The Instrapundit links to this collection of utter crud saying that the author is"Reliably Wrong." I should be doing somehting else but this requires fisking so as a public service I'm stepping up to bat.
Train wreck of an election
By James Carroll | February 1, 2005
IN THINKING about the election in Iraq, my mind keeps jumping back to last week's train wreck in California. A deranged man, intending suicide, drove his Jeep Cherokee onto the railroad tracks, where it got stuck. The onrushing train drew near. The man suddenly left his vehicle and leapt out of the way. He watched as the train crashed into his SUV, derailed, jackknifed, and hit another train. Railroad cars crumbled. Eleven people were killed and nearly 200 were injured, some gravely. The deranged man was arrested. Whatever troubles had made him suicidal in the first place paled in comparison to the trouble he had now.
I always prefer to start a fisk with a bit of agreement. I think I can agree that "Whatever troubles had made him suicidal in the first place paled in comparison to the trouble he had now." Mind you I don't see what this has to do with Iraq.
Iraq is a train wreck. The man who caused it is not in trouble. Tomorrow night he will give his State of the Union speech, and the Washington establishment will applaud him. Tens of thousands of Iraqis are dead. More than 1,400 Americans are dead. An Arab nation is humiliated. Islamic hatred of the West is ignited. The American military is emasculated. Lies define the foreign policy of the United States. On all sides of Operation Iraqi Freedom, there is wreckage. In the center, there are the dead, the maimed, the displaced -- those who will be the ghosts of this war for the rest of their days. All for what?
Ok James I think I see the problem. Did you notice that Iraq was not one of the better regarded democratic states over the last decade or two? did you perchance notice the lack of a certain landmark in New York? Look dickwad (pardon my French), the person who started this was either Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden, depending on how you want to measure things. I saw the TV pictures and the blog writings by Iraqis and so on and humiliation was not what I noticed first. I noticed people rejoicing at being offererd the chance to make their voice heard. By the way the "displaced" - who precisely are you talking about? Iraq has not had a refugee crisis, indeed the refugees from the former regime are returning and in the marshes to the south people are returning to the communities they were forcibly removed from by Hussein. Then on the note of dead and maimed, might I inquire if you are aware of the numbers of dead and maimed killed by Hussein and his gang of thugs each year? Oh and if you want to see the dead, the maimed and the displaced why don't you pay a visit to Darfur?
Tomorrow night, like a boy in a bubble, George W. Bush will tell the world it was for "freedom." He will claim the Iraqi election as a stamp of legitimacy for his policy, and many people will affirm it as such. Even critics of the war will mute their objections in response to the image of millions of Iraqis going to polling places, as if that act undoes the Bush catastrophe.
What catastrophe? lets see now. The UN is no longer complicit in a billion dollar bribery case? one of the more vile dictators in modern history is in jail awaiting a trial? a known sponsor of Palestinian suicide bombers and the only user of chemical weapons since WW1 has been removed from power? catastrophes are what happens in Darfur where the government has killed 70,000 people or where an earthquake and tsunami kills a quarter of a million. A country which formerly has one political party and limited press not has a hundred parties and twice that number of news journals is not benefiting from "freedom"? Perhaps you were sleeping when they taught you it but usually freedom is measured by this sort of thing.
There is only one way in which the grand claims made by Washington for the weekend voting will be true -- and that is if the elections empower an Iraqi government that moves quickly to repudiate Washington. The only meaning "freedom" can have in Iraq right now is freedom from the US occupation, which is the ground of disorder. But such an outcome of the elections is not likely. The chaos of a destroyed society leaves every new instrument of governance dependent on the American force, even as the American force shows itself incapable of defending against, much less defeating, the suicide legions. The irony is exquisite. The worse the violence gets, the longer the Americans will claim the right to stay. In that way, the ever more emboldened -- and brutal -- "insurgents" do Bush's work for him by making it extremely difficult for an authentic Iraqi source of order to emerge. Likewise the elections, which, as universally predicted, have now ratified the country's deadly factionalism.
James old chap, do you read those funny things called opinion polls? Do you understand what a promise is? curiously enough Iraqis seem in the main to prefer the idea of the US occupation to the alternatives. Of course they would prefer not needing to have the Americans but given a choice between an occupying power that keeps its word and does what it said it would when it said it would and anrachic chaos the choice is clear. And, while I regret the loss of British, American and other coalition lives, I can't help notice the disparity in kill rates. As Wretchard pointed out, the US is not treating Iraq the way the Soviets treated Afghanistan. In Iraq it is the Jihadis who die and the Americans who learn their tactics not vice versa. Finally I cannot help but notice that the factionalists, such as Moqtada Al Sadr, seem to be the ones marginalized. The more mainstream groups are preaching a united, possibly federal state. Now whether this will work I cannot say but compared to (taking a country not quite at random) Bosnia, the rhetoric is rather different.
Full blown civil war, if it comes to that, will serve Bush's purpose, too. All the better if Syria and Iran leap into the fray. In such extremity, America's occupation of Iraq will be declared legitimate. America's city-smashing tactics, already displayed in Fallujah, will seem necessary. Further "regime change" will follow. America's ad hoc Middle East bases, meanwhile, will have become permanent. Iraq will have become America's client state in the world's great oil preserve. Bush's disastrous and immoral war policy will have "succeeded," even though no war will have been won. The region's war will be eternal, forever justifying America's presence. Bush's callow hubris will be celebrated as genius. Congress will give the military machine everything it needs to roll on to more "elections." These outcomes, of course, presume the ongoing deaths of tens of thousands more men, women, and children. And American soldiers.
City smashing occured, not in Fallujah but a few hundred miles away across the Syrian border in Hama. Unlike Hama, in Fallujah the occupants were given time to leave and were not shot as they tried to do so. A body search is rather less fatal than a machine gun. In Fallujah it was the defendants who beheaded kidnapped prisoners, who stored munitions in mosques, hospitals and so on. If you can't grasp that the US forces have been remarkably non-destructive perhaps you should visit Grozny. Or Srebenica.
Something else about that California train wreck strikes me. As news reports suggested, so many passengers were killed and injured because the locomotive was pushing the train from behind, which put the lightweight passenger coaches vulnerably in front. If, instead, the heavy, track-clearing locomotive had been leading and had hit the Jeep, it could have pushed the vehicle aside. The jack-knifing and derailment would not have occurred. The American war machine is like a train running in "push-mode," with the engineer safely back away from danger. In the train wreck of Iraq, it is passengers who have borne the brunt. The man with his hand on the throttle couldn't be more securely removed from the terrible consequences of his locomotion. Thus, Bush is like the man who caused the wreck, and like the man who was protected from it. Deranged. Detached. Alive and well in the bubble he calls "freedom," receiving applause.
Well I think I know who is deranged and detached and it isn't President Bush. This whole metaphor is stretched to breaking point. Unless you are seriousy suggesting that today's national leaders should act like Alexander the Great and lead their forces into battle then this is a ridiculous analogy. I think the last major ruler who could claim to have lead his country's armies into battle was Napoleon, (by the way Napoleon was defeated by the Duke of Wellington who only became a politician afterwards). While I do not think that the Iraqi occupation has been flawless, the idea that the occupation has been pushed on from behind regardless is utter nonsense, the occupation has in fact changed policy time and again with different things done at different times. Sometimes I feel that has been a part of the problem. You Mr Carroll are alive and well in a bubble called "freedom", if you doubt it try living in Iran or Saudi Arabia and writing a piece as critical as the government.