What our freed, democratized, nation-built “allies” in Iraq think of us

While we “have watched, rapt, as Barack Obama deliberated over exactly how many troops to withdraw from Afghanistan,” writes Diana West, “the Iraq of anyone’s lingering ‘surge’ dreams,” the “ally in the war on terror,” has “vanished.”

She goes on to detail how—even while the U.S. has been virtually begging the Iraqis to let the U.S. forces remain longer so as to avoid an embarrassing implosion of that country during the U.S. presidential election campaign next year—the Iraqi leadership has become increasingly open in its hostility toward and rejection of the United States.

Item — A senior Shi’ite cleric has said: “The extended mission of the infidel occupiers in Iraq even for one single day after the mentioned date (as cited in the security agreement) is haram.” “Haram” means against Islam.

Item — When a visiting delegation of six U.S. congressman raised the question of Iraq re-paying the U.S. for its reconstruction expenditures, Iraqi government officials told them to leave the country.

Item — The Iraqi parliament has accused the U.S. of stealing $17 billion from Iraq, and an Iraqi parliamentarian has said: “…the U.S. side did nothing for Iraq. It gave from the right hand and stole from the left.”

Diana concludes:

How rancorous can a country—for whom more than 4,000 Americans died [and how many lost their limbs?]—get?

As recently as 2007, the Bush Iraq Strategy Review predicted Iraq would be “an ally in the war on terror.” In December 2008, Charles Krauthammer saw in Iraq “our best hope for the kind of fundamental political-cultural change in the Arab sphere that alone will bring about the defeat of Islamic extremism.” Last year, John McCain burbled on about an Iraq that “over time will be a beacon, a model to other nations.” …

The dream is over, and what a nightmare—and that includes the demonstrably failed strategic impact of the surge. Bizarrely, the surge still enjoys golden status. After all, Obama not only replicated it in Afghanistan, he tapped its leading practitioner as CIA director.

When do we get to wake up?

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LA writes:

The Iraqi politician who said, after the expenditure of thousands of American lives and limbs and hundreds of billions of American dollars to reconstruct Iraq, that “the U.S. side did nothing for Iraq,” perfectly echoes American blacks who say, after white America has turned itself upside down and spent trillions of dollars in a sixty-year long heroic effort to raise up blacks, that white America has done nothing for blacks. We should not be shocked in either case. No people can maintain its self-respect if it admits that an alien, enemy, oppressor people has helped it in major ways. To Muslims, Americans are infidel enemies. To blacks, whites are oppressors and forever Other. White America could literally destroy itself in trying to “help” Muslims and “help” blacks, and will never get the acknowledgement and gratitude it seeks, because such gratitude would violate human nature.

And why don’t white Americans see this? Because they are liberals. And in the liberal “script” through which liberals understand the world, nonwhites and non-Westerners are not moral actors with their own personalities, desires, and agendas. They are simply the passive, appreciative recipients of the whites’ marvelous benevolence. In the liberal script, only liberals and their agendas and their virtues are real. Non-liberal perspectives and values, such as those held by Muslims and blacks, are not recognized as real. And so white liberals keep expecting a gratitude and an affection from the objects of their benevolence that will never be forthcoming.

James P. writes:

Best of all, when Iraq and Afghanistan implode into America-hating Islamic dictatorships, the Left will blame “conservatives” Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, and Powell for not doing enough and botching the post-war occupation and reconstruction.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 24, 2011 09:56 AM | Send