Iraqis blame US

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ_THE_AFTERMATH?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME

Breath taking story in the paper of how Iraqi’s blame US for the attack on Iraqi children. The really striking thing is that there is no dispute about the facts. One person did say that the US wanted intentionally invited the children there to use them as human shields but in the main they were in agreement. They don’t seem to dispute that the Americans did invite the kids to come around just to give them candy. Their complaint is that they should have known better.

Now there is something familiar here. When we have a horrific crime—say a slaying that takes place in a dark alley that should perhaps have been lighted—we complain about the officials that should have protected us from it and focus on things the authorities should have done to prevent it. This doesn’t mean that anyone thinks the officials wanted the crime to happen or that they somehow planned it. They know it is the criminals that are ultimately at fault, but we complain about the authorities because they are the ones that can be made to do something.

Still there is something a bit perverse here. It goes beyond the regular desire to complain to people that will listen. Saying “the killers are the first terrorist and the Americans are the second” is setting up a moral equivalence that is just hard to fathom.

I think part of what is happening is that people there are in a state of denial. They don’t want to think about how depraved their own civilization has become and so want to focus some of their horror at what they have in some sense become on powerful outsiders. This is a central trope of fascism throughout time.

But it is hard to ignore that focusing on how Americans should change their tactics leads us away from a central problem: how utterly depraved the society that we are trying to turn into a democracy has become. We didn’t have to worry about passing out candy in occupied Germany or Japan because the people that were fighting us—and we forget that there was a lot of fighting in occupied Germany against us even years later—were not depraved. Loathsome as the Nazis were it never occurred to them to kill their own children to show the people that the Americans can’t govern. And if they had the people of Germany would hardly have taken it as a sign that the Americans may not be as nice as they thought. We have a very sick enemy, but that is not all. For such tactics to even be conceivable it requires a sick society as well.

The conclusion that some people draw from this is that we shouldn’t try bringing democracy to these people in the first place. There are two lines of reasoning it seems to me.

One comes predominantly form the left. The argument (more like an assumption) is that the only way to explain such irrational hatred—and I think most would agree that blaming Americans for passing out candy to children rather than the people that see children gathered as an opportunity to kill a lot of children—is that the people with such a hatred have been the victims of injustice at the hands of Americans historically. Even if the judgment holding the Americans responsible may, in the immediate instance, be a bit irrational, in historical terms the existence of such terrorists in the first place and the depth of suspicion of America’s motives is rational. We have done so many wrong things to these people that now, even when we try to do the right thing, we will get the blame. Given that history there is nothing to do but leave and give the job to an organization that has historically clean hands, maybe the UN, maybe the Arab league. The specifics of what to do in light of the left’s analysis are unclear but ultimately besides the point. We have done so much wrong that it is too late to start trying to do right.

The other criticism comes from the right. George Will has put the view most forcefully. If the people of Iraq are ready blame people that give out free candy rather than the people that use children gathered as to get free candy as an opportunity to kill them then it is evidence that they are not ready for democracy. The conservative viewpoint would be more inclined to dismiss the hatred of the populace for America as a feature of a primitive political culture rather than as the effect of some specific US actions in the past. These people have always blamed their problems on someone, it happens now to be the US. But the point it is that they deal with their problems not by dealing with them but by blaming someone else for them. That inability to face the real causes of your problems is something that an outside power can’t fix and is the ultimate reason that Bush’s Wilsonian project of democratizing the Middle-East is doomed to failure.

What is common to both views is the idea that hatred for America is deep and an insurmountable obstacle to our progress there. I think that this is a mistake.

First of all we overestimate the hatred for America because of the tacit assumption that widespread violence means widespread support for violence and widespread hatred for the objects of that violence. In fact the number of violent attacks against Americans does not require a large number of people. In absolute numbers the combatants in this conflict really doesn’t have to be, and does not appear to be, that large. The crowds gathered round protesting America and reveling in the burning wreckage of American armored vehicles are made to seem larger than they are because they are constantly replayed and because we assume they are completely spontaneous. But even in Falluja where support for the insurgency seems to be centered there was at most a couple of hundred people in the pictures of crowds celebrating the mutilated corpses of American security guards. The anti-American demonstrations that are whipped up even in the American no-go zones for Al Jazera (spelling?) are surprisingly small. For a country where hatred for American occupiers is so intense that people are driven to spontaneously take up arms and blow up scores of school children for the chance to kill a couple of Americans the inability to get crowds out of the three digit range is quite striking.

The people blaming the Americans for the deaths of their children are being amazingly irresponsible in one way, childish, if you will. But in another way, it is quite heartening. They don’t actually have any doubt about who set off the bombs. Even the outrageous suggestion that the Americans wanted children there for their own protection is predicated on the assumption that Americans don’t do things like this. Even this guy knows that the people who kill Arab children are other Arabs. What the people in this story are angry about is the American failure to realize how utterly evil their enemies—other Arabs—are.

And this is what is heartening. People are angry at Americans for not being ruthless enough. Their criticism is from the right if you will. We have the power to crush armies, why not the terrorists. Part of their anger serves the purpose of deflecting the thought that the terrorists are their fellow Arabs. The argument from the left assumes that the widespread attacks and the widespread criticism after the attacks are from a widespread hatred of Americans. The attacks are from a fringe group that in its Baathist and Shia fundamentalist variants combined commands the support of no more than 20% of the population. The criticism after the attacks is that we aren’t tough enough on the minority that is trying to derail democracy. These attacks are from a fringe that fears democracy precisely because they know how unpopular they are.

The argument from the right assumes that the state of mind of the people of Iraq can’t be changed. It assumes that since democracy took centuries to build here it will take centuries to build there. This is wrong in my opinion but there is a problem with refuting it: there are few counter examples in the Muslim—and none in the Arab—world. That is why I am sort of glad sometimes when Bush gives these simplistic answers, that we will succeed in Iraq because all people in their hearts yearn to be free. If one looked at the social science evidence there would be little to make one optimistic.