Stupidity and Arrogance

Everyone has gone batshit over the State Department official who confessed on al-Jazeera that things haven’t gone so swimmingly in Iraq and that the United States has displayed, among other possible attributes, “stupidity” and “arrogance.” The predictable suspects have worked themselves into a frothy mess over this, citing remarks by Alberto Ferbandez as one more piece of evidence that the DNC-Media Complex want the United States to “lose” in Iraq. The warbloggers appear to be nearly unanimous in calling for Fernandez’s head (literally, I would assume in some comments sections); those who aren’t are suggesting — since Great Britain is the new France — that the BBC is hatching an anti-American, pro-Islamist plot. It’s all quite exciting.

For a valuable corrective to all this, here’s Lounsbury on the issue:

[D]enying one has fucked Iraq into a cocked hat merely means one is a liar or delusional – or a stupid cretin I suppose – and framing it as an honest attempt destroyed by incompetence and arrogance at least steps up to the plate, whereas the other choice is for people to believe you deliberately have fucked the Iraqis.

Lounsbury’s point is reiterated and magnified more substantively by Marc Lynch, who — get this — actually understands something about the nature of public diplomacy and explains why these remarks were potentially quite useful. This administration has stood by with mute incomprehension for over five years now, wondering why (as The Decider often puts it) the people of the Middle East misread the pure intentions and noble hearts of Americans. As Lynch understands, if that narrative is ever going to be persuasive, it won’t so long as the Bush administration remains defiantly “on message,” falsely insisting that the war is exactly what they expected it would be.

To warbloggers — for whom the notion of “Arab culture” is an abomination, and for whom any dialogue a slippery slope toward “dhimmitude” — none of what Lynch has to say will make any sense. For the rest of us, the whole post is worth reading.