Reading some of the comments and diaries lately about Iraq has been very enlightening and very depressing.

“We broke it, now we own it”

Isn’t that like “White Man’s Burden”? To which the response was written in 1899:

Pile on the brown man’s burden;
And, if ye rouse his hate,
Meet his old-fashioned reasons
With Maxims up to date.
With shells and dumdum bullets
A hundred times made plain
The brown man’s loss must ever
Imply the white man’s gain.

Pile on the brown man’s burden,
compel him to be free;
Let all your manifestoes
Reek with philanthropy.
And if with heathen folly
He dares your will dispute,
Then, in the name of freedom,
Don’t hesitate to shoot.

(from The Brown Man’s Burden
by Henry Labouchère)

Then today responding to the sky-is-falling Juan Cole piece, we’ve got what amounts to a whole series of comments like:

Oh, pity us, if we don’t “fix” Iraq our whole petroleum-sucking lifestyle will go down the drain! Woe is me!

Three questions of a rhetorical nature, which I asked on dKos as well…

First verse:

What gives us the right, having violated international law and invaded another country without provocation, killing perhaps 100,000 people and destroying the place utterly, to decide anything at all about its future?

Second verse:

Why should I — an aspiring to be reality-based Tigger — assume that philanthropy is the true aim of any American administration in any foreign country, let alone a BushCo administration?

Third verse:

Why should I — an aspiring to be reality-based Tigger — assume that even if it had the best intentions (which we know it does not), a BushCo administration could succeed at such goals? This is because of their past performance at grand projects of nation building and philanthropy?

Supporting the continued occupation of Iraq by the USA (and the UK) assigns to us arrogant invaders rights we do not have. Furthermore it assigns to BushCo benevolent intentions that they do not have. Furthermore it assigns to BushCo a characteristic of competence that they do not possess.

The following, apparently, is a difficult sentence to parse?

Newsweek reports that “Every major poll shows an ever-larger majority of Iraqis want the Americans to leave.”

We are responsible for paying for the rebuilding of Iraq. Supplying machinery, spare parts, equipment, supplies for schools and hospitals, individual expertise if they request it from us. That is the only mission left. (In a dream world: an apology and a trial of the war criminals… but we must leave that battle for the distant future…)

Everything else about “the mission” sounds like so much Kipling.

“I think it would be a great idea.”
 — Mohandas Ghandi’s answer when asked what he thought of Western Civilization
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