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I promise I really do have thoughts of my own, and am capable of posting things other than what someone else has written. When someone else just plain has better thoughts and writes them down better, though...you get the point.
Tom Friedman's message to the Democratic party about how to be thinking about Iraq now is truly compelling. Check it out in today's Times.
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Calling All Democrats
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1 Comments:
Don't sell your own thoughts so short: you can do better than this, I'm sure.
Yes, we--the US, Dems and Reps--need to do everything we can to help the Iraqi people achieve a free, democratic and peaceful future. And we should do all we can to help bring the same to other people of the Middle East. I don't know of anyone who disagrees with this. But how should we do this? By invading and 'freedomizing' the countries of the Middle East? Hardly. Friedman's article is an attempt to shift blame for a bad outcome in Iraq from the idiots like himself who wanted to invade the country to the people who opposed the invasion in the first place (or, like John Kerry and other congressional Dems, should have opposed it but didn't early enough to stop it).
Some choice bits from Friedman's article:
"There is no single action we could undertake anywhere in the world to reduce the threat of terrorism that would have a bigger impact today than a decent outcome in Iraq."
A democratic and peaceful Iraq is certainly a good goal--indeed, it would seem a moral obligation for the US at this point, considering how much damage we've done to that country. But how, exactly, would a secure democracy in Iraq effect Israel's policies toward the Palestinians? Would an elected government in Iraq suddenly change US policies toward the Palestinians, or toward Egypt or Saudi Arabia? It's possible, I suppose, but the mechanism is vague, at best--it's some sort of dominoe theory of moral influence. The presumption seems to be that the Middle East exists in a non-rationalistic haze of ill temper; that the hatred of the US couldn't possibly be based on any rational view of the current situation, or past and present US policies. This is incredibly naive, and prevents consideration of actual policy changes that might make the US seem less threatening and less hypocritical.
"What Iraq is now embarking on is the first attempt - ever - by the citizens of a multiethnic, multireligious Arab state to draw up their own social contract..."
I believe Iran wrote its own constitution after the 1979 revolution. I'm not sure how Friedman is excluding Iran from his counting--maybe because it's Persian, not Arab; maybe because its ethnic and religious minorities don't meet some Iraq-like threshold; maybe because he doesn't like the way Iran's constitution was written. In any case, his categorization sounds so well tailored as to be effectively meaningless for generalization.
"It takes a village, and the Iraqi election was the Iraqi village telling the violent minority that what it is doing is shameful."
What ballot measure was the renunciation of violence? Turn out in the village was pretty low, especially in Sunni areas. And, according to a recent Zogby poll, 52 percent of Sunni Arabs say that attacking US personnel and facilities is justified.
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