Serious Golmal

This is blogger Anupam Chander on drawing wrong lessons from the failure to rebuild Iraq:

The failure of Iraqi reconstruction likely has more to do with our own actions rather than their social pathologies. We became the local autocrats, with proconsul Bremer the incompetent leader, his diktats enforced with ruthless force, and with lower level administrators who were inexperienced but well-nurtured on ideology. We spent Iraqi money carelessly on American contractors.

It wasn’t that Iraqis preferred their own local ruthless autocrats to the American ones. I suspect that they would prefer neither crew.

Pro-war ideologues have precious little to add to their record of support apart from desperation and hand-wringing about Iraqi “pathologies”. Here is a Harry’s Place piece on the “Talibanisation of Iraq”.

Iraq is sliding fast towards theocracy and is likely to end up similar to Iran. The power and influence of fundamentalist militias is growing rapidly. Two militias are doing most of the killing. They are the armed wings of major parties in the Blair-backed Iraqi government. Madhi is the militia of Muqtada al-Sadr, and Badr is the militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which is the leading political force in Baghdad’s ruling coalition. Both militias want to establish an Iranian-style religious dictatorship.

I’m not sure what the HP blogger is referring to when he writes “similar to Iran”. But if he means Iraq is now a few nuclear-power plants short of a full blown anti-Western Shia theocracy, then he’s right. But that’s more a development of the nascent Iraqi democracy which, after all, was architected by the Americans, than the fault of insurgency terrorism.

Of course the Pro-war contingent of Harry’s Place, Normblog, Nick Cohen etc don’t have anything substantive to say about the rebuilding of Iraq but instead settle on decrying the barbarity of the al-Sadr militia or the Sunni insurgents. Unable (unwilling?) to face up to the fact that anti-US forces in Iraq are up and running because of the continued presence of US/UK forces in Iraq. Its far easier for them to keep up the canard that insurgents are the problem and the Occupation is benign.

Fred Kaplan in this article from Slate (Western Targets) admits to something that is rarely said but flagrantly obvious, you would have thought: that the insurgecy is directed at the Occupation and is not an anti-civilian effort.

The statistics—compiled by the multinational military command in Iraq and reproduced in a report released Wednesday by the Government Accountability Office—raise anew a basic question in the debate over the future of U.S. policy toward Iraq: Is the presence of American troops doing more harm or more good?

Fewer and fewer people, not least the American MSM, think so anymore. Here’s an excerpt from a Newsweek article (It’s worse than you think):

As much as ordinary Iraqis may hate the insurgents, they blame the Americans for creating the whole mess. Three months ago Iraqi troops and U.S.-dominated “multinational forces” pulled out of Samarra, and insurgents took over the place immediately.

This entry was posted Monday, September 4th, 2006 at 11:19 pm and is filed under Middle East. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.