As you may be able to tell from the links that I have selected tonight for the Midnight Blog, I am feeling fairly disheartened, too disheartened to do much original writing. Once I again, I find that my writing, which starts off being about technology and its effect on people, people and their use of technology, my voyages of discovery on this crazy thing we call the 'Net, and the fun random stuff that crosses through my brain, ends up focusing on politics, writ large. I don't know how not to write about politics, as we go to war.
I feel like I am living in Europe in the summer of 1914 after the assassination of the archduke Franz Ferdinand, and I am watching the troops mobilize across Europe for a quick fight to "show who is right," and I know how it is not going to turn out. History has many more examples of wars with different outcomes than their instigators' intended than it does of wars that turn out as planned. It is not going to be a short glorious war, although the opening stages may look like it. One billion Muslims may not rise up at once, but they are not going to be happy with Christian occupation of the Islamic heartland, and some of them will find nasty ways to express their unhappiness. It is not going to be the war to end all wars, nor will it make the world safe for democracy. Like all wars, it will brutalize the participants and bystanders alike. In this case, both sides will probably make use of advances in military technology to commit new barbarities.
So it was particularly disheartening to read this brilliant article, Just the Beginning, Is Iraq the opening salvo in a war to remake the world? by Robert Dreyfuss. Dreyfuss looks at the intellectual godfathers who agitated for a war against Iraq in the 1990's, neoconservatives like Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, Reuel Marc Gerecht and Douglas Feith, most of whom are now in or associated with the Bush administration. As Dreyfus documents using their own words, they see the war against Iraq as just the first step in a war to remake the Middle East by militarily attacking or otherwise overthrowing the governments of Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. They want to see a Middle East dominated by an alliance between the United States and Israel, backed by overwhelming military force. They either ignore the fact that being democratic does not mean being pro-American policies, something that should be self-evident to even the most ignorant person by now, or they are clear that what they are after isn't democracy -- they would be just as happy to have authoritarian pro-American rulers. And they are prepared to have America go to war to install satraps for the new American empire. Some quotes:
"I think we're going to be obliged to fight a regional war, whether we want to or not," says Michael Ledeen, a former U.S. national-security official and a key strategist among the ascendant flock of neoconservative hawks, ... the very logic of the global war on terrorism will drive the United States to confront an expanding network of enemies in the region. "As soon as we land in Iraq, we're going to face the whole terrorist network," he says, including the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and a collection of militant splinter groups backed by nations -- Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia -- that he calls "the terror masters." "It may turn out to be a war to remake the world," says Ledeen. ...
In their book, The War Over Iraq, William Kristol of The Weekly Standard and Lawrence F. Kaplan of The New Republic write, "The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there. … We stand at the cusp of a new historical era. … This is a decisive moment. … It is so clearly about more than Iraq. It is about more even than the future of the Middle East and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United States intends to play in the twenty-first century." ...
"Nostalgia for the last shah's son, Reza Pahlavi … has again risen," says Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer who, like Ledeen and Perle, is ensconced at the AEI. "We must be prepared, however, to take the battle more directly to the mullahs," says Gerecht, adding that the United States must consider strikes at both Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and allies in Lebanon. "In fact, we have only two meaningful options: Confront clerical Iran and its proxies militarily or ring it with an oil embargo." ...
Perle called on Israel to work with Turkey and Jordan to "contain, destabilize and roll-back" various states in the region, overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq, press Jordan to restore a scion of its Hashemite dynasty to the Iraqi throne and, above all, launch military assaults against Lebanon and Syria as a "prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East [to] threaten Syria's territorial integrity." Joining Perle in writing the IASPS paper were Douglas Feith and Wurmser, now senior officials in Bush's national-security apparatus. ...
Chas Freeman, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, thinks it will be a disaster. "This outdoes anything in the march of folly catalog," he says. "It's the lemmings going over the cliff."
Required Reading, especially for anybody who thinks this war has anything to do with freedom.
Like Chas Freeman (a brilliant diplomat, one of the US' best), I am convinced that the insane asylum inmates have taken over the bus that was transporting them to the loony bin, and they are driving the bus over the cliff. Unfortunately, we are on the bus too.
What is a concerned citizen to do? I write my Congresswoman and Senators, to support their opposition to the war, I write in this weblog, but I fear that all this writing is just preaching to the converted. The inmates have taken over the bus, and there doesn't seem to be anything we can do to stop them. Instead, we just watch as the bus goes over. I wonder if this is what it was like to watch the troop trains scurry across Europe in August of 1914, knowing that death and destruction were on their way, but feeling powerless to stop them. Suggestions for meaningful action welcomed.
