U.S. criticizes unjustly

The American occupation of, war with and involvement in Iraq is a disaster created as much by… The American occupation of, war with and involvement in Iraq is a disaster created as much by American ideology as by Iraq’s problems. On Monday, the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, hung the responsibility for resolution of the situation solely on the neck of Iraq. According to a Feb. 20 Associated Press story titled, “U.S. envoy warns Iraq over sectarian govt,” the Ambassador points to the ethnic and sect-related strife the way a father might point to the puddle his son’s puppy just made.

Clean it up. Get him to stop doing it, and I’ll be able to stop yelling at you every night.

While, abstractly speaking, it’d be a solution, the Iraqis face a hellhound, a beast that bites the moment it’s admonished. In America we’ve tried to legislate away such nightmares. The Constitution and its Amendments stand as guardians against all the fears bred by history.

Still, America finds itself trapped in a nation that never escaped its own history long enough even to decide what to guard against, much less how best to do it. Iraq’s struggle is not utterly alien to us. Worse than if it was, we experience that same weakness in human nature daily, but in a toothless fashion. The depths of foreign ferocity seem unimaginable next to our muted reactions, but we too allow ourselves to be divided. Where our minorities are discontent and disillusioned, theirs are incendiary and destructive.

How easily we divide ourselves by the smallest of things: music categories, music sub-categories, specific bands, specific movies, styles of dress and gaming platform preferences.

These more shallow distinctions change easily and frequently. Others develop unconsciously and become habit or are learned from tradition. From favorite sports teams to most hated accents, we’re trapped in a culture and a nation that divides itself by the oddest of criteria. Still, beneath all that, the classic divisions of wealth, gender, race and religion remain.

On occasion we’ve managed to truly dissolve such differences and form genuine communities. All too often, however, all we manage is a thin veneer of tolerance.

As a nation, as citizens, we’ve combined all of these differences that dictate our day-to-day interactions into two political groups. Our tolerance disappears. Our communities become war camps. We’re unable to move beyond the assumptions that limit our ability to change the status quo.

Primary among those debilitating assumptions: We’re free. Utterly, triumphantly free. Free enough to invade other countries believing our freedom contagious. Though for all that, we’re still bound to a political system dominated by two parties that must contain millions of members’ ideals. We too are bound by sects. Our minorities are simply so apathetic that we don’t even struggle for change.

Iraq faces the destructive, opposite end of the spectrum. “The sectarian and ethnic conflict is the fundamental problem in Iraq,” Khalilzad is quoted as saying in the AP article. The bombings, suicide and otherwise, make the severity of that problem quite obvious.

Our ambassador’s advice to these people: elect officials “who are nonsectarian, broadly accepted and who are not tied to militias.” Sure. No problem. Why didn’t they think of that?

Even if they ignore the insulting suggestion that the death and turmoil in their nation could be solved if they voted for better candidates, we’re still not offering them a solution. We haven’t found one. We’re suggesting a process of democratization that, if applied successfully, would minimize the violence in the long run. The sooner people stop dying over religion and race the better, so we may as well continue with this plan. It would be nice, however, if our officials didn’t make announcements stating the obvious as though the Iraqi people are too dense and too obsessed with violence to figure it out on their own.

The tragedy is that slight tolerance for America’s internal differences has bred in us this arrogance, this certainty that we’re correct. We judge, prod and direct Iraq from our lofty ideological position because their culture never reached a similarly peaceful solution before we intervened. Who knows what answers they may have discovered had we not forced ours on them?

Burn the puppets with Zak Sharif at rzs8@pitt.edu.