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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
As violence erupts across Iraq, conservatives wonder if Iraqis are expressing their "natural" barbarity, whether AP conspired with killers to publicize grisly Fallujah photos, and if the U.S. shouldn't simply "nuke the Sunni Triangle."
Apr 7, 2004 | The grisly public murder of four American civilian military contractors in Fallujah last Wednesday, with its inevitable comparison to the slaughter of American soldiers in the streets of Mogadishu in 1993, has sparked hot debate among conservatives about the nature of the insurgency against the U.S. occupation -- and how the United States should respond. Many on the right have called for a display of U.S. military might, while others caution that a large-scale retaliation could advance the strategic goals of the terrorists who planned and flaunted the vicious murders.
"You say Fallujah, I say Rambo!" blared USA Today contributor and syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, whose biweekly commentary appears on the right-wing clearinghouse Townhall.com. A staunch campaigner for family values, Parker offered up her own clan's consensus on how to deal with the latest Iraqi violence.
"I suppose it would be considered lacking in nuance to nuke the Sunni Triangle.
"But so goes the unanimous vote around my household -- and I'm betting millions of others -- in the aftermath of what forevermore will be remembered simply as 'Fallujah.'
"Wouldn't it be lovely were justice so available and so simple? If we were but creatures like those zoo animals we witnessed gleefully jumping up and down after stomping, dragging, dismembering and hanging the charred remains of American civilians whose only crime was to try to help them."
Once she gets that off her chest, Parker argues that the United States must stay the course in Iraq, and she does offer one notable bit of prescience:
"It is hard at such times to keep one's head, to remain calm, to rise above the impulse to exact immediate revenge. Or to cut and run, as we did under similar circumstances in Somalia not so long ago. But keep our heads we must. Calmly we must transcend the primitive lust that compels ignorant others to mug idiotically for cameras.
"Our revenge will be in facing down enemies who, though unworthy adversaries, impede the worthy goal of stabilizing a country whose future may predict our own."
National Review contributor Jed Babbin offers a more nuanced discussion of the rising threat to stability in Iraq. He says it's good that the United States is "finally taking action -- after months of diplo-dithering -- to drain the Sunni Triangle swamp." But the Bush administration's delay in doing so, he says, now has grave consequences for the rush to hand over power to a new Iraqi government.
"Because we haven't destroyed the terrorist networks in the Sunni Triangle and elsewhere, it is almost impossible to see how we can turn Iraqi sovereignty over on the schedule we so foolishly announced. The president unwisely reaffirmed his commitment to the June 30 date Monday. Of the many lessons Vietnam taught us -- or should have -- one of the most important is that if you establish a schedule, it's not just yours: It's the enemy's as well ... The enemy is preparing the battlefield for their fight against any democratic Iraqi government. We must also prepare the battlefield to ensure that when a new government is ready, it can function with authority and credibility."
Interestingly, Babbin says that part of the failure to quell the insurgency and stabilize the country results from the Coalition Provisional Authority's use of the very type of American civilian security guards who were murdered last week:
"The Fallujah incident illustrates all too vividly the difference between what we have been doing and what we should have been doing. I've gotten an earful about Fallujah from the spec-ops community. The problem, they say, is not only with the mullahs and terrorists there. It is also with some of the "PMCs" -- private military companies -- we have hired to support the Coalition.
"Under contract with the CIA, these men are tasked with protecting dignitaries, making sure that Coalition installations are safe from terrorist attacks, and performing any other mission the 'customer' imposes. Most of these men are former Navy SEALs, Army special forces, Marine Recon, or Air Force PJs. When they join the civilian companies, they have the skills they need to seize ships, rescue hostages, and the other things the spec-ops guys do so well. But, as one of the former operators who worked for a PMC in Afghanistan told me, their skill sets and trained mental attitude aren't what's needed on the streets of Iraq.
"One man I spoke to was sent to Afghanistan with hardly any training. The PMC planned a patently inadequate three days of preparation to test basic skills and make an operator ready for the Afghan streets. There was apparently no training in small-unit tactics designed to create cohesion among the operators. This operator told me that the pressure to get men in the field overcame the contractor's already too-low training standards, and people were sent out long before they were ready."
A battle for (inferior) hearts and minds
Victor Hanson, a senior fellow at the right-wing think tank Hoover Institution, asserts that the insurgency draws foremost from the "natural" barbarity of the Iraqis -- and the rest of the "pathological" Arab world, for that matter.
"Are the citizens of Fallujah the victims of Saddam, or did folk like this find their natural identity expressed in Saddam? Postcolonial theory and victimology argue that European colonialism, Zionism, and petrodollars wrecked the Middle East. But to believe that one must see India in shambles, Latin America under blanket autocracy, and an array of suicide bombers pouring out of Mexico or Nigeria."
Hanson accuses Arabs of rejecting modernism itself, but then says they crave it, too:
"The enemy of the Middle East is not the West so much as modernism itself and the humiliation that accrues when millions themselves are nursed by fantasies, hypocrisies, and conspiracies to explain their own failures...
"When one adds to this depressing calculus that for all the protestations of Arab nationalism, Islamic purity and superiority, and whining about a decadent West, the entire region is infected with a burning desire for things Western -- from cell phones and computers to videos and dialysis, you have all the ingredients for utter disaster and chaos."
That formula for chaos, Hanson claims, also springs from Arab laziness and ingratitude.
"How after all in polite conversation can you explain to an Arab intellectual that the GDP of Jordan or Morocco has something to do with an array of men in the early afternoon stuffed into coffee shops spinning conspiracy tales, drinking coffee, and playing board games while Japanese, Germans, Chinese, and American women and men are into their sixth hour on the job?...
"I support the bold efforts of the United States to make a start in cleaning up this mess, in hopes that a Fallujah might one day exorcize its demons. But in the meantime, we should have no illusions about the enormity of our task, where every positive effort will be met with violence, fury, hypocrisy, and ingratitude.
"If we are to try to bring some good to the Middle East, then we must first have the intellectual courage to confess that for the most part the pathologies embedded there are not merely the work of corrupt leaders but often the very people who put them in place and allowed them to continue their ruin.
"So the question remains did Saddam create Fallujah or Fallujah Saddam?"
