| What comes through even more clearly is the imposition of alien benchmarks on the Iraqi society and its faltering government. These benchmarks are not an effort to assist Iraq recover from the disaster of the American invasion and occupation, they are an effort to impose Western, if not American, values and methods on a society that has been resisting them, mostly violently, for the last four years. Perhaps even more to the point, the benchmarks have every appearance of an effort to make American politicians, not Iraqi citizens, feel better about themselves. An oil law to assist non-Iraqi oil companies extract resources, Western notions of constitutional law and minority rights, federalism - if not regionalism leading to virtual partition - and ending forthwith centuries old divisions in the society are just some of the end states the benchmarks seek to effect. |
The rhetoric of that paragraph begs one to turn it around and speculate that what the wretched invasionized indigs really need at this juncture is Oriental values and methods that would make them feel better about themselves by cherishing, rather than terminating, centuries-old divisions.
Au moins il est différent! [1]
Unfortunately, such an eccentric position needs more exposition than it gets. Instead of developing it, however, the alien scribbler immediately does pretty well the last thing one would expect, he instantly forgets all about our neo-Iraqi subjects and starts going on about ourselves:
| Moreover, the politicians in the White House and Congress pushing the benchmarks are probably thankful these tests are not being imposed on them, if the thought of oversight of themselves were ever to occur to them. For example - --Benchmark X seeks to permit Iraqi military commanders "to make tactical and operational decisions ... without political intervention ..." That would have been an excellent suggestion for former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and several others during the run up to the initial American invasion and for the political wrangling going on this very week in Congress from both sides of the political aisle. --The discussion in the White House report on benchmark XI ("Ensuring that Iraqi Security Forces are providing even-handed enforcement of the law") complains that, "There have been inadequate efforts to detain some senior ... officials believed responsible for human rights abuses...." The hypocrisy of this "benchmark" pains the core of every decent American's soul. --Benchmark VI calls on Iraqis to enact amnesty legislation, something that was a long time in coming after the American Civil War and that today's anti-immigration activists scream against from the rooftops; it bespeaks a frame of mind that many Republicans and Democrats in Congress never fail to reject as they pretend to lament the absence of bipartisanship. |
Ordinarily any attempt at application of the Goose-and-Gander Principle enlists my sympathies, but in this particular case, not so fast! Does the Dr. Gen. really consider
(1) that chickenhawk control of the military is a mistake?
(2) that, once let off that leash, the violence pros are to run about arresting chickenhawks for "human rights abuses"?
(3) that there is more than a verbal connection between "amnesty" for wetbacks and for Sunni shootists?
The last item is outstandingly perverse in its selection of gooses and ganders. Strict parallelism would suggest, surely, that it is the Crawfordites who need to be let off the hook for illegal entry into somebody else's country? [2]
Perhaps none of these suggestions is completely insane, but like the implied basic therapy for "Iraq," they are so far out of the beaten path that they can hardly be PowerPointed at us as if they were easy and obvious and require no special explaining and defending.
The third bullet was a twofer, and it does rather commend itself to theorize that nobody on Capitol Hill really relishes bipartisanship. Yesterday's vote in the lower chamber suggests something of the sort,
| [T]he Democratic-controlled House responded by voting almost totally along party lines to require that the United States withdraw most combat troops from Iraq by April 1. The 223-to-201 House vote, in which just four Republicans broke with their party, came as the White House continued its intense effort to stem a growing tide of Republican defections on the war. |
There may even be a not-so-far-fetched application to the happy Land of Peace and Freedom, although to be fair, one should probably recognize that forty-three-partisanship in the Green Zone must be somewhat trickier than anything merely bi-.
Finally,
| Are the benchmarks an honest and soundly based effort to assist Iraqi society and government? Or, are they an excuse-in-waiting for American politicians to exploit when they try to explain away the failure of a half decade of misbegotten policy, more than half a trillion dollars, and 3,600-plus American military lives[?] Bush's new "Initial Benchmark Assessment Report" is an interesting document, but it should be read to understand American political maneuvering with respect to the war, rather than a measure of "progress" in Iraq. |
The crowning oddness: he tells us how to read the Benchmark Baloney document and goes away, neither having read it that way himself nor offering to help us do so. (Mars must be a funny place!)
At Slogger City, the point of disseminating this exotic curio must more or less be to indicate that the natives don't enjoy being benchmarked. There is also another piece to the same effect by another writer with a distincly non-indig sounding name, "Ambassador Chas Freeman." He writes rather more sensibly , but also before the Big Party baloney was actually put on sale. Here's a sample:
| Meanwhile, our use of force is not seen by many Iraqis as legitimate and the more we use our military power the more we delegitimize it. The more the current Iraqi regime is seen to depend on our military power, the less legitimacy and authority it enjoys. We cannot transfer the authority we do not have to a regime that lacks both the power and the authority to receive it. |
The Pol. Sci. is open to question a little, perhaps, for "legitimacy" can be a slippery word. [3] It is difficult to imagine any recommendation on the militant GOP's occupation policy other than Irresponsible Withdrawal coming from that quarter. [4] Still, Amb. Chas. doesn't actually say so, and perhaps one shouldn't attempt to read his mind. There's no rush, after all, now that Little Brother has made perfectly plain that nothin' will be changin' as long as He can help it.
___
[1] The Visserian-Badgerian junta won't find it different at all, to be sure, and especially not that ever-abominable sting in the tail end. In VB-land (just northwest of Cloudcuckooland) everybody knows that "sectarianism" and "divisions" were imported into Mesopotamia only on Republican Party bayonets, being previously entirely unheard of in those parts.
It would be tidier if all self-appointed spokesmen for restless natives agreed straight down the line, but evidently they do not: the VB's have a sweet tooth for "constitutional law and minority rights" as well as a stern contempt of "centuries old divisions." Their extreme schizophobia is perfectly compatible with Dr. Gen. Wheeler's, no doubt, but since none of the other paleface impositionists are seriously working to rip the lovely folkloric tapesty of "Iraq" to shreds, the point does not loom very large at the moment.
[2] Also, he omits the broader parallel in which one sovereign, independent, democratic and constitutional State gets to benchmarkize and impose upon another nominal ditto as much as it likes, while turning the asymmetry around would seem as unnatural as water flowing uphill. On the other hand, since Dr. Gen. Wheeler appears to be a Huntin'tonian Clashist,™ the sort of neo-ideologue who hypothesizes a radical incommensurality between THEM and us, perhaps he did well enough to leave all that alone.
Still, if operating inside the Clashist framework, should he have permitted himself the lesser goose-and-ganderisms either? Has he actually checked to make sure that "Turn-about is fair play" and "How would you like it if I did that to you?" are not mere parochial and provincial maxims, "Western, if not American, values and methods"? Perhaps he himself knows exactly where West stops and East begins, but he has not told us where the border is and I don't see how we can reasonably be expected to guess his views.
[3] Here again, somebody ought to call up Mr. Huntington of Harvard and verify that "legitimacy" is a catholic value and method rather than some petty parochial Occidentalism.
[4] The policy implications of Dr. Gen. Winslow Wheeler are none too clear. He could be an Irresponsible Withdrawalist, "the failure of a half decade of misbegotten policy" &c. &c. points in that direction. Maybe. But he might also be a sort of disciple of Neocomrade Dr. D. Pipesovitch, who considers that withdrawal could be responsible if a "pro-democracy strongman" is switched on when the extremist GOP finally goes out the door. WW would probably demand rather less pro-democracy than DP, perhaps it would suffice if Saddam Redux merely agrees that democracy is a very fine thing for Westerners, even Americans, but unfortunately . . . .
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