Right now, hopefully beyond partisanship, I’m of opinion with many others that we seriously misread Iraq though we understand (correctly I think) that freedom is a universal value. Freedom is, I believe, one of the stated and underlying reasons we decided to invade.
We observe Iraq from within our own political, legal, and intellectual traditions which have fostered our own notions of how freedom should be pursued and how it is maintained. We overlook the long tribal history of the region, and the lack of thinkers thinking of freedom outside of Islam, the mosque and the Quran.
This makes our task of leaving a Constitutional Democracy behind extremely difficult and any advance in that direction all the more fragile (and perhaps more likely to be rejected by Iraqis). I think it also lends to the absurd position Bush finds himself in having to staunchly support these ideas regardless of what’s happening on the ground.
Of course, we still have our troops there…
