Mad Social Scientist

Bill O'Reilly said the following on his radio show (via Media Matters):

O'REILLY: Because look ... when 2 percent of the population feels that you're doing them a favor, just forget it, you're not going to win. You're not going to win. And I don't have any respect by and large for the Iraqi people at all. I have no respect for them. I think that they're a prehistoric group that is -- yeah, there's excuses.

Sure, they're terrorized, they've never known freedom, all of that. There's excuses. I understand. But I don't have to respect them because you know when you have Americans dying trying to you know institute some kind of democracy there, and 2 percent of the people appreciate it, you know, it's time to -- time to wise up.

And this teaches us a big lesson, that we cannot intervene in the Muslim world ever again. What we can do is bomb the living daylights out of them, just like we did in the Balkans. Just as we did in the Balkans. Bomb the living daylights out of them. But no more ground troops, no more hearts and minds, ain't going to work.

[...]

They're just people who are primitive.

If, like me, you can scarcely believe someone would say such things on radio, you can listen here. I'm going to discuss some recent reporting on the mismanagement of the occupation in a moment, but first just ponder the hate in this quote. Here is a widely syndicated talk show host exposing himself as a hateful bigot who feels qualified to judge an entire nation unworth of respect; a man who advocates mass murder of anyone in a Muslim country based on his hatred for Iraqis; a man who clearly thinks some nations are primitive (sub-human?), and that more advanced nations need not respect their dignity or lives.

As always, it is easier to understand how vile this statement is by substituting different names into the equation. If an Iranian claimed that because of "trouble" with the US, they were justified in bombing the living daylights out of Canada, another Christian nation, since they would no longer be patient with Christians who caused problems, we would consider the statement barbarous. O'Reilly deserves no slack on this one. And he deserves no mouthpiece for his hatred. I refuse to take Fox News the slightest bit seriously while they give him an audience.

But now on to the main event. Several reviews of the Iraqi occupation are showing it was even more calamitous than we thought. The WaPo is starting to wise up to the disaster, and this report is well-worth reading:

The Iraqi army is one-third the size U.S. officials promised it would be by now. Seventy percent of police officers have not received training. When violence flared across the country this spring, many soldiers and policemen refused to perform their duties because U.S. forces failed to equip them, designate competent leaders and win trust among the ranks.

About 15,000 Iraqis have been hired to work on projects funded by $18.6 billion in U.S. aid, despite promises to use the money to employ at least 250,000 Iraqis by this month. At of the beginning of June, 80 percent of the aid package, approved by Congress last fall, remained unspent.

Electricity generation remains stuck at around 4,000 megawatts, resulting in less than nine hours of power a day to most Baghdad homes, despite pledges from U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer to increase production to 6,000 megawatts by June 1.

...

Attacks on U.S.-led forces and foreign civilians now average more than 40 a day, a threefold increase since January. Assassinations of Iraqi political leaders and debilitating sabotage of the country's oil and electricity infrastructure now occur routinely.

...

"Did we really do what we needed to do? What we promised to do?" a senior CPA official said. "Nobody here believes that."

...

Despite the scale of their plans, and Bremer's conclusion by last July that Iraq would need "several tens of billions of dollars" for reconstruction, CPA specialists had virtually no resources to fund projects on their own to create much-needed local employment in the months after the war. Instead, they relied on two U.S. firms, Halliburton Co. and Bechtel Corp., which were awarded large contracts to patch Iraq's infrastructure.

...

The CPA also lacked experienced staff. A few development specialists were recruited from the State Department and nongovernmental organizations. But most CPA hiring was done by the White House and Pentagon personnel offices, with posts going to people with connections to the Bush administration or the Republican Party. The job of reorganizing Baghdad's stock exchange, which has not reopened, was given in September to a 24-year-old who had sought a job at the White House. "It was loyalty over experience," a senior CPA official said.

...

Because many of the 2,300 projects to be funded by the $18.6 billion are large construction endeavors that will involve foreign labor instead of Iraqis, they will result in far less of a local economic boost than the CPA had promised, another senior official involved in the reconstruction said. The projects were chosen largely without input from Iraqis.

"This was supposed to be our big effort to help them -- $18 billion of our tax dollars to fix their country," the senior reconstruction official said. "But the sad reality is that this program won't have a lot of impact in it for the Iraqis. The primary beneficiaries will be American companies."

...

When anti-occupation militiamen converged on the Rafidain police station on April 4, officers inside the blue-walled building sprang into action.

They grabbed their possessions and ran home.

...

The militiamen met surprisingly little resistance elsewhere. Rafidain, in central Sadr City, was no exception.

