It's U.S. Policy That's 'Untidy
latimes.com
Robert Scheer:
How telling that U.S. forces so carefully protected
Iraq's oil fields while ignoring the looting of Baghdad's
internationally renowned museum. The complete, and
by all accounts preventable, destruction of one of the
world's most significant collections of antiquities is a fit
metaphor for current U.S. foreign policy, which causes
more serious damage through carelessness than
calculation.
The notion that Iraq even has history -- let alone that
7,000 years ago this land was the cradle of civilization
-- is not likely to occur to the neocolonialists running a
brawny young nation barely more than 200 years old.
The United States' earnest innocence is the charm that
our entertainment industry markets so successfully
around the world, but it is also the perennial seed of
disaster as we blithely rearrange corners of the planet
we only pretend to understand.
To Donald Rumsfeld, the widespread looting that has
ravaged hospitals, libraries and museums in Iraq was
simply further proof the U.S. invasion of this fractured
Muslim country represents liberation. "Freedom's
untidy," he said. "And free people are free to make
mistakes and commit crimes." Translation: You have to
break a few eggs to make an omelet.
It almost sounds as if the Defense secretary is
projecting onto the looters a blanket excuse for deadly
errors the White House and the U.S. military have
made and will continue to make in Iraq: alienating
allies, killing civilians, handpicking craven and corrupt
Iraqi "leaders" who haven't been in the country for
decades. This is, after all, the distillation of the Bush
Doctrine: Free countries are free to commit mistakes
and commit crimes in unfree countries.
One wonders whether Rumsfeld would extend such tolerance to the United
States' own 2 million prisoners. Surely he would not dismiss our country's long
history of urban riots as an example of the untidiness of freedom? It is only in
Iraq that we believe, to quote a song Janis Joplin made famous, that "freedom is
just another word for nothing left to lose."
Yet neither the awesome display of U.S. military power or the slew of false
justifications used to unleash it -- the imminent threat of Iraq's use of weapons of
mass destruction, now likely to be proved nonexistent, or the unsubstantiated
claims that Iraq is linked to 9/11 -- qualifies the U.S. to remake a nation with
which we have absolutely no affinity.
If Iraq needs a foreign midwife to assist in its rebirth it should be under the
broader sponsorship of the United Nations Security Council, which our macho
president continues to disparage for having failed to vote our way. Will the
democracy we so glibly promote for Iraq be pushed aside if it similarly fails to
produce results to our liking?
Eager to rebuild their country after years of misrule, will Iraqis really swallow the
shameless plans of Bush insiders to privatize Iraqi oil while the administration
awards billions of dollars in contracts to U.S. companies?
And what if Iraqi Muslim fundamentalists prove as successful at the polls as
radicals in Algeria, where the U.S. only mildly rebuked a repressive regime for
smashing a popularly elected but theocratic opposition?
If the new Iraq follows the path of Pakistan and Turkey, where the populace is
inclined to obliterate any wall between state and church, will the U.S. spin this as
a victory for democracy? Will Rumsfeld justify the ethnic cleansing common in a
nation riven with competing tribes, clans and religious sects arbitrarily packed
together by previous colonialist rulers as the unruly joy of freedom?
Why have the media bought the administration's propaganda that we come to
Iraq with clean hands and virgin swords to slay the dragon of Saddam Hussein,
when the U.S. did so much to keep him in power? Surely, even embedded
journalists recall that it was Reagan administration special envoy Rumsfeld who
met with Hussein in the 1980s to guarantee U.S. support for Iraq's war with
Iran.
Once again, we're deep in the "nation-building" game that Bush the candidate
railed against in 2000. Having blundered in, guns blazing, we should now play to
win the peace, slowly backing out and inviting a true multinational rebuilding
effort with support from the U.N. and Muslim countries.
And for heaven's sake, can we remember in our next preemptive invasion to
assign at least a few of our tanks to protect the hospitals and museums?
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