“Hell no, we won’t go,” say US diplomats assigned to Iraq:
“It’s one thing if someone believes in what’s going on over there and volunteers, but it’s another thing to send someone over there on a forced assignment,” Mr. Croddy said. “I’m sorry, but basically that’s a potential death sentence and you know it. Who will raise our children if we are dead or seriously wounded?”
His remarks were met with loud and sustained applause from the approximately 300 diplomats at the meeting. Mr. Thomas responded by saying the comments were “filled with inaccuracies” but did not elaborate until challenged by the head of the diplomats’ union, the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), who, like Mr. Croddy and others, demanded to know why many learned of the decision from news reports.
Mr. Thomas took full responsibility for the late notification but objected when AFSA President John Naland said a recent survey found only 12 per cent of the union’s membership believed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was “fighting for them.”
Comment:
I had mixed feelings when I read this. On one hand, it’s good news that the rank and file of the diplomatic corps are up in arms against this administration’s policies. It means staying on in Iraq gets more and more dicey. On the other hand, leaving aside the bigger picture, what does this say about the governing class?
That it’s a bunch of tough-talking wimps could be one ungenerous conclusion.
Let’s see.
Some of you folks did nothing to stop the mad rush to war when you had both the expertise and the credibility to do so. You could have resigned en masse. You could have publicized what was going on. You could have signed up with the antiwar movement. You could have blown whistles, sounded alarms, rung bells, issued distress signals – whatever it took.
But you did nothing of the sort. You were quite happy to go along when it was young men and women from rural areas, small towns, and impoverished neighborhoods who were hauled off to the desert to kill and mutilate and to be killed and mutilated themselves. When they survive intact in body, they will still be maimed for life in their minds and souls. Ask John McCain.
All for reasons that they hardly knew.
And now, now, when YOU have to face the fact that your life might be in danger, it’s a whole different game suddenly.
Suddenly, you are in revolt.
Mind you, the Green Zone you are going to is an impregnable fortress next to the rest of the country the poor grunts get to see up close and personal.
And mind you, I am all for people shirking their duty if it’s tied up with death and mutiliation. The more people do that, the fewer wars we would have.
But so much tender concern for your own hide with no concern whatsoever for anyone else’s is a bit…..what’s that word I’m groping for here?….begins with a “c”?
Hmmm…
Conscientious? Christian?
Try again.
OK, Cautious….
Or wait,
Compromised….cringe-making….cowardly…craven….
Bingo.
“You mean that it isn’t just yuppie fraternity games as in campus politics,” said the
Fletcher School of Foreign Fun & Fraternity games.
Exactly.
Some of these schools are so rarefied in atmosphere, it’s painful to think their graduates hold the fate of a large chunk of the globe in their manicured hands.
There’s Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria (in origin, an Indian Muslim from a wealthy Bombay newspaper family), who, I remember, was all for the war. He’s also a Tufts alum, I think.
Now, he wants out. Maybe he wised up. Good for him. But why do we consider people like him prodigies of intellect and foresight when they’re so wrong most of the time? Beats me.
Could it be because we have a caste system based on “prestige” schooling that segregates us and indoctrinates us so we think only some people’s opinions count? So we limit really original and useful opinions and replace them with a staged public debate that gets labeled “diverse” just because we have enough “browns” and “blacks” and “yellows” involved – all of whom are carefully picked out of the same “prestige” system.
Now, Zakaria could be a well-meaning fellow. But that isn’t enough. Can an immigrant like him really move up the official ladder fast if he stepped out of line? I think not. People like him only step out of line when there’s enough public momentum on their side. But a real leader steps out of line when his reason and conscience tells him to.
I could be wronging the man. Maybe, he really did think the Iraq war would work. But come to think of it, that’s even more frightening. If top graduates of top policy schools are all that (I was going to say dumb)…naive, what does it say about top schools, about schooling itself, and about that ever so American subject of study – political science?
A better and more powerful example of caste and status in contemporary Supernation would be hard to find.
The intellectual class up close, very personal, and confronted with maiming and ugly death.
Imagine if the video of “a potential death sentence” for State Dept. bureaucrats was shown to every teen age recruit for grunt/get-blown-up status at a few hundred per month?
Let’s send bloodthirsty Norman Podhorentz to Iraq where he can ride shotgun for a few months in a Humvee, and we will see how he likes it.