April, 2003

So there are flowers in the streets and Baghdad seems to be ours without the need of house to house fighting. It's early to tell, but good news in any event for Iraqis as well as our troops.

I immediately ran (by way of the web) from the New York Times to Al Jazeera,to get the Arab side and the Arab side confirms the NYT in most respects.

A sigh of relief, yet it's early times and there's huge work to be done. A lot of Iraqis won't die, a lot of our troops will eventually come home that may not have come home walking and who is so stone-hearted as to not cheer for that?

It may be that the peaceful turnover of Baghdad was brokered by the Russians. There's rumor that Saddam Hussein is sequestered in the Russian Embassy in Baghdad, a rumor that infuriates the Arab world, who expected him to die at the helm and raise hell with invading forces. No one yet knows for sure.

As to the wrong dream, the basic facts remain the same. This is America's first venture into attacking a country "pre-emptively," a turn that many, including myself, see as a lurch that takes us a long way from our concept of ourselves as a nation and a mega-leap from the intentions that attended our founding. We have very nearly destroyed the UN, ruptured our relations with Europe and threaten to rupture them further as we close Europe out of the rebuilding contracts. Our unilateral foot has tracked up the house for generations to come.

And what next?

One can hardly have provided a more effective recruitment poster for al Qaeda and that rustling noise behind the flower-throwers is the shuffle of Arab feet, signing on to the still undestroyed terrorist organization. Terror groups may bloom like spring flowers in the "next in line" countries of the Middle East; Saudi Arabia, Syria, Pakistan and Iran. None of them are secular nations as Iraq and Turkey are---Iraq by bloody dictatorship and Turkey by the will of its army since Kemal Ataturk in the 1920's. Secular doesn't necessarily mean democratic. There's no democratic model in the Arab world, no history, no hunger and certainly no road map. Establishing democracy in Iraq, if not impossible, will certainly be a decades-long and difficult chore.

So, the long knives are unsheathed and held close to the leg. Iraq will (has?) capitulated and the fence-sitters among the warlords are rushing to the winning side, even as the hardcore Muslim extremists strap on their explosives. Jihad is in the basements of the Middle East and quite probably Chicago and Duluth and New York as well. It's likely to be a nasty, routing-out, locking-up, informant and informer business with civil rights, civil liberties and civility itself as the first victim.

And that's not my dream, but it sounds very much like a dream I've read described by Osama bin Laden.

Don't bother calling me un-American or unpatriotic. I served my time in America's army proudly, voted every time they opened the booth, albeit as an independent, but more often Republican than Democrat. I deeply love the America in which I grew up, wept when Kennedy was killed, cheered as the Soviets fell apart and read deeply Jefferson's writing. Ashcroft's America is not Jefferson's America and it's not mine. George Bush's vision is not Eisenhower's and it's not mine either.

But mostly, I believe that George Bush's dream come true is the wrong dream.

Get out of the Archives and read what Jim's writing today