After abject failure in Iraq the post-Petraeus debate has now shifted to blaming the victims. Not only were they ungrateful at being attacked by the US and Britain (and having 750,000 of their kind killed), now those pesky Arabs have the gall to start a civil war.
The front page of the New York Times lamented how the poor little Iraqis were getting in a twist about oil because of sectarian arguments, and this was – oh, please, no - making the Bush administration look bad. They wanted it as one of the ‘benchmarks … as a sign that they are making headway toward creating an effective government.’ But the Iraqis are too pugnacious to do what we want.
And, of course, there was a op-ed a few pages later to buttress this conception by Roger Cohen who noted that Iraq has:
… the drawback of tending toward [its] self-destruction in the absence of a strongman to resolve contradiction through force.
What Cohen deigns to forget is that Proconsul Paul Bremer decided to disband the whole security forces infrastructure after the invasion, putting thousands of people out of work and causing untold amount of confusion and anger. Thomas Ricks’s work Fiasco documents this extensively.
In fact, in the aftermath of the invasion there was much less violence, it was the cack-handed work of Bremer and his superiors that created the carnage since.
But this is all too close to home. This makes the warmongers look too incompetent and sadistic. So now it is the Iraqis fault that they were attacked and bombed to smithereens. Stupid, aren’t they?
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