When leaders lose faith in the people


George Bush lost faith with the American people.

The Iraq Study Group never had faith in the Iraqi people.
Dean Barnett posts this at Hugh Hewitt's blog.

That’s what makes the situation in Iraq at the moment so intolerable for most of the country. Nearly 3,000 troops have sacrificed their lives there, and yet the nature of the mission for most of the country is opaque. It’s not the sacrifice itself that’s unbearable; it’s the seeming pointlessness of it.

It’s interesting that the sacrifices don’t rankle the members of the military and their families the same way they do the rest of the country. The military understands the ambitious nature of the Iraqi undertaking. But the military is a self-selecting group of our most ambitious and patriotic citizens who believe in America’s greatness with a fervor that the typical citizen doesn’t match. It’s understandable that their perception of the fight would be different from others’.

I think it’s fair to ask, why the gap? And I think it’s fair to point to the White House as the cause. The American people have never shrunk from a challenge when they’ve understood the necessity of taking it on. That too is one of the characteristics of our country’s genetic code. By putting so much emphasis on Iraq while never putting the battle for Iraq in the context of the bigger global struggle that’s afoot, the administration has caused the public to view the Iraq War as an exercise in nation building on behalf of a bunch of people who really don’t want us to build them a nation.

At some point, I think President Bush flinched and lost faith in the American people. I think he thought if he explained the scope of the struggle ahead and the sacrifices that are going to be necessary to prevail, the American people would have blanched and turned to a different leader, perhaps even one as lame as John Kerry.

I think it is dead on. Bush should have kept the faith. And that is terribly ironic if you think about it.

It's also obvious that the Iraq Study Group never had faith in the Iraqi people. Emphasis added.

We offer this roundup not because these Iraqis are infallible on how to move their country forward, and in fact they often disagree. But their reaction exposes the flawed conception of the ISG process, which is that a group of unelected American "wise men" were going to come up with policies that would somehow save Iraq's elected government from itself. "The report has a mentality that we are a colony where they impose their conditions and neglect our independence," the pro-American Talabani said pointedly.

If democracy and representative government are to take root in Iraq, it HAS to be something that the Iraqis do for themselves. The U.S. can offer some breathing space while they get things set up and some advice along the way, but that is all we can do.

That is all we should do.

Doing anything else is just playing the same old power game, using one faction to keep the others in check. That is the behavior that made Islamist terrorism possible. In our rush to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War, we enabled tyranny. We destabilized the Middle East without offering an alternative for freedom.

Now all our choices are bad ones and anything we do is messy and dangerous.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Fri - December 15, 2006 at 05:20 AM  Tag


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