As we watch our nation continue to make stupid, counterproductive decisions in it's self-described "war on terror", every now and then we get a glimpse of the reason there are so many people in the world who hate us enough to die trying to force us to just leave them in peace. Certainly, America's activities in the rest of the world, even in those rare occasions when her motives were pure, have consistently been arrogant, ham-handed and culturally insensitive, and have very often resulted in alienating and angering the very people they were intended to help.
It's a tragedy how poorly the US government has targeted the actual aggressor, and in many cases have actually knowingly responded to external threats by attacking the wrong target. The greatest example of this is Iraq. How is it that, once attacked by a Sunni Egyptian/Saudi organization, the greatest minds in America retaliated by invading Secular Iraq? Clearly, these were not actually our greatest minds.
So now we have Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, visiting New York. The frantic, hateful response to his expressed desire to go to Ground Zero was far beyond embarrassing, to the point of being cringe inducing. And yet, from every corner, all walks of American punditry, all you hear is voices raised in concert, decrying the very thought of such a loathsome possibility.
Why would this be? The Iranians did not attack us. And whatever hostility they may show toward America, perhaps at least some of it might be explained by the fact that our government is having an debate, right out there in the open, about attacking them without provocation. If another nation, say Brazil, had a fleet of warships off our coast, was occupying Mexico and was openly discussing whether it would be a further excellent idea to bomb our nuclear reactors, I wonder if we might feel something less than brotherly love for them?
But the hue and cry raised against this "outrageous" visit to that sacred ground in lower Manhattan is representative of so much that has gone wrong with American society. Apparently we have become so fragile, we cannot allow a head of state to visit ground zero, taking from it whatever he might, saying what he might. It is especially odd that we still allow the Ku Klux Klan to march, we allow white supremacists to sell records full of hate, but we do not have the cultural fortitude to allow a visit by the Iranian Head of State, and perhaps have our feelings hurt by what he might say. And it saddens me that our venal, criminal government has been so effective in demonizing a people who are not, or at least should not be, our enemies.
The only people who should not be allowed to visit that sensitive memorial to our losses on that day would be bin Ladin and Zawahiri. And for that matter, were they in custody in America, I would like to take them in irons down to that site and rub their nose in the death of innocents. I believe that in spite of whatever bravado they might show, what humanity they have would recoil from the thought of the horror they caused on that summer morning.
It isn't just Americans that harbor such generalized, ignorant racism. Certainly, in places as widely separated as Germany, France and China, the people hate the "others", people who are not like them. But somehow it is Americans who have perfected a kind of insouciant racial hatred, a sense that they can't be bothered to learn the difference between Persians and Arabs, Japanese and Chinese, Mexicans and Salvadorans. It is sad that we live in a nation that can make the calculation "Muslims attacked us, Iranians are Muslims, therefore Iranians are our enemies". Or even more simplistically, "Muslims attacked us, we need to kill all Muslims". This racist, militarist mindset will ultimately bring America down, because you cannot sustain eternal warfare against half the world's population, but to so many Americans, purity of hatred may not be watered down by pragmatic concerns over morality, economics or the judgment of history.
So, they couldn't end the Occupation of Iraq. They couldn't restore Habeas Corpus. They decided they actually supported torture, indefinite detentions without due process and eavesdropping on American Citizens without judicial oversight.
But in the grand scheme of things, what matters is protecting Military Leaders from criticism or insult. And when it came to an opportunity to grandstand without actually accomplishing anything, the Senate outdid themselves today with a Condemnation of a paid advertisment run in the NY Times, an action of precisely zero consequence.
This is so disgusting, so silly, so embarrassingly inconsequential, so blatantly a political game, it gives me gas. It's come to this. The legislative branch of the US Government has lost the ability to have any effect on events. They are clearly powerless in matters of state. And they are reduced to ideological pedagogy of the most flaccid kind.
The Republicans are just playing a game, fiddling while Rome burns. The Democrats have no spine, no heart, no soul and cannot find a way to even try to be relavant. The US is facing some of the most serious challenges in her history, and this is how the government responds. Never mind the eyes of the world, Senator. History will not judge you kindly.
