ROSA AL-SADR WON'T HAVE TO RIDE IN THE BACK OF THE BUS:

The New Iraq: Spiffy, shiny, theocratic, allied with Iran — and we made it happen (HAROLD MEYERSON, 8/26/05, LA Weekly)

[George W. Bush] has spoken at long last about U.S. casualties in Iraq, and, with echoes of Lincoln at Gettysburg, vowed that, “We will finish the task that they gave their lives for.”

But, of course, Lincoln at Gettysburg did not merely pledge to see the cause through. He redefined for all time the cause for which Union soldiers died; he expanded the scope of the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of human equality; he proclaimed that America would emerge from a Union victory as a freer and more democratic nation than it had been before.

But what is the cause for which U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since they deposed Hussein? If we’re to take the draft constitution seriously, the Iraq we’ve fought and bled to create is to be a loose federation, in which the Shiite South, and perhaps the Sunni center, will be governed by Islamic law, with Shiite senior clerics given special status outside the writ of national law, and Shiite women offered up to the mercies of their friendly local Koranic law judges.

Given that Mr. Meyerson had previously compared President Bush to Jefferson Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the KKK, the reference to Lincoln at least marks some progress. But it's worth noting how badly Father Abraham comes off in the comparison. There were more than five times as many Americans killed just at Gettysburg than we've lost in the entire Iraq War, and as a percentage of the population the number is even more dramatic. And what was the cause for which they fought, bled and died? That blacks might be subjected to a brutal regime of Jim Crow that was little different than slavery, that greed-driven corporadoes might loot the South during a military occupation and that it might remain economically backwards for a hundred years. It's rather a low bar to clear but Mr. Bush's war, which liberated two oppressed populations in Iraq and actually put them in control of their own destinies while establishing one (or two, or three) of the first constitutional republics in the Arab world, is certain to be a greater achievement purely in terms of human equality than was his predecessors.

N.B.: Mind you, the KKK, which might be considered the Confederate resistance, is still a going concern a hundred and forty years later, which gives the Shi'a a good long while to put down the Ba'athists remnants quicker than we've managed to deal with their parallel here.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 25, 2005 11:26 PM