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04/08/2006:
"Those ungrateful Iraqis!"
AT LAST, there's consensus on who's to blame for the mess in Iraq: the Iraqis!From the beginning, there were ominous signs that the Iraqis weren't going to play the game right. More than a few neocon hearts were broken by the Iraqi refusal to greet us with flowers and champagne as we marched into Baghdad, and the snub still hurts. Just this week, Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum and an unrepentant hawk, complained about "the ingratitude of the Iraqis for the extraordinary favor we gave them: to release them from the bondage of Saddam Hussein's tyranny."
What really rankles most politicos these days is the Iraqis' refusal to get cracking on the formation of a multiethnic government. Four months after the elections, Iraqi factions still haven't come up with a power-sharing arrangement that satisfies all constituencies.
In Baghdad on Monday for a joint appearance with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Condoleezza Rice suggested that we've now given the Iraqis all the help a liberated people can reasonably expect: We "have forces on the ground and have sacrificed here," she told reporters, so we have "a right to expect that this process [of government formation] will keep moving forward."
Chiming in, Straw called on the Iraqis to shape up and select a prime minister, pronto: "The Americans have lost over 2,000 people [in Iraq]. We've lost over 100…. And billions — billions — of United States dollars, hundreds of millions of British pound sterlings have come into this country. We do have, I think, a right to say that we've got to be able to deal with Mr. A or Mr. B or Mr. C. We can't deal with Mr. Nobody."
The "after all we've done for you!" theme is more than a little jarring, coming as it does from the architects of the war. The Iraqis didn't beg us to invade their country. We invaded Iraq for reasons quite unrelated to the welfare of the Iraqi people (and, it turned out, for reasons unrelated to the welfare of the American people as well).
informationclearinghouse.info
