Watching the debt-limit debate in Washington these last several weeks reminds me of covering politics in the Middle East. And for Americans, that is an extremely disheartening conclusion.

In Iraq not so long ago, I was talking to Mowaffak al-Rubaie, former national security adviser, about his government's inability to move forward on several critical issues.

"Compromise is a dirty word in Arabic," he said matter-of-factly. "I call it the all-or-nothing phenomenon. For Iraqis, everything is a statement of principle."

Or, as Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawar, a former interim Iraqi president, put it: "People here speak from the heart. And when you speak from your heart, you have a hard time hearing anyone else." Doesn't that sound like Tea Party Republicans and their allies?

Because of their cultural inability to compromise, Iraqis took almost a year to form a coalition government after elections in March 2010. Well, today that coalition remains unable to agree on which party will direct what ministry. Sixteen months later. Our political system is totally different, but is that where we're headed?

The distressing thing for me, in the Middle East and in Washington, is the myopia afflicting these leaders - their blanket refusal to look beyond their own intransigent dogma, their inability to appreciate that their decisions can cause real people serious harm. Some people out of their direct line of sight will suffer and die. One Republican budget cut, for example, slashes foreign aid. As a direct result, infant children in Sudan and Somalia, Laos and Afghanistan, will die.

The final agreement in Washington last week simply kicks the can down the road - assuring that all of us, in the United States and around the world, will continue watching Sen. Mitch McConnell, a multimillionaire, lecture us over and over again, explaining why it's utterly unacceptable to raise his taxes by even a dime.

China, which holds at least $1.16 trillion in U.S. debt, was half complaining and half gloating when it proclaimed: "The ugliest part of the saga is that the well-being of many other countries is also in the impact zone when the donkey and the elephant fight."

In short, the unending surly debate will continue sending ugly ripples around the world. But just like those Iraqi leaders, ours can't seem to see anything behind their own obdurate ideological blinders.

The ever-stubborn stalemate in Iraq has left a power vacuum that Iran is happily trying to fill by sending mercenaries and munitions across the border, bolstering Shiite militias as U.S. troops leave. Violence is stepping up again. People are dying, in large part because the key ministers that those obstinate politicians have been unwilling to appoint are supposed to be running the defense and other security ministries.

But if you want to see where Tea Party-style closed-minded intransigence assumes its ultimate heedless horror, Saudi Arabia shows the dirt-smeared depths to which pitiless politicians can fall. For years, the nation has insisted that middle-aged men have the right to marry prepubescent girls, despite long-standing opprobrium from around the world.

Finally, in March, the Justice Ministry announced its intention to regulate marriages of underage girls. The ministry has not elaborated, but even broaching the idea ran headlong into implacable religious dogma. Sheikh Saleh al-Fawzan, a highly influential cleric, issued a fatwa a few days ago decrying the ministry's decision.

"Those who are calling for a minimum age for marriage should fear God and not violate his laws," he wrote. "Scholars have agreed that it is permissible for fathers to marry off their young daughters, even if they are in the cradle. But it isn't permissible for their husbands to have sex with them unless they are capable of being placed beneath and bearing the weight of the men."

How utterly disgusting. But the sheikh explains: The prophet Muhammad married a 6-year-old but waited until she was 9 to have sex. Don't you feel much better? If that happened, it was 1,400 years ago. Has the world progressed not at all since then?

Can you imagine this miscreant sheikh knowingly subjecting his own 9-year-old daughter to this despicable edict? And that's the point.

That is Saudi Arabia. This is America. And I remain aghast that House Speaker John Boehner and his ilk in both houses of Congress, just like that reprobate sheikh, cannot take even a moment to imagine themselves or their families in the place of their fellow Americans whose lives they will shatter when they eviscerate social services, retirement benefits and the rest.

Have you no empathy, none at all?

© 2011 Joel Brinkley