12/11/05 08:17 AM
Haditha. Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo. Secret prisons. Make no mistake, under the Bush Administration the United States of America has become the most powerful rogue nation in the world today. The defining characteristic of a rogue nation is its arrogance; a belief that its interests, insights, and actions are inherently superior and more important than the rest of the world community. This is also the defining characteristic of the Bush administration. We have committed the very atrocities that we claim to be fighting. To paraphrase Sartre, the delivering angel has become the demon.
Life is not ultimately about what you do. It is about what you do about what you do. In its second term the administration has recognized some of its tragic mistakes, and some of the worst perpetrators have run for the doors, but still our handling of these atrocities is both troubling and telling. First we deny them, then obfuscate and/or downplay them. Finally we refuse to accept adequate accountability. The media sometimes seems more concerned about the political impact of such events than with the moral gravity of the events themselves. All of this serves only to confirm the world’s greatest fear, that we really are an autonomous rogue nation that has not the least respect for the human dignity of non-Americans. The soldiers who have perpetrated various misdeeds in Iraq and elsewhere are ultimately accountable, but they are not alone. The warlords in the Bush administration have placed them in impossible positions among people who feel a mixture of ambivalence and animosity toward them, they are given mandates that reflect the arrogance and hegemony of their superiors, and they are then hung out to dry when things go wrong.
As awful as these atrocities have been, they are merely reflections of the much greater evil: The Bush “Regime’s” usurpation of 9/11 to justify its neoconservative, evangelical crusade upon the world. The Iraq war (really a crusade) is not only unjust, it is despicably unjust. We, the United States under George W. Bush, have declared and prosecuted an unprovoked war virtually unilaterally and with nearly complete contempt for the United Nations. The UN may have faults, but it is the best manifestation that we have of a world community forum. Flaunting its wishes and even the intelligent input of our allies is not leadership; it is the arrogant, unilateral act of a rogue nation. How ironic that we have blithely disregarded the integrity of the UN to invade a country for blithely disregarding the integrity of the UN. The Bush Regime decided to have a war, picked a boogeyman, contrived reasons to invade, falsified intelligence, slandered, threatened, demeaned, and attacked dissenters at home and abroad, and in the end invaded another sovereign nation almost completely unilaterally. It is true that the leader of that nation was a monster, but that was neither the original rationale for war presented to the American people and the world, nor was it our right to pick that fight. Despotism, if it is to be dealt with by the world body is grave enough that the world body should act together. It is not an excuse for an individual to act despotically himself.
As it turned out, the conquest of Iraq not only had nothing to do with the “war on terror”, it has in fact illegitimized the United States’ justification to fight terror. We have become the worst terrorists of all. The events of 9/11 were terrible but limited in scope. We correctly describe this as “terrorism”, but it is hypocritical to then bomb into oblivion an entire nation that had nothing to do with those events and have the arrogance to call it “Operation Shock and Awe”. It was not “shock and awe”. It was wholesale terrorism. Assigning catchy marketing names for this conquest is uncomfortably reminiscent of Hitler’s “blitzkrieg”. It is surreal and nauseating to present this to the world as an example of our “leadership”.
The reason Bush et. al. needed a “war” in Iraq is simply that they needed a war. War, by definition is the military action of one nation against another. Al Quaeda is not a nation, it is an organized group of criminals who have committed violent crimes against the US and others for years. The actions of 9/11 were not acts of war by one nation against the US. They were horrible criminal acts by criminals against innocent people of many nations residing and working within our boundaries.
These acts were also a political opportunity for George Bush, an otherwise feckless ideologue, and for the ultra-right wing neoconservative, nationalist hawks who control him. Initially after 9/11, the US was looked upon with sympathy by the nations of the world. Bush et. al.’s effort to cast this conflict as a “war” was generally accepted by the world community. Somewhere along the way, however, Mr. Bush and/or his handlers decided to highjack this event as an opportunity to impose their agenda upon the world. They declared early on that “whoever is not for us is against us”, thus assuming that they alone could discern and assign what is “right”. With this “divine wisdom” they have appeared to believe that they could legitimately preemptively attack whomever they wished. Their blustering about other proposed enemies such as North Korea and Iran only serves to provoke confrontation and actually seems to legitimate violence by both sides instead of pursuing very achievable diplomacy.
