Jim Sleeper: All the Good Guys Are Dead, Mr. Bush
[Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale University, is author of “The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York” (W.W. Norton, 1990) and “Liberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream” (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997).]
“It’s almost a war without a home front,” journalist Bob Woodward told Time magazine just before Christmas. “Taxes are down, everyone’s buying…. There is a sense almost that we’re not at war. I can’t explain that phenomenon.”
I can’t explain it, either. But I think that most of us who’ve never been asked to do anything for the Iraq war effort but go shopping, pay fewer taxes and vote Republican do carry some vivid image or story of the war that captures what we feel is at stake and what has been ventured and lost. With Bush likely to reaffirm and even expand the venture, at least we should take stock of our stories and, this time, perhaps, act on whatever they tell us.
The story I’m carrying tells me that the United States trifled with and let down thousands of ordinary Iraqis whose democratic aspirations we aroused without recognizing what those hopes meant to them, and against what odds.
The cost of our ignorance was caught best for me by Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter in Iraq. Reviewing National Public Radio reporter Michael Goldfarb’s book, “Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace,” in October 2005, Filkins noted that Americans “have felt their sympathies for ordinary Iraqis travel across an emotional arc, beginning with compassion and affection and ending, as the American enterprise has faltered, in anger, even disgust.”
But then he noted that countless Iraqis did come forward after we arrived in April 2003, knowing “that they had to seize the moment, that it might not come again. And they knew… how difficult it would be to carry their broken and brutalized country with them. So they started newspapers, they organized political parties, they called meetings to start a national conversation.
“And now, today, many of these Iraqis…. have been shot, tortured, burned, disfigured, thrown into ditches, disappeared. Thousands of them: editors, lawyers, pamphleteers, men and women. In a remarkable campaign of civic destruction, the Baathists and Islamists who make up the insurgency located the intellectual heart of the nascent Iraqi democracy and, with gruesome precision, cut it out. As much as any single factor, the death of Iraq’s political class explains the difficulties of the country’s rebirth. The good guys are dead.”
Why is this so damning of America? Saddam Hussein had murdered or terrorized democrats every day, and, after he was gone, it wasn’t American GI’s or the Young Republicans playing at governing in the Green Zone who kept murdering “the good guys.” It was Baathists, Islamicist terrorists, tribal warlords and gangsters.
“[T]he blame for the violence in Iraq…. belongs to the Iraqis,” claims The New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier. “For three and a half years, the Iraqis have been a free people. What have they done with their freedom? After we invaded Iraq, Iraq invaded itself.”
That doesn’t quite settle it, though. It was the Bush administration that cast Saddam and his loyalists as Baathists, terrorists, tribalists and gangsters rolled into one, claiming we would liberate Iraqis for democracy by decapitating the regime and handing out contracts to investors from abroad. Democracy wasn’t the invasion’s top priority — remember weapons of mass destruction and Saddam’s alleged support for Al Qaeda and the September 11 attacks? — but Filkins and Goldfarb remind us what democracy meant to more than a few Iraqis we encouraged and then dropped.
I know a little about this because I have a brother-in-law who grew up in Baghdad in the 1950s and attended Al Hikma, the American Jesuit high school, a few years behind the future, now former, prime minister Ayad Allawi and the current oil minister, Ahmad Chalabi. Unlike Alawi and Chalabi, neither of whom was typical of Al Hikma’s graduates, my relative was part of the world’s oldest continuous Jewish community.
Most of Baghdad’s Jews didn’t return from exile in Babylonia to their homeland in what most of the world calls the West Bank when Persia’s King Cyrus allowed their return in 539 B.C.E. Twenty-four centuries later, the Ottoman yearbook of 1917 counted 80,000 Jews among Baghdad’s 202,000 residents, 20,000 more in Basra and Mosul.
Even after Israel’s establishment in 1948, Jews mattered for a while in Iraqi journalism and trade. But by the early 1950s most had left, and after Saddam took power, almost all were gone. My brother-in-law and his family escaped overland via Kurdistan and Iran in 1970, and now live in California.
In the summer of 2004 he attended a reunion in Montreal of hundreds of Al Hikma graduates, and if you doubt that Baghdad had a cosmopolitan middle class inclined to liberal democracy, ask them. Some returned briefly in 2003, and found that it was not only they who had huddled breathlessly around televisions and cell phones cheering Saddam’s overthrow. Seeds of democracy were sprouting, as Filkins and Goldfarb reported.
Not that my relatives were naive. My brother-in-law has said clearly that very possibly those seeds would have failed even if the Bush team hadn’t bungled and subverted the planting by making undemocratic deals with its own key constituencies: bad contractors, political careerists and ideological hardliners and their apologists — free-market absolutists, bombastic neo-conservatives, Armageddon-hungry fundamentalists, Fox News producers, grand-strategy pundits and pedagogues, and neo-imperialists.
