“None So Blind As He Who Will Not See”

President George W. Bush, in one of his typically occluded public observations, announced that he sees “progress” in Iraq as the Iraqi people are “slowly but surely” reclaiming a “normal” society. He claims credit for this progress as a result of his troop buildup. Although even field commanders in Iraq have deemed the “surge” to be an abject failure in terms of its intended purpose, Bush still attempts to spin progress out of failure. Relying consistently upon the old P. T. Barnum maxim – “Nobody ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American public” – Bush once again places his confidence in the stupidity and ignorance of the American populace. What remains unclear is whether Bush has become so accustomed to and comfortable in his lying mode that he cannot discern the truth from falsehood and fiction. Any objective view of the status of the populace and conditions in Iraq would lead inexorably to the conclusion that the state of Iraqi society is far from “normal” in any sense of that word.

Bush’s assertion that Iraqi society is slowly normalizing ignores that essentially human trait and instinct of adaptation. History has shown us that humans can adapt to very hostile and adverse conditions when necessity imposes those conditions. It is a survival instinct and not optimization as Bush would have us believe. The Japanese Americans adapted to the internment camps that they were forced to live in during World War II. Their conditions were adverse and they were not in any sense living in a “normal” society. Yet they adapted to daily life in imprisonment, carrying on such educational, social and recreational activities as they could under circumstances that violated international human rights precepts and the Constitution of the United States.

To contend that Iraqi society is normalizing is about as valid as calling Jewish society in the Nazi concentration camps or the daily life in Mogadishu or Darfur to be “normalized.” It is only when you adopt a very distorted and self-serving definition of normal, rather than an objective and honest definition, that you could begin to describe Iraqi society as returning to “normalcy.” The infrastructure of the country remains in a shambles, despite billions of dollars spent to allegedly rebuild. Basic services of water, power, education, health and public safety are unreliable, if available at all, in many areas. The country is in the throes of a civil war with tribal and ethnic factions fighting for control and territory.

Bush’s current claim, of course, ignores the fact that “normal” - status quo ante -must be compared to life under the dictator Saddam Hussein. Bush found that governance so abhorrent that he duped the US Congress into authorizing his violation of international law to unilaterally invade Iraq and install a US occupation force in Iraq. Any “progress” would have to be measured by whether the condition of the Iraqi people is improved over the conditions under which they lived under the prior regime. Even a blind man who can at least listen to the outcries from the Iraqi people for the US to get out of their country and the daily explosions from bombing of innocent civilians and periodic unprovoked slaughter of Iraqi civilians by US mercenary squads would have to concede that the situation is not better than before the US arrived. George W. Bush seems to be worst than blind. “There is none so blind as he who will not see.”