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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: The End is Nigh If we step back a moment from the inhumane and criminal debacle that is the Iraq war and look at it as a logic problem, we can see that the aspirations of its architects are, well, absurd, and if there is something to be grateful for with regard to the Iraq war, then perhaps it is that the absurdity of nearly everything Bush, Cheney, Feith, Kristol, Wolfowitz, Bolton, et al. represent is now apparent to almost everyone besides themselves. 1. Modern war is pointless. Since the end of the Second World War, the US has put a lot of its economic eggs in the war machine basket, and bet on the idea that wars can be fought with more and more sophisticated technology. The basic principle of this technology is that of the gun--I can stand farther and farther away from you, but kill you anyway with some sort of explosion (bomb, rocket attack, nuclear weapon, maybe some sort of star wars rain of death from space if only the American taxpayer will pay for it). The attack on Iraq was premised on this idea--Shock and Awe. The first plan the Pentagon geniuses came up with was to intimidate the Iraqis into submission by demonstrating our invincible might, kind of like a huge fireworks display in which only very narrowly targeted, and deserving, victims would be killed--presumably the bombs would serve as judge, jury, and executioner only for resolute followers of Saddam, and if we could label other victims as "collateral damage", we could get away with the inevitable mistakes. What the geniuses were aiming for was some sort of veneration by the Iraqis, as if the US were God-like in its power. But the Pentagon could not pull off the plan because technological war is by nature vast and messy. Technological war could not help killing, wounding, and alienating civilians, missing the well-protected ruling class and Saddam himself, and being the first demonstration for the Iraqis and the rest of the world, of who the Americans were--heartless, careless, murderous, robotic aliens intent on interfering in a country that was not generally agreed to be the Americans' business, no matter what the Americans themselves asserted. Shock and Awe did not work. The natural plan B of modern war is more modern war--more death, more injuries, more devastation. But we were supposed to be the Iraqis' friends, and so-- Technological war from the air was followed by technological war on the ground. But from the beginning, American soldiers might as well have been wearing signs on their backs saying "shoot me". In their desert camo uniforms, boots, and helmets with goggles, carrying all sorts of equipment, including weapons, of course, and driving in armored, but not sufficiently armored, vehicles, everything about their appearance showed that they did not fit into the local culture; every aspect of their appearance suggested to the local culture that they were alien. The geniuses at the Pentagon would have said, probably, that the army needs to retain its identity as a "fighting force", but that identity only served to focus the concentration of the Iraqi resisters more and more on resistance. Soldiers who were so markedly different from the local culture would have had to do everything perfectly in order to avoid arousing hostility, and we know that they didn't. They acted as the geniuses at the Pentagon ordered them to act--aggressively. Even apart from war crimes and other crimes that the American soldiers committed, their demeanor has been warlike, which is not perceived by the occupied populace as reassuring or secure, but as frightening and dangerous. At the same time, the US has several different "armies" in Iraq--the regular US army and the mercenaries run by Blackwater and Halliburton. The geniuses at the Pentagon who thought of "outsourcing " military operations for fun and profit didn't reckon with how the subject population would experience whole different sets of Americans doing lots of different and contradictory things, creating chaos and sowing more and more fear. What do people do when those who claim superiority over them don't act in a morally superior way and then show vulnerability? They attack. It's human nature. Iraq may be a multi-front civil war between groups with old enmities, but one thing they have shown themselves (and said themselves) to agree on is that the Americans ought to be attacked. Newly converted former neo-cons who now oppose the war and want to get out because it isn't our business should remember that even if we can't finish it, we did start it. As a result of the Iraq war, we should thank the Bush administration for demonstrating the futility and cruelty of war as the Pentagon and its contractors have designed it. The Pentagon could have looked around in the fifties and seen that insurgencies were the wave of the future, but they didn't--they invested in something more expensive and more risky, and now we and our children are once again paying the price. Vietnam was fair warning more than anything else, but Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, and the contractors didn't heed that warming. 