The Worst Of All Possible Worlds
I sure wish those naysaying lefties would just shut up about our so-called failure in Iraq. They are just wrong.
Like, for instance, that commie bastard Bruce Fein who wrote in the Washington Times today that the new Iraqi government is fucked up five ways to Friday and there is almost no hope that it won’t fly apart like the Big Bang the minute the US turns over sovereignty:
Volcanic. That characterizes a heated symposium I attended in Ankara, Turkey, last week sponsored by the Foreign Policy Institute and Bilkent University to appraise “Iraq on the way to its new Constitution.” The attendees included Iraqi participants in the March 8, 2004, interim constitution promulgated by the 25 member Iraqi Governing Council (IGC). Other attendees hailed from Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The symposium exposed numerous fault lines destined to fracture Iraq soon after the Coalition Provisional Authority and United States sovereignty dissolve on June 30, 2004:
• An interim constitution and Iraqi Transitional Government devoid of legitimacy.
• A legal system denuded of legal principles.
• An irreconcilable conflict between the universal tenets of Islam and fundamental democratic freedoms.
• Implacable embitterment of Kurds toward Arabs born of their wretched oppression and genocide under Saddam Hussein.
• A demand by Turkmen to the same language and autonomy privileges enjoyed by Kurds.
• And exchanges and monologues that smacked more of belligerence than of fraternity.[…]
The staggering blunders of the Bush administration in governing post-Saddam Iraq have left no satisfactory post-June 30 denouements. The least bad option is a managed partition into statelets for Kurds, Turkmen, Sunnis and Shi’ites to escape a reprise of Yugoslavia’s blood-stained disintegration.
Symposium participants challenged Iraqi representatives to defend the legitimacy of their constitutional handiwork, soporifically styled the “Law of Administration for the State of Iraq for the Transitional Period.” No member of the IGC was elected. All were appointed by the United States. None enjoy more than a crumb of popular support.
A favorite of the Defense Department, Ahmed Chalabi, is more reviled than Saddam Hussein. The interim constitution was neither drafted nor debated in a public forum before its promulgation. The document turned precepts of self-government on their heads.
The defenders fatuously retorted that the interim constitution and the IGC deserved legitimacy because both were superior to Saddam Hussein and Ba’athist tyranny. By that yardstick, a restoration of the King Feisel dynasty would be defensible.
[…]
The seminar changed no minds. Differences were more aggravated than softened. Contemplating Iraq’s future evoked visions of civil war featuring rocket propelled grenades and AK-47s, not free and fair national assembly elections monitored by United Nations observers.
The United States should declare its post-Saddam nation-building enterprise a failure. It should begin immediately to arrange the partition of Iraq by regional self-determination plebiscites. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, it would be the worst imaginable last chapter of Operation Enduring Freedom, except for all the plausible alternative scripts.
Another fifth columnist for Kerry, no doubt. Must have a book coming out.