August 12, 2005

Lessons in History

The headlines might as well read, "Bush succumbs completely to hallucinatory foreign-policy fantasies." Troop levels, it was announced yesterday, will stay the same. And by the way, it's still called the Global War on Terror, not G-WAVE.

For the second week in a row, Bush woke up from a nap, stepped onto a nearby lawn, and proceeded to contradict what his own aides had been saying for the previous three days. If there's any kind of plan in the White House (and they continue to insist there is — but then someone could step out to reverse that claim any minute now), it must be one of disinformation via confusion. Perhaps, seeing things aren't going so well in Iraq, Rove & co. have decided to wage psychological warfare on the American people instead, figuring the targets are agreeably softer.

Bush's claims he is not willing to "sacrifice" the Iraqi people. By which he means, I guess, that he is willing to sacrifice the American people, figuratively and literally.

Ah yes — well do I remember the days before the war, when millions of Americans lay awake at night burdened by thoughts of their suffering Iraqi brothers, with whom they felt such a strong personal and historical bond. When the burning question on their minds as they moved through their underemployed days was what they could do — what sacrifice they, personally, could make — to bring the dreams of their Iraqi friends to fruition. How they gathered in cafés and on street corners, or at night in bars, nursing beers and all but ignoring the sporting events on the muted televisions overhead, to discuss these preoccupations with friends.

Were they aware, I wonder, that the dream a good many of those Iraqi brothers longed to pursue was that of living in a place much more like neighboring Iran? Or that others longed to pursue the dream of jihad against Westerners, or against fellow Iraqis who don't subscribe to their particular brand of faith? Or that still others longed to pursue the dream of redirecting the stream of oil revenues from the previous dictator's pockets to their own?

It's not the dream that matters. It's the pursuit.

Bush's declaration that Americans are not yet done sacrificing themselves for Iraqis who no longer wish to have them around came on a day when one of the more significant Shiite sects — Shiites are the majority in Iraq, lest we forget, and were long oppressed by the previous regime, and are now somewhat understandably but not altogether productively determined to get a little payback — announced that it wanted not to participate in a united, free Iraq at all, but to participate in a little nation-building experiment of its own — on its own. No doubt they'll be wanting to take along an oil field or two when they go.

Thus the dreaded civil war.

How to avoid the dreaded civil war? There may be only one way, and that may be to let them go. And then to let the Kurds go. And then to let go whoever's left, in as many directions as they demand. That's self-determination, after all. It will, of course, doom the region to militarized border disputes for the next century or two. But let's be honest: there was probably no way to avoid that, short of replacing the old brutal regime with a new brutal regime. As in the former Soviet Union, the brutal regime was the only thing keeping a lid on sectarian and tribal rivalries that go back intractable centuries. Did the Pentagon really think a few American leaflets were going to cure that?

It is ironic that American exceptionalism leads Americans to view America not as an exception at all, but rather as the inevitable rule. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, in America, the civic self has — at least until recent months — been placed ahead of the ethnic and religious self as definitive within the context of nationality. More than much-touted "freedom," more than much-touted "rule of law" (both of which have been practiced more or less similarly in Europe for more or less as long as they have been here), this is what's definitive in the American experience. It's also what may be least transferrable. Even in Europe, where people are extremely well-educated, sophisticated, and wealthy by global standards, it's proving impossible to make broad federalism work. If the French and Italians can't let go of ancient sectarian rivalries — most of them having, by the way, nothing to do with god and everything to do with cheese — how ever will the Shiites and Sunnis?

In most of the world, history is destiny, more or less. Americans — so fortunately, so sadly history-less — tend to forget this. But that doesn't mean Iraqis will. They know it even if we don't, even if Bush and Rumsfeld and Rice don't (though one suspects somehow that Rice, who seems the least idiotic of the three, does know it, in a deep dark corner she'll discover after a quarter of a million in post-administration therapy). Sooner or later, we'll be gone. Americans, unwilling to confront their demons at home, will have their adventures abroad. But eventually they run out of patience and/or money and/or will, and they withdraw. There is only the question of how long you must endure them — of how many of them you must kill, of how many of your own people must be killed by them — before they go. But they will go. And then your future truly will be your own to devise.

Bush — never an adept student at anything, especially history, and an absentee during the Vietnam era — will have to learn this in his own hard way. It's just too bad the text must be written in the blood of Cindy Sheehan's son, and in the blood of so many other sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, husbands and wives and friends. Unlike sectarian rivalries, our loved ones cannot be resurrected.

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