2. The "free market" is actually just colonialism by another name. What is the mantra of the "free market"? It is "buy low, sell high". It aims at all times to externalize costs and keep the profits. In the "free market', there is always a sucker. Taxpayer, go look in the mirror! We can thank Bush and Cheney for demonstrating in a kind of absolute way the selfish inhumanity of that model of human existence. We know for a fact, no matter what the PR of the Bush administration says, that Cheney wanted to secure the Iraqi oil fields for the use of western corporations, with the possible byproduct of enabling American car buyers to keep buying SUVs and pickup trucks with impunity. He would externalize the costs of securing the oil fields by charging it to the American taxpayer in a multitude of different ways--stealing from us through the Pentagon, Halliburton, KBR. Even if Bremer and his bosses hadn't actually looted the accounts, the war itself would have been stealing, but Cheney and his gang piled stealing upon stealing. "Waste and fraud" are the mildest and kindest terms for how they have taken us to the cleaners. But what they stole from us is chickenfeed compared to what they planned to steal form the Iraqis, through securing the oil but keeping the profits for American companies. Bush and Cheney could have accepted the science of global climate change seven years ago and saved us a hell of a lot of trouble. In not doing so, they demonstrated another failure of capitalism--protecting investments is much more important than innovation, and old, established industries will kill and destroy in order to not do the obvious new thing. What if ExxonMobil had said, "The solar panel is the wave of the future, or the electric car is where we are putting our money?" They did not. In order to preserve their investments, the machine that is made up of automakers, war contractors, oil companies, agribusinesses, and their financial enablers doubled down their bets on the old industries, and now, because they have spent so much of our money to so little purpose, it is ever more clear to everyone that they have nowhere to go except the place they could have gone seven years ago at less expense--toward less reliance on oil. Selfish inhumanity compounded with blind stupidity--that's Bush/Cheney. 3. White men are nothing special. Those of us who marvel at the unprecedented stupidity and arrogance of the Iraq war often wonder what it is that sets Bush and Cheney and Libby and Feith and Wolfowitz and Kristol etc apart from the rest of humanity. How is it that they arrogate to themselves the right to visit such destruction on Iraq, and then Iran? Clearly, the Christian religious impulse accounts for part of it, in some of these people, and Zionist fear accounts for part of it in others. But the biggest lesson we see when we watch them walk and talk is that just being white men is enough for them. In fact, it is the basic long term premise of conservatism as we know it that white men of power ought to do and can do whatever they feel like because they are white men of power. If there were anything special about Bush, Cheney, and the others--if they were talented or handsome or articulate or had charisma or were wise or extra moral, those qualities would confuse the issue. It is because Bush and his pals are so entirely and unrepentently ordinary (although white and well-connected) that we can clearly see that they don't deserve and have never deserved the power that they claim. Having nothing else, only power, to solve their existential dilemma, they try to use it and fail to achieve any results. Of course, the other half of the "white men are special" conservative argument is that western civilization is so special as to require of all other people "shock and awe". As an independent-minded woman, of course, I naturally prefer secular western civilization, but the Iraq war has failed to demonstrate the superiority of western civilization, and has in fact done just the opposite--it has demonstrated all the bad things about western civilization, beginning with its willingness to accept "collateral damage" to other people when its convenience (driving, selling cars, retooling factories) is endangered by their personal and property rights. George W. Bush was exactly the sort of person who should have taken a course in political correctness. Then, perhaps, he would not have framed the war on terror and the Iraq war in such a stupid and ignorant way, as a "crusade", as bringing "democracy" to the unenlightened masses of the Middle East. Secular western civilization, in my view, is valuable and worth preserving, but when we "fight for it" in Bush's terms, with contravention of such legal protections as habeas corpus, breaking down the separation of church and state, interference in scientific research for the sake of ideology, or torture, we wreck it ourselves, and what we have to sell to others looks like more of what they already have, or worse (just as lots of Iraqis feel that what we have brought them is worse than what they had under Saddam). One of the powers of secular western civilization used to be its allure; what Bush and Cheney have done to our country as well has to Iraq has tainted that allure, perhaps fatally. Do the Russians want to be like us? The Chinese? The Canadians? Anyone? Perhaps there would eventually have been a natural balancing around the world of what various nations and peoples aspired to, but Bush and Cheney and the American war machine have accelerated that rebalancing in a very dangerous way, one that threatens the secular and reasonable fabric of western civilization. The very best thing about the separation of church and state is that all religions know that they have a place, but only a place, among others. This is practical. Since it is in the nature of religions to claim ever more power and to back up their claims with shootings, bombs, violence, and war, then the separation of church and state is our only hope. Bush and Cheney have put this already-resolved question back into play for their own purposes, taking away yet another reason for anyone in the world to accept the superiority of western civilization. 