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COMMENTARY
September 17, 2003
Disaster
I used to put mottoes at the heads of my columns and need one today from Goethe. This is from his novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship: "There is nothing that the Menschenpack (human rabble) so much fears as reason. Stupidity is what they should fear if they knew what is fearful. But the former is embarrassing and therefore brushed aside; the latter is only disastrous and permits of an attitude of wait and see." I become more and more convinced with the passage of months that the democratic Menschenpack throughout the Western world including in America have lost their minds. Perhaps I should call it the Mediapack for the attitudes we see are tutored. A mere two years after terror attacks on New York and Washington we are no longer discussing what must be done to prevent that kind of thing from ever happening again. We find ourselves instead compelled to discuss the Bush administration as if it were the cause of the events to which it has responded. And all kinds of political pressure has been brought to bear on that administration for the opposite of the right reasons. Its obvious successes are presented as failures. Its obvious failures are also presented as failures. And finally it seems that President Bush himself has decided that failure is the only available course. This became clear at least to me over the weekend when Secretary of State Colin Powell was allowed to deliver perhaps the stupidest speech even in the recent history of the U.S. State Department. And to deliver it right where it counted -- in the middle of Baghdad Iraq. Since then I've been checking with my usual sources and confirming my first impression: that Mr. Powell has now created the conditions for a power struggle between the U.S. occupation forces and the provisional government of Iraq. The mainstream liberal media have been determined to present Iraq as a "quagmire like Vietnam" when the Iraqi circumstances do not even slightly resemble those of Vietnam. (There is no North Vietnam left to fight only hit-and-run artists.) A more thoughtful minority present the analogy of the post-War occupations of Germany and Japan. This is also nonsense for Iraq has not been thoroughly defeated and destroyed the way Germany and Japan had to be to bring them to their senses. Only the regime in Iraq has been defeated and the people of Iraq are overwhelmingly pleased with this. They have been until now natural allies of the American occupation forces; and have been on balance remarkably co-operative and helpful. However Iraq is Iraq not America. The people want security courtesy USA; but not to be governed by foreigners. They already have a provisional government dominated by Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress that is more representative of the country's diverse communities than is any government in the Arab world. It has proven itself politically adept and is chafing for the opportunity to deal directly with huge problems created by decades of totalitarian and vicious Ba'athist rule. Mr. Powell arrives to tell them they can wait longer; that in effect the U.S. is determined to create the quagmire that it has so far avoided. He wants to micromanage the Iraqi recovery. He wants to continue the unbelievably destructive State Department policy of putting obstacles in the way of Iraqi self-government by undermining in Mr. Chalabi and friends the only leadership Iraq has that is sincerely determined to pursue democracy. Mr. Powell a man who is notoriously the "doubting Thomas" within the Bush administration about the prospects for democratic self-rule anywhere in the Arab world is put in charge of building what he thinks can't be built -- and which most certainly can't be built by foreigners. And it must now be assumed -- as it is being assumed in Washington -- that Mr. Powell enjoys President Bush's full support. This is the surest indication of a loss of nerve at the centre. The Donald Rumsfeld new Pentagon or "neo-conservative" (a misnomer but they live with it) approach is out. This is the approach that has got results in both Afghanistan and Iraq while learning quickly from mistakes; which has looked upon the oppressed Afghan and Iraqi peoples as allies rather than clients. Which has instinctively turned to the adaptable Marines rather than to the habit-ridden Army for its model of how to proceed. They took the view that Iraq must rebuild itself with U.S. help as opposed to being rebuilt by the U.S. to American specifications. It is a view that grasps that the perfect is the enemy of the good. What now emerges is a triumph of the bureaucrats empowered by wave after wave of highly selective and misleadingly reported bad news from media that are out to get Bush regardless of consequences. We have a resumption of the attitudes that dragged the U.S. through the quagmire of the United Nations and has dragged her back again; which provided the disastrous "Roadmap" to peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority after failing to learn from the "Oslo process". Reason has proved unpopular and I am now convinced that stupidity has been adopted as the U.S. course. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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