Charles Krauthammer is upset that America is getting blamed for the civil war in Iraq. In his opinion it is the fault of the Iraqis. We tried to give them democracy and they chose civil war.

I’ve got a couple of things to say about this. There are bad people in the world. Adolf Hitler was a psychotic person. He hijacked a country that was suffering from economic hardship and military disgrace. It’s true that ‘the Jewish problem’ in Germany was not invented by Hitler. Anti-Semitism was far more pervasive in Germany (and Europe and America) than just the National Socialist Party. But there was nothing inherent in German society, no inexorable logic, that led to the Holocaust or to German wars of conquest. Hitler took a civilized society and turned into a machine of pure evil.

That seems to be how conservatives like Charles Krauthammer looked at Saddam Hussein. He saw Iraq as a basically decent, secular, potentially pro-Western society that had been unfortunately hijacked by a bloodthirsty anti-Semitic dictator. It never seems to have occurred to Charles Krauthammer that Saddam Hussein acted like a son-of-a-bitch to the Shi’ites and the Kurds because there were internal dynamics in Iraq that made it very hard to hold it together. I don’t want anyone to think I am excusing the way Saddam Hussein operated. I’m not excusing gassing civilians or torturing and mutilating people. I don’t know how much of the horrible things Saddam did and had done were necessary and how much of it just fed his sadistic nature. He and he sons were definitely sadistic. But I think we can look at Iraq today and understand why Saddam operated the country as a police state. It’s hard to see how anyone can regain control over the country and provide basic security without resorting to many of the dictatorial tactics used by Saddam.

And let’s not get distracted and think the situation in Iraq means that Arabs are incapable of democracy anywhere and at anytime. I’m not saying that. But Iraq was a really bad place to choose as a laboratory of democracy because of the sectarian and ethnic divisions that exist there. Egypt is much more homogenous. I bet Egypt could do democracy. Iraq cannot. It’s a fact that many knowledgeable people predicted. And we need to come to grips with it.

Krauthammer is trying to come to grips with it:

Our entire strategy has been to fight one side and then the other to try to prevent sectarian violence — a policy that has been one of the leading reasons Americans are ready to quit and walk away. They can understand one-front wars, but they can’t understand two-, three- and four-front wars, with Americans fighting any and all in sequence and sometimes in combination.

But he is failing to acknowledge that the people that really understood Iraq already knew this before the first shock-and-awe bomb fell. And people like Krauthammer didn’t listen to them. They were dismissed and their patriotism was questioned. So, when we ask whose fault it is that 600,000 Iraqis are now dead (not the tens of thousands that Krauthammer estimates) we have to point the finger right back at Krauthammer. He is responsible. No, not the military. Not the Iraqis. The neo-cons that made the decision and the case for war are responsible. The blood is on your hands Charles. Your hands and the hands of the monkey-in-chief and his quail-hunting sidekick.