A Meditation on Stupidity

A conundrum, as it were, is that, at least in the arts, self-marketing is, obviously, as important as the talent being displayed. How good can an unheard musician be, so to speak.

But other than self-promotion, what justification can there be for this person being allowed to hold himself out as any sort of expert?

“There were failures at the level of leadership, and they’re overwhelmingly Iraqi failures,” he said. Chief among the culprits, he added, were the Iraqis picked by the Americans in 2003 to sit on the Iraqi Governing Council, many of them exiles who tried to create popular bases for themselves by emphasizing sectarian and ethnic differences.

“Sectarianism began there,” he said.

***

Then there is the small issue of American policy. “Everything they could do wrong, they did wrong,” Mr. Makiya said. “The first and the biggest American error was the idea of going for an occupation.”

At Brandeis, Mr. Makiya is exploring all these themes in a class this semester on — what else — post-invasion Iraq.

***

...Mr. Makiya refers to Dec. 30, 2006, the day Mr. Hussein was hanged, as “one of the worst days of my life.”

“It was a disaster, an unmitigated disaster,” Mr. Makiya said, his voice rising. “I was just so upset, even on the verge of tears. It was the antithesis of everything I had been working for and hoping for.”

The tribunal did little to expose the all-encompassing cruelty of the Baath Party, Mr. Makiya said. And in failing to control an execution chamber filled with seething Shiite officials and policemen, the Iraqi government “actually succeeded in making Saddam look good in the eyes of the Arab world.”

***

Talk turned to the presidential race. Mr. Morse mentioned the pressure that Hillary Rodham Clinton was facing to apologize for her Senate vote authorizing President Bush to go to war.

Mr. Makiya stared into his glass of red wine. “That’s so Maoist,” he said. “People shouldn’t feel the need to apologize. What is there to apologize for?”

Well, some Brandeis parents should apologize for allowing their children to be any class taught by this guy....

Link.

Just imagine: There was never a possibility of sectarianism until we set up our first puppet government. Let's just turn the historical clock back ever so little: sectarianism was in part the reason why Saddam ruled as he did. Or for that matter, why Saudi Arabia is ruled the way. It is in fact the natural state of man: the majority tribe rules the minority in an abusive way: Darfur; Somalia; Russia; Serbia; Nazi Germany -- those are just examples off the top of my head.

And what's there to apologize for? Enabling an Administration of crazy people to go to war -- or "quagmire" -- for no justifiable reason whatsoever is not a good reason to apologize? No, that's Maoist.

Yet this expert, as it were, actually seems to think that sectarianism first came to Iraq in 2003??

And he's also wrong that an occupation qua occupation was wrong. Actually, it was necessitated by a prior mistake: destroying the Iraqi government and civil service and -- duh, Doctor -- creating a complete vacuum.

I know, I know: it's wrong and unfair to essentially call this guy an idiot when we're led by who we're led by....