April 17, 2004
A More Humble Hawk
By DAVID BROOKS
I didn't get this job because I was self-effacing, but today I'm really going to beg for your indulgence. I thought it might be useful to describe the doubts and thoughts going through the mind of one ardent war supporter — me — during these traumatically bloody weeks in Iraq.
The first thing to say is that I never thought it would be this bad. I knew it would be bad. On the third day of the U.S. invasion, I wrote an essay for The Atlantic called "Building Democracy Out of What?" I pointed out that we should expect that the Iraqis would have been traumatized by a generation of totalitarianism. That society would have been brutally atomized. And that many would have developed a taste for sadism and an addiction to violence. On April 11, 2003, I predicted on "The NewsHour" on PBS that we and the Iraqis would be forced to climb a "wall of quagmires."
Nonetheless, I didn't expect that a year after liberation, hostile militias would be taking over cities or that it would be unsafe to walk around Baghdad. Most of all, I misunderstood how normal Iraqis would react to our occupation. I knew they'd resent us. But I thought they would see that our interests and their interests are aligned. We both want to establish democracy and get the U.S. out.
I did not appreciate how our very presence in Iraq would overshadow democratization. Now I get the sense that while the Iraqis don't want us to fail, since our failure would mean their failure, many don't want to see us succeed either. They want to see us bleed, to get taken down a notch, to suffer for their chaos and suffering. A democratic Iraq is an abstraction they want for the future; the humiliation of America is a pleasure they can savor today. ...
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/17/opinion/17BROO.html>
Carl
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