GEORGE F. Will says that "in Iraq, civil war might be preferable to today's combination of disintegration tempered by violent Sunni-Shiite collaboration against U.S. supervision". How very revealing: it is better that Iraqis kill each other than that they join to fight off a foreign invader, as long as the foreign invader is us.
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Will says some other revealing things. First, the U.S. will not be able to 'transfer sovereignty' to Iraq, because "There will be nothing to receive real sovereignty, and the United States, whose writ does not run throughout Iraq, does not yet possess real sovereignty to give away." The U.S. NEVER possessed sovereignty over Iraq. Sovereignty and foreign control are opposites. Sovereignty resides in the people of a nation; independence and control of their own affairs are intrinsic to sovereignty. Foreign occupation is, at best, colonialism, the thing we established the United States to fight against.
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And, like every other Zionist, Will denounces the UN's envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, for saying that Israel complicates everything in the Middle East, even tho it is obvious to the entire world that that is true. Will challenges, "calm would come to Iraq if Israel returned to the 1949 armistice lines?" He just doesn't get it: Israel should never have been established, within any lines. Palestine must be reunited under a secular, multiethnic government devoted to peaceful coexistence and cultural synergy in a religiously pluralist society, not carved out into separate 'turfs' for separate gangs, each of which wants the whole thing.
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Zionists did not arrive in Palestine as pious religious immigrants intent on living in peace with their fellow citizens in an exciting, multireligious community. They came as invaders and thieves intent on stealing an entire country out from under the people who lived there.
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It's appalling that we, as a nation of immigrants, don't identify with the Palestinians. It is as tho Mexicans, Guatemalans, and other Latin American immigrants who arrived here took up arms against us, created a Spanish-speaking country out of most of the United States, imposed a military dictatorship over the rest, and when our kids demanded that they leave our neighborhoods, the Hispanics shot them dead and bulldozed their parents' houses. Would we settle for sovereignty over PART of the United States, and be content to leave the bulk of it in Hispanic hands, speaking Spanish and inflicting inequality upon English-speaking Americans throughout the permanently stolen areas? Or would we do everything we could, including endless guerrilla war ("terrorism"), to retake our stolen land?
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George Will does understand one principle of democracy, that the majority that rules should be as diverse as possible, comprising constantly shifting coalitions of minorities that cannot co-conspire to oppress the minority. I suggest that Iraq is ideally constituted ethnically and religiously to achieve such protection of the minority, and, ultimately, that tiniest of minorities, the individual. But only if it remains united.
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Will even makes tiny noises about the possibility of federalism in Iraq, a surer guarantee of effective majority rule with protection of minorities than any unitary state would provide. But he is 'will'ing to see democracy fail in Iraq, and views the creation of "a stable, perhaps illiberal, even authoritarian Iraq which cooperates in the war against terrorism" as an acceptable outcome to the Bush family's adventure in interventionism.
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Will concedes that this would abandon the ex post facto justification of a "war originally justified primarily by the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction" — none of which has ever been found. But that "exit strategy", leaving Iraq a ruin in the hands of an authoritarian government, would be an acceptable outcome for him.
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I thought Iraq had an authoritarian government under Saddam, but that was NOT acceptable, even tho Saddam was never a sponsor of terrorism against us. Oh, that's right: Saddam favored nonconventional war ("terrorism") against ISRAEL. That's why he had to go. WMD was just an excuse, and when they weren't found, a new "justification" was put forward, of creating a democracy to inspire the entire Middle East.
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Now we are to abandon even that sham and be content if all we have done, at the cost of uncounted thousands of Iraqi dead, the destruction of infrastructure across an entire country, the death of hundreds of American youths, the waste of over 100 billion American taxpayer dollars, and a huge national loss of face in the international community, is an authoritarian government that cooperates in the war on terror.
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But once we withdraw, leaving such a government in power, what is to keep it from withdrawing from such an imposed alliance and falling into the hands of extremists who are even more militantly anti-Israel than Saddam was? The people of Iraq hate Israel and the international Zionist conspiracy that sustains it with vast inpourings of money, military assistance, and excuse-making for endless violence against Arabs. Any government that is truly representative of the Iraqi people will be anti-Zionist. So either we stay in perpetual occupation; or we threaten a new war if Iraq turns against Israel; or we went to war for nothing. (Responsive to "Get to Elections - Fast", April 29, 2004)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:59 PM