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 Haider
Hamid was arrested in Baghdad on April 15 by officers wearing Interior
Ministry uniforms, according to Mr. Hamid’s brother, Majid. Majid Hamid
found his brother’s body, above, showing signs of torture, five days
later in the city morgue. He said he received no explanation for what
happened.
Despite promises to eschew nation building, the
Bushistas feel they have found
the recipe
for Democracy:
"Send Lawyers,
Guns and
Money".
How’s
that working out for them? An article on the front page of today’s New
York Times exposes how the massive injection of billions of dollars and
millions
of weapons into Iraq has created an era of "freelance government
violence."
BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 23 – Even in a country beset by murder
and death, the 16th Brigade represented a new frontier.
The brigade, a 1,000-man force set up by Iraq’s Ministry of Defense in
early 2005, was charged with guarding a stretch of oil pipeline that
ran through the southern Baghdad neighborhood of Dawra. Heavily armed
and lightly supervised, some members of the largely Sunni brigade transformed
themselves into a death squad, cooperating with insurgents and executing
government collaborators, Iraqi officials say.
Such is the country that the new Iraqi leaders who took
office Saturday are inheriting. The headlong, American-backed effort
to arm tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and officers, coupled with
a failure to curb a nearly equal number of militia gunmen, has created
a galaxy of armed groups, each with its own loyalty and agenda, which
are accelerating the country’s slide in
from the
New York Times
It started as a simple idea. What the world needs
now, agreed idealists at both ends of the political spectrum, is more
Democracy.
But what the gung-ho gang of giddy neo-cons who tried to act on the idea
didn’t realize is that Democracy is a delicate bloom, which needs to
be nurtured gently over time, adapted to the native soil, protected from
frost and parasites and assorted worms, roaches and other vermin. Land mines, improvised explosive devices, carpet bombing and death squads are not condusive to its growth.
The neo-con cowboys thought Democracy could be exported and imposed,
and if it doesn’t take right away, well astute application of arms, technology,
dollars and good old American know-how can smooth the way. After all,
if the British Empire, even as it ebbed into the sunset, could create
in India the largest Democracy in the world, why then converting our
little Iraqi buddies should be no problem.
They thought that if they threw enough lawyers, guns and money at a country, they could buy a Democracy. But Democracy can’t be bought, and it can’t be imposed at the point of a gun.
In fact, the world today is a very different place than
it was 100 years ago, Iraq is no India, and Nouri al-Malik is no Mahatma
Gandhi. The axiomatic mistake of those who envisioned Iraq as a beacon
of progress and democracy illuminating the entire Middle East was the
believe that any population, oppressed long enough and brutally enough,
will, upon being liberated, embrace Democracy like a drowning man grabbing
an inner tube.
The difference is that India had been oppressed
by an enlightened Democratic Empire, and once freed, desired, in a
sort
of
national Stockholm Syndrome, to emulate that oppressor’s political system.
The
Iraqi’s have spent 30 years being ground under the heels of a series
of despotic sadists bereft of any political philosophy beyond how many
fingers on how many triggers they can put on the street. Naturally, once
the chains and fetters come off, the survivors instinctively grope to emulate,
nay, outdo their oppressors.
99.9% of Iraqis have never spent one hour in a democracy
and wouldn’t recognize one if it dropped out of the sky and flattened
their houses like pancakes. Which, come to think about it, is
pretty much what happened.
Take a country like this, a patchwork of open wounds,
blood feuds, generation-old clan warfare, revenge starved widows and
orphans, violent and unrestrained murderers and torturers, flood it with
easy money and a million automatic weapons, and what do you expect?
Welcome to Iraq. Please send more Lawyers, Guns and
Money.
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