Iraq

I'm pretty sure this is entirely true. I was watching Charlie Rose and the intern president was saying the same thing about Iraq.

Louis Sako, the Chaldean Archbishop of Kirkuk, is a very frustrated man these days. "It is not all death and destruction," says the archbishop. "Much is positive in Iraq today. . . . Universities are operating, schools are open, people go out onto the streets normally. . . . Where there's a kidnapping or a homicide the news gets out immediately, and this causes fear among the people. . . . Those who commit such violence are resisting against Iraqis who want to build their country."

It's not just the terrorists who, according to His Eminence, are creating problems for Iraq: Elections in January "will be a starting point for a new Iraq," he says. Yet "Western newspapers and broadcasters are simply peddling propaganda and misinformation. . . . Iraqis are happy to be having elections and are looking forward to them because they will be useful for national unity. . . . Perhaps not everything will go exactly to plan, but, with time, things will improve. Finally Iraqis will be given the chance to choose. Why is there so much noise and debate coming out from the West when before, under Saddam, there were no free elections, but no one said a thing?"

The guy on the TV with Charlie Rose pointed out there are hundreds of marriages a day in Baghdad and 1500 childen born (does that number make sense)...yet no one reports these things. I do believe the media is struggling to make Iraq into another Vietnam. Whether it is true or not - well, unfortunately, we don't have a trustworthy media to help us determine it.

I don't like good versus evil talk - which the intern Iraqi president used on TV...but I am comfortable saying right versus wrong. And I think it is so clear that ours heart and the people of Iraq's hearts are in the right and are generally in the same place. I am also comfortable saying the insurgents are in the wrong. They are trying to incite Civil War and creating factions between different ethnic and religious groups. The tactics they use are terror. Their vision is chaos. Our vision is a democratic and free Iraq.

Prior to 9/11, I bought into a lot of relativism. My favorite show was Seinfeld, still is, actually. I wasn't comfortable saying with any type of authority, we are right, they are wrong, especially with respect to people of different cultures. History had proven that we were often wrong, that we had made poor decisions in the name of righteousness that had negative consequences that the people living in those times did not see: compromising on slavery at the Constitutional convention, killing off the Native Americans, stealing California from Mexico, initiating the Spanish-American War, staying out of WWII too long, Vietnam, Iran-Contra, supporting dictators in South America, supporting Saddam in the Iraq-Iran war, empowering Osama Bin Laden and the Afghan Arabs.

But after 9/11, I saw something, we all saw something, that we couldn't fathom before, something we didn't think others capable of wishing and much less doing - the purposeful murder of thousands of civilians and destruction of buildings that were testement to the power and wealth of capitalism. I knew immediately this was wrong. No one needed to explain it to me. No relativism could possibily explain 9/11, and if one tried, it seemed so desparately to miss the point, to the point of disgust. It was wrong, and OBL knew we would view it that way. That was his intent.

And all of a sudden I saw history differently - I looked at great things America has done in the name of freedom, the Revolution, the Constitution, abolishing slavery, standing up to Imperialists - first the French, then the British, and winning, fighting and defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and then rebuilding their countries and not seizing land, supporting democracy in Asia, fighting the North Koreans, standing up to the totalitarian USSR and as it failed, helping it to peacefully transform into a more democratic and capitalist model, and leading a coalition against Saddam in 1991.

I looked at our failures and saw not willful wrongdoing, but misguided, uninformed behaviour, that over time we tried to correct, although history is not very forgiving. And I saw our victories as something to be proud of. I started to feel shame about the things we didn't do: stop dictators in places like Chile and Argentina, or Uganda. Or stop genocides in Europe or in Rwanda or Iraq.

Now the world hates America, but I think we're doing the right thing. If the other option is doing the wrong thing and having the world like us, I'd take the former any day.