Letters to the Editor
rkr327
Published Letters: 43 Editor's Choice: 5
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Fantasy!
[Read the article: Stand up, stand down]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In Washington the winds of change are finally blowing over the Iraq War. At last, one hopes, a serious and searching effort has been launched. While I believe a truly vast overhaul is needed, what we have heard thus far remains stuck in a fantasy. The fantasy holds that the Iraqis see, or will soon see, a viable government worthy of their confidence: a government that can command the loyalty of sufficient coercive force as will be able to establish a stable reality, allowing us to bring our soldiers home. Do those who put this forward, whether they want to make 'one last push', or because they want to use it as 'cover' for leaving, actually believe it? From either side of the debate, let alone American/World interests, one understands the need to believe it. It offers hope; even if now it is a hope for little more than getting out of a quagmire.
That a viable government and a dedicated national military is a fantasy is clearly evident today from the facts on the ground.
That it was fated to be little more than a fantasy was all too evident from the beginning of the electoral process. In January of 2005, as the first Iraqi elections were just underway, I laid out why they were unlikely to come to any useful outcome:
"Tom Friedman's hope for the Iraq War was embodied in the Pottery Barn rule: "If you break it, you own it". Behind that lay the notion that the 'new owners', the Bushies, would have to get it right, and that a 'can do'America couldn't and wouldn't fail. Well . . . . . . . . . . . . Friedman has now offered a new rule: 'If you own it, you'll fix it'. The 'idea' is, if the Iraqi's understand they own it, they will 'fix it'. From the Iraqi perspective, however, the problem is just Who will own What? The Iraqi's fully appreciate that is what is unfolding now. The elections, which for us seem to be nothing less than the logical starting point for defining the 'new Iraq', are for them an unknown process, and they have no experience to provide them with any confidence in it. . . . .They are on terra incognita, and will continue to be there after these elections are over. George Bush's pipe dream - a stable, democratic, prosperous, pluralistic Iraq - is just that to the Iraqi people: a pipe dream. However desirable, it is heartbreakingly remote.
The meaning . . . [the elections] . . . are overwhelmingly likely to come to will be to intensify already existing partisan division. They will serve to affirm Iraq's existing societal fault lines, and will do so because the political reality has not matured to a point where there is much chance they can do anything else.
. . . . . . The notion that the answer will come from simply getting an effective, 'home grown', force in the field to fight for the 'new Iraq' founders on just this point. The very people we are trying so assiduously to train do not understand what this Iraq they are expected to fight for will be, or how they and what they hold dear will fare in it. It remains nebulous, undefined, and frighteningly perilous. If one had to parse out the loyalties of the force in training now, they would be, first and foremost, to their families and friends, then to their tribes, then to their identities as Sunni, Shia, or Kurd, then to their identities as Muslims, and finally, last and most distant, to some dream of an Iraq that can somehow unite all these identities into a stable, just, and prospering reality. The very remoteness of this last possibility, and the far more immediate and vivid reality of the preceding associations, is what makes the situation so difficult. It is the reason we have found the commitment of many we have already trained so tenuous and volatile.
. . . . . the Iraqis may say they see themselves as Iraqi first, but we aren't talking about some ancient civilizational Iraq as may exist in their collective imaginations, but this particular incarnation of that hagiographic Iraq that remains, to this point, far too undefined. The practical result is that the realities of well established associations, tribal, historical (Sunni/Shia/Kurd), and religious (Muslim/Infidel) will likely dominate the consciousness out of which the Iraqi's will, in fact, act in the coming months."
And that is what has happened.
With nascent democratic processes, it isn't the act of holding elections that matters most, but what is seen to flow from them. The hard reality outlined in January of 2005 has changed in no substantive respect. The situation has, in fact, deteriorated. ALL those baleful potentials have matured into this tragic and horrific present.
In the end, it doesn't matter how many Iraqi's are trained up or how trained up they are - the 'hope' of the 'fantasy' - but to whom they understand their loyalties extend.
Reliance on elected officials whose basis for selection was solely the interest group they represented offers little in the way of encouragement. Expecting a government to command loyalty to an Iraqi nation the government itself in no way expresses seems the essence of futility. Above all, reliance on young Iraqi men to fight and die for something other than the associations they hold most deeply - or else some clear and immediate self-interest - seems the very definition of a fantasy. Will American leaders now present us only with fantastical hopes? If we cannot devise something more consequent than a conjuring from fantasy we are poor indeed. At long last, will we, can we, move on to something grounded in a hard reality, something more insightful and substantial?
Enough of fantasy!