Thinking about Iraq

How can we approach the Iraq debacle? Not by placing the blame on Bush, a pitiful puppet of the real bosses behind the scenes. Nor can we blame the oil industry, which will, following the laws of power, expand it`s own interests when possible. We can only blame ourselves for being gullible, naive, and too lazy to put up any real resistance, too cowardly to follow our feelings that were telling us that something was wrong about trying to install democracy with force.
Right from the start no effort was made to understand the internal problems in Iraq, which surfaced soon after Saddam`s iron grip gave way. The American invasion created total chaos and provoked an unanticipated violent reaction. This confused the Americans. Why would anyone not want to live like us? Suddenly they were baffled by people blowing themselves up in devastating bloodbaths. Why would they do something like that? Americans shook their heads. We just wanted to bring them Democracy, but they don`t want it.

Unfortunately there is some truth in this, Democracy is not something you bring people in a package. Democracy is a skill that is learned in childhood, based on learning to tolerate and accept people who think and believe differently. Democracy is a product of education.
Even less can Democracy be imposed by force. Based on the concept of free will and free choice, it forbids the use of force through it`s very definition.
The concept of majority rule, another pillar of Democracy , was bound to fail in a country consisting of three separate and opposing populations. The idea of democratic parties in a homogenous society cannot be grafted onto a nation torn ethnically, religiously and geographically. This attempt has produced the most unsustainable situation where violence is the answer to violence in a never-ending echo.

I live in Brooklyn, in Flatbush, and not far away there is a corner where Jewish, Arabian, Afro-American and Mexican neighbourhoods meet. There is a little market where these various people do business with each other in a perfectly friendly way.
But Baghdad is not Brooklyn. The hatred between Sunnis and Shiites, built up through generations, effectively suppressed by Saddam, is exploding as predicted by many insiders before the war began. Why did the government choose to ignore these warnings?
Was it feigned ignorance, ignoring the information that history provided? Without considering the catastrophic consequences, they opened the Pandora`s box of Iraq. It was like trying to build up a sphere of influence on a powder keg.
Blaming Bush and his acknowledged stupidity only permits commercial interest groups to hide their responsibility. In this way, each president is set up like a decoy to be shot down, while commercial interests maintain their influence in policy.
After spending trillions of dollars tax money to finance this fiasco, the government expects to extract more money from the empty pockets of taxpayers to pay some expensive consultants of their choice to analyze the mess.

It seems more logical that money to rebuild Iraq should be paid by the companies that made the most profit from the war, oil and weapon industries. Let us have a look at the books to find out whose war we have been financing and make them accountable. Maybe with our new president this will be thinkable.