New York Times Blames Democracy For Iraq's Woes

By Ed Lasky

Besides blaming Bush, this New York Times editorial blames the immense problems in Iraq on the fact that the majority Shias are in control and that the President should have foreseen what democracy did to the nation:

The problem is not Mr. Maliki’s narrow-mindedness or incompetence. He is the logical product of the system the United States created, one that deliberately empowered the long-persecuted Shiite majority and deliberately marginalized the long-dominant Sunni Arab minority. It was all but sure to produce someone very like Mr. Maliki, a sectarian Shiite far more interested in settling scores than in reconciling all Iraqis to share power in a unified and peaceful democracy.

"All but sure" denotes a belief by the Times that Mr. Bush should have consulted a psychic prior to the invasion as the Times seems to have done prior to writing this editorial. On what reasonable, rational basis can anyone make the claim that it was "all but sure" that a sectarian partisan would have risen to the post of Prime Minister?

It is arrogance, of course, that allows the Times to opine this way.

The logic is hard to find in this scathing attack against George Bush (but isn't that always so at the New York Times). The editorial notes Maliki's incompetence and sectarianism but incomprehinsibly blames Bush for creating the democracy in Iraq that allowed Maliki to be elected. Is the Times suggesting America impose a ruler in Iraq as the British did as a colonial power?