aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, August 28, 2005

On founding fathers & Iraq

Frank Rich, in a column today with many important things to say, has this brief passage which will afford me the opportunity (below) to get back to something I meant to point to a couple weeks ago:

Before anyone dare say Vietnam, the president, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld drag in the historian David McCullough and liken 2005 in Iraq to 1776 in America - and, by implication, the original George W. to ours. Before you know it, Ahmad Chalabi will be rehabilitated as Ben Franklin.

Fred Kaplan writing in Slate on Bush’s lousy analogy, after noting that if it took our forefathers eleven years to come up with a constitution (and that “the American colonies were as well-fit for a democratic union as any society in human history"), wonders shouldn’t we expect it might take even longer in Iraq? 

Among other things, he observes:

• A major dispute at both constitutional conventions was how to divide power between the central government and the regional provinces. But in the American case, the provinces-i.e., states-were well-established political units, with governors, statutes, and citizens who identified themselves as, say, New Yorkers or Virginians. There are no comparable authorities, structures, or-in any meaningful sense-constituents in Iraq’s regions (except, to some degree, in the Kurdish territories, and many people there want simply to secede).

• America’s Founding Fathers shared the crucible of having fought in the Revolutionary War for the common cause of independence from England. This bond helped overcome their many differences. Iraq’s new leaders did not fight in their war of liberation from Saddam Hussein. It would be as if France had not merely assisted the American colonists but also fought all the battles on the ground, occupied our territory afterward, installed our first leaders, composed the Articles of Confederation, and organized the Constitutional Convention. The atmosphere in Philadelphia, as well as the resulting document and the resulting country, would have been very different.

• America had a natural first president in George Washington, the commanding general and unblemished hero of the Revolutionary War. Amid the climate of political brawls and duels that make current tabloid fare seem tame, Washington was the one figure who could not be criticized, whose decisions were accepted by all. Had Washington rejected politics and retired to his estate, the union-and the Constitution that enshrined it-would have fallen apart. Perhaps if Ahmad Chalabi-the Pentagon’s handpicked Washington wannabe-had led a few brigades into Baghdad, his prospects would have brightened.

Good points don’t you think? The emphasis was obviously mine; the whole article is worth reading.

UPDATE Billmon has more: “The framers of the U.S. constitution expelled an occupying army. The founders of the New Iraq are guarded by one.”