A Failure To Communicate

      There's an excellent piece in today's New York Observer about the current climate in Iraq that is by turns insightful and very funny. Of the latter: "For purposes of comparing the outrage here with the outrage back home, perhaps the most striking of the Iraqi themes is that of total indifference as to whether Donald Rumsfeld is kept on, pushed out, or melted down and drizzled over porcini mushrooms." Of the former: "The world-famous catastrophe of Abu Ghraib has something important in common with every little domestic political gaffe: It would not resonate unless it rang true." The disjunction between the American and Iraqi perceptions of matters (to say nothing of those of the rest of the world) is so great that common ground may not finally be possible. I've said it before and I'll say it again: those who haven't already should read Graham Greene's The Quiet American, the American in which is both idealistic and dangerously oblivious, in large part because he blinkers himself to the obvious, but also because he simply does not-- cannot and will not-- see matters from a perspective other than his own. American policy makes will niggle and try to tear away at the sort of parallels drawn in this assessment by an Iraqi, insisting on a fundamental difference of moral purpose:

For the mass graves, it was not Saddam Hussein who dug them personally," said Ali Hassan Mohammed, a 55-year-old shopkeeper. "It was his followers who did that, and the Americans want to judge him."

The Americans are now (slowly) being forced to realize that they are caught in a moral hypocrisy, however unintentional. Like the Christians that slough off Shylock's "Hath not a Jew eyes?" rebuke in The Merchant of Venice, so too do the Americans seem oblivious to their own immersion in a moral, political and military quagmire. They may not be their enemies, they may not be like their enemies in many ways, but in the eyes of very many in the outside world and in Iraq, the distinctions between the Americans and the forces they toppled are becoming very blurry indeed, and increasingly difficult to illuminate. Long story short: this is only going to get far worse before it gets even a little better, Rummy or no Rummy, Dubya or no Dubya. Scary.