- Most Americans have long ago now reached two conclusions
about their government. First, that George W. Bush is an incompetent president
with, additionally, a temperament ill-suited to the job. And second, that
his grand project the invasion of Iraq was a major mistake.
-
- Both these conclusions are absolutely incorrect. But
only by omission. They are, in fact, quite accurate as far as they go
it's just that they don't go nearly far enough.
-
- Bush is incompetent and Iraq is likely the greatest foreign
policy blunder in two-plus centuries of American history. But to say that
and particularly to say that alone does not truly do justice
to either disaster, Bush or his war. The truth about this president and
his motives for war are far, far uglier than the words `incompetence'
or `mistake' imply.
-
- But getting to that requires of American citizens several
attributes which have been, shall we say, in something less than great
abundance of late. It requires historical background, factual knowledge,
a motivation to understand, and the wisdom that results from the combination
of all of these. And it requires a substantial degree of courage to go
where the facts lead.
-
- Most Americans lack a large degree of each of these,
let alone the requisite combination of all of them. As such, this much
reviled president is perceived as `merely' incompetent and error-prone.
Would that he and his actions were actually so benign. It would be a much
better world. In fact, they are far more deeply pernicious than Americans
are willing to let themselves understand. One way to appreciate the extent
of American `ostriching' is by doing a bit of comparative analysis.
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- It is a curious and telling fact that Europeans figured
out Bush far before his own constituents did. There are two reasons for
that. One is that they were less frightened than we were. Not that they're
necessarily braver than Americans in general, but they've had more experience
of terrorism in the past, and we were just hit badly they weren't.
Americans were therefore a fearful people in 2002 and 2003, looking for
leadership and reassurance. But looking, as it would turn out, in all
the wrong places.
-
- The other thing is that Europeans have a more mature
politics than Americans do let's just come right out and say it.
You can see it in their attitudes toward sexuality, drugs and crime. You
can see it in their wholesale rejection of nationalism and religion, humanity's
worst mythologies and twin curses, wherever they arise. You can see it
in their rejection of the juvenile selfishness that characterizes the
American style of raw capitalism and obsessive consumption. And you can
see it, especially, in their foreign policies and attitudes toward war.
In large part because they so heavily and repeatedly paid the consequences
of their own prior immaturity about war, their understanding and approach
to it today are far more advanced than that of Americans.
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- It is not that Europeans are cowards or unreliable allies,
as American neoconservatives love to paint them whenever the folks on
the other side of the Pond get in the way of the raw exercise of American
imperial power. They are neither. What they are, rather, is sober. They
understand that war is sometimes a necessary resort, but that it must
always be the very last resort, and only ever contemplated when the alternative
is considerably more horrible (which is to say, given the horror of war,
very rarely indeed). They know this all to well, because they spent centuries
living it up close and personal. As someone once remarked, "Europeans
know that anything could happen there, because everything has happened
there".
-
-
- They have learned through the hard experiences of Flanders
and Stalingrad and Normandy and Dresden and Dachau the stakes involved
when the public is cavalier or even less than vigilant about holding
back the dogs of war. Americans have some sense of this after the twin
disasters of Vietnam and Iraq, but both of these were fought elsewhere.
And, however ugly they were, by far and away the vast majority of the
dying was done by brown people living on other shores. Not pleasant, to
be sure, but not catastrophic at home. We have never experienced Berlin,
1945.
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- Europeans also have a greater sense of history than Americans
do and, sadly, they'd be hard-pressed not to, of course which
gives them a larger wisdom about power and human nature. They understand
that the motivations for war by those who make it are not always quite,
um, as advertised. National leaders do not usually call upon their people
to risk life and limb to advance the glory, wealth and power of those
same kings or prime ministers, largely because damn few would. Instead,
wars must be packaged as necessary to the preserve the national honor,
protect national security, or to bring the benefits of some political
system or religion to other people. Well before Europeans managed to
stop fighting each other they were gaining an understanding of this principle.
Not for nothing has war long been referred to as the `sport of kings'
on the continent. And, as it turns out, people are generally not terribly
interested in risking their lives, their health, their property, their
families, their communities and their sanity so that a handful of elites
can have a rollicking good time and maybe score some booty in the process.
-
- Ironically, Americans have a rather similar database
on which to draw. I'd be surprised if more than five or ten percent of
Americans would agree with the proposition that any prior president ever
lied the country into a foreign war (though perhaps the number would be
higher in the present context than it was before 2003). Indeed, I'd be
surprised if that many could even name the major foreign wars in the country's
history. Those wars include the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War,
World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War and the present
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Of these nine, at least four or nearly
half and possibly more involved known egregious lies on the part
of the administrations conducting them. And what is revealed when such
lies are peeled away is that there was absolutely nothing necessary about
these wars whatsoever.
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- For example, the deceits that were used to justify the
invasion of Mexico and the theft of about one-third of its territory were
so great that at least one congressman was motivated to denounce President
Polk for conducting "the sheerest deception" in lying to the
Congress and the country about the war. Perhaps you've heard of this fellow
before. Congressman Abraham Lincoln went on to bemoan the "fact that
the United States Army, in marching to the Rio Grande, marched into a
peaceful Mexican settlement, and frightened the inhabitants away from
their homes and their growing crops". He further accused the president
of fighting an unnecessary war and of violating the Constitution in doing
so, though he nevertheless also voted to supply the Army during the war
(why does that ring familiar?).
