When is Iraq no longer our problem?

Freddie de Boer wants to know:

If nothing else, I would like for those who continue to support the occupation of Iraq to confront this question: is our obligation to the Iraqis truly limitless? Is there no point at which we can consider a debt repaid? I wish, desperately, that we had not caused the destruction of their civilian infrastructure, the murder of a generation, and the extermination or exile of the entirety of Iraq's professional class, so necessary for genuinely rebuilding the country. (Which stands in contrast to the sad spectacle of keeping the immediate peace and declaring it victory.) But even in the context of that horrible decision, we have to ask: is there truly to be no limit at all to what we are expected to provide? We talk endlessly of our responsibility to Iraqis. We never speak about their responsibility to us. Why is it a mark of great moral irresponsibility to ask whether the Iraqi people have failed to live up to their own responsibilities of order and peacefulness? Make no mistake about it, there has been uncommonly terrible behavior from a large number of Iraqi people. Breaking a country apart is a reprehensible act, but it no more excuses indiscriminate violence and madness than our sins in the Middle East excused 9/11.

Just asking the question of what we are owed by the Iraqis may appear strange to you. It feels strange to write it. That is the degree to which we have made our country into a martyr nation, purely devoted to the good of other people, at no expectation of repayment or considerate behavior from those we bless with our beneficence. This is an unsustainable way to conduct a foreign policy, and it has to change. We can't succeed in spreading democracy and prosperity to the people of the globe, and we shouldn't try. Asking "what is the best thing for my country" may be out of fashion, but I find it both moral and pragmatic.

Hear, hear. I feel exactly the same way about affirmative action -- which we will have with us until the end of time, because white elites who don't have to worry about their children being disadvantaged have the luxury to be morally magnanimous in reparation for the sins of their ancestors -- as long as the sons and daughters of working and middle-class whites bear the burden. Similarly, as long as the human cost of our Iraqi occupation is borne by that narrow class of Americans of all races who serve in the US military, and their families, our elites will continue to support hanging on there. After all, it's not their sons and daughters serving there, or sitting at home trying to make ends meet in a severe recession while the family breadwinner is off fighting Mr. Bush's wars.