From TPM Reader MLTheres

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From TPM Reader ML:

There’s this chimera (some might call it a meme) floating about that hasn’t been properly considered, and the dangers of not doing so are stark. There’s this belief that the Iraqis have to know that they’re responsible for their own fates, and with that burden, they’ll at least make strides towards whipping themselves into shape. So the US should set the timetable or get out or whatever, so the Iraqis have the felt exigency of just getting along. (Of course, this has been pedalled by Friedman, the same one convinced that ‘moderate’ Muslims are capable, through their overweening moderation, of stopping lunatic extremists.) But take a step back and see what’s being said and who it’s being said about before we start down another dangerously deluded road, making the same mistakes and presumptions as before. Is this not the same couple of groups with a 1400 year-old blood feud? Are these not embers that have ignited into war repeatedly between small groups and nation states in the region? What, aside from its a priori attraction, should we possibly make of the argument that sovereignty or the threat of it will calm these rivalries? I’m open to suggestion as to how that might work, but my gut tells me it’s dangerously misguided wishful thinking.

ML hints at a point I’ve been meaning to get to for some time. If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a hundred times–from politicians in both parties and from countless commentators: If we give the Iraqis a timetable for withdrawal, they will have to stop relying on our good graces (look where that’s gotten them) and take responsibility for their own destiny.

Let’s call it neo-toddler foreign policy. With the right balance of rewards and punishments, we can re-direct misbehavior in the short term and instill long-term discipline.

Where does this notion come from?

It’s long been a component of American foreign policy (though the neo-conservatives seem to feature it), but is there some historical basis for this approach, or is it, as I suspect, just a blatant manifestation of our paternalistic approach to most of the rest of the world?

This approach–reducing politics to competing bad or good behaviors, rather than, say, competing self-interests–infects most of our current dealings in the Middle East. We can’t talk with Syria or Iran because that would be a reward for bad behavior. We can’t stay in Iraq indefinitely because that would be overprotective. Instead, the Iraqis need to be weaned from our presence.

That may be an effective parenting technique for toddlers (or maybe just a way to patch and fill through a difficult phase they eventually grow out of). But even setting aside how patronizing and condescending it must sound to foreign peoples and countries (and therefore self-defeating for us), it is a desperately impractical approach to foreign policy.

Signaling to Iraqis that we’re leaving by a date certain in hopes of forcing them to pick up the pieces of their broken country and put it back together is more of the same grand-scale wishful thinking that led us into this mess in the first place.

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