[Mb-civic] Rhetoric of Unreality - George F. Will - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Rhetoric of Unreality
Where Is Iraq After Nearly 3 Years of War?

By George F. Will
Thursday, March 2, 2006; A21

When late in the spring of 1940 people of southeastern England flocked 
across the Channel in their pleasure craft and fishing boats to evacuate 
soldiers trapped on Dunkirk beaches, euphoria swept Britain. So Prime 
Minister Winston Churchill sternly told the nation: "We must be very 
careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. 
Wars are not won by evacuations."

Or by curfews, such as the one that cooled the furies that engulfed Iraq 
after the bombing last week of a Shiite shrine. Wars are not won simply 
by facing facts, but facing them is a necessary prerequisite.

Last week, in the latest iteration of a familiar speech (the enemy is 
"brutal," "we're on the offensive," "freedom is on the march") that 
should be retired, the president said, "This is a moment of choosing for 
the Iraqi people." Meaning what? Who is to choose, and by what 
mechanism? Most Iraqis already "chose" -- meaning prefer -- peace. But 
in 1917 there were only a few thousand Bolsheviks among 150 million 
Russians -- and the Bolsheviks succeeded in hijacking the country for 
seven decades.

After Iraqis voted in December for sectarian politics, an observer said 
Iraq had conducted not an election but a census. Now America's heroic 
ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, one of two indispensable men in Iraq, has 
warned the Iraqi political class that unless the defense and interior 
ministries are nonsectarian, meaning not run as instruments of the 
Shiites, the United States will have to reconsider its support for 
Iraq's military and police. But that threat is not credible: U.S. 
strategy in Iraq by now involves little more than making the Iraqi 
military and police competent. As the president said last week: "Our 
strategy in Iraq is that the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down."

Iraq's prime minister responded to Khalilzad's warning by accusing him 
of interfering in Iraq's "internal affairs." Think about that, and about 
the distinction drawn by the U.S. official in Iraq who, evidently 
looking on what he considers the bright side, told Eliot Cohen of Johns 
Hopkins, "This isn't a war. It's violent nation-building."

Almost three years after the invasion, it is still not certain whether, 
or in what sense, Iraq is a nation. And after two elections and a 
referendum on its constitution, Iraq barely has a government. A defining 
attribute of a government is that it has a monopoly on the legitimate 
exercise of violence. That attribute is incompatible with the existence 
of private militias of the sort that maraud in Iraq.

Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, writing in the Wall 
Street Journal, reports that Shiite militias "have broken up coed 
picnics, executed barbers [for the sin of shaving beards] and liquor 
store owners, instituted their own courts, and posted religious guards 
in front of girls' schools to ensure Iranian-style dress." Iraq's other 
indispensable man, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, says that unless the 
government can protect religious sites, "the believers will."

When violence surges, if U.S. forces take the lead in suppressing it 
they delay the day when Iraqi forces will be competent. If U.S. forces 
hold back, they are blamed by an Iraqi population that is being 
infantilized by displacing all responsibilities onto the American 
occupation.

In the New Republic, Lawrence Kaplan, writing with a Baghdad dateline, 
says that only U.S. forces, which "have become an essential part of the 
landscape here -- their own tribe, in effect," can be "an honest broker" 
between warring factions, "more peacekeeper than belligerent." But he 
also reports:

"With U.S reconstruction aid running out, Iraq's infrastructure, never 
fully restored to begin with, decays by the hour. . . . The level of 
corruption that pervades Iraq's ministerial orbit . . . would have made 
South Vietnam's kleptocrats blush. . . . [C]orruption has helped drive 
every public service measure -- electricity, potable water, heating oil 
-- down below its prewar norm."

Kaplan tells of a student who, seeing insurgents preparing a mortar 
attack, called a government emergency number. Fortunately for him, no 
one answered. Later, friends warned him that callers' numbers appear at 
the government's emergency office and that they are sold to insurgents. 
The student took Kaplan to see a wall adorned with a picture and death 
announcement of a man whose call was answered.

Today, with all three components of the "axis of evil" -- Iraq, Iran and 
North Korea -- more dangerous than they were when that phrase was coined 
in 2002, the country would welcome, and Iraq's political class needs to 
hear, as a glimpse into the abyss, presidential words as realistic as 
those Britain heard on June 4, 1940.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/01/AR2006030101935.html?nav=hcmodule
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