The images are permanently etched in our collective conscience. The heartbreakingly clear blue sky. The city in the summer. The orange fireball, the confusion, the fear. The second impact, so much more ominously terrifying than the first. The collapse. The stunned, dusty survivors, the frantic search for victims, the final count both amazingly small and overwhelmingly huge.
Where were you on 9/11? A moment in our history that will go down with The Maine, Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination. It was an event that simultaneously demonstrated our best natures and our shared psychoses. As Americans, we wanted to share our grief and help our fellow citizens hurt by this monstrous attack, but all of that was somewhat obscured by our desire, or perhaps more accurately our desperate need to hit back. Hard.
So here we are today, looking back on six years where much of our lives, our politics and the way we view the rest of the world is shaped by the events of that summer day. Our government's response was to launch military invasions and subsequent occupations of two different Muslim nations. To turn their backs on our legacy from Nuremberg, on our steadfast belief in human rights, in our commitment to our constitution and the kind of liberal democracy it defines. Put simply, they killed 3000 of ours. We have killed close to a million of them, and still so many Americans do not yet feel they can call it even.
Of course, the stupidity of a military response to an asymmetrical attack is almost too massive to describe in useful terms, and virtually every action America has taken as a result of the 9/11 attacks has been counterproductive at best, and outright helpful to those who would attack us at worst.
They say 9/11 changed everything. I'm not sure that's true. But it is certainly true that six years after the attacks, virtually everything has changed. But much of that is a result of America's ham-handed, blundering responses to the attacks, rather than the attacks themselves. America is hated and feared in the world as she has never been before. Sure, American interference in the sovereignty and internal affairs of other nations throughout history is well documented, but illegal aggressive invasions, military occupations, indefinite detentions without due process, torture as an instrument of policy and a bullying, coercive form of diplomacy by the nation once called "the shining city on the hill" is unprecedented. A few small, cowardly little men of little imagination and even less courage happened to be in charge that day, and it is they that took us down this ruinous course. But it is us, of course that allowed it to happen. If you are still here, and have not yet been named an "enemy combatant", there is blood on your hands also.
There was a kind of balance in the Middle East and Gulf region, achieved after years of political juggling, proxy fighting, wars, near wars and cold wars. Every force was balanced, offset by an opposing force. The American-Israeli alliance was actually an exception to that, in that Israel was allowed to play a role all out of proportion to her actual political, economic and military role in the region. But while Israel was allowed to run roughshod over her neighbors, offending and angering the nearby nations, there was just enough restraint to keep it from getting out of hand most of the time, and things were kept roughly in parity. The lynchpins to this regional balance were Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran and Iraq. Secular, highly militarized Iraq served to deter both Shiite Iran and intensely theocratic Sunni Saudi. It was messy, and sometimes violent, but it was, by and large, working.
Then the US invaded Iraq, toppled Saddam and deposed his government. When the US found it had nothing to put in it's place, Sistani brought pressure to bear for national elections, and the Shi'a majority took power. The result was not just chaos and bloodshed, but chaos and bloodshed that served as a proxy for the region. The balance was smashed, and every nation now must reexamine it's influences and alliances. The Shiite Iran/Iraq alliance on the gulf is now the major power, and Egypt, Turkey, Saudi and even Israel must now consider where they are in a hierarchy of belligerent powers. And they have the US to thank for this condition.
So now we have a Global War on Terror, a Department of Homeland Security, and a surveillance state that is only one attack away from being a police state. al Quaeda attacked us, but in our fear, our anger and our need to lash out we took over for them. bin Laden is sitting in his house in Warziristan, laughing. Because all he has to do is produce media now. Americans have taken the job of destroying America, and they are doing it much more effectively than he could ever have hoped for.
Look. This is very simple. al Quaeda can kill American citizens, and can destroy buildings and Landmarks. We know we can survive all that without suffering any real impact. But in our reaction to this amorphous, assymetric threat it is us, our Leaders and Lawmakers and Pundits, who will bring about the end of America. al Quaeda only had to get the process started. Six years on, we've taken on the job and are accomplishing it with that vaunted American effectiveness. And for what it's worth, I don't see a way to reverse the trend...
