‘Those people’ are people, too
When someone employs the phrase “those people” – as if they are a distinct species from the speaker and his people – the words to follow rarely are complimentary.
The “language of the other” surfaces in times of conflict and war as sure as congressional investigations follow lawmakers’ bad behavior. Describing one’s adversaries or enemies as worth less than oneself perhaps is necessary to justify the need to defeat or kill them.
My dearly departed father-in-law, a World War II Navy veteran who saw combat in the Pacific theater, said unrepeatable things about the Japanese, whose military not only said but did despicable things to Americans and the Chinese during that war.
German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck reportedly commented in the 1870s that the Balkans was not “worth the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian musketeer.”
Doug Bandow, then a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, paraphrased ol’ Otto during testimony in 1999 before the House International Relations Committee on what he saw was the folly of the Clinton administration’s plan to intervene in Kosovo: “The Balkans is not worth the bones of a single healthy American rifleman.”
Similar sentiments are being aired these days – perhaps not quite as colorfully as Bismarck, but no less adamantly – with every new U.S. casualty reported in Iraq.
“Those people” aren’t worth one American life.
The number of U.S. troops killed in action in Iraq came up repeatedly from Democrats during the congressional hearings on the “surge” and how the United States should proceed. The implication, although not openly uttered, was that the level of casualties are not worth what’s been achieved – and what still remains to be done – for the Iraqi people.
Lawmakers from both parties questioned the Iraqi commitment to “standing up” to achieve change in their own country. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin opened the Tuesday afternoon hearing by repeating comments made in the earlier Foreign Relations Committee hearing and Monday’s joint House hearings: “The future of the Iraqi people is in the Iraqi people’s own hands.”
As if saying it often enough would make it so. The old saying, “You break it, you fix it,” is applicable here. The United States broke it.
An honest assessment of the Iraq situation must include the number of Iraqis who have signed on, at great risk to their own safety and that of their families, to positions in the Iraqi army and the various local, regional and national police agencies.
Review the number of courageous Iraqis who have been harassed, kidnapped and even killed because they stepped forward to work with U.S. entities or serve in the admittedly dysfunctional parliament. Sheik Sattar Abu Reesha, the leader of a U.S.-backed Sunni Muslim alliance in Ramadi that literally changed the dynamic of the battle in Anbar province, was killed in a bomb attack Thursday.
Al-Qaida is as despised by the Iraqis struggling to take their future into their own hands as it is by Western interests. The Iraqi people have suffered much greater losses than have coalition forces in trying to wrest their nation from these indiscriminant killers.
Whether one supports the administration’s mission to stay in Iraq until this war is “won” or wants American troops home as soon as possible, to characterize “those people” as unworthy of the U.S. lives that have been lost is flat out wrong and insulting to both the U.S. military and the Iraqis.