Posted by Geodog at March 16, 2003 12:38 AM | TrackBackMy apologies, but my web hoster has turned off commenting, due to a flood of obscene spam bringing the server to its knees. I hope to have this weblog transitioned over to Wordpress in the near future, so that I can have commenting up and working again. Until then, please feel free to send me your comments via my email contact form.. Please ignore everything below this comment.
Props to Ms. Malaprop, and apologies for all the mixed metaphors. Perhaps in the morning I'll figure out how to harmonize them.
Posted by: Geodog on March 16, 2003 12:38 AM"US out of the UN" -- I have been thinking about these handmade signs that
appear around a few of the ranches around here, and around other parts of
the rural west as well. The messages are pretty simple, that the US is
giving up its sovereignty by being a part of the UN and that the UN is
controlled by anti-American interests (and that any gun control is an
atheist, communist evil -- but that is a different topic). Ironically, this
isolationist, anti-intellectual, slightly paranoid faction has much in
common with the anti-globalization movement -- a gut-level mistrust of
global interconnectedness and dependency, and the powerlessness that comes
from having your fate determined by an enormous multi-national institution.
I think that this belief, and the beliefs that its leads to, are one of the
roots of the contradiction that this administration finds its in. They
fundamentally don't want any international group to have power over the US,
and they don't want the US trying to fix problems in "obscure" parts of the
world. After 9/11, they see that a fundamentally isolationist policy does
not work anymore -- the US can't be secure without the world being secure.
The majority of the rest of the world (and all of the rest of the
economically powerful world) wants the same thing. Yet the natural path of
working with these countries to build international institutions to foster
security hits the "US out of the UN" brick wall -- the basic ground rule
that we cannot risk ever getting in a situation where another country could
have power to keep us from doing what we think we need to do.
This also manifests itself in the post-Saddam Iraq democracy paradox -- the
administration believes in democracy, but can't deal with the possibility
that a democratic, representative government in post-Saddam Iraq might well
be extremely anti-American.
" ... with the POSSIBILITY that a democratic, representative government in post-Saddam Iraq MIGHT well be extremely anti-American [emphases added]?"
You've raised understatement to a fine art, haven't you? The CERTAINTY that a democratic Arab government will be extremely anti-American is precisely why such a beast will not be allowed to arise during the period of American dominance.
While much of what America is excoriated for is undoubtedly undeserved, any rational view of the last century and indeed the one before would lead to the conclusion that America has not been a good citizen of the world, with few exceptions.
How many times have our armed forces invaded other lands? Heck, we wouldn't be here at all, if not for our forefathers' genocide against the aboriginals.
As I mentioned, there have been a few shining examples of the US being a good citizen - the Marshall Plan and, a generation later, the Alliance for Progress among them. How do these examples weigh on the scale of Justice when balanced by our interventions and interference in Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, China, Russia, Grenada, Angola, Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Kosovo*, Laos, Cambodia, Viet Nam, Canada (yes, we even invaded CANADA at least once) and the many other times American troops and spooks went abroad?
(*Despite what you've no doubt heard from the lap-dog press, the American intervention in Kosovo was not necessarily an unadulterated Good; the folks at http://www.icdsm.org lay out a pretty good indictment of our treatment of the Serbs. While not everything can be taken at face value, it is a fact that the US built a large military base there, after evicting the Serbs from their ancestral homeland).
Posted by: Randall on March 17, 2003 10:08 AMTR:
I think that there is a faction (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Perle, etc) in the administration which is determined to show that the US doesn't need anyone else to act -- that the US can and should act unilaterally. This faction has gone out of its way to sabotage the other faction's (Powell, Bush pere) efforts to secure multinational support for US actions vs. Iraq. This faction realizes that (quoting from the Newsweek article, http://www.msnbc.com/news/885222.asp) the US has the support of a majority of the people in only one country in the world, Israel, but they don't care, because the US is the most powerful nation on earth, and because they "know" we are right. (see John Perry Barlow's essay on Cheney's beliefs http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200302/msg00186.html). I think they are dangerously wrong, and I'm so pissed that they have thrown out much of the good will earned in the last 50 (the US has been far from perfect, but on the whole people were happier to have the US on the scene than not.) These people are harnessing the American people's natural isolationism to build the world's biggest empire.
Randall:
While I have been a frequent critic of US activity abroad, in many of the places you cite, I think that overall the US record was better than not. Certainly judging from world popular opinion, the US was mostly seen as mostly a force for good. Some significant exceptions, of course.