Friday, June 17, 2005

On the Bloody Ground in Iraq

There's too little on-the-ground reporting on life in Iraq nowadays, but "Building Iraq's Army: Mission Improbable" in the Washington Post almost makes up the difference. A staggering account of the relationship between an American National Guard unit and the Iraqi security force it's trying to train, numerous aspects of the article will make you want to throw up your hands in grief and disgust, from the American troops' latter-day "white man's burden"-style ethnocentrism and raw incomprehension of Iraq to the Iraqi soldiers' mercenary impulses and hatred for the nominal allies. As Jonathan Schell writes in commenting on the piece for TomPaine.com, the article punctures the official myth that "every act of torture, every flattened city, every gushing sewer, every car bombing and beheading, is... a bump on the road to 'freedom' for Iraq, or for the Middle East, or even for the whole world, in which our president has promised an "'end to tyranny.'"