The Bushites’ cargo cult syndrome

A blogger who calls himself the Liberal Avenger pointed me to an entry of his where he had written something similar to my own catalog of the past eagerly anticipated, joyously celebrated, and then quickly forgotten “turning points” in Iraq. I told him I also liked his line:

When the Iraqi people can hold an election themselves without 170,000 foreign troops on their soil and cell and satellite phone service jammed and all vehicle and air traffic stopped and all borders sealed and with no bombings, assasinations, kidnappings or $300M planes being shot down, then I’ll buy the champagne.

He wrote back to me:

Somebody in the Bush Administration must be a big fan of Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams. Remember that one? “If you build it, they will come?” He bankrupts himself by building a baseball diamond on his farm and magic ghosts come and play baseball, allowing him to reconnect with his late father and attracting thousands from the far corners of the prairie, all of whom are willing to pay to watch these games.

We keep on counting on “field of dreams” solutions to the acute problems at hand in Iraq. Because we’ve done X, everything else will now finally fall into place. The election is but the latest example. Unfortunately, Field of Dreams was a silly movie and the problems in Iraq appear to be far more serious than anybody is willing to seriously acknowledge—on both the left and right.

To which I replied:

Interesting. I never saw “Field of Dreams.” But as a paradigm for understanding the thinking that underlies our Iraq policy, it seems to have some parallels with the famous “cargo cult” of certain South Pacific islanders. The cargo cultists believed that if they created an airport (or the simulacrum of an airport), then planes and with their rich cargo would come, as they had during the war when there were air bases there and huge amounts of war materiél were being flown in. Similarly, the Bushites seem to believe that if America helps the Iraqis hold an election (an election only made possible by the presence of U.S. troops and the massive shutting down of the country to prevent terrorist attacks, as well as massive infusions of other kinds of assistance), then victory over our enemies, the disappearance of the terrorists, a functioning, self-sustaining, pro-Western, democratic government, national unity, equal rights and personal freedom will all result.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 05, 2005 01:00 PM | Send