Iraqis? What Iraqis? (Digby)

[Mass]

Read the whole piece, please. Once again the media do what they do best, ignoring the point of view of the rest of the world.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/iraqis-what-iraqis-gosh-i-wonder-what.html

Marc Lynch has a great piece in Foreign Policy pointing out the odd fact that nobody who's talking about the Iraq anniversary has bothered to ask the Iraqis what they think about it. Interesting, no?

And it's a problem:

Myopia has consequences. Failing to listen to those Iraqi voices meant getting important things badly wrong. Most profoundly, the American filter tends to minimize the human costs and existential realities of military occupation and a brutal, nasty war. The savage civil war caused mass displacement and sectarian slaughter that will be remembered for generations. The U.S. occupation also involved massive abuses and shameful episodes, from torture at Abu Ghraib Prison to a massacre of unarmed Iraqis in the city of Haditha. The moral and ethical imperative to incorporate Iraqi perspectives should be obvious.

The habit of treating Iraqis as objects to be manipulated rather than as fully equal human beings -- with their own identities and interests -- isn't just ethically problematic, it's strategically problematic. It helps to explain why so many American analysts failed to anticipate or to prevent the insurgency, why the political institutions the United States designed proved so dysfunctional, why Washington drew the wrong lessons from the Anbar Awakening and the surge, and why so many analysts exaggerated the likely effects of a military withdrawal.

...

Let's not let a little failure get in the way of a ripping tale of All American know-how. I'm sure we'll be doing the same thing for quite some time. The bipartisan national security consensus says that we may have blundered in the beginning, but we recovered nicely and perfectly executed the dismount. Too bad it's bullshit.

Lynch concludes with this:

Want to understand what went wrong in Iraq in all its complexity and chaos? The Internet is full of Iraqi academics, journalists, NGO leaders, and political activists with interesting perspectives on the invasion. It might also be useful to hear from the refugees, the displaced, and the families who lost everything. They will disagree with each other, have little patience for the pieties of American political debate, and refuse to fit comfortably into analytical boxes. On the 10th anniversary of the invasion, we should be hearing a lot more from them -- and a lot less from the former American officials and pundits who got it wrong the first time.

No kidding.