A Hell of a Country (review of Ali Allawi's memoir)

Slate ^ | Christopher Hitchens

[Lorianne]

Ali Allawi's memoir The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace certainly deserves the praise and attention it has been getting (even from writers like Maureen Dowd, so eager to score cheap points against the Bush administration that—even while rebuking others for having insufficient grasp of Iraqi reality—she confused the author with his cousin Iyad Allawi and called him a "puppet" into the bargain). The book is written with a very strong combination of heart and mind by someone with an enviable command of English who both knows and cares a good deal about Iraq. He does not make too much of the fact, but having been both a minister of defense and a minister of finance since the fall of Saddam Hussein, as well as serving as a member of the National Assembly, he must have risked his own life more times in the past four years than many professional soldiers have to do in a lifetime. (We have a tendency to forget this, of the Iraqis who step forward as volunteers for the rescue of their shattered country.)

We can probably stipulate that Allawi's criticisms of U.S. policy in Iraq—from general innocence about conditions in the country to great presumption about the measures needed to redeem it—have been sufficiently borne out by other witnesses for them to be accepted as generally true. But this now-common view sometimes comes with a corollary that I think Allawi does not share. Reading about the murder of more than 100 Iraqis last week, I was barely even annoyed when I saw the headline that an anti-war Web site put on it: Dozens more die in Bush's war was the general thrust of the thing. It was as if al-Qaida had played only a walk-on part in its own atrocities.

[nuconvert]

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[sageb1]

It is not Bush’s war. It is Western Civilization’s war.

[neverdem]

bttt