The indispdensible website Watching America has posted an interesting editorial from the Bangkok Post titled “Simplistic view yielding disaster” which attributes the problems in Iraq to President Bush’s perspective.
Here’s a key section:
Bush can’t be blamed for the prejudices and animosity that have been brewing for hundreds of years between religious sects, but he can be blamed for his ignorance of them, and the lack of preparation to head off sectarian tensions after the lightning invasion. His father and his father’s former advisers tried to tell the younger Bush that he was opening a Pandora’s box, but he preferred to listen only to those who assured him he would be hailed as the father of Iraqi democracy. It appears that he is still listening only to those voices.
The irony is that in spite of the fact that the war was begun on false pretences, the picture those voices painted might have become reality if more attention had been paid right from the start to the true democratic principles of inclusiveness and self-determination. Instead the major item on the agenda seems to have been opening up the riches of the country to foreign investors.
When L Paul Bremer took over as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in May of 2003 he issued a series of orders that allowed the US to maintain significant control of Iraq’s government after the transfer of sovereignty, with many of the orders focusing on economic matters. Bremer pushed through laws opening Iraq’s economy to foreign ownership, as well as one which gave US oil companies a virtual free rein in Iraq. Reconstruction efforts, again controlled by foreigners, have been inefficient and corrupt from the start and there has been almost nothing done to correct the situation. This sort of hypocrisy helped to fuel the insurgency just as surely as the history of sectarian tensions. Bush is right in saying there are those in Iraq who hate the idea of democracy taking hold. The question is, why did he play into their hands?
Read it in its entirety.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.