The fact that the Washington Post has Robert Kagan as a columnist demonstrates its immense superiority over the New York Times (not that either can hold a candle to the Washington Times or the great New York Post, but I digress). Kagan’s Sunday column took dead aim at one of the fallacies growing like a cancer in the American political right: that the problems in Iraq are all the Iraqis’ fault.
First, Kagan explains why this excuse (and that’s exactly what it is) holds so much power:
For Republican elected officials looking desperately for a way out of supporting a war that threatens their reelection, this has become not only the preferred excuse but also a necessary psychological crutch.
For these Republicans, even more than for Democrats, blaming the Iraqis solves a number of big problems. It absolves them of having supported the war in the first place. We were right to go to war, they will say, and we gave it our best shot. It isn’t our fault if the Iraqis were unable or unwilling to do their part.
Blaming the Iraqis also allows Republicans to acquiesce in defeat without having to acknowledge that it is an American defeat. We didn’t fail, the Iraqis did. And blaming the Iraqis clears the American conscience. We got rid of Saddam Hussein, Republicans will say. The rest was up to them, and they failed. The more sophisticated will declare that the Iraqis were culturally destined to fail.
A few paragraphs later, Kagan starts to take the excuse apart (link in original):
The fact is that, contrary to so many predictions, Iraq has not descended into civil war. Political bargaining continues. Signs of life are returning to Baghdad and elsewhere. Many Sunnis are fighting al-Qaeda terrorist groups, not their Shiite neighbors. And sectarian violence is down by about 50 percent since December.
Then Kagan detonates the excuse with this salient fact (link in original, emphasis added): “According to Gen. David Petraeus, upward of 80 percent of the suicide bombers are not Iraqis.”
So, in addition to the “civil war combatants” not actually fighting one another, and the fact that both “sides” are in fact supported and funded by the Iranian mullahcracy, we now know that the overwhelming majority of the terrorists involved are foreigners.
This is a civil war? It looks at lot more like a slow-motion invasion to me.
