The Iraqi people want us dead.

About six in 10 Iraqis say they approve of attacks on U.S.-led forces, and slightly more than that want their government to ask U.S. troops to leave within a year, a poll finds.

Six in ten. So an IED goes off in a Baghdad neighborhood and ten Iraqis look out of their windows to see what's going on. They see American soldiers or marines lying dead or dismembered on the ground. And six of those ten say, "Good, serves 'em right."

I supported this war. And I supported it specifically on the theory that we were going to turn Iraq into a Democracy.

I've also stated -- and I get bitched at for it -- that it never occurred to me that we were going to let Iraqis handle the transition to Democracy. I assumed we were doing Japan 1945. I assumed we were going to type up a constitution, hand it to whoever we hadn't killed during the initial attack and say, "Here, do this. If you don't, we'll shoot you." Boot-on-neck democratization.

Instead we've done the righteous libertarian-Republican thing. We knocked off the Iraqi despot and expected democracy to break out like a rash. And now, if it was up to the Iraqi people, "Dead Americans" would win in a landslide.

Here's the thing that should have been clear from the start: if the Iraqis were going to spontaneously auto-democratize, they'd have done it before, and without US Marines.

Left to their own devices they might well have evolved their way to democracy in, oh, a century or two. But if we were going to insist on the express elevator to freedom it was going to have to be done the old-fashioned way. We were going to have to shove it down their unwilling throats. And that meant establishing iron control with an overwhelming troop presence, writing their constitution, reworking their social institutions, taking over their schools and sitting on them for twenty years or until they could manufacture decent home electronics, whichever came first.

I know, it sounds all harsh and draconian. So, let me ask you this: twenty years from now will the Iraqi people be where the Japanese were twenty years after the surrender on the Missouri? Sometimes harsh medicine is the only cure.

This entry was posted by Michael Reynolds, on Thursday, September 28, 2006. You can leave your response.