First, Send Everybody Home
Three hundred-thirteen dead U.S. troops in the last three months and no Iraqi territory gained, none held, none pacified. Target-practice for the insurgents against the surge of American troops, set in motion by Presidential Medal of Freedom winner M. Paul Bremer when he sent everyone home four years ago. In one irresponsible and mistaken move, Bremer destroyed a functioning Iraqi society and opted for chaos.
Three hundred-thirteen dead U.S. troops in the last three months and no Iraqi territory gained, none held, none pacified. Target-practice for the insurgents against the surge of American troops, set in motion by Presidential Medal of Freedom winner M. Paul Bremer when he sent everyone home four years ago. In one irresponsible and mistaken move, Bremer destroyed a functioning Iraqi society and opted for chaos.
Taking the Czech Republic as an example of a more sensitive and sensible transformation (a regime change, if you will) from communism to democracy, there were lessons aplenty and footprints to be followed. Examples from Czech statesmanship might have served M. Paul and his associates, the failed and dishonored Paul Wolfowitz and the failed and dishonored Don Rumsfeld.
The instructor in this case is Vaclav Havel, dissident, writer and first president of the Czech Republic.
Havel knew better than to create and encourage a witch-hunt within Czech society, opting instead to vet and eliminate the worst of the ex-communist offenders and keep the rest in place. Czech society needed someone to run it. Who was that supposed to be, he reasoned, if all the communists were sent home to idleness and trouble-making? So, the country became democratic in name over night and democratic in reality very slowly. It was a learned craft, this self-government and it is still being learned eighteen years after the ‘velvet revolution.’
But Bremer had no patience for that. He wanted a house-cleaning and, not having time or inclination to listen to the lessons of history from tribal-warlord societies, he destroyed the house rather than do the hard work of nation-building.
First, he sent home the army
Then the police
Followed by the bureaucracy
And finally the teachers, street-cleaners, public health officials, garbage-men, tax collectors, managers of industry and ice-cream truck drivers
He transacted this foolishness because the army, police, postal workers, managers of everything that provided civil services to the Iraqi population and the teachers, university professors, city officials and on and on,were—big surprise—somehow connected to the Baath political party. Saddam’s party.
As in Czech society (where to hold any responsible job you had to be a communist party-member) Iraq required at least nominal Baath Party membership to advance in that dictatorial society. Most responsible positions were doled out on that basis. You might not love Saddam, but you went along to get along.
That reality was lost on M. Paul. Ignoring Vaclav Havel and the Czech experience, Germany’s reunification, as well as the transitional governments of Hungary, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland; Bremer simply sent everyone home. He was in a hurry. The boss wanted democracy on the cheap and he wanted it fast.
So, in a country where the middle class was already selling their furniture to eat, he sent everyone who still had a paycheck home to gnaw at a corner of the remaining rug.
And turned the streets over to looters
And the power-grid and all other civil infrastructure to incompetents
And drove the newly poor military (who took home their weapons and knew where all the other explosive goodies were hidden) into an insurgency of survival that soon became an insurgency of national pride and Shiite-Sunni revenge.
Stuff happens. To paraphrase Rumsfeld, it’s not the army you wish you had that you send home, it's the army you have.
So the disaster in Iraq, for which these 313 sons and fathers, daughters and mothers gave their lives in the last 90 days, is not the commonly blamed disaster born of al-Qaeda terrorists.
It is the gradually revealed disaster born of neocon hubris and incompetence, where the perpetrators of one catastrophe after another award themselves medals and hand off blame in whatever way is most convenient.
Vaclav Havel, who shook George Bush’s hand in Prague last month, would easily understand the scenario. He lived under similar incompetence and blame-avoidance for forty years. Until the wheels came off communism. Not so much because it was a failed philosophy (which of course it was) but because it was so thoroughly and inherently incompetent.
The wheels have similarly come off the Bush neocon-inspired administration, not so much because it had a failed philosophy, but because it was (and is) overwhelmingly, stupendously, incomprehensively incompetent.
Small government, low taxes, balanced budgets and democratic principles are laudable goals. Nothing at all wrong with that part of the Bush political philosophy. It’s incompetence that has brought us enormous (as well as unrelentingly bungled) government, record deficits, tax irresponsibility and a near collapse of democratic principal both here and abroad. Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there. The incompetence of this Republican administration is so deep and pervasive that it has prominent Republicans running from it as well.
The only entity that has less public approval (by half) than our president is the Congress. In Washington, it might be good policy to follow what was disastrous policy in Iraq.
Send everybody home.
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