Ungrateful Wretches

by digby

Bush is now caught in a trap of his own making:

“I sensed a frustration with the lack of progress on the bigger picture of Iraq generally — that we continue to lose a lot of lives, it continues to sap our budget,” said one person who attended the meeting. “The president wants the people in Iraq to get more on board to bring success.”

[…]

More generally, the participants said, the president expressed frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq, and was puzzled as to how a recent anti-American rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad could draw such a large crowd. “I do think he was frustrated about why 10,000 Shiites would go into the streets and demonstrate against the United States,” said another person who attended.

Damn Iraqis, sapping our budget and costing our lives like that. Why won’t they understand that we came in and killed them, occupied their country and indiscriminately threw thousands of them in jail for their own good?

Joseph Darby the Abu Ghraib whistleblower has a first person article in GQ this week. He made a comment in passing that I think is telling:

One of the things you have to understand is the mentality of where I grew up, in western Maryland. It’s a small town, and there’s not a lot of work. So most people are either in the military, in the Reserves, or they’re related to somebody who is. They’re good people, but I knew they weren’t going to look at the fact that these guys were beating up prisoners. They were going to look at the fact that an American soldier put other American soldiers in prison. For Iraqis. And to those people—who basically are patriotic, socially programmed people who believe whatever they’re told—the Iraqis are the enemy, and screw whatever happens to them.

Bush has always been trafficking in cognitive dissonance with his Iraq talk and it’s caught up with him. He tried to gloss over some fundamental illogic with slick PR and it didn’t work.

From the very beginning he framed his war on terror as being “with us or with the terrorists.” He then consciously conflated Iraq with 9/11 and sent many soldiers over there with the idea that they were fighting those who attacked us. But the facts never supported that and they knew it. Since we live in a world in which outright conquest is no longer acceptable, once his WMD rationale evaporated, he was forced to lean on the idea that we are there to help the Iraqi people and “spread democracy.” He obviously came to believe it.

He has tried to make distinctions between the good Iraqis who are “with us” and the bad ones who are “against us” — “terrorists” “bitter enders” “insurgents” — but many of the soldiers over there and their families back home and Bush’s racist supporters see the “enemy” as simply Iraqis — or just arabs or muslims. And I suspect that a whole lot of other Americans are just plain confused. It’s very hard to finesse all that and it’s one of the reasons why the occupation has been such a disaster. Nobody really knows what we’re doing there, not us, not them. Now Iraqis are boldly demonstrating in favor of terrorists and even Bush can no longer hide his own confusion and dismay.

In that sense, this war makes Vietnam a moment of foreign policy clarity. It was certainly a mistake to put so much importance on the idea that the US could not afford to fail in a small proxy war or risk communism taking over the far east. But at least everyone understood the premise and could either agree or disagree with it. This war in Iraq is totally incomprehensible to everyone. We invaded for dozens of disparate reasons none of which were entirely compelling and all of which have been proven to be mistaken. We are throwing away hundreds of billions and yet there are now many more terrorists in Iraq than there were before the invasion and many more all around the world because of it. Oil prices are sky high and rising. The middle east is more unstable than its been in many decades. Lots and lots of people are dying.

This is all because after 9/11 we had a leadership who ruthlessly exploited the crisis for political gain and an influential advisory cabal who had waited for 30 years to unleash their half-witted ideological experiments on the world. None of it ever made any sense and now that the fog of 9/11`has lifted, that much, at least, is starting to become clear to most people. The problem is that the mess they’ve left is so huge it’s virtually impossible to clean up. Damn, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a case of “sow the wind, reap the whirlwind” unfold so quickly and so starkly right before my very eyes.

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