This is a tragic evolution on numerous levels. The Bush Administration has actively pursued a utilitarian agenda in which any means they might choose are justified by the goal of fighting any enemy they might name. At home they have trampled constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties, the right of privacy, and the right of free expression, among others. They have bankrupted the country and crippled our ability to provide for the general welfare in the face of actual, tangible threats such as natural disaster. Abroad they have, in less than 5 years, transformed the US from an object of international sympathy and support to a feared and despised rogue nation that does as it pleases regardless of world opinion. This has recently been reflected by comments from many world leaders at various conferences on the topic. It is no surprise that a change agent such as Barack Obama has been embraced so passionately in Europe and elsewhere. While failing to make any meaningful progress in catching and containing actual criminals, Bush et. al. have captured and tortured many people of dubious or marginal culpability. They have actually legitimated the motivations if not the tactics of what they call an “insurgency” in Iraq. Because of our own commission of numerous war crimes, we have made it possible for the “insurgents” to be accurately described as “resistance fighters” against an occupying force. It is not surprising that in national opinion polls in Iraq, the extreme majority of Iraqis want the US troops to leave immediately, while a smaller majority, but a majority nonetheless, believes that it is perfectly acceptable to kill American soldiers.
While the Bush administration contrived the Iraq “war” to make its nebulous activities seem more tangible, and although our blundering there precipitated a civil war, our conquest there was not originally a war at all. From the beginning, our presence was nothing more than an occupation. A “war”, by definition, is a military action by one nation against another. We are not there fighting the nation of Iraq. We have succeeded in installing a government that is at least ostensibly on our side. No, we are not fighting a war at all. We are occupying a country. Because of our presence, and not in spite of it, there is great violence against Americans and even more between Iraqis. There is debate about whether Iraq could slip into civil war. If there is any warring in Iraq today, as there most certainly is, it is a civil war. Our very presence inflames it and gives the resistance its voice and raison-d’etre. Our departure now may not help and it would certainly humiliate the Bush and Mr. McCain, but it would not likely make matters much worse. In light of our repeated war crimes, it would be completely appropriate for the Iraqi government to expel our troops immediately.
There are tragic logical errors to the Bush madness as well. Aside from the moral turpitude of Mr. Bush’s interpretation of his “mission”, the whole concept of a “war on terror” is illogical on many levels. In the first place, it is not possible to wage war against a concept. The danger here is that he who declares such a war also claims the right to name whatever individual enemy he chooses. The Bush Administration declared early on that “whoever is not with us is against us”. This is a totalitarian and despotic claim. It presumes that the speaker has a particular, and perhaps exclusive, claim to truth and virtue. Mr. Bush believes that he has a divine mission to pursue his agenda and that this is God’s Will. He subscribes to the common evangelical belief that others must have faith according to American evangelical traditions in order for that faith to be legitimate. He holds all views other than his own as inferior, or at least relative to his beliefs, which is turn are dictated by his own denominational leaders. He believes that all other nations, all other cultures and traditions can and should be ground in the crucible of his own values and evaluated only in the context of his laughably limited understanding.
Another logical error inherent to the idea of a “war on terror” is that terror is something new since 9/11; something that has just now been declared upon a peaceful world and against which we might logically declare a war. This is an ignorant and particularly American misconception. Terror has been around for all of human history; from the time of Cain and Abel, from the history of the Egyptian and Asian Dynasties, and indeed much earlier. Terror even at the hands of al Quaeda has been around long before 9/11. It just has not happened so massively on our soil. What does it say about our empathy for the world that we had made no pervasive response to terrorist crimes until it happened here at home? We always just assumed that it could never happen here, and when it happened elsewhere, it just wasn’t worthy of our full attention. Now that it has happened to us, Mr. Bush would have us and the world believe that it is now finally important enough that he can claim unlimited presidential power to fight it, even to the point of trampling constitutional protections and the rights, the opinions, and even the sovereignty of whomever he wishes.