-
- The Spanish-American War was likely another instance
of trumped up war. After multiple investigations over the last century,
it is still unclear whether the USS Maine sunk as a result of a mine or
an accidental internal explosion, and that lack of clarity alone should
have been enough to prevent the war. What is completely clear, however,
is that appetent imperialists and yellow journalists were hungry for the
war, so much so that they succeeded in bringing it about, including ugly
extended fighting in the Philippines against the anti-colonialist guerillas
whom the Americans were supposed to be there liberating. Indeed, so great
was the manufactured pressure for war that President McKinley, who didn't
want to fight it, was ultimately forced to do so.
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- Then there's Vietnam, the lies surrounding which could
fill a library. Here, we have documentary evidence beyond question of
these fabrications, supplied via the bravery of Daniel Ellsberg and his
colleagues. They risked their freedom and very lives to prove the degree
to which the government was lying to the American public and Congress
about its involvement in Nam, its involvement in surrounding countries,
and its knowledge that the war was hopeless even while it was saying just
the opposite. Oh, and did I mention how it was the US government, not
the evil communists, who walked out on a previously- negotiated international
agreement to allow Vietnam to decide its own fate by ballots, not bullets,
simply because it was clear that the American proxies would lose the vote?
Or that the American government green-lighted the coup that resulted in
the assassination of the President of South Vietnam, the country where
we were fighting to preserve `democracy'? Or the Gulf of Tonkin `incident'
far weaker a casus belli than even the sinking of the Maine
that gave the pretext for the major escalation of the war? Hey, we're
just warming up here. As McGeorge Bundy said, "Pleikus are streetcars".
If you wait long enough, one will come along, and you can therefore use
such an incident to justify your bombing escalation, your war, or whatever
you want to do.
-
- As for the Gulf War, it seems quite probable that Bush
the Elder (good lord, how do people from this reprobate family keep
becoming
- president?) had his ambassador, April Glaspie, give Saddam
a go-ahead to invade Kuwait, especially given that Saddam produced
a tape recording of the conversation which has her saying just that. Of
course, the Bush folks just claimed that Saddam had doctored the tape,
and there went that. We do know for sure that evidence presented to the
public and Congress about Saddam's atrocities was bogus, even though the
dictator had surely committed many such crimes in reality. But the big
lie about the Gulf War was the unspoken assumption that the United States
was continuing its role as the friend of peace, freedom and democracy,
fighting Saddam's nasty aggressive dictatorship.
-
-
- In reality, we had helped create Saddam, we had
been silent if not complicit when he was committing his worst atrocities,
and after the war we stood by and watched as he annihilated his own people
whom we'd set up like so many human bowling pins. Most importantly, though,
when he had invaded a neighboring country one decade before he committed
the unforgivable sin of attacking Kuwait, the US government had actually
encouraged him in that effort, armed him, and supplied him with satellite
and other intelligence data. That resulted in the Iraq-Iran War, one of
the most brutal of the late-twentieth century. To go to war in 1990/91,
therefore, out of moral indignation at the invasion of Kuwait, was a massive
hypocritical lie.
-
- Go figure, eh? Just as shocking is the fact that everything
about the present war in Iraq has been a lie, as well. We know that Bush
planned to invade for domestic (let alone personal psychological) purposes
well before he was even president, let alone before 9/11. We know that
Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. We know that the administration knew
that Saddam was no threat. We know that they lied repeatedly and egregiously
about the evidence that he was. We know that they lie like flea-ridden
dogs to this day when they continually claim to be supporting the troops,
but still can't even get them sufficient armor. And on and on and on.
-
- But absent a knowledge of this historical record, and
absent sufficient courage to grapple with its implications, and absent
the facts and costs of the current war in daily life, and absent a motivation
to understand these things, Americans continue to vaguely disapprove of
the war and the president who bequeathed it to us. That is well, proper
and necessary, but hardly sufficient.
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- This was not a `mistake' made by an `incompetent' president.
It was those things, to be sure, but leaving it at that would be like
describing 9/11 in the history books as an airplane crash. This was a
king sporting. This was a war trumped up with zero necessity. This was
a war of power and profit. This was a war of immense deceits. This is
a disastrous war of epic proportions.
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- My guess is that Americans simply can't go there, just
as many can't possibly entertain the thought that 9/11 might have been
done by their government, or at least perhaps allowed to happen. People
can imagine that the war was a mistake, but not that they are such pathetic
pawns of their own government that their lives and the lives of American
military personnel are of zero consequence to political elites. Or that
those daddy-figures upon whom they rely for their precarious sense of
security could in fact be vicious predators readily able to betray, ruin
and destroy their own public for purposes of financial or power enrichment.
-
- This is just too much for the psyche to handle. This
is something that happens in banana republics, or history books, right?
not in contemporary democratic America. And certainly not by those
super- patriots of the Republican right, the ones who are so eternally
vigilant about keeping us safe.
-
- To truly understand the magnitude of what is at stake
here, one has to resort to the greatest of violations of trust of which
the human animal is capable, such as the molestations of daughters by
their fathers, or of little boys by their priests, or the betrayal of
comrades during wartime. Such sickening transgressions are often too
heinous to even contemplate, frequently blowing the psychological circuits
of anyone subjected to them.
-
- Sometimes the choice is between denial or death.
-
- And so it is that Americans continue through their day,
oblivious by self design to the magnitude of the evil that
has been visited upon them.
-
- But, ironically, this is not remedy at all. Obliviousness
to victimization by government is no excuse, especially in a democracy,
and especially when other innocent people are much greater victims, to
the tune of about a million in number.
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- To a very large extent, those who would ignore the crimes
committed in their name crimes they have the power to stop
become criminals themselves.
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