomas Friedman not aware of who was president of the United States? Had he not yet heard of Karl Rove? Did he notice the 2002 electoral campaign? Had he followed the mendacious campaigns surrounding the two tax cuts? Had he noticed a reliance on Ahmad Chalabi? Did he have - over two years into this presidency - any reason to expect a sudden change of heart? Had the honesty and transparency of the campaign leading up to the war convinced Friedman that the White House had turned over a new leaf? No, he just ignored it all. His complaints about Bush have zero legitimacy. This wasn't about whether we should support Tony Blair's war; it was George Bush's war and no one else's.]
From the day the looting started in Baghdad, it has been obvious that we did not have enough troops to create a secure framework and to control Iraq's borders. As a result, local militias began to spring up everywhere. If you turn on your TV, you can see how well armed they became while Donald Rumsfeld was insisting we had enough troops there to control Iraq.
[Did Thomas Friedman - foreign affairs columnist of the NYT and, alas, Pulitzer Prize winner - not notice what happened to General Shinseki when he made this point before the war? Did he take that into consideration in supporting his "long shot"? Who knows?]
I know the right thing to do now is to stay the course, defeat the bad guys, disarm the militias and try to build a political framework that will hold the now wavering Shiite majority on our side -- because if we lose them, the game is over. But this will take time and sacrifice, and the only way to generate enough of that is by enlisting the U.N., NATO and all of our allies to make the development of a decent state in Iraq a global priority.
[Did Friedman consider this when he supported the war despite its evident lack of support by the UN and NATO? Did Friedman consider this when he added his "liberal" voice to the choruses of vulgar Francophobia, just because that liberal democracy - along with the majority of the world's liberal democracies - saw the situation differently? Did he think through that it might be difficult to get their support later for your "long shot" if you slandered them for seeing the world differently? Did you consider that "long shots" often end up needing unexpected help? Did you ever think through what you would recommend if your "long shot" went awry? No.]
Without more allies, without more global legitimacy -- and without an Iraqi center ready to stand up against their Khmer Rouge now posing as their Viet Cong -- we cannot win in Iraq. We will be building a house with bricks and no cement. In that case, we will have to move to Plan B. Too bad we never really had Plan A.
[Look it, let's not idealize the Viet Cong. The North Vietnamese were a pretty atrocious state and if we get a North Vietnam in Iraq that will be bad enough for most of us. If we get a Khmer Rouge - God forbid? - who will be to blame? Will it be the French who warned us that we didn't know what we were getting into? Will it be the Islamists who have never come to power (save in Iran) save in the aftermath of foreign intervention and/or lengthy civil war (see Afghanistan, Sudan)? Indeed, which of the truly atrocious regimes of the 20th century did not come to power because "civil society" was annihilated by lengthy and devastating war? Would we have had the Bolsheviks without WWI? Hitler without WWI and Versailles? Mao without the Japanese occupation of China? The Khmer Rouge without Vietnam? The Taliban without the Russian invasion? No. So who will be to blame if we - god forbid - get a Khmer Rouge in Iraq. Bush and Cheney of course, the neocons most certainly, the Islamists themselves no doubt, but a place of pride should be reserved for the American liberals who enabled Bush in pursuit of a "long shot" in Iraq, and the greatest of these is Thomas Friedman.]