Generally speaking, the American post-9/11 language of power ostensibly aimed at building up the forces Washington supports in Muslim lands invariably sounds condescending. They are always peripheral to us, even when they are being urged or prodded to be at the center of the action. This is why their civilians who come in harm’s way are referred to as “collateral damage,” an inconceivable way to describe American civilians in harm’s way. This is why, from Vietnam to today, in the movies that are made about our wars, even the anti-war ones, Americans invariably hog center stage, while you usually have to keep a careful watch to find passing evidence of those we are fighting against — or for. This was why, 40 years ago, Vietnam was regularly referred to here, whether by hawks or doves, as an “American tragedy,” not a Vietnamese one — and why the same thinking applies to Afghanistan and Iraq today.
This is why, using imagery that might have come out of the mouths of nineteenth century colonialists, American officials long talked patronizingly about teaching the Iraqi “child” to pedal the “bike” of democracy (with us, as global parents, holding onto the bike’s seat). This is the context within which even a president wondered when to take off “the training wheels.”
This is evidently why, today, the introduction of “democracy” to Iraq is considered an American gift so precious that it somehow makes up for anything that’s happened in the last seven years. This is why, for instance, in a piece about the recent Iraqi elections headlined “It’s Up to Iraqis Now. Good Luck!” pundit Tom Friedman could write this sentence about the “U.S. project in Iraq”: “Former President George W. Bush’s gut instinct that this region craved and needed democracy was always right.”
This is why, in honor of those same Iraqi elections, Newsweek could feature a “Victory at Last” cover showing George W. Bush striding from the scene on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln where he gave his infamous “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” speech under a White-House-produced banner reading “Mission Accomplished.” And then, under the eerie headline, “Rebirth of a Nation,” with its American movie resonances, that magazine’s correspondents could write: “And yet it has to be said and it should be understood — now, almost seven hellish years later — that something that looks mighty like democracy is emerging in Iraq. And while it may not be a beacon of inspiration to the region, it most certainly is a watershed event that could come to represent a whole new era in the history of the massively undemocratic Middle East.”
Like Afghanistan before it, Iraq is now largely the “forgotten” war, and if this is “victory,” then here’s a little of what’s been forgotten in the process, of what Friedman suggests he’d prefer to leave future historians to sort out: that the American invasion led to possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths; that literally millions of Iraqis had to flee into exile abroad and millions more were turned into internal refugees in their own country; that the national capital, Baghdad, was significantly ethnically cleansed in a brutal Shiite-Sunni civil conflict; that the country was littered with new “killing fields”; that a devastating insurgency roiled the land and still brings enough death and terror to Baghdad to make it one of the more dangerous places on the planet; that a soaring unemployment rate and the lack of delivery of the most basic services, including reliable electricity and potable water, created nightmarish conditions for a vast class of impoverished Iraqis; that the U.S., for all its nation-building boasts, proved remarkably incapable of “reconstructing” the country or its oil industry, even though American private contractors profited enormously from work on both; that a full-scale foreign military occupation left Americans on almost 300 bases nationwide and in the largest embassy on the planet; that American advisors remain attached to, and deeply embedded in, an Iraqi military that still lacks a credible air force and is unlikely to be able to operate and resupply itself on its own for years to come.
The Pride of Us
In other words, as bad as Saddam Hussein was (and he was a megalomanic monster), what followed him was a staggering catastrophe for Iraq, even if Americans no longer care to give it much thought. Against the charnel house that Friedman would prefer to leave to history, however, stands one counterbalancing factor, the gift of “democracy” (even if, as was true in the Afghan election of 2009, the present election in Iraq is now dogged by claims of fraud from all sides). Democracy remains, it seems, the pride of us.
Even many who never supported George W. Bush’s “democracy agenda” now seem to take some pride in this. (Let’s leave aside for a moment the fact that the Bush administration arrived in Iraq with remarkably undemocratic plans for the country and was thwarted only by the unwavering insistence of the revered Shiite cleric Ali Sistani on a one-person, one-vote election.)
Here’s a prosaic passage on the recent elections from a Wall Street Journal report, which managed to sum up a hopeful, if hesitant, American consensus. Journalist Margaret Coker wrote:
“The election to choose a new 325-seat parliament is considered a key step in Iraq’s transition to stability and a harbinger of whether U.S. troops will be able to begin their planned withdrawal this summer. Both the vote itself and the protracted wait for results have been relatively free of violence, adding to hopes that Iraq’s democracy is maturing.”
There, of course, is that “kid” again, maturing, even if still under our tutelage. The question remains, however: Is he stable enough to stay on that bike so American troops can let go of the seat and withdraw fully? And if that still-immature democratic Iraq fails to grow up? Rest assured, it will be the fault of the Iraqis. They just didn’t mature fast enough — an unfortunate American tragedy, which would leave us no choice but to garrison the country into the indefinite future.
Of course, in all of this, there are staggering levels of hypocrisy — in the fact that we were for Saddam before we were against him. In the fact, as well, that from Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) to Chile (September 11, 1973) and Pakistan (2008), the U.S. has, in instance after instance, regularly fostered and supported military juntas, strong men, and dictators, while holding off or overthrowing democracies not to our taste or not in what Washington defined as our interests.
