February 07, 2006

Demonstration

It's worth noting that the protests flaring through the near East and Europe — now riots, many of them — are in some measure the fruits of Bush's and Blair's labors. Certainly not directly: neither man is a cartoonist. But the Iraq war to which both stubbornly, ineptly cling has provided angry sectors of the Arab world with ammunition and a glaring target.

Ineptly: it's important to understand that failure, or at any rate lack of success, has played a role here. All would certainly not be rosy had Baghdad never been invaded. But for more than three years now the Arab street has been seething over a low-burning flame, and with each passing day the misery that is Iraq offers generous kindling. Israel, of course — not the real place, but the monster of pointed regional legend and bedtime nightmare — remains the villain of choice. But Iraq is the looming symbol, locally, of Western attitude toward Arabs and the non-Israeli middle East. Iraq is seen as indicative, predictive. The Bush administration has never seemed to understand the extent to which this is so: the extent, I mean, to which it's not the mere presence of US and British armies that fuels tension, but the Westernness of those armies. Troops from Western countries are troops from Christian countries, by and large: not Arab, not of the middle East, not Muslim. Closely allied, those armies are — politically, historically, militarily — with Israel; and they have a record, in the region, of supporting corrupt and tyrannical regimes.

It's instructive that those same regimes are now leveraging proximity to morph themselves into local heroes. Who's busing the protesters in, after all? Who's provoking them with calls to Islamic solidarity? Whose security forces turn their backs while embassies burn?

Local leaders know an opportunity when they see one. They understand that the West is nearly finished in the middle East. We have little clout and dwindling capital. We aren't convincing anyone in the streets; in the streets, no one has been listening for quite some time. Moderates may have listened once — skeptically; cautiously. But the moderates are being squeezed out. There are fewer every day, and we've hastened their demise with our shambling, stuttering, ineffectual bravado and empty promises.

There was no room for Western failure in the middle East. Yet Rumsfeld's war, Cheney's war: failure, from the start of occupation to present day. American troops are sent to slaughter by men who don't know what they want, don't know how to get it, and can't see that they shouldn't come wanting to this part of the world to begin with. Iraqis are killed by those same men: starved, strangled, collaterally damaged, worst of all deprived of hope by delusion and incompetence, poor planning when not no planning at all, demagoguery and negligence. When the men running this war have done something right they've done it too little, too late.

There was no room for that.

If they needed to be shown how far and how badly things have gone — if they needed to know what little hope remains for recovery, or glimpse a very likely future — well, vivid demonstrations are now underway.

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