Spawning a new culture of corruption

Ron has a rather chilling report over at Running Scared about the current state of affairs in Iraq under their current government. It's definitely worth your time to read, but it gave me chills, coming as it did on the heels of my opinion piece yesterday. When writing, "There is a timetable, Part III," I spoke of the core differences between Iraq's people and Americans when it comes to how business and government are run on a daily basis. The corruption there is endemic and massive, and seems to simply be a part of the fabric of their society.

The one feature I failed to anticipate, though, was that I thought the Iraqis would wait until we had pulled out to put most of that into practice. Unfortunately, the article Ron references speaks of Iraqi death squads, torture centers, and corrupt police engaged in profiteering and terrorizing the citizens. And we're not talking about insurgents doing this, or even Americans. This is the current Iraq government today.

We have discussed at length, both here and on my blog, the "culture of corruption" which seems to be running rampant in the present American administration and the highest levels of the Republican leadership in Congress. (I certainly don't need to detail them all for you again here.) But Iraq's culture of corruption is different. Let's give credit where credit is due, folks. When American politicians want to strongarm somebody or funnel large quantities of cash in a clandestine fashion, they are forced to do it under cover. There are still some people watching, so they have to at least make the effort to cover their tracks, launder money through PACs, or influence votes in a way that won't leave a paper trail.

Not in Iraq. The corruption there is a very down-home, "in your face" sort of trouble. When you have a politician making waves or not voting the way you wish, you don't have to promise him a seat on a better committee, or threaten to cut his PAC funding or say you'll out his gay daughter. You just kidnap his wife and threaten to chop her head off. Failing that, you send a group of your "bodyguards" to his house to blow it up with him inside.

If you need to take possession of a large amount of American money which has shown up, there's no dithering about with Bermuda based, offshore companies, clandestine transfers of PAC money or messy tax forms to worry over. You just back a truck up to the building and haul the money away in cash.

Troublesome citizens speaking out about your corrupt practices? No problem! There's no worries about them taking you to the Supreme Court for violating their rights of free speech or sicking the ACLU on you. You just haul them off to a basement someplace and dip their feet in acid.

This is how these people grew up. It's all they know. Certainly Saddam Hussein was a very evil man who richly deserves the punishment he is apparently going to receive, but let's face it - he wasn't exactly ruling over a pack of Boy Scouts. The "government" we have put in place is apparently not even waiting for us to leave and are already up to the same old tricks they learned by observation all their lives.

As Ron so succinctly put it in his essay this morning,

2100+ Americans are dead for this? All the American lives and treasure for a Shiite theocracy aligned with Iran. Some legacy Mr Bush.

Our leaders' failure to understand the Iraq military and Saddam's weapons programs pales in comparison to the complete lack of any clue about the society which we were ostensibly attempting to "fix" when we invaded. The changes needed to turn Iraq into some sort of American based model of progress and democracy are not the kind that happen overnight with a quick infusion of cash. They are generational changes which would require an entire new era of Iraqis growing up in a free society. They are simply doing what they have always known to do, and with or without us, it's not going to be pretty. It's time to declare victory and go home and simply hope for the best from that broken country in the future.