Remember how fashionable the term “empire” was for a year?...
Read entire article at Jewish Daily Forward
“It’s almost a war without a home front,” journalist Bob Woodward told Time magazine just before Christmas. “Taxes are down, everyone’s buying…. There is a sense almost that we’re not at war. I can’t explain that phenomenon.”
I can’t explain it, either. But I think that most of us who’ve never been asked to do anything for the Iraq war effort but go shopping, pay fewer taxes and vote Republican do carry some vivid image or story of the war that captures what we feel is at stake and what has been ventured and lost. With Bush likely to reaffirm and even expand the venture, at least we should take stock of our stories and, this time, perhaps, act on whatever they tell us.
The story I’m carrying tells me that the United States trifled with and let down thousands of ordinary Iraqis whose democratic aspirations we aroused without recognizing what those hopes meant to them, and against what odds.
The cost of our ignorance was caught best for me by Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter in Iraq. Reviewing National Public Radio reporter Michael Goldfarb’s book, “Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace,” in October 2005, Filkins noted that Americans “have felt their sympathies for ordinary Iraqis travel across an emotional arc, beginning with compassion and affection and ending, as the American enterprise has faltered, in anger, even disgust.”
But then he noted that countless Iraqis did come forward after we arrived in April 2003, knowing “that they had to seize the moment, that it might not come again. And they knew… how difficult it would be to carry their broken and brutalized country with them. So they started newspapers, they organized political parties, they called meetings to start a national conversation.
“And now, today, many of these Iraqis…. have been shot, tortured, burned, disfigured, thrown into ditches, disappeared. Thousands of them: editors, lawyers, pamphleteers, men and women. In a remarkable campaign of civic destruction, the Baathists and Islamists who make up the insurgency located the intellectual heart of the nascent Iraqi democracy and, with gruesome precision, cut it out. As much as any single factor, the death of Iraq’s political class explains the difficulties of the country’s rebirth. The good guys are dead.”
Why is this so damning of America? Saddam Hussein had murdered or terrorized democrats every day, and, after he was gone, it wasn’t American GI’s or the Young Republicans playing at governing in the Green Zone who kept murdering “the good guys.” It was Baathists, Islamicist terrorists, tribal warlords and gangsters.
“[T]he blame for the violence in Iraq…. belongs to the Iraqis,” claims The New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier. “For three and a half years, the Iraqis have been a free people. What have they done with their freedom? After we invaded Iraq, Iraq invaded itself.”
That doesn’t quite settle it, though. It was the Bush administration that cast Saddam and his loyalists as Baathists, terrorists, tribalists and gangsters rolled into one, claiming we would liberate Iraqis for democracy by decapitating the regime and handing out contracts to investors from abroad. Democracy wasn’t the invasion’s top priority — remember weapons of mass destruction and Saddam’s alleged support for Al Qaeda and the September 11 attacks? — but Filkins and Goldfarb remind us what democracy meant to more than a few Iraqis we encouraged and then dropped.
I know a little about this because I have a brother-in-law who grew up in Baghdad in the 1950s and attended Al Hikma, the American Jesuit high school, a few years behind the future, now former, prime minister Ayad Allawi and the current oil minister, Ahmad Chalabi. Unlike Alawi and Chalabi, neither of whom was typical of Al Hikma’s graduates, my relative was part of the world’s oldest continuous Jewish community.
Most of Baghdad’s Jews didn’t return from exile in Babylonia to their homeland in what most of the world calls the West Bank when Persia’s King Cyrus allowed their return in 539 B.C.E. Twenty-four centuries later, the Ottoman yearbook of 1917 counted 80,000 Jews among Baghdad’s 202,000 residents, 20,000 more in Basra and Mosul.
Even after Israel’s establishment in 1948, Jews mattered for a while in Iraqi journalism and trade. But by the early 1950s most had left, and after Saddam took power, almost all were gone. My brother-in-law and his family escaped overland via Kurdistan and Iran in 1970, and now live in California.
In the summer of 2004 he attended a reunion in Montreal of hundreds of Al Hikma graduates, and if you doubt that Baghdad had a cosmopolitan middle class inclined to liberal democracy, ask them. Some returned briefly in 2003, and found that it was not only they who had huddled breathlessly around televisions and cell phones cheering Saddam’s overthrow. Seeds of democracy were sprouting, as Filkins and Goldfarb reported.
Not that my relatives were naive. My brother-in-law has said clearly that very possibly those seeds would have failed even if the Bush team hadn’t bungled and subverted the planting by making undemocratic deals with its own key constituencies: bad contractors, political careerists and ideological hardliners and their apologists — free-market absolutists, bombastic neo-conservatives, Armageddon-hungry fundamentalists, Fox News producers, grand-strategy pundits and pedagogues, and neo-imperialists.
Remember how fashionable the term “empire” was for a year?...