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Nation-Building Fuels Civil Destruction
By Pierre Tristram

Nation Building , 2007 [->0]

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"The strength of the West in relation to the East has never been in its impositions and colonialisms."
Pierre Tristam argues in this viewpoint that the U.S. nation-building in Iraq mimics circumstances involving the United States in Southeast Asia over thirty years ago. In both instances, he believes the United States has exaggerated its nation-building efforts to cover up the destruction it wages against the societies it is involved with. Tristam predicts, based on his historical reading, the United States will blame the Arabs for our own failures in Iraq and elsewhere. Pierre Tristam is an editorial writer and columnist at the Daytona Beach News Journal, and editor of Candide's Notebooks.
As you read, consider the following questions:
1. When U.S. neoconservatives celebrated the invasion of Iraq as a turning point in Middle East democracy, what did they ignore, according to Tristam?
2. According to Tristam, how has the United States used the story of Muslim on Muslim violence in Iraq?
3. Does the author believe that another genocide could happen in Iraq despite U.S. nation-building efforts?
The standard line about Iraq [as of February 2006] is that the country is on the verge of civil war. That "simmering hatreds" are boiling to the surface. That "sectarianism" is to blame. All those regurgitated clichés of the Orientalist [studies of Near and Far East cultures by Western scholars] canon may well be true. But what convenient detractions from a three-year-old certainty rendered by the American invasion. What ideal way to shift the blame, indemnify the invader, and make this [March 2006] third anniversary of Iraq's "liberation," approaching at the speed of a panicked Bradley Fighting Vehicle [U.S. Army tank], look like a job gone awry only because Iraqis couldn't get along. Sure, the destruction of a revered Shiite mosque in Samarra,...