TT: Then there is Keith Smith's Iraqi mirage

... I cannot understand how Mr Bush and his people including his point man here, Mr Austin, could have believed that they could go into a place like Iraq and do what they want or how the hairs on the back of their necks didn't rise up to warn them that the victory was too easy to be anything but apparent, Iraqi nay-sayers all but letting them come in before WHAM! winding up a second war that could be fought around the Americans' own weapons of mass destruction, some of the very Shiites they had come to save now savaging them to the point where now only Allah knows what is going to become of that sad place, sadistic Saddam, at least, knowing his people well enough to know the level of strongmanism required to keep all those ethnic rivalries in check, democracy being all very well and good the only question being whether people are well enough for it to be good everywhere.

Still, having posed the question, I have to reach for an answer and I have come to think that at the core of the problem is America's predilection, administration as well as people, not to know anything or, at least, enough about other countries and other people and I don't think that it is just wilful arrogance although I suspect that when yuh big and rich there must be some ah that. But, over and above that, I think that America's major constraint in these times, ironically globalised by much of her own doing, is because she was for so long so self-contained that she needed to know relatively little about the rest of us in this restless world and now up comes this righteous breed of Republican thinkers to persuade this Bush administration that all it will take to right the world is American power to impose a Pax Americana.

I don't know about you but in my mind's eye I see all these earnest GI Joes really believing, in spite of the disbelieving appeals of some of their erstwhile allies, that single-handedly" we could fix that!, the that being all those loonies, and Lord knows there are a lot of them, who believe that they have a divine mission to re-arrange the world for better or for worse depending, of course, on which side of the missionary zeal this one or that one happens to be lined up and when I think, come to think of it, that on one side is the rich and mighty and on the other side there is the poor and weak, the only conclusion I can come to is that there is something about both Power and the Absence of Power and, only God or Allah knows when, if ever, the twain shall ever meet.

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