Blindness and Fixing Other People's Messes

While reading the news Monday, I learned of the scheduled departure of six of Moqtada al-Sadr's men from their posts as ministers in Iraq's government. My initial reaction was positive; in my admittedly naive analysis, there's not much downside to sectarian theocrats vacating ministerial posts which Prime Minister al-Maliki, if he is wise, will fill with relatively independent technocrats.

Imagine my surprise, then, to see Juan Cole on PBS's NewsHour that evening, arguing that such a move would be undesirable because ministries are "sources of patronage" and "ways of rewarding allies". The implication seemed to be that any move toward professional, rather than confessional, government in Iraq would be a net negative and would threaten the stability of the parliament. The sentiment seems to have some currency in the lefty blogosphere.

Of course parliamentary government is a tricky and often unpredictable thing, even in countries which aren't in the throes of violent tribal and religious conflicts. But is there really no advantage whatsoever to the departure from a putative unity government of six highly-placed men who are blindly loyal to the leader of an armed and violent religious faction? As limited as my knowledge of Iraqi politics is, I find that difficult to believe.

As a die-hard secular liberal, I can't imagine that I'd greet the departure from our goverment of any of Pat Robertson's creatures with anything other than relief and a desire to see more of the same. If you think, as I do, that the use of religion as an instrument of state power (or vice versa) is corrosive both to religion and to the fabric of liberal democratic society, then you have to think it no matter what country we're talking about, and whether or not you believe the obvious truth that George Bush's Iraq policy is an almost complete failure.

Mr. Cole's reading of this event suggests of a kind of moral blindness; it's almost as if, having objected to the invasion of Iraq, he averts his eyes from the possibility of real progress there while a single pair of American boots remains on its soil. The best that can be said about this is that perhaps it's an attempt at consistency. But in the face of religious extremists, death squads, and violent Baathists nostalgic for the days of minority rule and state terror, it's a
foolish consistency -- and we know what Emerson had to say about that.

The emerging consensus between left and right in this country on Iraq --
namely that, having ignited a civil war there, we should leave and let the combatants slug it out -- suggests a more problematic lack of vision. We on the left seem to think that reversing the disastrous decision to enter the country as we did will automatically reverse the disaster that has ensued; and many on the right seem to think that, those ungrateful Iraqis having squandered our good will and not instantly shaped themselves into a stable Jeffersonian democracy, we should wash our hands of the whole affair. (You can almost hear the peevish subtext in the conservative blogosphere: We threw a perfectly good war, and these people ruined it.)

In the debate on whether or not to invade Iraq, I came down against it; I thought that, even assuming you agreed with the stated reasons for going to war, there were simply more effective methods than war for addressing them. But it seems obvious to me that irrespective of how we got into Iraq, there are objectives worth fighting for in that country now -- objectives which ought to be shared by anyone who truly believes in liberal democracy -- and there is at least an argument to be made for not ceding the ground to theocrats and death squads. That argument can and should transcend every well-deserved criticism -- and there are many -- of the Bush administration's policies and decisionmaking, if only because the people who live in Iraq and have chosen to stay will be there long after the Bush administration is a bad memory.

It's simply not good enough to look at the disaster that has been Bush's foreign policy and think "we're better than this"; if we really are, then we must be up to the task of trying to repair at least some of the damage. This will be painful and difficult, and it will cost more lives. Averting our eyes will be much less painful and difficult, and it will also cost more lives. The engineered calamity that is Iraq makes any small victory more precious, not less so; and the absence of any good options there doesn't absolve us of the responsibility to think seriously about what should happen next.