Wasn’t me

Before the 2003 Iraq war–the one that’s still going on now–some argued (Here’s Molly Ivins–may she rest in peace–from 2003) that removing Saddam might lead to ethnic bloodletting on a massive scale (1991 Dick Cheney among them). How things change when the foot’s on the other shoe:

>Of all the accounts of the current situation, this is by far the most stupid. And the most pernicious. Did Britain “give” India the Hindu-Muslim war of 1947-48 that killed a million souls and ethnically cleansed 12 million more? The Jewish-Arab wars in Palestine? The tribal wars of post-colonial Uganda?

>We gave them a civil war? Why? Because we failed to prevent it? Do the police in America have on their hands the blood of the 16,000 murders they failed to prevent last year?

That’s not the accusation. The claim is we knew or should have known a civil war was the likely consequence of our willful ignorance of the realities of Iraqi political and ethnic realities and our Rumsfeldian strategy for giving them a free society–where people are free to live life and make mistakes. Knowing that such violence and bloodshed and chaos and destablization of the whole region was the likely consequence of our action, and doing it anyone, makes us morally responsible. Do we pull every trigger and cut off every head and blow up every Mosque? Nope. But that hardly means we’re not responsible for that happening.

2 thoughts on “Wasn’t me”

  1. Another gem from that Krauthammer article. On the pre-invasion roots of the violence, and on America and her apparent lack of any obligation in the results of her actions:

    When “Shiites kill Shiites and Sunnis kill all in a spasm of violence that […] has roots in hatreds born long before America was even a republic, to place the blame on [the one country] that has done more than any other to try to separate the combatants and bring conciliation is simply perverse.”

    So then, to pick up where Powell left off with the Pottery Barn analogy… the next time you see a customer scrambling to sweep some broken glass under the rug, let’s not blame them for breaking the overpriced trinket, but commend them for “doing more than any other to bring conciliation.” The real blame, clearly, lies with the object itself, for being made of glass in the first place.

  2. It is the one excuse left of those whose ideology of righteous aggression got us into this war…. it is their fault.

    We shall hear this refrain from now on… the Iraqis are to blame for all that has gone bad.

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