a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Thursday, October 30, 2003 Driving DrunkMarc over at Misanthropicity jumps all over Tom Friedman for his White House cheerleading, which is what this column amounts to in spite of his caveats at the end. I agree Friedman has lost the balance of mind he seemed to possess before the Iraq war. But he's probably right that the suicide bombers in Baghdad are more like the Khmer Rouge than the Viet Cong, meaning not patriotic Iraqi resistance fighters so much as angry Ba'athists and Al Qaeda meddlers who know what American success in Iraq would imply for them (irrelevance, death), and want us to fail — they're "not killing us so Iraqis can rule themselves," but "killing us so they can rule Iraqis."Marc's answer is: So what? "It's a distinction without a difference ... [because] we still have no valid reason for being there." But what would Marc do instead? We can't pull out. Like it or not, Bush has committed the U.S. to rebuilding Iraq. The protesters in San Francisco last weekend who shouted "end the occupation" were agitating for years of violence and chaos, not peace. In stabler parts of Iraq life has already improved, and anyone who replaces Bush next year had better understand that following through with his declared project of democratizing Saddam's poisoned yard is the only way to convince Muslims that we weren't pursuing empire, oil, or some kind of modern crusade. Which is the only way to avoid a general uprising of the Iraqi people — and in that sense Friedman's distinction does matter, because once Iraqis as a whole turn against the U.S. occupation, we're in a lot of trouble. I agree with Marc that watching the Iraq invasion was like riding in a car with a drunk driver. Bush and his friends exaggerated the weapons threat in order to nab a base of operations in the Middle East. To me the wide, screeching veer we took around the U.N. was the crucial mistake, because now Bush can't even bribe other countries to help us do a proper reconstruction. There was no hurry to invade, in retrospect, besides Bush's own re-election timetable. He lied, he was arrogant; and now we're all paying for it, from California to Baghdad. But it will be worse if he fails. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 9:31 PM | |
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