This afternoon George Bush let the Naval War College in on his recipe for success in Iraq: It should use Israel as a model:
"Our success in Iraq must not be measured by the enemy's ability to get a car bombing in the evening news," he said. ... "In places like Israel, terrorists have taken innocent human life for years in suicide attacks," Bush said. "The difference is that Israel is a functioning democracy and it's not prevented from carrying out its responsibilities. And that's a good indicator of success that we're looking for in Iraq."
Yeah, and maybe we'll get Ehud Olmert over to Baghdad to consult the Iraqis on just how to pull that "Iraq as Israel" thing off?
For the President's handlers to let him out in public to suggest America wants to remake Iraq in the image of Israel betrays about the most colossal single display of ignorance we've heard out of the White House in a while.
A couple of things occur to me at first blush:
First, just on the "public relations" level, Bush's decision to hold Israel up as a model for how to integrate diverse religious and cultural heritages into a harmonious whole may invite hostile reactions among damn near EVERY non-Jew in the Middle East. That neither Iraq's Shiite nor its Sunni are likely to look to anything -- politically or diplomatically -- Israel does or says as an approach to settling their sectarian differences seems to have just rung off Bush's tin ear.
The ignorance betrayed by the lack of ANY ANALOGUE between the sectarian divide in Iraq, and its civil war within its recognized borders, versus the embattled national identities of Israelis and Palestinians occupying separate and distinct enclaves I find, well, astonishing. In fact, even the reserved AP reporter, Jennifer Loven, observed:
"...the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is such a sensitive issue in the Muslim world that it has become a rallying cry for many and major recruiting tool for Islamic extremist groups such as al-Qaida."
Second, Israel's democracy of 7,150,000 souls depends upon keeping the approximately 3.8 million Palestinians walled off from their electorate in an area historically held in common. Is this Bush's 'back door' way of suggesting that Sen. Joe Biden is right, and that we should help the Iraqis sub-divide, politically, into three distinct entities?
Or is Bush taking it more literally (like his party is doing on our own Southern border) and suggesting that the various national/religious groups in Iraq should build their own 20-foot walls to keep each other out?
Now, I'm no expert on the Middle East, but I'm guessing that just my own rather benign observations about the "situation on the ground" that Israel's democracy faces will be enough to spark some controversy among us here on D-Kos (a relatively homogeneous group).
I can only imagine what's coming from our "friends and allies" in the Arab Middle East and Europe in response to Bush's stated "standard of success."