Good Reporting Corroborated, Irony Abounds

Speaking about Kindergarten lessons, P.J. O'Rourke has an interview in the Atlantic about his upcoming piece on Iraq. Check out this snippet:

One example of the kind of reporting that O'Rourke favors is his account of a trip organized by the Kuwait Ministry of Information (part of the Department of Moral Guidance, he notes), during which he covered the Kuwaiti Red Crescent Society's distribution of food in Safwan, Iraq, just across the Kuwait border. He watched the chaos that ensued from the top of the aid truck:

There was no reason for people to clobber one another. Even assuming that each man in the riot—and each boy—was the head of a family, and assuming the family was huge, there was enough food in the truck. Mohammed al-Kandari, a doctor from the Kuwait Red Crescent Society, had explained this to the Iraqis when the trailer arrived.... Al-Kandari had persuaded the Iraqis to form ranks. They looked patient and grateful, the way we privately imagine the recipients of food donations looking when we're writing checks to charities. Then the trailer was opened, and everything went to hell.

Most of us have never considered that kindergarten's most important lesson—that of lining up—is somehow related to our society's ability to self-govern. For O'Rourke, the mad dash for food in Safwan represented something more than hunger or desperation:

Aid seekers in England would queue automatically by needs, disabled war vets and nursing mothers first. Americans would bring lawn chairs and sleeping bags, camp out the night before, and sell their places to the highest bidders. Japanese would text-message one another, creating virtual formations, getting in line to get in line. Germans would await commands from a local official, such as the undersupervisor of the town clock. Even Italians know how to line up, albeit in an ebullient wedge. The happier parts of the world have capacities for self-organization so fundamental and obvious that they appear to be the pillars of civilization ... But here—on the road to Ur, in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley ... nothing was supporting the roof.

Now check out this snippet I caught on the web where someone was reporting what he found from a soldier just back from Iraq:

And I am not the greatest narrator or storyteller so much of this is just going to be rambling but you should get the jist of it. First off, I guess I should clue others in that my boy (no, not my son SA :-) ) had just came in Satuday from Iraq and I went over there to shoot the sh*t with him. One of the first things he said to me was how f’ed up the Iraqis over there are. They do not understand civility or rules or kindness, just abuse and total authority over them. He said it was like babysitting whenever he had to work with them. Don’t get me wrong, there were some that understood more than others, but as a whole they are selfish and undisciplined without any sense of community. Also, they lacked common sense. An example of this is when they filled propane tanks for the Iraqi citizens, they couldn’t let it be known where it would be until a couple minutes before hand because of the scrambling of everyone to get theirs first. They even had to put concertina up and form a male and female line so that they can have some semblance of organization in the whole process. Inevitably some people would try to jump ahead in line and that is where the Army would show the Iraqis what a hammer toss is, using their tank as the hammer. Back of the line son !

What the libs don't get is that the precise reason why we may not succeed is the precise reason why we have to! (Since when has the world become an irony-free zone?) You can't let these people have nukes -- they'll put the big red button on their car hood as a bragging right; and then wonder what went wrong when they parked under the coconut tree. And that's the ones who aren't viciously brainwashed to be insane killers. (And irony of ironies, I have great sympathy for the Iraqis and actually believe that they are one of our best hopes to snap out of it due to the very brutality of Saddam's oppression. Check out Healing Iraq, for instance.)

Which leads to the real money quote from the O'Rourke interview:

In your last interview for The Atlantic you mentioned that Chris Buckley and Dave Barry are good friends of yours. What would happen if we locked the three of you in a room—with drinks and cigars, of course—and told you to solve the problems of the Middle East?

First of all, it better be a lot of cigars and a lot of beer! An awful lot of beer, because we're going to be in there for a long, long time. The problems of the Middle East are the problems of mankind since we came out of the trees. They just happen to be a little more intense. When you look at a chaotic region like the Middle East, what you're really seeing is most of human history, and some parts of America and some parts of Europe and a few parts of Asia are glaring exceptions. The kind of peaceful, productive, incredibly wealthy life that we live in these few areas around the world—this has only been going on for a nanosecond as time goes. It's so exceptional I'm not even sure what it means. The whole world might degenerate back into the Middle East, because that's what it's always been. And you can't solve the problem of the Middle East, because it's not a problem, it's a condition. It's the normal condition of mankind.

If you read Donald Kagan's The Peloponnesian War, it's all there. It's been going on like this, time out of mind. Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I'm not even sure we can draw lessons from them.

So we shouldn't be trying to make sense out of it?

You don't despair about something like the Middle East, you just do the best you can. Do the right thing and be brave and it will never get any better.

There's lots to chew on here, no? The idea that the West can just sit around and have parlor conversations about cricket with barbarians is just the West's "fantasy ideology" to pair up with Al Qaeda's that Allah will make them victorious in the face of an opponent they can barely comprehend. And the real irony here is that implementing the Western Leftist's fantasy world of preemptive surrender is the only plausible way that Al Qaeda's fantasy can happen.

For the unspoken truth is what everyone knows with a moment's reflection -- if the West were actually as evil as Noam Chomsky thunders, then the Muslim world would have long since been rendered as a sea of human lampshades. For that's what the real Hitler did without remorse.

We are once again driven by our enlightenment values to risk our lives and our futures hoping against the clock that measured battle can once again come from behind and defeat the latest barbarism at a price we can pay without overwhelming tears. For if our children's futures clearly become the center of the stakes, as finally became clear in the struggle with Japan, history shows that science and logic continually provide us new tools that ignorant barbarity cannot even imagine...