What We Don't Know About Iraq

In my last two entries, I suggested that Americans--and the American military in particular--may not know as much about foreign cultures as we think. Because most of our knowledge of foreign cultures comes by way of American intermediaries, we seldom make genuine cross-cultural contact.

In an op-ed running tomorrow in the Washington Post, Philip Bennett argues something very similar. Referring to recent histories of the Iraq War, Bennett writes, "Iraqis' stories have been overshadowed by the towering drama of our own experience." Our failure to understand Iraqi perspectives on their own country poses a real problem now that American forces are beginning to withdraw. Bennett writes:

With U.S. forces set to withdraw from Iraq over the next 18 months, does it matter that we know so little about how Iraqis have understood and lived through the war? The invisible connection between the overlapping experiences of Americans and Iraqis -- and the blame, estrangement and hatred that has choked the air between them -- impairs our ability to see what will happen next. It also means that as U.S. officials apply the lessons of the Iraq war to strategy in Afghanistan, they risk missing a central part of the story.