I have no particular interest in parsing the Iraq Study Group report. Many very smart people have taken a look at it and there is very little that is surprising arising from the efforts of these elderly celebrants of diplodancing to whom every problem can be solved by talking and, perhaps, treating the people most at risk as expendable and non-contributory. After all, there is really no other way to understand the thinking behind a report which proposes to determine the future of Iraq and Israel (the connection between the two remains difficult to grasp, but Baker assures us the connection exists) without ever consulting the peoples involved. There were no Iraqis, no American military, and no Israelis on the panel and very few were actually consulted.
In trying to understand the ISG approach I imagined the occasion of a second opinion, a common reason for a consultation concerning a difficult treatment case. In such a circumstance, if I do not interview the patient, their treating Doctor, or their family, but instead rely on the records in the chart and interviews with their next door neighbors, I could conceivably arrive at a recommendation. It would have the virtue (sarcasm alert) of not being confused by the various desires of the people most intimately involved but would likely suffer the vice of having very little to do with reality.
In the early days of Psychoanalysis, when this new treatment approach was meeting with some success in alleviating the distress of people for whom traditional approaches were thoroughly unhelpful, Psychoanalysis was over-sold, as happens with most new treatments for desperate conditions. All Psychological disturbances were thought to be amenable to the proper and judicious applications of the "talking cure." Unfortunately, painful lessons were yet to be learned. Certain patients, with certain conditions, could not be helped by talking, even when they seemed ideal candidates for the treatment.
The realization that certain young, intelligent, charming, well spoken individuals might not actually be treatable took some time to penetrate the fog of our desires. Unfortunately, Sociopaths entered Psychotherapy with very different goals and intentions than the treating Professional, and therein lay the problem.
Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis requires a certain set of agreed assumptions, usually unspoken and often unconscious, without which no treatment can take place. The basic assumptions have to include that the patient feels some distress and is searching for relief. Further, they must understand the relief as emerging from the interaction with another, unique and separate human being. The patient must bring to the consultation room the belief that other people have desires that are not identical or subordinate to their own. This is not an absolute statement, of course, but there must be some small recognition of the humanity of the therapist, or no therapy can be possible. The Sociopath does not have this recognition; when a Sociopath enters Psychotherapy it is almost always under externally driven duress. They seek relief from the distress that others (often including the legal system) are causing them and do not see themselves as in any way directly responsible for their distress. In their minds, other people are not independent human beings with their own desires and needs, but are objects whose sole purpose is to provide gratification for the desires of the Sociopath.
[I have described, in previous posts, the convergence of Narcissism, in its most extreme form of Malignant Narcissism, with Sociopathy and Paranoia.]
The ISG seems like a study in Applied Diplomatic Narcissism. The Commission treat the Iraq problem as primarily an American problem; the victims of any American failure in the region, those very people most like us and most committed to a democratic and free future in the Middle East, are treated as mere afterthoughts, as if they are a nuisance rather than the people we most need to support. Our enemies, Utopian fantasists who treat people as objects to be used to support their messianic and power lusting dreams, are imagined to be men with whom we can talk and who can help us solve the problem they are currently involved in causing.
The fact is that the world view of the Islamists is incompatible with ours; they proclaim the fact on a regular basis (although our Media seem deaf and dumb to their pronouncements) and it requires an act of willful ignorance to avoid understanding that they mean what they say and have been acting in consonance with their beliefs for at least the last 27 years.
The hall mark of Narcissism is the failure of the Narcissist to fully grasp that another person's mind does not necessarily operate in precisely the way their mind operates.
As a simple example, there are those who say, "everyone cheats"; in part this justifies their own cheating but it also implies that they are cheaters who imagine that all other people's minds are structured much like theirs. In fact, not everyone cheats and the emotional grasp of this fact, of different minds working differently, is a crucial point in any Narcissist's treatment.
The Diplomatic Narcissist fails to understand what all Narcissists fail to understand. Not every person who is urbane and well dressed, well groomed and well spoken, with a sophisticated vocabulary and cultured tastes, is a civilized man. Some are barbarians dressed up as civilized men. Barbarians can mimic the language of civilized men but it is a facade that only fools those who are easily fooled. Whether we refer to the barbarians of the HISH Alliance as Sociopaths or as religious extremists matters little; what matters greatly is that they believe and behave as if their lives depend on destroying us. Talking to them in order to gain their assistance is foolhardy in the extreme.
The single best prescription I have seen for moving ahead in the Middle East was posted by A Jacksonian. To understand what we are facing and how to arrive at the best possible outcome with the least possible blood shed, first read Americans fighting democracy so that you can fully grasp how nonsensical some of the current suggestions are, and then read The Plan to Stabilize Iraq. I guarantee you will be smarter when you finish than when you start.
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