Certainly the occupation of Iraq, and even the nebulous “war on terror” as prosecuted by Mr. Bush is profoundly unjust and is a great evil in our times. Even this, however, is only the eventual and perhaps inevitable result of an even longer term evil. For decades, the United States has pursued a policy of incredibly self-serving arrogance in its international affairs. This is particularly true as it relates to oil policy. We have for decades actively, even brazenly, pursued an agenda that supports the acquisition of as much oil as possible. We have supported any power structure that would deliver this oil, however despotic the ruler and however the people of such countries might suffer. The American public is mostly naïve to this reality, which is sadly obvious to the rest of the world. It is one of the main reasons that the terrorist organizations are so powerful at all. If the US and its allies had a history of actually supporting the rights and welfare of the citizens of the Muslim, Asian, and Latin worlds, we would not be regarded with such enmity and fear and loathing as we are. Mr. Bush says that he is the vanguard of democracy in the world, but such claims are a vacuous insult to the intelligence of his “beneficiaries” when he simultaneously annihilates civilizations and cultures, rationalizing the killing of many innocents for the sake of getting a few “bad guys”. If we had only supported democracy and peaceful coexistence in the first place, would we now be in this position?
Instead, we have aggressively pursued a policy that acquires as much oil as possible, much more than we could ever deserve on a demographic basis, trampled the rights and welfare of those who live on top of it, bring it to America where we burn it indiscriminately and inefficiently to create an American culture of unbridled excess, and finally refuse to accept responsibility for the environmental ravages caused by our disproportionate contribution to global warming. All the while, we continue to pursue our agenda of excess, continue to treat the rest of the world, particularly the third world, as our indentured servants, bankrupt our own country in the effort to sustain this lifestyle as we seek to relativise other cultures to our own, and turn the world into what Mr. Bush hegemonically sees as our possession. Our religiously zealous enemies bluster that they will fight until they see America in flames. They won’t have to. We are literally using their oil to incinerate the world around us. There have been many world empires before us who have consumed themselves though their own hubris and narcissism. The principle difference between them and us is that we have the technology to do it faster.
What is the solution? The Judeo-Christian scriptures say that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. Rediscovering a humble fear of God would certainly help, but perhaps developing a little fear of ourselves could help too. Although a huge majority of the American public disapproves of Mr. Bush’s behavior, we still need to take responsibility for his actions. We need to take a hard look at our values and our virtues and recognize that we don’t have all the answers for the world. The American society and the American soul has much more to learn from other cultures, Christian and nonchristian, than they have to learn from us. We have great resources, and we could help so many others in so many ways. It is a senseless evil to use our resources to destroy other cultures simply to sustain an oil guzzling myth that will soon destroy the very economy and environment that supports it. The Bush Administration is in power at a time in history when something could have been done, but squandered the change to do what was both wise and morally right.
Mr. Bush’s legacy will not be his ideology, or his theology, or even his effect on the US and the current world order. Sadly, his legacy will be his intellectual ineptitude, possibly the worst among the (thankfully small) rogues’ gallery of truly inept American presidents. His actions are so arbitrary and short sighted, that one must wonder whether even the “C’s” he is so proud of from Yale were a gift because of his family’s position and reputation. He has demonstrated an inability to process even the simplest abstraction, and compensates for this by confusing steadfastness with intransigence and leadership with tyranny.
The solution for the next President is to act more like a leader by acting less like a tyrant. We must extricate ourselves as self-effacingly as possible from the business of running other countries. We must apologize as sincerely as possible to the world community for Mr. Bush’s outrages and for decades of self-serving policies. We must make it clear that we will value freedom and self-will, by allowing others to have some of both. We must renounce the current practice of demanding U.S. immunity from the world court and other international systems of accountability. We should make it clear that we will continue to value our own freedom and self-determination and will fight fiercely to defend ourselves against any and all attackers, but that we will do this without making the surreal leap to committing pre-emptive invasion and occupation of would-be enemies. We do not have the money, the resources, the will, the responsibility, the wisdom, or the right to run the world, but we do have wonderful resources to be a citizen in the world. We have the ability to spend lavishly on the common welfare of our citizens, and to rediscover a true respect for our citizens, new and old, while still establishing a reasonable level of security and environmental and economic stability. If we weren’t spending ourselves broke blowing up half of the world and trying to run the rest of it, we could be instrumental in creating a safer and more sustainable world for all cultures. We don’t have to continue the madness just to appear to be true to our past. We need to decide to be a citizen in the world, and we need to do it now.
