Art Small: Rebuilding Iraq From The Roof Down


[This is the text of the flyer that you can pass out at your Fahrenheit 9/11 screenings or house parties. Scroll down for more information.]

Almost every school child has read Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
and delighted in the sense of the ridiculous found in the descriptions
of the Lilliputian pigmies and the Brobdingnag giants. But only a few
today read the sections of that great classic in which the Royal
Academy of Lagado is described. The scholars of that academy, although
blind, mix colors for painters by feel and smell. They work to
propagate a breed of naked sheep. They build houses by beginning at the
roof and only later work down to the foundations.



It’s a
pity few read about the Academy of Lagado because today such scholars
still continue their work, not between the pages of an 18th century
classic but in the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. There they
serve as the trusted advisors of the Bush administration and chart the
future of Iraq.



How else can one explain the continuous series of disastrous mistakes the Bush administration has made in Iraq?



The
common characteristic of the scholars of the Academy of Lagado was
their inability to exercise any common sense. They tried to force the
world to conform to their notions of what should be. They refused to
adapt to reality and to how the world and human nature actually worked.
When they failed, as they always did, they did not adjust; they worked
harder and failed again.



Sound
familiar? The political scholars within the Bush administration are
still convinced there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and with
time they will be uncovered. They are still convinced that the people
of Iraq will come to welcome them as liberators rather than as
conquerors. They are still convinced that with a little patience, a
liberal democracy will flourish in the land between the Tigris and
Euphrates.



It would take pages to spell out the litany of their mistaken beliefs. They have been wrong so repeatedly.



Yet they hold their convictions so blindly they will risk lives and the lives of others, to prove their doctrines true.



Like
Swift’s scholars — who tried for years to extract sun-beams from
cucumbers – they appear not to be learning from past mistakes, or
reacting to the world as it is.



Edmund
Burke, the great British statesman who supported the American
Revolution, observed that democracies do not come into being according
to abstract ideas of right. Rather, the people must desire freedom and
have an abiding respect for the rule of law. Government must originate
directly from the people. It cannot be transmitted to them. Sadly,
these conditions do not exist in Iraq and, despite the blind desires of
the Bush administration’s academy scholars, are unlikely to spring into
existence in my lifetime.”



Arthur A. Small

Democratic Candidate for U.S. Senate

Art Small does not accept special interest money.  You can contribute to the Art Small For U.S. Senate campaign here.