I assume everyone’s reading Salam Pax, but I’m linking to this post of his anyhow.
The various bodies that have been installed here don’t seem to have much coordination between them. We all need to feel that big sure and confident strides forward are being taken; it is not like this at all. And how about stopping empty pointless gestures and focusing on things that are real problems? Can anyone tell me what the return of children to schools really means? Other than it makes nice 6 o’clock news footage.
Schools have been looted; there are schools that have cluster bombs thrown in them when fedayeen were still there, no one bothered to clean that mess up before issuing the call on [Information Radio] that all students should go back to schools. How about clearing the mess created by the sudden disappearing of the ration distribution centers? How about getting the Hospitals back in shape? How about making it safe to walk in the street?
I mean there are a million more pressing issues for these committees meeting daily than getting children back to unsafe schools.
Yes yes I know. Patience. God needed seven days to finish his work and all that.
Read the entire post here.
The extent to which the Americans running Iraq haven’t even been able to project an image of competence – either here or, apparently, in Iraq – is one of the surprising things about the invasion of Iraq. Why do I keep on expecting the Bush administration to be something other than slipshod? Must be an effect of the Bush publicity machine (the one aspect of this administration that seems well-run).
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, we’re continuing to let things go to hell (or, actually, to the Taliban). I was going to do a whole post on this, but it was too damn depressing; but for folks who are interested, the website of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of RAWA is an excellent resource. Just scroll waaay down (about 2/3rds of the page) to where it says “Recent Reports from Afghanistan,” and read the articles.
Hell, if you don’t want to read the articles, just read the headlines; they form a sort of lousy prose-poem of neglect and horror. Here’s the current top ten headlines from RAWA’s list:
An overview of the situation in Afghanistan after “liberation”
“Climate of fear” rules Afghanistan
UN reports serious rights violations in NW Afghanistan
US Admits 11 Civilians Dead In Bombing Raid On E Afghanistan
Afghanistan: the Taliban’s smiling face
Afghan Police Accused of Rights Abuses
Afghanistan has been well and truly betrayed
Afghan poor sell daughters as brides
Afghan Warlords Killing at Will
Before the war on Iraq, some pro-war liberals were asking why it mattered if the Bush administration’s heart was in the right place; what’s important is that Iraq be “liberated,” not what’s in the hearts of the liberators. But what’s happened in Afghanistan shows that sincerity does count for something. Liberation – if it can be imposed from outside at all – is a long, tedious process, requiring a genuine commitment, not just pretty words. In Afghanistan and now in Iraq, it’s become clear that the United States lacks that commitment.
The U.S. just has no follow-through. But that’s okay, because that’s not the sort of news which American voters will be exposed to much by the media that counts. That kind of stuff is just too depressing. Can we re-run the footage of the statue being pulled down instead?.
Evidently some right-wing bloggers are now speculating that Salam Pax is a Ba’ath party agent. Their evidence seems to consist of the fact that he doesn’t say what they want. Eve Tushnet, who I guess is right-wing (I don’t read her) has a post rejecting this argument.
It’s certainly disappointing that the Bush government seems to find all these issues that have come up to be surprising or somehow inexplicable, but then this is the administration that “forgot” to include their promised money for Afghanistan in their budget.
This seems to be part of what I first noticed during the Reagan administration. He had a lot of people with international business experience in high places in his administation and I figured that even though I dsagreed with their politics, they would at least be competent at working out international agreements, treaties, and the like, especially in the Middle East where Carter had made a terrific start with Egypt and Israel. I was surprised to find they were amazingly incompetent instead.
I thought about this and I think there’s two basic reasons:
1. International business largely consists of dealing with people who think a lot like you on the basic issue (making money) and who can be bribed, either through the promise of business or just plain ol’ bribes. International diplomacy doesn’t work like that, not in making any long term solutions.
2. It’s part of the same idea that anything government does, private enterprise does better; the critical mistake in this idea is the assumption that private enterprise and governments either do work the same ways, or that they should. They don’t, and when you look at what governments do, they can’t. So this leads them to approach dealing with governments like dealing with businesses, and this is virtually always doomed to fail, because the two are not the same, and can’t be. (As just one example, a business can be quite sucessful ignoring huge swaths of the population, in fact that’s often necessary for success as they can concentrate on certain profitable segments. A government that does this will likely fall into troubles.)
Some of the problems we’re seeing in Afghanistan and Iraq are not due to this (any sensible business would certainly have better contigency plans than the Bush administration has been shown to have) but some are: for instance, their idea of the ease of simply bringing in “outside managers”, like Garner or Chalabi.
Here’s another post debunking the “Ba’athist” smear against Salam Pax.
(sheepishly) I should have checked Eve Tushnet first … her post links to the one I posted. As does the other one she links to on the subject.
Umm … carry on. :-)
This brings to mind a few precient old comments from D-Squared (I’ll let you guess what I googled to retrieve these):
Wednesday, February 26, 2003:
…can anyone, particularly the rather more Bush-friendly recent arrivals to the board, give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:
1. It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
2. It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
3. It wasn’t in some important way completely fucked up during the execution.
Wednesday, February 05, 2003
:
…I’ll support regime change in Iraq once we have a regime in Washington that can remotely be trusted not to fuck up the aftermath.
Nice post, Swopa. Is there any lingering doubt that Instapundit is a piece of trash? Sorry, but there it is. If there is any doubt, read Matt Yglesias’s piece called, I think, Going Too Far, on Instapundit’s shocking post about a cinema full of Germans laughing at a Holocaust film (The Pianist), two-line link noting the story is completely bogus, and then more long updates – “for another view” – as to whether all Germans today are Nazis, consisting of unsupported slurs: “Scratch a German and you’ll find a Nazi” is presented as evidence. This is deeply immoral and dishonest writing, and he is using the Holocaust to do it. Shame on him.
QrazyQat I think there’s another problem with having businessmen in charge, which is that these people have spent their lives following the maxim “Kill the competition”, and unsurprisingly try to apply it to international relations, where, equally unsurprisingly, it’s a disaster (eg every single US foreign policy action since Jan 01).
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