Palestine...Lost in the shadow of Iraq, but still with lessons for us.

I just saw this really interesting guy named Dennis Ross on Charlie Rose. He's an author and a think tank guy on the middle east. He made some interesting statements about the elections in 2005 (the ones in which Hammas took power, and directly after which the world cut off foreign aid to the region). This guy claimed that those elections should never have taken place, because Hammas refused to abide by the election criteria established during the previous elections in 1996. Apparently, the Bush administration pushed for these elections to take place anyways, and were the first to condemn them when Hammas won power.

There is an interesting parallel here between the kind of faith-based decision making that Ross describes, and the kind of faith-based decision making that has gotten us into such incredible trouble in Iraq. That is, Bush pushed for elections in Palestine because he had faith that free elections were a prescriptive wunderkind that would solve problems in any context. Now, from his own janky election victory, he should have known categorically this was not true. At least as importantly, he should have seen that with Fatah (the party opposed to Hammas in those elections) in shambles at the time, the better organization and message discipline of Hammas would allow them to triumph in spite of being in fact a minority party. After that happened, Bush (and much of the democratic world) was left in the awkward position of opposing a duly elected democratic regime, because of human rights violations and explicitly religious values.

Similarly, in Iraq, faith based decision making has gotten us in trouble across the board. We had faith that Iraqis cared more about freedom than they did about religion. To put it another way, we had faith that Iraqis cared more about being Iraqis than they did about being Sunni or Shia Muslims.

We also had too much faith in the superiority of US troops and firepower. My best friend is a US Marine, and I have as much respect for their capability as anyone, but they were tasked to use less than a quarter million troops to pacify a nation of more than twenty million. And to do so on that nation's home turf, more than a quarter world away from home. There simply aren't enough bodies to occupy that much space. US troops can achieve any specific tactical objective, but they cannot be present in the entire country at once. It's like trying to sop up twenty gallons of liquid with a single rag. There's no question the rag can absorb water, but at the same time, there's no question there is more liquid than a single rag can absorb.

At the core, the Bush administration is guilty of the same faith based error as the general in the Kubrick film "Full Metal Jacket". The general confronts Joker wearing ambivalent imagery on his uniform, and says that the US must prevail in Vietman because "Inside of every Gook there is a red-blooded American trying to get out." Replace "Gook" with "Iraqi" (or with "Towelhead", if the slur must stick), and you have a pretty accurate description of the Bush attitude towards the middle east. We are finding out, to our detriment, just like to the film's General, that this is simply not the case. Whether Palestine, Iraq, or anywhere else in the Middle East, Muslims are simply, categorically, and finally different than us. They care about different things, they live in different ways. The only way they are like us is that they are willing to fight and die for their families and their beliefs.