To most of the world, and to most of Iraq (if we believe the polls coming out of there) America has become the bad guy (what used to be called the “black hat” in old time movies).
Bush and his advisors have attempted to create a number of black hats to rally the locals and the world (like weapons of mass distruction, Suddam, Osama, Iran, Militant Islamists, Syrians, Bathists, even the French for a while) to the side of the Americans and British, but we keep wearing the black hat.
The other day a friend of mine and I tried to come up with something else that might get all the different aspects of the Iraqi adventure fighting together with rather than against America.
We only came up with two, but both of them would have to be manipulated by the U.S. and no one could ever find out about it afterwards.
Alien invaders from another planet ala Independance Day or War of the Worlds.
America could ban together with all factions to fight off the evil invaders and then leave the country after helping their Iraqi brothers and sisters repulse the invaders.
A disease like bird flu that would affect all the different factions fighting pretty much equally and would show the Americans fighting the disease in a wonderfully herioc light as they waded into dying Iraqis both friends and former enemies trying to save their lives. When the disease was finally controlled (rest assured it would have reaked most havoc with those who would refuse to turn to the U.S. and its allies for help) the U.S. could leave in even better light than they did with the Marshall Plan. Yes, I know it sounds a great deal like giving disease-carrying blankets to the Native Americans in the late nineteenth century.
OK, OK not great ones; One is silly and the other is blood thirsty (and against every treaty the world has ever signed). Is there a black hat we can turn to in order to be able to get out of Iraq?
Send five hundred young, blonde white women there and claim they’ve gone “missing”? Well, at least you’ll have the American media holding out for you.
Lob a Wii (via mortar, or parachute drop) into every terrorist camp and put out an ad on Gamespot. (Nerds, unite!) Then organise a search and rescue party for all the frail, missing children.
Or, set up a warlord with actual dirty bombs in the corner of Iraq edging on Iran :dubious
Hype him up as extra-dangerous in the media, then have an A-1 Thunderhawk or something send a missile flying his way and watch the fireworks. An actual dirty explosion would probably rally quite a few. It’d also be a huge “Told ya so!” for the current administration.
Nitpick : We were the black hat from the beginning; we didn’t become it.
We can get out of Iraq any time we feel like it. As for turning their anger towards a new enemy, I don’t think it’s possible at this point; even if a new bad guy showed up, they’d still hate us, and they’d probably assume that the new bad guy was working with or for us. I don’t think that your disease idea would work, because the Iraqis would instantly assume we had inflicted it on them; either as part of the plan you describe, or out of sheer malice.
We gave up the white hat when we told the Europeans to shove it at the start of the war, and again when the initial fighting was over and we rejected their late entry as peace keepers (to hoard all the oil and rebuilding money for Haliburton, etc.)
To get the white hat back, all we have to do is declare we will withdraw our troops one-for-one with any peacekeepers from Europe or Arab states.
That puts all the options on the rest of the world to put up or shut up.
Won’t work; they’d just say “you broke it, you bought it.” I doubt they’d feel any responsibility to clean up our mess. Nor would failing to do so make them the black hats; they warned us, and we basically said “screw you”.
At this point, we’d need to turn Iraq into the neocon fantasy of a peaceful, democratic, prosperous, American friendly country to take off our black hats, and we can’t do that. We were never going to manage that; we welded those black hats onto our heads when we invaded Iraq.
I bet they’d be a bit stricter in demanding payment if you fired an RPG into their shop and broke everything, and set the place on fire to boot. Which is a much better analogy for us in Iraq. We are the only ones who are likely to shrug off responsibility for Iraq, and that doesn’t doesn’t do any good for convincing other people we aren’t the “black hats”’.
It takes a lot longer to build a good reputation than it does to trash it. Bush has done damage to the US image in the world that will take generations to undo. Until this fiasco has run its course, there is nothing that can be done to clear the nation’s name.
No. Even if we could find someone worse, it would not excuse our own actions.