May 18, 2004
KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:
Focus on What's at Stake in Iraq (Jim Hoagland, May 13, 2004, Washington Post)
Those who were silent about torture in Iraq during Saddam Hussein's time should be modest about cloaking established political agendas in the name of that cause now.Abu Ghraib does not change the essential reality about Iraq, which I have flogged here for months: It is up to Iraqis to determine their political future, and it is up to the Americans and other Arabs to get out of their way -- yesterday. That has not been the Bush way. Proconsular absolutism has been abandoned in favor of yielding political power not to Iraqis but to the United Nations. This would presumably deprive Kerry of a campaign issue and placate Sunni Arab governments, which were silent about torture and mass murder when committed by Hussein's Sunni minority. Those regimes now prefer to see Iraq in chaos rather than ruled by Shiite Arabs.
"It is impossible for Iraq to be ruled by the Shiites," a political adviser to a ruling Arab monarch said recently in a not-for-attribution setting that encouraged unusual candor. "Sunnis make up 85 percent of the population of the Arab world. How could it be democratic" for a national Shiite majority to rule an Arab country? That is the key issue for King Abdullah of Jordan, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and other Sunni autocrats.
Impossible? It's inevitable. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 18, 2004 7:34 AM
Hoagland writes, "Those damning photos and videos of abuses at Abu Ghraib, and others that may show similar incidents elsewhere in the overextended U.S.-British archipelago of war prisons, are useful clubs for them to wield against the Bush administration's most ambitious visions of democracy and gender equality in the region."
That is twice now I have seen our detention of suspected terrorists compared implicitly to the Gulag (the other was Evan Thomas's Newsweek cover story). This from a mainstream press that implcably ignored and downplayed the real Gulag when it existed; and despite the plain fact that these prisons are not a black hole outside the law, which is demonstrated by the Supreme Court of the United States taking up several cases related detainees.
Our press ought to be ashamed of itself.
Posted by: Paul Cella at May 18, 2004 10:46 AM"That has not been the Bush way. Proconsular absolutism has been abandoned in favor of yielding political power not to Iraqis but to the United Nations."
What is this guy talking about? I haven't been paying that close attention, but hope I would have noticed any hint that the UN was being granted a role, before or after 30 June.
Another in the long line of statements that come out of the Arab world that only make sense if you ignore all the accepted standard definitions for the words they speak.
Should someone ask Syria if they agree that it's "impossible" for an Arab country not to be ruled by Sunnis?
Posted by: brian at May 18, 2004 4:07 PM