So I'm at a friend's 50th birthday party, and I meet some of her partner's former students. One of them just got back from Iraq. Because he was just a hair away from having his truck repossessed, Iraq was the best thing that happened to him. But it becomes very clear talking to him that even if we believe in empire, believe that democracy can be imposed from without, there's no way in hell we can win there.
Arabic is one of the hardest languages to learn from an American standpoint. Just making the psychological shift to reading and writing right to left has to be difficult. As a result I'd gather that of the infantry responsible for much of the peacekeeping activities, less than 10% are proficient in Arabic. Of the psyops unit the kid I talked to was with, I got the sense that it was more like 5% tops.
Layer on top of that the fact that many of these kids were trained to wage war, not make peace (Rep. Kucninich has been proposing a Department of Peace for a while now...it sounds kitschy, but I'll be damned if something like that isn't needed here). So in an extremely short period of time, soldiers who've been trained and brainwashed (make no mistake, amping someone up to become a stone cold killer requires brainwashing) to view these folks as the enemy are now required to smile and wave upon every encounter.
It's clear that the segue from soldier to policeman can be a straightforward one. But being familiar with the history of relationships between police and African Americans, I can say that I'm not particularly surprised that more sophisticated versions of Detroit circa 1967 are occurring on a frequent basis.
Posted by at May 16, 2004 09:38 AM | TrackBackWas it worth screwing up? I think so. There is a generation of lessons to learn. No matter what the outcome, America deserves credit for going the whole nine yards for trying to bring democracy to another country.
Understand that failure in Iraq will do nothing but validate the nativist position that some people just cannot be civilized. It also means that the CIA will become nationalist and we will have many more Contras in secret coups in the future.
Posted by: cobb at May 18, 2004 11:37 AMCobb...I remember you reading The Art of War, and writing something about it every day to imbibe the principles. I don't know how you can call Iraq a great mistake, given that at no point has the US in this endeavor even acted like Clauswitz, much less took the lessons of Sun Tzu to heart. If I'm reading Salon correctly they just put a gun to CHALABI's head.
Posted by: Lester Spence at May 20, 2004 12:55 PM
LKS ,I gleemed two points from your article one financial,A colleague was offered 150k tax free to work in Irag as a electrician,from Haliburton,repossesion looms on the horizon for the reurnee; two, occupational force ,assuming they can spread democracy to the middle east.Fisrt this war is control by private industry and the goal is not bringing democracy to the middle east but american present, Israel can no longer be trusted.
Posted by: tootsie at May 17, 2004 07:30 AM