It is sad that I have to resort to foreign outlets to be able to read a writeup of Iraq’s elections that is free of pundit sound-bites. That sadness is a different and deeper sort when I read the Independent’s analysis of the Iraqi election.
The neo-con justification for the Iraq War has always been to create a Reganesque “City on the Hill” for the Middle East and cause a reverse domino effect. Many of the brightest minds on the right were willing to sacrifice any means to create that end, even if it meant lying to us.
Though I worried this might be a March of Folly, I hoped I would be wrong. We put America on the path of an empire and all trajectory of all empires contains the fall of it. Maybe those who actually didn’t just use poly sci to fill a humanities elective would prove me to be naïve, for how could one college quarter of game theory compare to a lifetime of agenda setting?
But then you run across this quote:
The US ambassador in Baghdad, [Zalmay] Khalilzad, sounded almost despairing yesterday as he reviewed the results of the election. “It looks as if people have preferred to vote for their ethnic or sectarian identities,” he said. “But for Iraq to succeed there has to be cross-ethnic and cross-sectarian co-operation.”
It shows the simpleton predictions would be true—Iraq is no better than the United States. At the earliest opportunity, a democratic republic degenerates into factious demagoguery. Two millennia has given us nothing but the math to prove the obvious.
As explained in a recent New Yorker article,1 Khalilzad is a brilliant neo-con—not some hanger-on like Wolfowitz or shift-with-the-political-winds like Condoleeza Rice. And the results are easily predicted and expected. The neo-con agenda has not only failed, it has backfired.
In 1787, the founders of this country sought to create “a more perfect union.” We have enjoyed the benfits for over two hundred years, Iraq has not had even a single day—we have killed democracy in its cradle taking ours with it.
