I normally do not go in for this sort of "shrill" argument, but Shrub's pep talk to congressional Republicans today makes one thing perfectly clear: Racism (or ethnocentrism, or prejudice, if you prefer) explains much of what the US has done in Iraq:
President Bush sought to rally Republican lawmakers around his Iraq plan Thursday, saying Iraqis are ready to "take the training wheels off" by assuming some political power, but warning that violence is likely to worsen as that transfer approaches.
To Bush, then, Iraqis are moral, cultural, ane mental children who needed the tough love of invasion, conquest, and occupation, with frequent corporal punishment (the kind fired from planes and tanks), so they can grow up to be like their Uncle Sam. The infantilization of nonwhite peoples is one of the oldest and most revealing themes of old-fashioned western imperialism, of the "white man's burden" type.
It also reveals a profoundly low estimation of the worth of nonwhite lives that Bush could use a homely analogy to suburban American childhood to describe a military occupation that has killed thousands of mostly innocent Iraqis, imprisoned, "abused" or greviously wounded many others, and wrecked countless Iraqi homes and neighborhoods. This is the old Euro-American racial calculus, going back to the early American Indian wars, in which a single raid (often retaliatory or highly provoked) could bring on a massive war of extermination and expropriation. Check out the origins of such conflicts as Lord Dunmore's War of 1774 or the Creek War of 1814. The overwhelming white response to the abortive slave rebellions of Gabriel (Virginia, 1800) and Denmark Vesey (South Carolina,1822) flowed from the same source. Quite simply, white lives were regarded as worth many times what nonwhite lives were, justifying whatever scale of retribution and violence whites cared to inflict. Fallujah, anyone?
