Fawaz Turki, disinherited@yahoo.com

If most Iraqis appear so exhausted by the daily grind in their lives, evincing seemingly little interest last week in the choice of their new prime minister-designate and interim government, paying heed more to keeping private generators humming, lining up for hours at gas pumps to fill up their tanks, and struggling to put food on the table in a country with a shattered economy, take heart.

For most Americans, the times seem equally out of joint these days as ordinary folk, prominent commentators and political leaders contemplate the blowback from the war in Iraq.

In recent weeks, President Bush embarked on an aggressive campaign to convince Americans that all is well there and that the turnover of power to a new Iraqi government at the end of this month will go smoothly. Most Americans, however, don’t appear that convinced. While polls show them as “hopeful” about the eventual outcome of the mess that the neocons have gotten them into, the number of “optimists” have fallen, from 80 percent 15 months ago to 62 percent today. In another change, only a minority now describe themselves as “proud” of the US effort in that distant land.

Meanwhile, commentators, holding their own media’s feet to the fire, are engaged in a campaign of their own as they ask their own news organizations why, as the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote last Friday, “poorly documented claims of a dire threat [on the eve of war] received prominent, uncritical coverage, while contrary evidence was either ignored or played down.” And in an interview with Bob Herbert, another columnist for the Times, Al Gore, the former vice president, fumed that the war in Iraq “is the worst strategic fiasco in the history of the United States.” Moreover, he added, “It is an unfolding catastrophe without any comparison.”

Americans are increasingly questioning the administration’s way of doing business around the world. Those who had supported the war from the outset (or voted for it in congress, such as John F. Kerry himself) wonder whether in fact they had done so in order not to seem “unpatriotic” and “soft” on Saddam.

More than a year after President Bush appeared aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln to declare the end of “major combat operations,” he refuses to admit that he blew it in Iraq and Palestine, and continues to promote triumphalism in the former and phantom statehood in the latter.

The problem with the US president, a Texan with scant knowledge of foreign affairs prior to his inauguration in 2001, is that he has morphed under the tutelage of the neocon ideologues, who dominate his administration, into an avenging warrior who is convinced that the US, whose moral authority and superpower status put it above multilateral diplomacy, has the right to wage pre-emptive war, behead adversaries, rebuild nations, and promote Jeffersonian democracy as a template for Middle Eastern and other lands. For Americans, “representative” is the highest encomium they give their government. They expect public opinion to be translated into policy and their political leaders’ duty to be deference to the mass sentiment. That appears to be the thrust of the public debate these days, and no doubt it will change hearts and minds come the presidential elections in November. Alas, Iraqis enjoy no such luxury. Their seeming apathy to the naming of new appointees to the new interim government grows out not only of the knowledge that these folks are not their choice of leaders to begin with, but out of a process of socialization in their political culture that had long long conditioned them to believe that they are not masters of their own destiny.

While Americans debate freely among themselves, Arabs remain passive, quietly acquiescing in the forfeiture of their powers of self-determination. While Americans openly challenge their government to show cause, Arabs are held back by the ethic of fear. And while Americans reinvent themselves every four or eight years, Arabs move around the treadmill of immemorially posited, stultifying norms. I end with a quote from a Steve Biko speech delivered in Cape Town in 1971. “The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor,” he said, “is the mind of the oppressed.”