U.S. embassy employees in Baghdad live life of fear

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, sent a cable describing the hardships, intimidation, and threats suffered by the Iraqi employees of the U.S. embassy. The cable was leaked to the Washington Post in a pdf file and Randall Parker of ParaPundit has published the entire text. As Parker sums it up:

The happy talk blogs would have you believe that the good news is being ignored by liberal mainstream media. Well, here’s a diplomatic cable from the US embassy that confirms all the worst problems I’ve been posting about. Ethnic cleansing is happening throughout Iraq. People are fleeing the country. Militias rule and the central government has no presence in whole neighborhoods. People live in fear.

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Mr. Parker dropped me a follow-up note:

BTW, the extent of the changes had some surprises for me. Female dress in some areas is even more severe than it was in Iran at its highest theocratic extent. Also, people use different lingo in different neighborhoods depending on the religious faction in control. We sure very thoroughly broke the place.

I replied:

It’s just incredible. I’ve many times called it “the first neoconservative war,” that is, the first war conducted on the explicit basis that all people everywhere want democracy and are “assimilable” into an American-style democratic system, and that this new order would just appear spontaneously by itself so that it wasn’t necessary to maintain order in the country we had conquered. The neocons ignore all historical realities and particularities, all differences among peoples, or say they don’t matter. They also ignore fundamental Hobbesian realities.

And the result is always the same.

Re immigration, we allow people in on the basis that they are the same and can assimilate. When it turns out they are different, America turns into a multicultural society, and the neocons end up going along with that, while still touting the success of assimilation.

Re democratization, we destroy the only existing order in Iraq on the basis that the people there are the same as us and want to create a democracy. When it turns out that they are not the same as us but are different, extremely different, Iraq breaks up into a bunch of warring factions, while the neocons still tout the success of democratization.

An argument could be made that neoconservatism, at least in some respects, ignores reality more systematically and more dangerously than liberalism does.

Mr. Parker continued:

We really need to come up with a better term for the neocons. Their use of the term “conservative” when they are a bunch of radicals does conservatism a great deal of damage.

So what are they? Radical liberal hawks? Right wing liberals? They are ideological. That’s key.

They deny human nature. They want to radically remake the world and think they can reshape societies. They seem to oppose and embrace multiculturalism at the same time.

I replied:

The problem is, in talking about politics, we need to refer to people by the term that is generally used for them and that they use themselves to refer to themselves.

The neocons refer to themselves as “conservatives” or as “neoconservatives.” Many of us on the right regularly put scare quotes around “conservative” when speaking of today’s mainstream and neo-conservatives. At VFR I regularly refer to today’s neo-and mainstream conservatives as “right-liberals,” as compared wth the Democrats, who are left-liberals. I favor this terminology and use it all the time. But if we began exclusively calling the neocons something other than neoconservatives, such as right-liberals or progressive globalists (see my recent post on David Brooks), a central fact about their political ideology would be lost, namely the fact that they themselves call themselves conservatives, and that other people consider them to be conservatives. They are not simply “cold-war liberals,” or “radical liberal hawks.” They are liberals who present themselves as conservatives and are believed to be such. Since that is a central fact about them, and a central fact of modern politics, we must continue to refer to it.

You said: “They seem to oppose and embrace multiculturalism at the same time.”

This is key. It is built into the essence of what they are. The first position leads to the second. They start out denying differences and opposing multiculturalism. But because differences do exist, the ideological denial of differences removes society’s ability to defend itself from actual differences. The result is multiculturalism, and the neocons then adjust to that.

As I said in a comment in a VFR thread in 2004,

In this article Mark Richardson lays out a key distinction between left liberalism and right liberalism, that left liberals believe in mass immigration plus multiculturalism, and right liberals believe in mass immigration plus assimilation. By this criterion, Reagan, and most neocons up to the turn of the present century, were right liberals, while GW Bush, and some neocons today (see Jonathan Kay’s book review in the February 2004 Commentary saying that assimilation is not so important after all, that the old assimilation was harsh and bigoted, and assimilation has been happily redefined in a more inclusive manner) are increasingly manifesting themselves as left liberals.

- end of initial entry -

Ben writes:

I supported this war when it was about WMD and I thought my family’s life was at stake, that was legit to me to go after Saddam for that, but now this “war” has become nothing but a PC nightmare run by men with no knowledge of history, Islam, or how to secure a nation when it is like this. I do not understand how people in the conservative movement can sit up there still blaming the left for their guy’s (Bush) disaster of epic proportions of this occupation.

Bush didn’t have to run a PC war, he could have told the left and the media to drop dead and done what needed to be done and he would have gotten wild applause not only from the U.S. Military but also from the American people and the only people who would have whined would have been the usual far left…so why didn’t he? He’s a Liberal too of course….

Thanks for leading me to Mr. Parker’s blog, I like reading the truth about what is going on in the Iraq war and not fairy tale stories.

LA replies:

You write: “I do not understand how people in the conservative movement can sit up there still blaming the left for their guy’s (Bush) disaster of epic proportions of this occupation.”

Truer words were never spoken. Many pro-Bush “conservatives” take this line. The question to ask them is, “Suppose the left had supported Bush’s Iraq policy. Would the Iraq situation now be going any better? Would the various terror insurgencies not exist? If not, then the problem is not with the left, is it, but with the policy itself.”

Ben replies:

Here would be their comeback as I have heard this before. “If Ted Kennedy/Reid etc. had not kept hammering Bush and Rumsfeld over and over Bush would have taken the handcuffs off of him to do what really needed to be done so it is really the left’s fault for why this war is going bad.”

Like he couldn’t have anyway without the left’s permission. They just refuse to accept the truth that Bush is a liberal too and he agrees with the PC way of fighting a war.

Randall Parker writes:

I saw Ben’s replies and his reference to “the PC way of fighting a war”. Well, it is important to be clear on just what the PC mistakes are here. The first was to expect Iraqis to all act like Jeffersonian democrats eager to create a system of government with equal rights and respect for people with different religious and political views. Bush and Wolfowitz especially subscribed to this naive view of the Iraqis.

But the main problem was never restraint on what our soldiers were allowed to do. Generals such as former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki and Rand Corp. analysts James Quinliven and James Dobbins argued we needed a much larger Army to occupy Iraq. They based this on the number of soldiers needed in other occupations (so-called “peace-keeping operations”—said term has always struck me as a tad Orwellian btw) such as in Bosnia. You will see in the 3rd update to my own post on the diplomatic cable that I link to a previous post of mine where I provide plenty of links to the military and Rand Corp. views on the number of troops needed to handle a place like Iraq.

Before the war Paul Wolfowitz and other Bush figures made it clear that Shinseki should shut up. Acceptance of the higher troop figure would have required taking time and a lot of money to build up a much larger force before invading Iraq. Well, they didn’t want such obstacles in their way.

Even now the Bush Administration does not want to admit that a much larger force is needed because Bush does not want to admit the scale of his error. Plus, the public would balk at the taxes and draft that would be required to address the need. Bush, his allies, and not a few liberals are opposed to both withdrawal and a larger military force. So we are stuck marking time while we wait for the public to learn and to lose patience.

On the bright side: Iraq provides a great on-going demonstration of the falseness of the liberal belief that their political ideology is universal. Mind you, that is one reason why the liberals have been so ineffective in attacking Bush as the war has become increasingly unpopular with the public. The best arguments for why the war is a failure are all arguments for why liberalism is wrong.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 18, 2006 01:40 PM | Send