Blame the Iraqis? Oh, surely we wouldn't blame the indigenous population for having failed to step up to the plate and and blast that Freedom baseball right out of the park, scoring a home run for Democracy! After all, Georgy Boy said last week that Iraqis owe America a great debt of gratitude for having delivered them from evil. (TO what, you ask? Please don't ask.) I recently read Frances Fitzgerald's Fire in the Lake, about our great Vietnam adventure. I could hardly believe all the parallels between, not Vietnam and Iraq, but my country's approaches to Vietnam and Iraq. To begin with, through failure to comprehend the initial situation in each country, a vast inflation of the potential danger to mine and even the false creation of a casus belli in each case. Then a near total lack of understanding of the history, culture, political culture, language, religions, and every other important aspect of each country. And in the end, at least in Vietnam, we ended up blaming the Vietnamese, for not having had the ability (or the gratitude?) to make something worthwhile of this wonderful gift of Freedom we had given them, out of the goodness of our hearts, of course. I certainly hope the Iraqis don't end up having dropped the ball like the Vietnamese!
”I'm seeing the phenomenon of blaming the Iraqis for all that is wrong in Iraq, more and more... “
I took a course about family abuse and this is one of the markers of an abusive parent or partner. In interviews these abusive people would blame their kids or their partners over and over again for all the times they physically abused them. Not taking responsibility for their own actions; that is what these people are doing when they blame Iraqis this way.
Shame and guilt and pure anger over loosing your power for admitting being wrong, taking responsibility for it and changing behaviour is not something Bush and all his supporters are willing to do so they blame all others especially Iraqis. The thing is that this says more about them then anything else – its up us to remind them that they are war criminals, they are the ones who started and war based on lies.
Nadia, exactly. It's a very pogniant analogy.
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