Just in Time for Passover (The Hidden Brooks)

David Brooks' latest column, The Past Meets the Future (fully available to Times Select subscribers), posits a conversation between... erm... Mr. Past and Mr. Future discussing the parallels between Iraq and the Exodus story. The starting point is an essay by Elie Kedourie on the 1920s British occupation of Iraq. First, Mr. Past:

Kedourie shows the whole history of Iraq is a story of "bloodshed, treason and rapine." He shows how Iraqi politics have always been marked by "murderous currents," "demonic hatreds," "grisly spectacles," Sunni violence and Shiite fanaticism. He shows naïve Westerners who thought they could change all this. He even quotes a memo from a British officer saying Britain should threaten to withdraw because then the Iraqis will be forced to behave responsibly. It's all the same!

The central lesson of the past three years is that societies are not that malleable. Evils do not grow out of manageable defects in the environment that can be neatly fixed. We need to change our mentality, scale back to more realistic expectations.

To you, Mr. Future:

Actually, I did read Kedourie, but last night I also reread the Exodus story. The Exodus story reminds us that human beings can transform themselves and their situations. It reminds us that people who embark on generational journeys are the realistic ones, because they are the ones who see all the possibilities the future contains.

[...]

There are times amid the journey when the Promised Land can seem a long way off, when the words "next year in Jerusalem" seem unrealistic. But those are the times when the words mean the most. So of all the lessons to learn from the past three years, the worst would be to settle back into your cold-hearted acceptance of the status quo.

And it continues:

Mr. Past: You had no right to force others to sacrifice for your distant visions of milk and honey. How long is the young woman in Najaf supposed to be oppressed while you wait for the Arab journey through chaos to end?

Your problem is that in your innocence, you have no idea how long historical processes take to work themselves out. You have no idea of the deep cultural continuities that stretch back over centuries and shape behavior. The people who suffer for democracy should see the wages of their labor sometime in their own lives.

Mr. Future: Because you are so arrogant, you assume I am an idiot. The Exodus story prepares us for all that. It is not the story of liberation, but of the long, troubled march to freedom.

The Israelites had been damaged by their own oppression. They longed for freedom but were not ready for it. There were fights and divisions.

Moses told his men to "slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor," thus ordering the murder of 3,000 Israelites.

He closes out with Mr. Future, commenting on Mr. Past's pessimism, with an assertion that I find questionable:

Mr. Future: You will be surprised by the habits of mind you fall into. You will stop trying to end tyranny and pretty soon you will stop condemning it. You will develop a hardheartedness that flatters your moral vanity because it seems mature.

Remember, fewer Iraqis have died in the second Iraq war than in the first, when Saddam crushed the Shiite uprising we fomented. The world wasn't bothered by that extermination — there were no rallies in the streets. We were all being realistic.

The deaths in either war are deplorable (see this Wikipedia entry on casualty numbers in the current Iraq conflict), but the circumstances are quite different. In the former, a brutal dictator lashed out at his own people. In the latter, we (the liberators) have created a vacuum of leadership, of trust that has led to a breakdown of Iraqi society along canon-esque sectarian lines. I don't believe we should completely turn our backs defeating tyranny throughout the world, but the brazen, half-cocked, messianic way in which we entered the Iraq War (not to mention the lies that were served up to the American populace) needs to be replaced by a more realistic understanding of what and should be accomplished.