Truth And Consequences
by digby
Back when George W. Bush was riding high Bob Woodward asked him how history would judge the war. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” He was a man of action, then, confident that he was ordained by God to rid the world of evil and that everyone worshipped him. (That’s the same interview where he says he doesn’t ask his father for advice because he appeals to a “higher father.”)
My, how things have changed. Bush is now counting on history to redeem him, and being the shallow little nitwit he is, he will probably rest easy into his dotage believing that no matter how much his presidency may have screwed up the world, ultimately everything will work out. It’s a shame about all the dead bodies, but sometimes that’s the price others have to pay for the priviledge of getting the American way of life.
Bush is described by another recent visitor as still resolutely defiant, convinced history will ultimately vindicate him.
“I’ll be dead when they get it right,” he said during an Oval Office meeting last week.
This is becoming a new theme in ruling class circles these days. Events have proven these people to be asses so they are hiding behind the fiction that if humanity manages to survive and Iraq progresses to something better than it is today, then they will have been proven right. David Ignatius popularized this convenient theory with his seminal column entitled: “Iraq Can Survive This” from July of 2005, in which he posited that even if it devolved into a civil war that lasts thirty years, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, the odds are that someday it will turn into a peaceful nation, right?
Pessimists increasingly argue that Iraq may be going the way of Lebanon in the 1970s. I hope that isn’t so, and that Iraq avoids civil war. But people should realize that even Lebanonization wouldn’t be the end of the story. The Lebanese turned to sectarian militias when their army and police couldn’t provide security. But through more than 15 years of civil war, Lebanon continued to have a president, a prime minister, a parliament and an army. The country was on ice, in effect, while the sectarian battles raged. The national identity survived, and it came roaring back this spring in the Cedar Revolution that drove out Syrian troops.
What happens in Iraq will depend on Iraqi decisions. One of those is whether the Iraqi people continue to want U.S. help in rebuilding their country. For now, America’s job is to keep training an Iraqi army and keep supporting an Iraqi government — even when those institutions sometimes seem to be illusions. Iraq is in torment, but the Lebanon example suggests that with patient help, its institutions can survive this nightmare.
Only a pessimist could think that 15 yrears of bloody civil war is a bad thing. Why, in the end they had that awesome cedar revolution, with fine lookin’ babes and everything, the all-important institutions intact. No harm no foul. (Well, ok. Maybe they need a few more decades of bloodshed to fully appreciate how great it all is.)
By this logic, Hitler was history’s greatest European hero. Look at ’em today!
In fact, the Washington Post editorial makes that explicit argument today regarding Pinochet. After a few snide remarks about the “international left” who, it is implied, were misplaced in their outrage that Pinochet overthrew a democratically elected government and then went on to kill and torture thousands and thousands of people, assasinate his rivals and steal millions from the treasury, they point out that it was all to the good. After all, Chile’s economy is doing very well today:
Like it or not, Mr. Pinochet had something to do with this success. To the dismay of every economic minister in Latin America, he introduced the free-market policies that produced the Chilean economic miracle — and that not even Allende’s socialist successors have dared reverse. He also accepted a transition to democracy, stepping down peacefully in 1990 after losing a referendum.
Hey, you have to torture a few eggs to get a fluffy free market omelette 35 years later.
This is why accountability is so important. It is the epitome of injustice that allows war criminals and sociopaths like Pinochet to go unpunished for their deeds, allowing detestable apologists like Fred Hiatt to rationalize away the horrors he inflicted on his own people in the name of this abstract godhead “free-markets.”
Just as it is wrong to have allowed Pinochet to die a free old man, the leadership of this country should not be allowed to continue their comfortable lives without suffering any consequences in the here and now for their ongoing rationalization of American perfidy in Iraq. History will not redeem them any more than it has redeemed Pinochet and they should not be allowed to sit in the comfort of their riches and power like a bunch of decadent potentates and live as if it already has.