Oh, Jack Keane. Please stop clowning yourself. Via the Weekly Standard, the former Army vice chief of staff can't believe we're about to abandon our hard-won efforts to midwife Iraqi democracy at the barrel of a gun:
“Forty-four hundred lives lost,” Gen. Keane said. “Tens of thousands of troops wounded. Over a couple hundred thousand Iraqis killed. We liberated 25 million people. There is only one Arab Muslim country that elects its own government, and that is Iraq.
“We should be staying there to strengthen that democracy, to let them get the kind of political gains they need to get and keep the Iranians away from strangling that country. That should be our objective, and we are walking away from that objective.”
Has Keane really not figured out that precisely those democratic aspirations are the reason why the U.S. has to go? Or are Iraqis merely abstract concepts to him, deployed for whatever argument about the war he feels like making?
General Keane, meet the real-keeping Ambassador Chris Hill:
Why the deal didn’t happen had little to do with the so-called immunity issues that the U.S. insisted on, protections that our troops have when deployed to many other far-flung countries in the world. The reason was very simple: even Iraqis who benefitted enormously from the security provided by our troops, and for whom the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was the happiest moment of their lives, could not, in the end, support a continuation of foreign troops in their country. Call it visceral. Call it cultural. The fact is, no one likes to be invaded and occupied, and for eight years, told what to do and how to behave. To extend the stay of even just a few U.S. troops was to extend what many Iraqis, mindful of their country’s history, considered another occupation. In the end, Prime Minister Maliki got very little support from any other Iraqi political identity. The Sunnis opposed the extension. So did the Shia. The Kurds, the third element in Iraq’s body politic, may have supported an extension, but they could not carry the day without the Iraqi Arabs.
Am I mistaken, or is Tunisia a Muslim Arab country that just finished holding a vote for its own election? Admittedly the electoral process is still on going, but it is another notable oversight.
Posted by: Greg Sanders | 10/24/2011 at 08:56 AM
Keane is technically correct on the point of Iraq being uniquely democratic among the overwhelmingly Muslim Arab states. Yes, Tunisia just held a vote, but it was not for a government. It was for a Constitutional Assembly. Yes, Lebanon has elected a lot of governments over the years, but they have a lot of non-Muslim Arabs.
The problem (or, one of them) with Keane's argument is not whether that fact is true or not, it is that he implies that it supports an argument for keeping troops in Iraq. Elections have consequences, and one consequence of Iraq's elections is that their government cannot allow us to stay. One consequence of our elections is that bloodthirsty imperialist warmongers like Keane are not entirely controlling our policies. Elections have GOOD consequences.
Posted by: Bill Cole | 10/24/2011 at 02:00 PM