"Let Ahmed Do It!"

The Nyok Times opines as follows--and I want y'all to read this very, very slowly and in a single breath:

. . . Consider this all too familiar horror: yesterday, police said they pulled six bodies from the Tigris River about 25 miles south of Baghdad. They were handcuffed and showed signs of having been tortured. And five, including a child, had been beheaded.

Perhaps 160,000 American troops could hold down the overall casualty numbers indefinitely, but they cannot wipe away that sort of hatred. That’s the job of Iraq’s leaders.

The Nyok Times ought to have someone read this stuff in cold blood to catch the dissonances, before they actually go to e-press.

Whatever makes ye Ed. think that Iraqis are better able than we to "wipe away" hatred like that? I'm no apologist for the War; oh, no, not so, but far otherwise. I've no illusions about the Allies' ability to bring peace to the warring tribes. But the notion that natives can solve their own ethnic problems sooner than we can is simply laughable.

Remember how Reconstruction bound up the Nation's wounds, virtually overnight? Remember how the Brits batted 1.000 in Northern Ireland? Remember when the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960's put an end to racial tension in America?

Neither do I.

It's all but certain that the Allies won't solve the problem, but we're the only hope Iraq has. Tolerance (that once and future virtue) cannot be taught, except by example. The Allied Forces are likelier to do it than the present Iraqi government, or any government that Iraq can expect to field hereafter.

The subtext of the editorial, it seems to me, is this: Lift not a finger, O White Man, to stop the benighted Arab from destroying himself! In this, perhaps, they're right; who knows? But it would be refreshing if they simply came right out and said so.