Cellblocks that Will Haunt Us

Posted on September 29, 2006
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If tensions over terrorists are going to persist indefinitely, as it appears likely, be prepared for an indefinite period in which the U.S. makes little or no progress in improving relations with Muslim peoples. In short, a self-perpetuating cycle of terror-related tension.

That’s the likely outcome of the bills passed by the House and Senate setting up military courts for a newly designated category of “enemy combatants” without official state backing. The legislation curtails basic due process rights – including habeus corpus – and is bound to cause resentment among Muslims, whatever their feelings about the extemeists among them.

Whenever it’s disclosed that a suspect was wrongly arrested, held and possibly mistreated at the behest of U.S. agents, as was the case with a Canadian citizen recently, Muslims will be reminded of America’s new two-track justice system.

When we should be building bridges to the Muslim world, we’re managing continually to create images of murky U.S.-sponsored cellblocks operating under their own rules.

Plunging Into a Bereft Society

Posted on September 27, 2006
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Two or three months before the U.S. invasion of Iraq an acquaintance who was a retired State Department foreign service office told me we shouldn’t invade because “Iraq is made up of three groups – Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds – who hate each other”. It would be folly, he felt, to insert U.S. troops into so unstable a setting. Apparently there was general awareness of that at the State Department.

Now David Brooks writes in The New York Times that researchers have found that “Iraq is the most xenophobic, sexist and reactionary society on earth”. That’s understandable, Brooks notes, because the Iraqis endured decades of dictatorship, war and insecurity. Yet the findings from interviews of 2,300 interviews of Iraqis in the journal Perspectives on Politics are disturbing. They confirm the misgivings of all who questioned the wisdom of intruding militarily into Iraq.

Whatever was recognized at the State Department, the Administration clearly didn’t understand the nature of Iraqi society. “We do know, however,” Brooks writes, “that American policy makers were surprised to learn how religious Iraqi society had become during the 1990s. (Iraqi exiles had not prepared them for this.)”

The arrogance of invading a society that isn’t well understood and isn’t immediately threating the U.S. is being demonstrated each painful day in the news from Iraq.

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