The more I re-read and thought about the President’s speech, the more worried I got.
It is one part of the fundamental American creed that any person can be made into an American. With some basic exclusions — “any person” should not be a drug addict, an ax murderer, a committed Marxist-Leninist, or a suicide bomber — this is true. It’s only true at the individual level, which is the level at which we do most of our thinking — we are individualists.
Ship, say, 300 million Chinese peasants to the USA, and the nation would be radically transformed… but so far I have heard of no plans by the Bush administration to do that.
It does not, however, follow that every nation can be made into America.
Yet this seems to be what the President believes, unless (which I don’t think is the case) he is an extraordinarily good actor. George W. Bush has completely internalized the multi-culti creed: Not only are all human beings broadly the same (true), but all human societies are broadly the same (false), or can be made so by spending some money and shipping in some management consultants and systems analysts (false, false, false).
Here are some extracts from an article on the current state of the Iraqi armed forces, from the 6/18/05 issue of The Economist, a magazine that has been supportive of the Iraq effort (though with qualifications).
“BAHRO TAHIR is not the brightest soldier in Iraq’s new army. Last week, at an American-assisted military academy in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s home town, he began basic training for the fourth time. It was not that he wanted to spend another month studying tedious human-rights law and drilling under a blistering sun; Mr Tahir did not want to do that at all. Rather, according to the academy’s Iraqi instructors, Iraqi army commanders tend to send to basic training only those too friendless or dim to wriggle out of it, which included Mr Tahir. ‘They said they were sending me here for a computer course,’ he lamented, to the amusement of the recruits within ear-shot, except for another basic-training veteran, who turned out to be deaf.
“The instructors had more pressing concerns than the quality of their recruits. Two months ago, Iraq’s Ministry of Defence took over the job of paying its employees, up to then paid by America, and since then they had not seen a cent. Language is also a problem, with half the recruits speaking Arabic and the others Kurdish, and few instructors knowing both. Perhaps the worst problem is the quality of leadership. The Iraqi colonel nominally in charge of the academy tried to employ his relatives, said his American supervisors, including one who was subsequently arrested in murky circumstances. He would not have been the first insurgent to practise on the academy’s range: after the fighting in Fallujah, last November, American marines found the academy’s badges on enemy corpses. Asked to estimate how many of the academy’s students were motivated by a desire to help their country, Major Donald McArdle, the American in charge, reckoned 5%; his colleagues thought this too high.
“In recent weeks, ISF units have taken charge of small areas of Baghdad and Mosul. By the end of this year, when elections are due to be held under a new constitution, they are supposed to number 230,000, and to be operating in divisions. America would withdraw, or so officials say, some troops early next year. That is a pipedream. Corrupt, patchily trained and equipped, often abysmally led and devoid of confidence, most army units cannot operate above platoon-size. Between Iraqis and Americans there is deep mistrust:
Iraqi units billeted on American bases are fenced off from their hosts as a security measure.
“For every vaunted ISF success, examples of cowardice and incompetence abound. Even when stiffened by American forces, the ISF often flee when under attack. Iraqi marksmen have a habit of closing their eyes and spraying bullets in ‘death-blossoms’, in GI slang. Some of the better units, including the 12-battalion, mostly Shia, police commandos, are accused of torture and sectarian violence…”
And so on. Question for discussion: Of these two versions of current Iraqi affairs — The Economist report, and the President’s speech — which, in your opinion, agrees more closely with the classic accounts of Arab society
– David Pryce-Jones, Bernard Lewis, Shelomo Dov Goitein? You know, the Arab culture of shame and honor, family and clan, “money-favoring” and “power-challenging,” Islamic piety and loyalty to “the Arab nation”?
Asked to give a prescription for winning wars, the late Moshe Dayan said:
“Fight Arabs.” Unfortunately, he did not tell us how to fight Arabs with Arabs.