10/03/05 05:24 PM
We have all gone crazy, or at least we are getting there. The devastation of Hurricane Katrina is real and awful by any measure, but it is curious how such disasters re-center us on what really matters. America has for decades been blessed and protected from so many threats. We have resources and natural physical protections that so many others lack. But with that we have become complacent and entitlement-minded. The 9/11 tragedy was awful, and we should have been horrified. But, we were also shocked “that it could happen here”, and we had no basis for that. We all knew that New Orleans was an aging city sinking slowly into its own muck. We knew that a hurricane such as Katrina would be catastrophic. Capable experts have been predicting it for decades, but we all chose to ignore it, from the poorest resident to the highest politician. After all, it’s the Big Easy, and we’re America.
And so the craziness creeps in. It starts with the insidious idea that we can live without being violated, without tragedies big or small. Politicians of all ideologies allow us to believe that and to believe that we only need them in office to live free of danger. Their political lives depend on the wealthy maintaining an illusion of influence and the poor feeling afraid and dependent. Our current administration has turned the trafficking of fear and hate into a high tech science. They have bankrupted the country in a vapid plan to police the world and “get the bogeymen”, and in the process have decimated our ability to respond to problems at home. And why? Because catastrophes at home just don’t happen. They never expected to have to own up on the scale that Katrina is demanding.
We are also lulled in by our transformation into a litigious society. The illusion is the same, that we can and deserve to live lives free of misfortune. Under that assumption, any misfortune that does occur must be someone’s fault. Claiming 30 to 40% of monetary awards, trial lawyers have tremendous financial motivation to keep us all believing that. The same delusion pays advertising for increasingly seedy but popular entertainment. From reality TV to Jerry Springer to the lives of self-serving athletes, we worship the idea that you can have it all without necessarily possessing any ability or character or accountability.
We even take this to the point that we vilify those who do have character. Physicians are an example. Like all professions, the medical profession includes people of varying levels of integrity, but the defining characteristic of the huge majority of medical care givers is that they serve the basic physical needs of people. This distinguishes them from professions with more purely material motivations. In spite of this, trial lawyers have made an industry of seeking out clients and selling them the idea that if something is wrong, it is somebody’s fault. We could radically improve the malpractice crisis that is crippling our country if we simply adopted a different approach. Politicians keep focusing on limiting damage awards and ignoring the lottery-sized attorney compensation. Bad medicine could still be policed and we could remove the financial treasure hunting quite easily. A generation ago, we placed physicians and hospitals on fixed, resource based fee scales. We need simply to do the same thing for trial attorneys. A specific type of case should be compensated on a specific fee schedule, not a percentage of the “winnings”. When lawyers are receiving a percentage, there is awesome motivation to make those winnings as obscenely huge as possible, regardless of the merits of the case. If they were paid on a fee scale, we could then for the first time actually focus on those merits. This could also be easily modified to assimilate the current movement toward “pay for performance” in medicine. In other words, lawyers get less if they lose and more (on a pay scale) if they win. There would then be less motivation to pursue cases without merit.
We need to celebrate and reward those of us who have character, whether they are physicians, nurses, lawyers, fisherman, or cab drivers. It takes a disaster like Katrina to refocus us on those things. We have seen looters responding according to the philosophy that they deserve something for nothing, and we have seen nurses risking their lives to bag ventilator patients by hand while snipers take pot shots at them.
The lottery mentality also presumes that closure is possible; that if we make the big score, things can and will be good forever. But there is no closure in real life. There will always be tragedies and there will always be blessings. Bad things do happen to good people and no one from the FEMA Director to the cop on the street can change that. What defines good people, whether they are victims or onlookers is that they address the misfortune and rise above it. There is a time to analyze and criticize, but they focus first on response and rising above.
So, who shall we celebrate, the looter who sees tragedy as an excuse to get even, or the cop who stays at his work even when it seems hopeless? Will we celebrate the cracked out parent who blames politicians for their plight or the grandmother who is raising that parent’s children. Will we praise the doctor who does everything right and gets sued anyway for a bad result, or the personal injury lawyer who believes that a $40,000,000.00 award is noble and justified, as is his $15,000,000.00 commission.
No, life is not perfect, and we all need to face misfortune sooner or later. We must constantly prepare and constantly respond. Tragedies can never validate the concept that we can all be compensated, that we are deserving or even able to remain whole. They do however prove and refine the good character in most of us, and to that end tragedy can have some good effect. Katrina has proven to us again, in case we weren’t paying attention, that good and bad befall us all, whether rich or poor, regardless of color or condition, and such times demand that we care for each other. The alternative is anarchy, the most unbiased tyrant of all.
