The idiot speaks
Through the Looking Glass looks at the latest Tom Friedman idiocy:
The latest from Tom Friedman:
Iraq is a multiethnic society that had to be held together by a dictator’s iron fist. What Iraqis are struggling with today is whether they can forge their own social contract in which Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis can live together – without an iron fist. That is critical because virtually every Arab state today is a mix of religions and ethnicities held together by a hard or soft fist. If Iraqis can find a way to live together, any people out here can, and democracy has a future. If the Iraqis can’t, probably no one can, and we can look forward to dictatorships and monarchies in the Arab world — with all the pathologies they bring – forever.
So, if “democratizing” fails in Iraq, then we have nothing to blame ourselves for, because there was no saving it anyway. And so, the people who invaded without a rebuilding plan; who tried to use an undermanned army, untrained for the purpose, to keep civil order; who cut over-generous deals with extremists and separatists (SCIRI, the Kurdish parties) when that didn’t work; who dissolved the major multiethnic institution (the Army); who gutted civil society by over-aggressive de-Baathification; who took the Shiite and Kurdish side against the Sunnis in inter-ethnic feuding; and — oh, yes — who bungled the the economy terribly: the people who did all that take no share of the blame. Whatever happens, it’s not our fault.