An Admission of Stupidity and Arrogance

Alberto Fernandez, director of public diplomacy in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the State Department, decided to be honest and forthcoming about United States foreign policy and military strategy in Iraq. In an extraordinarily candid and unfiltered assessment of the United States' role in Iraq, Mr. Fernandez said that the U.S. had shown "arrogance" and "stupidity" in Iraq. It appeared that in the face of overwhelming evidence as to the hopelessness of the ground situation in Iraq, the Bush Administration had decided to throw in the rhetorical towel and admit the obvious: that the insurgents keep gaining traction, so much so that they can parade openly within sight of U.S. military bases without fear of reprisals.

In the meantime, recent estimates of the Iraqi casualty count were gaussian in stature: some 600,000 civilians were estimated dead as a result of the war. Sectarian death squads were accomplishing the unthinkable: making the regime of Saddam Hussein look like a government of relative peace and stability compared to the current government. Say what you will about Saddam, he controlled the ground situation for nearly three decades until we rolled in unfurling "Mission Accomplished" banners in a display of hauteur and hubris that left tongues wagging throughout the region. There were no roaming death squads who randomly executed civilians under Saddam, because Saddam had standards and wouldn't put up with such nonsense. He wasn't impeded by observer groups or deterred by the reports of Amnesty International when he confronted such menaces.

He simply killed or imprisoned the Neanderthals. His methodology may have been brutal and inhuman, but it was far more effective than the current strategy employed by allied forces in Iraq. The streets were safe. You could actually go out for cake and ice cream during Ramadan, and under the splendiferous security situation that we offer, the citizens of Iraq huddle in their homes hoping to keep their heads attached to their torsos.

In the midst of the extraordinary admissions by Mr. Fernandez and the daily death counts from the front, U.S. Senator Conrad Burns weighed in by stating that President Bush had a secret plan for victory that couldn't be unveiled just yet. In what has to rank as one of the more farcical occurrences of the midterm election campaigns, Burns stated that he knew of a secret presidential plan for victory in Iraq and then refused to reveal the plan to his opponent or the American voters. Mr. Burns' previous claim to fame was being designated as one of the thirteen most corrupt senators by Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington. According to disgraced former uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, "Every appropriation we wanted from Senator Conrad Burns' committee we got." Why the Citizens chose to stop at thirteen senators is beyond comprehension, but that's another essay entirely.

Unfortunately, any details we might want about this double secret edition plan for victory in Iraq are not available at this time. Mr. Burns and his cronies have these details, but as Senator Burns said to his opponent, they aren't going to tell us. The truth of the matter ought to be obvious: the President and his advisors are in disarray on Iraq. They have no real plan for anything concerning Iraq other than their strategy of uttering the phrases "stay the course" and "secure the ground situation" over and over again until the
public is numbed to the significance of what is truly going on.

Iraq is in the middle of a civil war. Shiites are killing Sunnis and vice versa, and the only ones who seem to be at a loss for recognizing the reality of the ground situation are the ones who oversee the ground situation: namely, the U.S. military and the Defense Department along with the entire Executive Branch of our government. While it may be inappropriate to criticize civilian leadership during a time of war, allow me: these people are not merely arrogant and stupid; they are asses for expecting us to swallow any more of their hooey.

There is no secret plan for victory, just as there is no public plan for victory. There is only the very real and obvious present plan of sticking our heads in the sand and occasionally peeking up to utter candid statements about our stupidity and arrogance. The Iraq war was winnable at one time. However, it has ceased to be winnable. We find ourselves in an intractable situation, fighting a war that cannot be won in any measurable sense of the concept while knowing that if we withdraw, we will leave Iraq on the edge of genocidal insanity.

All we can do is stand between the two major factions within Iraq as they swing away at each other and hope that we don't get clocked in the process of trying to stand between them. If we don't stand between them, they will likely usher in a medieval age of religious slaughter unparalleled in modern times. There are no easy answers in Iraq. However, in the United States we have only useless candor that comes months too late to matter from a bureaucrat who isn't high enough up the totem pole to be taken seriously in the first place.

All the while we have Senator Burns and others of his ilk traipsing around their states crowing about secret plans for victory that will be imperiled if their party isn't reelected in November. Truth be told, it doesn't matter who gets elected in November. The Democrats don't have any plan that will result in stability in Iraq, and neither do the Republicans. All either party can offer the electorate is a continuing vacuum of sensible strategy where Iraq is concerned…coupled with lungfuls of hot aired rhetoric about the shortcomings of their partisan foes.

There is no real reason to go to the polls come November, because votes don't mean anything with the current slate of candidates. Short of the heavens parting and God reaching down to collapse the dome of the Capitol Building with the members of both houses inside (and even then, he'd miss more than a few due to their lax attendance policies), we don't have any real options where meaningful political change is concerned. What Washington needs is an enema to flush away the encrusted corruption and hardened cynicism that pervades our political reality and creates environments like the one that we currently have in the Middle East.

Perhaps then Mr. Fernandez and others like him could begin acknowledging that the Middle East had a chance for democracy back in the 1960's, but due to the fact that the democratically elected representatives of countries like Lebanon and Iran weren't chummy enough with U.S. business interests, we helped overthrow those democratically elected regimes only to find three decades later that our efforts qualified as a gift that kept on giving.

In Beirut, we watched as terrorists bombed a Marine Corps barracks in 1983, killing hundreds of U.S. and French soldiers. Some thirty years before we had rigged an election in Lebanon, allowing the minority Christians of that country to ride roughshod over the majority Muslim population. As a result, the Muslim population rightly felt cheated of their right to elect representation. At the time, the U.S. was cavalier in its indifference to the outrage of the Muslims, even when that outrage blossomed into a destructive civil war that tore Lebanon apart. When the bombs ripped through the barracks and killed U.S. soldiers, we didn't draw the connection between our interference in democratic elections and the dividends that were paid as a result on that October day in 1983.

In Iran, we overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh, who had the unmitigated gall to oppose British efforts to deprive Iran of its oil assets. Mossadegh nationalized Iranian oil assets, effectively removing British control over Iranian oil infrastructure. The British promptly sued Iran in international court, but lost. Mossadegh had the popular support of the Iranian people, was legitimately elected, and was well within his rights to assert Iranian control over an Iranian asset. He was acting in the best interests of the country that had elected him to defend and assert its interest.

The interests of Iran were not of paramount concern to the British or Americans who mounted a coup and removed Mossadegh from power on August 19, 1953. They installed a Shah who gave them carte blanche to do as they pleased with Iranian oil, engaged in torture of Iranian citizens who opposed his undemocratic government, and generally came to represent a Western puppet to the Iranian people. When the Shah was overthrown by Islamic fanatics, we still could not fathom why the Iranian people would choose the Ayatollahs over our puppet. It should have been obvious: our puppet was our puppet, and their revolution, puerile and asinine though it may have been, was their revolution. They identified with that revolution in a way that they could never have identified with the government of the Shah. He was ours, and the ayatollahs, for better or worse, were theirs.

They had every right to resent U.S. and Western interference, just as the Lebanese did. We created legions of terrorists with our undermining of democracy some five decades ago, and the dividends from that interference continue to be paid on the ground in Iraq today. Had we allowed democracy to germinate and flourish in the region back in the 1950's, it is doubtful that we would have the problematic relationship that we currently have with the region. Time will tell if our recently admitted arrogance and stupidity have wrecked a chance for democracy within the Middle East altogether.