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A Good Deed (David Ignatius, April 25, 2003, The Washington Post)

Personally, I don't much care if the U.S. reports about weapons of mass destruction prove to be imaginary. Toppling Hussein's regime was still right.

But no good deed goes unpunished, as the old saying goes. And it seems possible that the United States will gain little in terms of its own security from its decision to liberate Iraq. We may have created a new Iran here -- an Iraqi democracy that will be dominated by a Shiite majority among which pro-Iranian clerics seem, at this point, to be the best-organized political force.

Or Iraq may become another Lebanon -- a lawless nation ruled by car bombs and warlords. Avoiding these disasters depends on whether the United States can quickly fill the existing power vacuum with a stable Iraqi government, help it get started and then leave, pronto.

American actions over the next few weeks will determine whether Iraq loves its liberators or becomes a seething pit of anti-American anger.

Mr. Ignatius makes this last assertion in the midst of an otherwise sensible essay, and it's a common enough sentiment, but a dangerous delusion. It grows from the comforting but erroneous, almost colonialist, belief that we ourselves determine other peoples lives for them, that Arabs, for instance, are some kind of tabla erasa upon which we can etch a personality of our choosing. In fact, we could do everything "right" in Iraq--minimize casualties, respect the liberated, feed the hungry, cede power quickly, etc., etc., etc., and the Iraqis may still hate us. So what?

The quality of our actions is not determined by their reactions. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein and the Ba'athists was a good thing. We should keep trying to do good things for the Iraqis over the next couple months, until we give them back their country entirely. If they appreciate that, great. If not, that's really their problem, not ours, and they'll hardly be alone in being ungrateful--just ask the French.

MORE:
The future is now (David Warren, April 12, 2003, Ottawa Citizen )

The reaction to the American and British victory in Iraq, in Iraq itself, was as predictable as the victory, to anyone with genuine knowledge of the situation there. The gratitude to President Bush and the allies is, momentarily, intense and euphoric. It is a comet-like condition that lasts about two days, but has a tail six months long -- the time in which the hard stuff has to be attempted, of creating a constitutional order for Iraq, out of almost nothing.

After that, Iraq is likely to settle back into a mood fairly unlike gratitude, as Kuwait did by the end of 1991, and, in different ways, as the countries liberated from Communism in central and eastern Europe did: the blame for problems will be increasingly assigned to the people who are trying to fix them, and removed from the people who caused them, who are no longer there. This is human nature, which is essentially incurable; but it will take
various peculiarly Arabic and Islamic cultural forms -- sometimes better, sometimes worse than their Western equivalents. (So much of human nature is a freak show.)

The U.S. soldiers will gradually be re-categorized from "liberators" to "foreigners". As we know from France and Germany, as well as the Gulf States, there is no such thing as lasting gratitude, except among the saints. There will nevertheless remain an institutional memory, should new Iraqi institutions survive, that the Americans and British are allies. And this, with any luck, will last for at least a generation to come.

This much is perfectly predictable, and I think it has been taken into account in Pentagon (if not State Department) plans for the Iraqi apres-guerre. My impression is that thanks to the personal shock and awe of Donald Rumsfeld, the attitudes and work habits of the Pentagon have been transformed. But thanks to the protective instincts of Colin Powell, the State Department bureaucracy continues to work within intellectual categories that should have been declared defunct on Sept. 12th, 2001.

There will be clashes between them in the weeks and months ahead, as the Pentagon tries to do things that are new, and difficult, while State tries to sabotage with the help of the old "Arabist" hands in the CIA, the academy, and the media -- the people who still have their jobs after being proved wrong about everything. It would be politically impossible for any President of the United States to simply sack the lot of them; and from that fact a lot of diplomatic "friendly fire" can be anticipated on the road ahead.

Advantage, however, to the people who've won the war, and been proved right about everything that was at issue -- for at least the immediate future. This is no time to be glum.

What is more interesting than the predictable mood on the ground in Iraq, is the mood of the onlooking world. Something very dramatic happened this week, on live television before a vast audience. For the Arab world especially, it was an event like 9/11, but upside down and inside out.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 26, 2003 7:22 AM