"To shoot those people would have been wrong," said Sgt. Falah Hassan, a lanky veteran whose uniform consists of rolled-up jeans and a rumpled blue shirt. "If a man comes with principles and I believe in those principles, I will not shoot him."

...

Of nearly 90,000 police on duty now, more than 62,000 still have not received any training.

But Iraqi political leaders and several CPA officials contend that the problems with security were more fundamental than training police. The U.S. military came to Iraq with too few soldiers to maintain order and guard the country's borders from foreign terrorists, they said. "I don't know anyone who thinks there's enough troops here," the senior adviser to Bremer said.

...

The sympathy for Sadr today at the Rafidain station -- on Fridays, officers pin his picture to their uniforms before going to the mosque -- suggests that the odds of getting the police to resist the cleric's militia have not improved.

...

"We were supposed to leave them with a permanent constitution," a senior CPA official said. "Then we decided to leave them with a temporary constitution. Now we're leaving them with a temporary constitution that the majority dislikes."

...

Life inside the high-security Green Zone -- what some CPA staffers jokingly call the Emerald City -- bears little resemblance to that in the rest of Baghdad. The power is always on. Shiny shuttle buses zip passengers around. Outdoor cafes stay open late into the night.

There is little effort to comply with Islamic traditions. Beer flows freely at restaurants. Women walk around in shorts. Bacon cheeseburgers are on the CPA's lunch menu.

"It's like a different planet," said an Iraqi American who has a senior position in the CPA and lives in the Green Zone but regularly ventures out to see relatives. "It's cut off from the real Iraq."

...

Limited contact with Iraqis outside the Green Zone has made CPA officials reliant on the views of those chosen by Bremer to serve on the Governing Council. When Brahimi, the U.N. envoy, asked the CPA for details about several Iraqis he was considering for positions in the interim government, he told associates he was "shocked to find how little information they really had," according to an official who was present.

Patrick Cockburn of the Independent adds his view from Baghdad:

[The soldier] added that security was not quite as tight as it looked since prostitutes were regular visitors to the [Green] zone.

My friend, a little alarmed, decided to investigate. He went to a house which was being used as a brothel. He says: "In the toilet I found that the women were writing pro-Baath party, anti-American and patriotic slogans with their lipstick on the mirrors." Their clients could not tell what they had written because it was in Arabic.

The story illustrates the way in which the CPA officials became wholly isolated from the real opinions of Iraqis. Arriving in the wake of the war last year they cut themselves off inside Saddam Hussein's old palace complex. They were as remote from the lives of ordinary Iraqis as if they lived in a Martian spaceship which had temporarily touched down in the centre of Baghdad.

This isolation helps explain the CPA's repeated mistakes. When it arrived 14 months ago Iraqis were evenly divided on whether they had been liberated or occupied by the US. The CPA's own poll shows that just 2 per cent of Iraqis say they feel liberated and 92 per cent say they are occupied. The CPA may be the least successful organisation ever created by the US government. It is certainly one of the strangest. "It is really like living in an open prison,' said one CPA official.

...

Uncertain where real threats come from, the guards of the CPA - both regular US army and private security firms - treat all Iraqis as equally suspicious. According to one former Iraqi minister a suicide bomber was able to blow up Izzedin Salim, the head of Iraq's Governing Council, on 17 May after his convoy had been prevented from passing through US security into the Green Zone because a vital document was missing. His vehicle turned around giving the bomber his opportunity.

...

It is still unclear why Mr Bremer and the CPA showed such poor judgement. The swift overthrow of Saddam Hussein showed few Iraqis supported him. But Mr Bremer disbanded the army and persecuted the Baath party pushing their members towards armed resistance.

By last summer he had alienated the Sunni Arabs (20 per cent of Iraqis) and by this spring he had infuriated the Shia (60 per cent). He turned the hitherto marginal Shia cleric Muqtada Sadr into a respected martyr and the hillbilly city of Fallujah into a patriotic symbol.

Many able and intelligent CPA officials are mystified by the extent of the failure, perhaps the greatest in American foreign policy. "Bremer stuffed his office full of neo-conservatives and political appointees who knew nothing of the country or the region," one said. "They actively avoided anybody who did."

America---or at least its semi-legitimate leaders---chose to invade Iraq and remake it. The Iraqi people did not ask for the chaos we have unleashed. We should do everything we can to make things right---though I fear there is little hope left---and we should beg Iraqis' forgiveness for treating their country like a playground for greedy corporate cronies, young Republican ticket-punchers, and sadistic prison guards. To speak of ingratitude is not just insulting. It is tempting fate, should there ever be a reckoning of our deeds in Iraq.