CT Blue

As any faithful reader can tell you, I’ve been a Joe Courtney supporter since the day after the 2004 election. However, no one is perfect, and I must take issue with Joe’s current take on the Iraq war, or more specifically, on the current state of affairs in Iraq.

According to the Day (Courtney Blasts Iraq’s ‘Failure’ To Pull Its Weight), Courtney had this to say after his recent trip to Baghdad:

Courtney said the weekend visit deepened his resolve to see an end to U.S. involvement in the country’s civil war and did little to ease his growing frustration with the Iraqi government’s handling of the increasing strife in the country.

“All the effort that the U.S. troops are putting in … is undermined by the failure of the Iraqi political leadership to get to the bottom of very basic issues dividing the two sides in a civil war,” Courtney said in a telephone interview from the Middle East Tuesday afternoon.

There’s more, for instance:

“The prognosis in terms of the political movement within the Iraqi parliament was frankly pretty distressing to me and to some of the other members,” he said. “There is just a limit to how much the military can accomplish when there is still fundamental tension between Sunni and Shiite.”

There’s a particularly good treatment of this tendency here, (a site with a Middle Eastern outlook).

It’s hard to come up with an analogy. You could compare this to a situation where a person burns down another’s house, and then blames the victim for failing to rebuild, but the analogy breaks down given that at least the poor homeowner can go about his rebuilding in peace. How do you extend the analogy to make it fit better? Add in that the perpetrator has created conditions that allow outsiders to destroy every rebuilding attempt? How about positing joint homeowners, who have hated each other for years and whose uneasy coexistence was destroyed in the fire?

The last factor is one that we Americans can’t seem to grasp. We demand that Sunnis and Shiites become one in a happy democracy. A laudable goal, but setting aside a thousand years of conflict along with adopting a form of government foreign to a thousand years of tradition, in the middle of a conflagration, is not something that we can expect to happen on demand. We just don’t seem to understand history. We have a tough time with our own, and have no use for anyone else’s.

I’m sure Joe understands all this. To be fair, his statements were more measured than the headlines imply. It’s still a bad line to take.

I can understand why politicians find the blame the victim strategy attractive. It’s a way to shift the blame from themselves; it’s a way to justify withdrawal without admitting failure; and it’s a way to ingratiate one’s self with the voters, by assuring them that it’s not their fault, either, for having allowed themselves to be led into (and initially cheer) this disastrous war. But it’s a fundamentally dishonest way of looking at things, and if this war has taught us anything, it’s that acting, or even pretending to act, on the basis of fundamentally dishonest premises is not a good idea.