Apr
8
Iraq - A Round Peg in a Square Hole
Filed Under The Muse |
Next to the economy, the Iraq War is the biggest issue in our upcoming elections. The general perception among the American populace is that the whole affair is not worth the price, in terms of lives, money, and hardship. We all sense what the powers-that-be do not want to admit to themselves, or perhaps to put it bluntly, the elitist power brokers in Washington do understand the cost, but some how see the cost of not seeing through what we started to be far greater, at least to themselves, the companies that stand to benefit, and maybe our economic and national interests.
Regardless of what the driving forces are for leaving or remaining in Iraq, the reality is that, no matter what we do, the situation is doomed to failure, and the reason is that we are culturally trying to pound a round peg into a square hole, which leads to both the peg and hole being badly damaged or outright ruined in the process. In other words, what we stand to gain is far less than we could possibly understand. No matter what we do, both sides will come out far worse than before this whole mess started.
Let’s look at our own fairly recent history. As early as 20 years ago, our country still faced a vast divide in terms of race relations. As early as 40 years ago, equal rights among women, blacks, and other minorities was in its infancy. There is still a noticable gap in terms of the perception between races today, as so elequently pointed out by Obama in his recent address on race and equality in America.
Only since the 1990s have we truly been able to say that organized crime did not have tremendous influence in politics, lawlessness, and business and government corruption. In the 1920s, Chicago truly was ruled by Al Capone, and the government’s Prohibition laws were a farce, at least until the government could figure out a way to regulate the industry well enough to assure their slice of the pie.
We have had assassinations, internal terrorism, major riots in large cities (over things ranging from percieved unjust police shootings to the outcome of major sporting events), questionable and illegal activities by both big business and government departments and officials, and a score of other problems that really don’t take a whole lot of brain power to remember quite clearly.
These things have happened in our own country, where culturally we have been raised and conditioned to our form of government in every generation since the United States gained independence in 1776. And yet we expect a totally different set of cultures to embrace a form of government (with its own set of ills and shortcomings) that has no cultural basis for acceptance? We expect that the diverse set of peoples who have tribal and sectional differences to embrace democracy and make it work? Not just Iraq, but the majority of the Middle East has hundreds, if not thousands of years of racial, religious, and even regional prejudices, injustices, and blood oaths to deal with. Iraq is a microcosm that gives us a fairly decent cross section of the wide disparities that exist in the Middle East, with the Kurds, Shiites, Sunis, Baaths, moderates, fanatics, extremists, fascists, dictators, shiekdoms, kingdoms, etc.
All that we can hope to accomplish in Iraq is perhaps to reach a deeper understanding of their own internal struggles, gain respect by giving respect and try and provide as much humanitarian effort as we can to ease the suffering of the innocents who are caught in the crossfire of what will inevitably be a huge mess no matter what we do, for we cannot hope to establish a foriegn type of government in a region that cannot culturally accept it, especially when the “model” for that form of government still has its own ills to deal with.
I think that’s what the American people have sensed about the Iraq War, and why the majority of Americans oppose it, for collectively we know too well from our own examples and history that our democracy, while perhaps the best form of bad governance in the world, is still a difficult form of government, even for the country that exemplifies it.
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[…] behind the mask wrote an interesting post today on Iraq - A Round Peg in a Square HoleHere’s a quick excerptNext to the economy, the Iraq War is the biggest issue in our upcoming elections…. […]