If you look at the online editorial page of today’s New York Times, up in the right corner of the screen you’ll see a little box with a summary of an editorial from Tokyo’s Asahi Shimbun. According to the Shimbun’s sages, the U.S. “needs to harmonize the interests of Iraq’s various ethnic groups.”
Gee, why didn’t we think of that?
And right next to that is a summary of today’s column by Thomas Friedman, whose title asks “Are There Any Iraqis in Iraq?”
Are there enough people ready to identify themselves — not as Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis — but as Iraqis, who are ready to fight for the chance of self-determination for the Iraqi people as a whole?
This is a good question, especially for a country whose residents (in the old days one would have said “citizens,” but now that term has become too “exclusionary”) have become accustomed to thinking of themselves primarily by their ethnic rather than by their national identity. The country I am speaking of, of course, is ours.
Perhaps it is too late to complain that our society and politics have become Balkanized. Maybe what we need to say now is that we have become Iraqized.
That is precisely the problem with the separatist racial/ethnic victimology mindset. Instead of a vast ‘melting pot’ coming together and collaborating on the creation of greater wealth (John F. Kennedy’s tide that raises all the boats higher), we get a bunch of half vast enclaves all fighting to gain a larger slice of a pie that will, on the whole, shrink. Everyone ends up worse off than they were before. There is only a change in who bears the greater brunt of the increase in misery.