Ignoring advice

Three years ago after a trip to Jordan to help build a house with Habitat for Humanity International, I was touring the sights of Jordan with a guide who had attended college in Baghdad during the regime of Sadaam Hussein. Sami and I were discussing the Iraq war and its impact. This was a time when almost everybody, including myself, felt that we were making progress toward a democratic Iraqi state that would be a positive force for a more peaceful Middle East. Sami’s reaction was that Sadaam Hussein was a really bad guy and the Middle East was better off without him, but the Iraqis should have done it themselves. He said “you guys have no idea what you are getting into. There are 1300 different ethnic, sectarian, tribal and political groups in Iraq. Without a really strong leader there isn’t a country there.” How prescient he was. The concept of a “nation state” is very much a western concept. In the Middle East people relate much more to the umma (the Muslim community) and to their tribe. When Gertrude Bell drew the lines in the Middle East after WW I, she not only brought the western idea of a nation state and the political and imperialist expectations of the victors to the process, but also a very British penchant for straight lines. Although she understood the area better than almost anybody else, she ended up with Arabs, Kurds, Persians, Sunni, Shia, Christians, Druze etc. scattered among the countries of the region. It makes the Balkans look like a unified society. The Iraq Study Group seemed to implicitly recognize this reality by inserting this caveat after they opposed devolution of Iraq into three regions – “…if events were to move irreversibly in this direction (i.e. devolution), the United States should manage the situation to ameliorate humanitarian consequences, contain the spread of violence and minimize regional instability.” In the recent election the American people expressed strongly that they weren’t satisfied with our policy in Iraq. Since satisfaction is the difference between expectations and reality, George Bush seems to have decided that it is better to improve satisfaction by lowering expectations than by changing the reality. We have come down from defining success as a “free and democratic Iraq that is an ally in the ‘war on terror’ and model for the ‘new Middle East’” to an Iraq that “can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself”. The Iraq Study Group has made a number of suggestions about how to improve the reality on the ground, but George Bush appears to be about to ignore most of them. He would not be the first recent President to ignore the recommendations of bi-partisan study group designed to give him political cover for difficult decisions. In 1998 President Clinton appointed a bi-partisan commission headed by moderate Louisiana Senator John Breaux to recommend changes necessary to prevent the bankruptcy of the Medicare program. When the commission issued its report, he proceeded to ignore the whole thing. I’ll grant that Bill Clinton was a little preoccupied with Monica at the time, but he might have done something with it. Even though George Bush doesn’t appear to have an intern problem, he is probably going cherry pick a few recommendations and call it good and end up “staying course”. Since he doesn’t have to check this out with the American people at the ballot box, he is likely to show his usual stubbornness. His Republican supporters who do have to run again may start heading for the exits. Meanwhile, while the politicians dither, America’s sons and daughters are still dying to try and create a reality that may not exist.