Reporter John Burns of the New York Times has left his station in Iraq to lead the American newspaper's London bureau. On cable television three days ago, he was asked by Tim Russert if Washington could ever have been able to "truly understand the way Iraqis would have reacted" to the deposition of Saddam Hussein; by Russert's implication, the impossible.
Burns responded, fair to the historical record of Iraqis greeting allied troops "as liberators," though he regretted leaders having "completely miscalculated the impact of 30 years of violent, brutal repression on the Iraqi people." I myself noted in July 2004 that "the one mistake America truly did make was to overestimate the humanity of its authoritarian enemies...the virtuous flaw of peaceful people."
Burns, however, went on, predicting that "history will say that the forces that we liberated by invading Iraq were so powerful and so uncontrollable that virtually nothing the United States might have done...would have effectively prevented this disintegration that is now occurring."
There is determinism in that, an ugly kind, the same with which an entire population is held blameworthy for the actions of its criminal and violent minority. John Podhoretz excerpted Burns' interview with Russert, calling the pronouncement "frank, complex, powerful and ultimately tragic."
Off went a short letter. John Burns' opinion may be "frank," I wrote, but it's prepossessed, irresolute and ultimately supercilious. Societies are so damaged that they should simply be left alone? Totalism hasn't been extracted from Iraqi culture after four years, so the liberation was — in principle! — a notional failure? This is typical Boomer sophism, in which one tries to pass off dereliction as forbearance. Remarkable, maybe — for its misanthropy.
Podhoretz replied succinctly: "Oh, come on — the guy has been there before during and after, is brave and honest. This is his perspective, and you can't dismiss it so lightly."
I have nothing against Burns personally. The opinion is a common one, however, and even if it weren't offensive it's been refuted several times in the last sixty years. How many would have believed, shortly after V-J Day, that the sons of the men who raped and butchered in Nanking would be invading the world with cuddly, animated characters?
As for empiricism — there are a lot of Iraqis who have been in-country throughout, necessarily longer than Burns, are capable of objective analysis and have concluded that the belief Burns shares is misguided, and that what has harmed the Iraqi cause most is Western fastidiousness.
One argument made by Burns that I can accept is of a half-million troops, flattening in 2003 the forces now harassing the government and slowly, like General Douglas MacArthur did, instructing the country on how to organize civilly. That is politically impossible at this time, and nobody should take what-ifs seriously. But this stuff, Burns' take, is gloomy excess.