Freedom In Iraq Advances
“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”
— Niccolo Machiavelli
The Prince (1532)
Thomas Friedman has a theory that argues Iraq is on a better trajectory because Iraqis are now taking ownership of the changes in their country:
One of the first things I realized when visiting Iraq after the U.S. invasion was that the very fact that Iraqis did not liberate themselves, but had to be liberated by Americans, was a source of humiliation to them. It’s one reason they never threw flowers. When someone else has to liberate you in your own home, that is humiliating — and humiliation, I believe, is the single-most underestimated force in international relations, especially in the Middle East.
That also helps explain why Iraqis initially never took ownership of their governing institutions, like the Coalition Provisional Authority, or C.P.A. They never fought for it. It was handed to them. People have to fight and win their own freedom, and that’s what gives their institutions legitimacy.
What seems to have happened in Iraq in the last few months is that the Iraqi mainstream has finally done some liberating of itself. With the help of the troop surge ordered by President Bush, the mainstream Sunni tribes have liberated themselves from the grip of Al Qaeda in their provinces. And the Shiite mainstream — represented by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and the Iraqi Army — liberated Basra, Amara and Sadr City in Baghdad from both Mahdi Army militiamen and pro-Iranian death squads.
Probably some truth to that.
Tony Blankley makes the point that we are now the strong horse in Iraq, while Al Qaeda has become the weak horse:
Now, it is doubtlessly true that our invasion of Iraq (and Afghanistan) helped al-Qaida’s recruitment. I have been told that by U.S. government experts I trust. But that is an old fact. What Osama bin Laden famously said about recruitment is also true: People follow the strong horse. And the new fact is that as we are winning in Iraq, as we are killing al-Qaida fighters and other Islamist terrorists there by the truckload (along with other insurgent opponents of the Iraqi government we support with our blood and wealth), we are proving to be the strong horse after all and can expect to see a reduced attraction for young men to join the Islamist terrorist ranks.
True, but I think Tony misses a more important point here: we’ve recruited, trained and equipped some half a million Muslims in Iraq to fight against the extremists, and they’re doing so with increasing success. That dwarfs the effectiveness of any recruitment bump extremists might have gotten by an order of magnitude.
And as is rarely mentioned, Iraqis have a free and independent (if battered and besieged) press, with hundreds of TV, radio and newpaper concerns that did not exist in 2002, freedom to criticize gov’t policies and hold protests, and several free and fair elections under their belts with more to come. No one who loves liberty can regard these as a “mistake,” though their cost was high.
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4 comments
The Friedman comments are similar to early discussions that "new Iraq" needed a heroic foundational narrative. Some (ie, David Brooks) thought it should be done by contriving things such that the Iraqis could somehow "triumph" over the US, without us actually losing.
As it happened, AQ and the Iran-backed Sadrists nicely did it for us; this would be the first Iraqi state that beat back the millenia-old Persian nemesis, and AQ is equally presentable as a pack of foreign thugs and bandits that were defeated by Iraqi heroism.
So, now "new Iraq" has a heroic narrative that is not anti-American, and is actually true.
Karl Rove couldn’t have planned it any better.
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Nice Machiavelli quote. I’m a big fan of his.
I’m always amazed at how much smarter long-gone dead guys are over the living.
Scott, it’s a selection bias. The stupid long-gone dead guys seldom get quoted (save by people trying to demonstrate what stupidity looks like, or by people who disagree that they’re stupid). Live guys and gals, stupid or smart, are speaking in real time. So the average live statement is automatically stupider, on average, than the average statement from a dead guy.
Wait. It’s not possible to train REAL Muslims to fight terrorism. We all know, terrorism is embedded in Islam, and the only way to fix it is to purge its holy books and/or make them all become Christians and/or rational Atheists. C’mon, ain’t that obvious by now?
(And before some idiot says "straw man," said idiot might want to ask me first to point to people who actually believe that shameful bullshit.)
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