I could ROFL. I really could. Before the war started I said the two probable outcomes were civil war, or a new dictator (possibly both). Now I'm not a ME analyst, and no one asks me to be on the Sunday talk shows, but if I knew this, and if my friends knew this (and they aren't on the talk shows either) how in the world did the neoconservatives get it so very very wrong, and why does anyone care what they have to say now? They should either be put in insane asylums or ignored (or possibly used as contrarian indicators while in mental asylums).
Now, finally the neocons "get" that it's been a mistake. Too bad it's years too late. Too bad they didn't get it before we wasted American men and women, and billions in American money, in Iraq. What a pathetic excuse for a war this cockup has been. Could these folks have been any stupider? I can't quite figure out how this all could have been done any worse, and what punishment should you mete out to people who set your country on this kind of road to failure, dishonor and waste?
Daniel Pipes' Weblog
"Could a New Strongman Help?"
November 12, 2006
That's the title of an article by John F. Burns in the New York Times today, reporting from Baghdad, and it recapitulates themes I have been arguing for since April 2003 – that Iraq needs stability before it can make moves to build democracy. Burns begins by reporting that "in the rudderless nightmare Iraq has become," many Iraqis crave "a strong leader, able to forge a nation from the country's fractious ethnic and religious groups, and to end the current wave of sectarian bloodletting."
It is something ordinary Iraqis say with growing intensity, even as they agree on little else. Let there be a strongman, they say, not a relentless killer like Saddam Hussein but somebody who will take the hammer to the insurgents and the death squads and the kidnappers and the criminal gangs who have banished all pretense of civility from their lives. Let him ride roughshod, if he must, they say, over the niceties of due process and human rights, indeed over the panoply of democratic institutions America has tried to implant here, if only he can bring peace.
This sentiment, however, continues to be ignored in Washington.
The closest anyone with the White House's ear has come to suggesting anything short of democratic rule, let alone an authoritarian model typical of other countries in the Middle East, are leaks from the bipartisan commission headed by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, which is charged with suggesting a new American approach to Iraq; some of its members have said that the group has considered recommending that stability, rather than democracy, should become the principal objective there.
I note with special interest that Iraqis have in mind the same person I had suggested (at "U.S. Needs To Learn Patience [in Iraq]," "Iraq's Leader Asserts Strongman Powers," "Thoughts on the Forthcoming Iraqi Elections," and "Middle East Update") for this role:
The leading candidate for strongman, among secular Iraqis, at least, would be Ayad Allawi, whom the Americans named prime minister in the first post-Hussein government, in 2004. Mr. Allawi, though Shiite, has strong ties with Sunnis, and a reputation as a hard man that goes back to his time as a young Baathist enforcer.
Comment: Years later, will the Bush administration finally understand, along with Voltaire, that "le mieux est l'ennemi du bien" (the better is the enemy of the good)? Security and stability must precede the gradual move toward democracy. |
