Operation Self-Deception

In the tsunami of discussion that followed President Bush's surge speech, it was evident that many professional opinion and policy makers have been telling themselves that the intractable problems in Iraq are largely the result of a lack of courage and resolve on the part of the Iraqi people. As though Prime Minister Maliki and company were teens on a spending spree, congressman wagged their fingers and warned that the Iraqis who have been dying by the tens of thousands do not have a blank check from us, and that we cannot and will not continue to defend them from themselves. In a highly critical response to President Bush's talk, Senator Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, put this spin on his curveball: "...we have given the Iraqis so much. We have deposed their dictator. We dug him out of a hole in the ground and forced him to face the courts of his own people. We've given the Iraqi people a chance to draft their own constitution, hold their own free elections and establish their own government. We Americans, and a few allies, have protected Iraqis when no one else would...Now in the fourth year of this war, it is time for the Iraqis to stand and defend their own nation...The Iraqis must understand that they alone can lead their nation to freedom. They alone must meet the challenges that lie ahead. And they must know that, every time they call 911, we are not going to send 20,000 more American soldiers."

This same subtext about the need for the Iraqis to pull themselves up by the bootstraps was the chorus in almost all of the commentary last week. Take it from Maureen Dowd who recently observed, "Many Bush officials and lawmakers now talk about Iraqis with impatience, as though they are deadbeat relatives who have got to stop putting the pinch on us for a billion a week and try harder, in the immortal words of Rummy, "to pull up their socks."

Perhaps history does not matter. Perhaps the blame-the-Iraqis-and-pat-ourselves-on-the-back gambit is the first move in a declare-victory-and-leave strategy, but there can be no doubt that our narratives about Iraq are tending towards the delusional.

To listen to our politicos, you would think that the majority of Iraqis had beseeched us to come and overthrow their dictator, even if it meant destroying the infrastructure and internal security of their nation. The idea of taking responsibility is, of course, the god-term of American moral rhetoric these days. So let's be clear and take responsibility for the fact that even though we dubbed it "Operation Iraqi Freedom," our campaign was driven by unadulterated self-interest.

As though it needed repeating, President Bush and his epigones were convinced that Hussein either had or was about to obtain weapons of mass destruction and, as the reasoning went, a pre-emptive strike was essential to national security. Later, when it became evident that there were no WMD, we even began to talk in terms of a rationale that sounded as though we were literally using the Iraqis as a means to our own ends, "better to fight the terrorists there in Iraq, then here" went the blatantly self-serving mantra.

Today, however, we are apparently about the business of trying to convince ourselves that we were doing the Iraqis an act of supreme kindness, and that although we are willing to give them one more chance, they have so far proven to be ungrateful and lacking in the courage and resolve to make use of the sacrifices that Americans have made on their behalf. Some philosophers and psychologists have argued that certain forms of self-deception are essential to our mental health. After all, there are stark truths that can immobilize a person or a country. Given the terrible sacrifices that our soldiers and the Iraqis are going to have to continue to make, it might be very hard for us to acknowledge that without good reason, we opened the tap of a predicable blood bath that we can't seem to stanch.

From a motivational point of view, Americans might find it helpful to pretend as though the troop surge was another facet of our Iraqi good will mission and that if the Iraqis only knew what was good for them, they would show more appreciation and pitch in and help us and themselves out. Maybe that is the line that we need to feed ourselves as we sludge through the incubus of the current conflict. However, I cannot imagine that this myth would be anything less than an egregious insult to the people whose country we have turned upside down and inside out.

Gordon Marino is a visiting Professor of Philosophy and a Professor in the College of Human Health and Performance at the University of Florida.