Saturday, March 24, 2007
Betrayal, thy name is Bush
When Our Dear Embattled Leader commenced his Glorious Li'l War in Iraq, many Iraqis, thinking a new day was dawning, offered their services to the conquerors. Of those that are still alive, many have learned to their regret that the US puts no value on anything Iraqi. George Packer, writing in the New Yorker has detailed the misuse of these people and the way they have been discarded like some used McDonalds wrapper.
Millions of Iraqis, spanning the country’s religious and ethnic spectrum, welcomed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But the mostly young men and women who embraced America’s project so enthusiastically that they were prepared to risk their lives for it may constitute Iraq’s smallest minority. I came across them in every city: the young man in Mosul who loved Metallica and signed up to be a translator at a U.S. Army base; the DVD salesman in Najaf whose plans to study medicine were crushed by Baath Party favoritism, and who offered his services to the first American Humvee that entered his city. They had learned English from American movies and music, and from listening secretly to the BBC. Before the war, their only chance at a normal life was to flee the country—a nearly impossible feat. Their future in Saddam’s Iraq was, as the Metallica fan in Mosul put it, “a one-way road leading to nothing.” I thought of them as oddballs, like misunderstood high-school students whose isolation ends when they go off to college. In a similar way, the four years of the war created intense friendships, but they were forged through collective disappointment. The arc from hope to betrayal that traverses the Iraq war is nowhere more vivid than in the lives of these Iraqis. America’s failure to understand, trust, and protect its closest friends in Iraq is a small drama that contains the larger history of defeat.Republicans can take heart from one main difference between Iraq and Vietnam. In Iraq there have been no deep bonds formed between US personnel and the Iraqis. There will be no flood of "our people" relocated to the US when we leave. Most of them will simply end up on a trash heap, bound, tortured and executed.
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