While prattling on about the great Iraqi civilization, Bush allowed it's very historical treasures to be looted. A perfect metaphor for the ineptitude and lip service the Bushies have paid to helping the Iraqi people.
IT'S not just about torture. Even if there had never been an Abu Ghraib, a Guantánamo or an American president determined to rewrite the Geneva Conventions, America would still be losing the war for hearts and minds in the Arab world. Our first major defeat in that war happened at the dawn of the Iraq occupation, before "detainee abuse" entered our language: the "Stuff happens!" moment at the National Museum in Baghdad.
Three and a half years later, have we learned anything? You have to wonder. As the looting of the museum was the first clear warning of disasters soon to come, so the stuff that's happening at the museum today is a grim indicator of where we're headed in Iraq: America is empowering the very Islamic radicals this war was supposed to smite. But even now we seem to be averting our eyes from reality on the ground in Baghdad.
Rich talks about our blindness. How naïve we all were, no just believing we'd be welcomed as liberators, but that anyone in the Bush Administration would have any idea of how to pull this whole venture....and lest anyone forget
The war's many cheerleaders in the press fell into line. In keeping with the mood of the time, administration enforcers like Charles Krauthammer and Andrew Sullivan damned Mr. Rumsfeld's critics as fatuous aesthetes exploiting a passing incident to denigrate the liberation of Iraq. In a column in Salon titled "Idiocy of the Week" (that idiot would be me), Mr. Sullivan asked rhetorically who was right about "the alleged ransacking" of the museum, Mr. Rumsfeld or his critics? "Rummy, of course. He almost always is."
Of course, dear old Rummy's what-me-worry take on the museum was the tip-off to how he would be wrong about everything that would follow: he reacted with exactly the same disdain and indifference to the insurgency happening under his own nose and to Abu Ghraib. There would be a hasty corrective to the looting, at least: a heroic Marine Reserve colonel, Matthew Bogdanos, commanded a team that ultimately tracked down a bit more than a third of the vanished objects. (It was too late to rescue tens of thousands of additional treasures in Iraq's National Library and National Archives, both also looted and torched.) But Mr. Rumsfeld's "Stuff happens!" proved indelible because it so resonantly set forth an enduring theme of the occupation: that the Americans in charge of Iraq were contemptuous of the local populace to whom they were so grandly bequeathing democracy and other fruits of civilization.
Let us also not forget that after $22 Billion of US Taxpayer fund were spent in reconstruction ( which they stopped by the way) has still only provided about 2 hours of electricity a day and probably now as much or more torture in Bagdhad than there was under Saddam. Now that they can't find any good news, they pay for it either rthough journalists of Madison Avenue geniuss.
Our broadcasting outreach there is supervised by a longtime Karl Rove pal, Kenneth Tomlinson, who last month was found by State Department investigators to be using his office -- literally -- to run a "horse-racing operation." One of Mr. Tomlinson's thoroughbreds is named Karzai, in supposed honor of the Afghan president. If that's his idea of lifting America's image in the Muslim world, he might as well be on Al Jazeera's payroll. On Wednesday, ABC News reported the bottom line of such P.R. misfires: a confidential Pentagon survey found that 75 percent of Iraq's Sunni Muslims support the insurgency, up from 14 percent in 2003.
Speaking before the United Nations last week in what may be the run-up to our new war, Mr. Bush was still on his battle-for-civilization kick, flattering Iranians much as he has the Iraqis. "We admire your rich history, your vibrant culture, and your many contributions to civilization," he said. All Iranians have to do is look to the Baghdad museum today to see that such words are worth no more now than they were in 2003.
It's symbolic of the anarchy throughout Iraq's capital that the museum's entrances are now sealed with concrete to keep out new hordes of killers and thieves. But the violence, which seems to spiral with each declaration of a new security crackdown, is old news. More revealing is the other half of the museum's current plight: it is now in the hands of Iraq's version of the Taliban. That sad denouement is another symbol, standing for our defeat in the larger war of ideas.
The museum changed hands in August, when Donny George, its longtime administrator and the chairman of Iraq's official antiquities board, fled the country fearing for his life and for the treasures in his care, both at the museum and the country's many archaeological sites. Mr. George is a Christian and had good reason to fear. The new government minister placed in charge of the museum, a dentist, is an acolyte of the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, whose goal is to make Iraq a fundamentalist theocracy.
You might think, given Mr. Sadr's radicalism.... he's an enthusiastic ally of Hezbollah besides. But he is instead a major player in the "democracy" we have installed in Iraq, controlling at least 30 of 275 seats in the Parliament and six government ministries, including the power centers of transportation and health....Back in 2004, the Americans made plans to take down Mr. Sadr, but as Larry Diamond, a senior adviser to the coalition authority in Baghdad, writes in his book "Squandered Victory," those plans were shelved for "various reasons, including political calculations in Washington." American forces arrested some Sadr aides last week, but such periodic skirmishes notwithstanding, his influence continues to grow. He is a crucial ally of the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, who would not be in office without his support. In the past few days, both Tony Snow and Condi Rice have been reaffirming that the administration has what the secretary of state called "enormous confidence" in Mr. Maliki, despite Washington chatter to the contrary.....For all of America's talk of stamping out a "murderous ideology" and promoting civilization and democracy in Iraq, we are now handing the very devil the keys.
There is plenty of grief to go around and lots of reason for it. Personally I also greive for the Iraquis who were have totally f**cked. Not just today's Iraq- but posterity's.
Link here:
http://select.nytimes.com/...