by Patrick Lang (bio below)
It becomes ever clearer to me that most Americans believe that because in their own country the body politic accepts the outcome of elections conducted with a modicum of fairness, that this must be true in all the rest of the world.
They are mistaken in this. In many places in the world, peoples’ primary self-identification has little to do with the idea of citizenship in a particular state and much more to do with ethnicity, religion as sect, actual tribes or regional interests. This is so of Iraq. Elections conducted in Iraq with the idea that people really believe in the idea of “one man, one vote” merely enable the most numerous identity groups to “put paid” to the less numerous. That is what is happening in Iraq between majority Shia and the minority Sunni. The Sunni Arabs know this and will continue to fight to prevent it.
“Civil War? (LAT) … continued below …
Iraq has been engaged in civil war among its primary identity groups since the End of the Coalition Provisional Authority’s catastrophic reign. The CPA’s projection of the Bush Administration’s policy of putting the Shia Arabs in charge of Iraq doomed Iraq to civil war.
Elections (democracy) and political correctness are the modern civil and secular religions of America. Americans believe that elections are in themselves transformative and beneficial, and that a government fairly elected is necessarily a good thing.
This is not the case. The historical example of the rise of National Socialism to power in Germany and Fascism to power in Italy should indicate the patent falseness of such an idea. Elections reveal what is in the hearts of men. They do not change those hearts. The Shia and Kurd majority in Iraq show little sign of giving the Sunni Arabs enough power to lure them from support of the insurgents.
There are predictions on TV today of how well things will go in Iraq this year. They will not go well unless there is a change in the hearts of men.
Pat Lang
Col. Patrick W. Lang (Ret.), a highly decorated retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces, served as “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism” for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and was later the first Director of the Defense Humint Service. Col. Lang was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at the United States Military Academy at West Point. For his service in the DIA, he was awarded the “Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive.” He is a frequent commentator on television and radio, including MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann (interview), CNN and Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room (interview), PBS’s Newshour, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” (interview), and more .
Personal Blog: Sic Semper Tyrannis 2005 || Bio || CV
Recommended Books || More BooTrib Posts
Novel: The Butcher’s Cleaver (download free by chapter, PDF format)
“Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy Council Journal, Vol. XI, Summer 2004, No. 2