Once again, the Bush Administration and the War Party won the game while the Democrats were still arguing about the rules. Petraeus and Crocker came in lying, loud and strong, reaching conclusions about minutiae without ever revealing either the source of their data nor the methodology used to derive the figures. Never mind that no organization has been able to reproduce their results. Never mind that the information we DO have about how they determined what was a sectarian killing and what was a simple murder is entirely artificial. Never mind that they have served as partisan political propagandists from the very beginning, primarily because Bush and Cheney have lied about Iraq so often and so blatantly that their credibility with the American people is effectively zero.
Even if we credulously accept every single conclusion provided by the General and the Ambassador, it still doesn't alter the fact that, as originally proposed, the Surge has been an utter failure. So how can they sit before the Civilian leadership and claim that black is white? Simple. They utilized two longstanding approaches to propagandisticdissembling. First, they recognized that the original premise, that increased US forces would suppress the civil war violence in order to provide the Iraqi government under NourialMaliki with the "breathing space" necessary for political reconciliation, had been a pipe dream, and of course, even if provided with the breathing space, the Maliki government had no intention of reconciling with the Sunnis, nor did they have any intention of ceding any more control than absolutely necessary to the Kurds in the North. So General Petraeus simply focused on minutiae. In order to avoid being confronted with the overall failure of the strategy, he focused on a number of dubious tactical successes, effectively turning the argument from "did the surge accomplish it's goals?" to "what did the surge accomplish?" These are quite obviously not the same questions.
Of course, they knew that ultimately it would be pointed out that the general had no clothes, and that in spite of any small tactical military success or reduction in violence, if the political conditions didn't change, the overall situation would continue to deteriorate. So they went to that other noted solution for declaring victory in the face of overwhelming defeat - they simply moved the goalposts. You see, they explained, the surge has begun to have a positive effect on the political and sectarian violence, and, as those gains are fragile, must be sustained in order to - ready for this? - provide the Iraqi leadership with the "breathing space" they need to engender political reconciliation.
It can no longer be debated. The illegal American occupation of Iraq will continue for the foreseeable future. At the very least, there will be over 100,000 troops in Iraq when President Bush leaves office in January 2009. I have profound doubts that the new American President will truly withdraw all American troops from their permanent bases on the oil fields.
Let's face it. The reason there does not appear to be a goal for the US in Iraq is simply that the goal has been achieved all along. The goal was always simply to install a permanent American military presence on the Persian Gulf oil fields in order to intimidate the oil producers, so as to make certain that America receives what it defines as it's share of the oil production, and enforce any American dictates about how that oil is distributed. As long as American soldiers are in Iraq in reasonably large numbers, the Bush/Cheney cabal and the war party will have exactly what they want. And if the casualties stay in the range of 1000-1500 KIA per year, and their propaganda machine can keep pumping out feel-good stories to obscure the loss and waste, then they will have everything they wanted.
As a final note, it is ironic that the very greed and hubris that has allowed them to be so completely successful to this point will be their ultimate undoing. If they follow through, as it appears they will, and instigate hostilities with Iran before the end of the Bush term, the spasm of violence, bloodshed and economic instability that creates will FORCE the withdrawal of American forces, not just from Iraq, but from the region in it's entirety. Sort of like the claims that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ultimately saved lives, both American and Japanese, perhaps this final paroxysm of bloodletting will ultimately lead to the cessation of large scale hostilities throughout the middle east.
Certainly it is likely to be another generation at least before America forgets the lessons she learned at such tragic cost and decides the simplest solution to a given geopolitical problem is warfare. And that would be a good thing...
It's from Houseman, fer crissakes. People really should read more. Much of what you see here is opinion, but unlike many Americans, my opinions are at least loosely based on facts.
As we watch our nation continue to make stupid, counterproductive decisions in it's self-described "war on terror", every now and then we get a glimpse of the reason there are so many people in the world who hate us enough to die trying to force us to just leave them in peace. Certainly, America's activities in the rest of the world, even in those rare occasions when her motives were pure, have consistently been arrogant, ham-handed and culturally insensitive, and have very often resulted in alienating and angering the very people they were intended to help.
