"Old Half-Witted Sheep": A New York Times Editorial Contemplates Iraq

He quoted Ghassan Attiyah, an Iraqi commentator. as saying that in "In two-and-a-half years Bush has succeeded in creating two new Talibans in Iraq."

In fact it didn't even require Patrick's expertise to see that the elections, portrayed by President George W. Bush as a sign of success for US policies in Iraqin fact meant a tremendous triumph for America's enemies, both inside and outside the country.

I did a great deal of driving during the Christmas season, hence listened a lot to the radio and more than once heard even-voiced commentators on NPR, one of them a New York Times correspondent, expressing gratification at the elections as a American triumph, launching the nation of Iraq on its first faltering stumbles along the path of liberal democracy.

The level of self delusion reminded me of similar delusions among the left, after the Ayatollah Khomeini took over in Iran in 1978 when there were confident assertions that the Ayatollah had lived in Paris, had absorbed therefrom the spirit of the Enlightenment. It took the sight of thousands of leftists hanged en masse in Teheran to make the left realized that the Ayatollah had not spent too many hours in that Paris sojourn reading Condorcet.

So the post-Christmas Times editorialist went down into the valley and did manful battle with the obvious, always excepting the fact that the US administration had had sustained a terrible defeat. "The final votes must still be counted in Iraq, but the trend is already clear," the editorial crooned. "The biggest winners appear to be the Shiite religious parties whose politicians have run the ministries and whose militias have run the streets of southeastern Iraq for a year or more."

Actually, the Shia militia have been running the entire south and much of Baghdad. The whole editorial nervously evades admitting how bad things are for the US.

After noting Kurdish strength in its region, the editorial sadly assessed the skimpy sub-20 per cent for America's man, Ayad Allawi, and the less than 1 per cent for Ahmad Chalabi and delivered its expert judgment: "the biggest losers were secular parties and those who tried to appeal to all of Iraq's communities, not just one religion or ethnic group."

Then, with a sad wag of the head, the editorial added gloomily, "Anyone who hoped that Iraq's broadest exercise in electoral democracy so far might strengthen women's rights, secular protections or national unity will be disappointed."

Say something twice, so why not three times? "Iraqi politics are settling into an unsettling pattern. Very few people vote as Iraqis; most vote as Shiites, Sunnis or Kurds."

By law, an editorial writer is duty-bound to detect "signs of progress", and the Times' writer did not fail in this duty: " It is progress that Sunni Arabs turned out in large numbers, but" (here a cautionary wag of the editorial finger,) "that may not be enough to assure them a meaningful role in reshaping a dangerously divisive constitution and forming a broad-based government."

Already the editorial is lunging towards fantasy. Nobody in Iraq thinks the Constitution is going to be significantly amended. If the
Kurds had thought so they wouldn't have agreed to compromise in the pre-referendum period. A few paragraphs later, the editorial writer calls for such a constitutional rewrite to ensure that oil revenues 'flow to the central government". Why would the Shia and the Kurds want to surrender the revenues from their own new super-regions?

But by now the editorial writer is ecstatic in his ghost dance, urging "the victorious parties" to summon "the sense to reach out to a Sunni Arab community that now has one foot in the political process and the other in the insurgency."

The strong vote for the Shiite religious parties, the editorial writer bravely continues, "does not necessarily mean that Iraqis have abruptly turned fundamentalist." Why not?

Then, just like those leftists in 1978 thinking Khomeini had read Condorcet, the editorialist advises the Grand Ayatollah Sistani and the equally triumphant nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr that "The legal rights of women, currently in limbo between civil and religious law, need reinforcement." As Patrick had pointed out, already most girls leaving schools in Baghdad wear headscarves. Women's rights in cases of divorce and inheritance are being eroded.

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