America as Annie Sullivan

Michael Wright: How are you feeling?

Pundita: Exhausted. The Battle of the Beltway is the political equivalent of the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Michael Wright: Rest up this weekend. Next week Petraeus and Crocker will bring a squealing pig to the Hill and slap lipstick on it.

Pundita: I wish you hadn't put that image in my mind.

Michael Wright: Even bin Laden is getting into the act.

Pundita: You mean one of his body doubles. As long as Qaeda sticks to talking and doesn't launch an attack to get in their two cent's worth, why not? Everybody and his uncle is trying to influence Congress about Iraq.

Michael Wright: Do you ever have doubts? About whether we should stay, whether we should have invaded?

Pundita: About two months ago I had a dream that shocked me. I hauled off and with all my might slapped President Bush in the face.

Michael Wright: How did he react?

Pundita: He took it on the chin, didn't say anything. That was the entire dream. What shocked me is that I didn't realize I was very angry with him. I guess my anger built up and finally surfaced in a dream.

Michael Wright: I thought you liked Bush.

Pundita: I do.

Michael Wright: Maybe you weren't angry; maybe you were trying to jar him awake.

Pundita: Huh?

Michael Wright: Being stubborn is one thing but with Bush he can get so upset he mentally folds his arms. That's a bad posture for fighting. Like trying to dig in your heels when a big wave comes at you instead of swimming like hell.

Pundita: Well, Michael, that's an interesting take on the dream. But Bush has certainly not stood back from the fray during the run-up to next week's showdown. Yes I have doubts, and I'm always struggling against despair about all the mistakes the US has made in the post-invasion phase.

Something I've never doubted is that the USA has to stop following in the footsteps of the Europeans in how we deal with peoples in the Middle East. The Arabs and Persians were treated like children and pawns, and the US went along with that. The upshot was that we never really communicated our way of doing things. There is always a lot of pain when you get serious about teaching people ideas that can dynamite their ordered view of things.

Michael Wright: America plays Annie Sullivan.

Pundita: I don't think that's far off the mark. If you only know repression and don't have any idea of how democratic government should work, it's a kind of blindness. So, yeah, you could say we're trying to play Annie Sullivan to the Middle East's Helen Keller.

I don't want to put it in such lofty terms, though. It's just that instead of treating them like pawns or children, we're trying to treat them as we treat Americans. That's because we can't really imagine what it's like to endure under someone like Saddam Hussein. So we're saying in essence, 'Here's what Americans would do to insure we wouldn't live under despotic rule.'

There's a lot of mistakes with that approach and a lot gets lost in translation. Yet not to try is -- it's not American not to try. The Europeans can laugh at our mistakes in Iraq or shake their heads all they want, but we're no longer doing an imitation of Europe in the Middle East.

Michael Wright: Unless you count Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and --

Pundita: One thing at a time. Iraq is where we're making our stand. We got used to having the UN come into a country, and the World Bank. We were left pretty much alone to stumble through in Iraq. So we found ourselves with a crying need to teach.

Michael Wright: You can't want things for people more than they want them. Many Iraqis don't want to know what the Americans can teach.

Pundita: Then why bring up the analogy of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan?

Michael Wright: I think you brought up the comparison first, a long time ago --

Pundita: Really? I don't remember. Look, Keller didn't want language. Annie Sullivan had to fight and fail repeatedly until Keller made some cognitive connections. Then Keller wanted to speak.

Michael Wright: That kind of effort is more than teaching.

Pundita: It's determination. Annie Sullivan was herself almost completely blind during her childhood. You can develop so much empathy that you see yourself in the student, so then thought of failure is replaced with sheer determination. It's taken time for empathy to grow among Americans who work with Iraqis, of course, and vice versa. And as always, those who most want to live in freedom are the ones who apply themselves to learning what the Americans have to offer.

Michael Wright: All this takes a tremendous amount of time, and money, and blood. Pundita, the United States of America is not in the teaching profession. It's not our job.

Pundita: Awwww. Americans are having to learn first-hand what the World Bank went through all these decades? Where is my Kleenex box?

Michael Wright: I don't recall thousands of Bank employees dying and wounded in battle.

Pundita: The age of using governments as pawns needs to draw to a close because untold suffering arises from it. When you remove manipulation from your dealings with a government in the developing world, you've got collapse of the government or return to ways that are not adequate to deal with this era. So what else is left but teaching? When turning away is not an option?

Yet there are smart ways to teach, and learning to teach in smart fashion has been America's biggest lesson in Iraq.