The Benefits of being Invaded

http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/2008/02/the-final-missi-1.php

Reading through this post, especially the last few paragraphs, brought to mind very strongly how an intervention like the American one in Iraq is not one event but many millions of individual events. There have been millions of interactions between individual Iraqis and Americans since March 2003, and Iraq will be changed in many subtle ways as a consequence. For one thing, America and Americans are for most people in the middle east mythical entities about which they hear much but have experienced nil. Not Iraqis. A very large majority of Iraqis will have now met Americans, talked to them, perhaps even had daily dealings with them. Meeting people, looking them in the eye and getting a chance to make your own judgement is so so different from judging from afar. For one thing, many of the myths about people fall away to dust when you stand in front of them and talk to them. Its impossible to be around people considerably different from yourself and not take an interest in how they think, how they live, how they behave morally.

I lived in Africa for six years, and my overall judgement of Africans was that individually many of them are great people, but that African culture as I got to know it was woeful and punitive. The Africans who gave it up and lived by our cultural rules seemed to gain tremendously from it. Will that happen in Iraq? Will American culture, the real actual American culture which is tolerant, even-handed, rough and ready but dependable and generous, rub off on Iraqis and give Iraq a much better chance of success as a country? Perhaps it will. Vanquished often copy their victors. Who knows, in a few years, young guys who were foot-soldiers in the insurgencies may well be playing basketball, pimping their rides and drinking beer down at the local haunt. And perhaps imbibing the more subtle flavours of American culture too...

I'm pretty sure though that Iraq will never be quite the same again. The Guardianistas and the Palestinian intellectuals in New York will hate it, sure, but Iraq will almost certainly gain from the experience. You only have to look at the other countries America helped down the road to western-style civic dispensations to understand that being taken over by them is generally a marvellous and salutary experience. Do you want to be rich and free and strong? Invite the Americans in.