Krauthammer blames it all on the Iraqis

David Seaton's News Links
I'm including this just in case you missed it yesterday. When I read it, it made me so angry and ashamed I nearly threw up. Charles Krauthammer is one of the major nonconservative pundits that led the people of the United States into invading a country whose people had never done anything to harm them. Now, as a result of that invasion the doors of hell have opened and the helpless people of Iraq are being swallowed in a terrible civil war that will surely lead to ethnic cleansing, the displacement of millions of people and probably the death of hundreds of thousands more... that is, if the war doesn't suck in the rest of the region and set the entire Middle East on fire... And now it turns out that the whole thing is the fault of the Iraqis. This miserable creature has the gall to throw a quote of Benjamin Franklin's, "A Republic if you can keep it" in the bloodied and humiliated face of the people of Iraq. I am really tempted to use one of George W. Bush's favorite words to describe Mr. Krauthammer, "evil". I can think of no other. Has he no shame? No pity? no mercy? Or even just enough sense to shut up and not reveal his vileness. DS

Abstract:(...) Are the Arabs intrinsically incapable of democracy, as the "realists" imply? True, there are political, historical, even religious reasons why Arabs are less prepared for democracy than, say, East Asians and Latin Americans who successfully democratized over the past several decades. But the problem here is Iraq's particular political culture, raped and ruined by 30 years of Hussein's totalitarianism.What was left in its wake was a social desert, a dearth of the trust and good will and sheer human capital required for democratic governance. All that was left for the individual Iraqi to attach himself to was the mosque or clan or militia. At this earliest stage of democratic development, Iraqi national consciousness is as yet too weak and the culture of compromise too undeveloped to produce an effective government enjoying broad allegiance. (...) s this America's fault? No. It is a result of Iraq's first democratic election. The United States was not going to replace Saddam Hussein with another tyrant. We were trying to plant democracy in the heart of the Middle East as the one conceivable antidote to extremism and terror -- and, in a country that is nearly two-thirds Shiite, that inevitably meant Shiite domination. It was never certain whether the long-oppressed Shiites would have enough sense of nation and sense of compromise to govern rather than rule. The answer is now clear: United in a dominating coalition, they do not. READ IT ALL (if you have a strong stomach)