Iraq course bound to end badly [View All]

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.suntimes.com/output/greeley/cst-edt-greel19.html

Every time our smirking, swaggering, stubborn, dishonest president promises "to stay the course" in Iraq I feel sick, especially when, dressed in a sport shirt and standing comfortably under the blue Texas sky, he comments on the deaths in Iraq. Young men and women are dying, being maimed, suffering psychological trauma which will haunt them for the rest of their lives. All the president can do is mouth cliches.

What does "stay the course" mean? At one time it meant "regime change." Then it came to mean "weapons of mass destruction," then it meant "war on terror." Now apparently it means an Iraq that is "democratic and free." Even for someone of the president's limited knowledge of history, that is nonsense. How many Arab countries are currently both free and democratic -- from Mauritania to Saudi Arabia? Not a one. Does that not suggest that it would be impossible for the United States to impose on Arab culture what we mean by freedom and democracy? In fact, how many Muslim countries can boast of Western-style civil society and democracy? Turkey, maybe, at least up to a point. Iran? Pakistan? Bangladesh? Indonesia? Does that suggest that in its present form Islamic culture is not conducive to what we mean by democracy?

Have Karl Rove and Condoleezza Rice told that to the president?

In Iraq even as the president babbles about "staying the course," the Shiite majority is struggling to create an Islamic republic on the Iranian model, more moderate, perhaps, but still a theocratic state in which the mullahs have supreme power -- and women have almost no rights at all. Indeed "staying the course" seems to mean fighting Iran's war against Iraq with Chinese money (which pays for the part of the national debt the war is piling up through the purchase of American treasury notes).