Those ungrateful Iraqis

“We have given to the Iraqi people more than any other nation could ask for. We have stood behind them, we have deposed their dictator, we have given them free governance and a chance at a constitution and free elections.”

George W. Bush making the case for “progress” in Iraq?

No, those words were spoken on the Senate Floor March 28 by Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin, D-Ill., an opponent of the 2003 resolution authorizing the Iraq war and, currently, a proponent of setting a deadline for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. “Now it is time for us to make it clear to the Iraqis that it is their country, it is their war, and it is their future,” continued Durbin.

Durbin’s not alone. Congressional war opponents have repeatedly, incessantly really, repeated this argument. It’s a variation on Vermont Sen. George Aiken’s famous 40-year-old quip. We should declare victory and get out of Vietnam, Aiken suggested in late 1966.

It’s also good politics. The antiwar Democrats are deathly afraid that the “cut-and-run” label will stick, that they’ll be accused for years to come of having “lost Iraq,” that they’ll forever remain the party that is “weak on defense.” The result is rhetoric meant to absolve the United States of responsibility for what we have wrought.

The same “it’s-all-theirs-now-not-ours” routine was high in the remarks of Washington Sen. Patty Murray in a recent Democratic Party radio address: “Our troops -- who have served bravely under difficult conditions -- have done everything we have asked. As we enter the fifth year, it is time for the Iraqis to step up, secure their own country, and finally take responsibility for their own future.” Right. We’ll just send out a notice to all Iraqis interested in figuring out how to step up, and hope some survive the trip to the meeting.

“We have given to the Iraqi people more than any other nation could ask for,” says Durbin. What nation asks for more than a decade of crippling sanctions -- economic boycotts that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of their citizens, a large portion children under the age of 5? Did the Iraqi people (outside of a few conniving anti-Baathists embraced by the Pentagon and the vice president’s office) ask us to invade their country? To rip apart the fundamental threads -- basic health care, jobs, public safety -- that allowed even a society as twisted and cruel as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to function?

“We have stood behind them ...” Really? In fact, our occupying force’s big boots stand atop the Iraqis.

“We have deposed their dictator ...” Well, he’s right about that one. Then we sponsored a show trial and looked the other way while sectarian forces further inflamed the country with a brutal execution.

“We have given them free governance and a chance at a constitution and free elections.” This contention would be laughable if it weren’t so seriously misguided. The ill-conceived notion espoused by President Bush and his neoconservative advisers that a country racked by decades of war (with Iran and then the U.S.-led forces), by sectarian division, by decades of brutal dictatorship preceded by brutal colonialism, would somehow emerge as a Jeffersonian democracy following an invasion and occupation was a grievous miscalculation. Wishful thinking posing as policy, warped idealism versus reality.

“We have given to the Iraqi people more than any other nation could ask for,” says Durbin. Indeed. One more strange abuse of language in the growing lexicon of Iraq- speak. The rest of the world should be wary of such benefactors.

National Catholic Reporter, April 6, 2007