4. The end of the world as we knew it was inevitable. In the future, and not so far in the future, the idea that burning fossil fuels would alter the atmosphere in unpredictable and probably dangerous ways, along with the idea that eating chemicals in our food might harm us, and the idea that the effect of antibiotics would be to engender populations of antibiotic-resistant bacteria will be seen as no-brainers. The foot-dragging and resistance on the part of our ruling class to accepting these ideas will be seen as yet another example of raw human idiocy, on the level of using all your manpower to raise one last Easter Island head before everyone dies in the attempt. As a child of the fifties, I was taught to revere the fruits of American knowhow--refrigerators, automobiles, superhighways, atom bombs, air conditioners, pesticides, television. We all lived in a bubble of self-congratulation that promised a technological solution to every dilemma--even to things that were manufactured dilemmas--remember vaginal sprays and Minipoo and nuclear submarines? It is now clear that capitalism plus ingenuity plus materialism does not add up to "wealth creation", but to wealth transfer--what was once sitting in the ground, for example, becomes something else because capitalists want to make money off it, whether or not it is safe, necessary, or desirable. It is also abundantly clear that the side-effects of all this wealth creation are not always happy or pleasant, mostly because greed trumps care every time. If one in 166 of our children is autistic, if more than a quarter of the population is obese, if cancer is on the rise, if the variety of the ecosystem is diminishing by the day, if parts of the ocean are filled with plastic bags and other parts of the ocean are dead, if Earth's orbit is filled with junk, if we have to go to war in order to profit the military industrial complex, who did that? Men like Cheney and Bush. It is exactly analogous: an extra proportion of Iraqi children are dead or wounded because of Cheney and Bush. Soldiers return from Iraq with uncontrollable infections because of Cheney and Bush. Iraq is filled with the weapons, poisons, and detritus of war, because of Cheney and Bush. The Iraq that existed in 2000, with its wealth of artifacts and sites and ecosystems and human variety is sadly diminished because of Cheney and Bush. Perhaps the end of the world as we knew it didn't have to be abrupt and violent, but it has been, because ordinary men with no imaginations, men who are entirely representative or their class, white and well-connected, for their own selfish purposes and the short-sighted purposes of their class have made it so. What is the good news? It is that non-white and/or non-privileged men and women are rising to power here and there--Germany, France, even the US. Coalitions of people are forming that extend across ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic lines that work with new ideas and new paradigms to try and undo the damage the old paradigms have wrought--one of these coalitions, in the South Bronx, literally picks up and reuses trash--there's an innovative idea! But we all know that white men do not give up power easily, and in this case they just might decide to blow everything up rather than change their way of looking at things. Is attacking Iran the beginning of the end? If so, and if Bush and Cheney order the attack, then history will say that those of us who didn't stop them deserved what we got.
Poster Comment: "White men are nothing special." While Jane has some good points to make in her commentary, I wonder why it is that she seems to blame the sins of these men on their whiteness.
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#1. To: christine (#0)
Excellent question. Evil is color-blind, imo.
And putting down the Sepoy rebellion wasn't? "In war, moral factors account for three quarters of the whole." Conquering Iraq was always feasible -- Saddam did it, after all. Modern technology was not the insurmountable difficulty, but modern mores. "A white man mustn't be frightened in front of 'natives'; and so, in general, he isn't frightened." And neither does he fraternize as an equal. It was passing out candy and stuffed animals that undermined the situation on the ground more than anything else. There was an inherent conflict between effective means and (ostensible) end. Iraq war has failed to demonstrate the superiority of western civilization, and has in fact done just the opposite--it has demonstrated all the bad things about western civilization, beginning with its willingness to accept "collateral damage" to other people when its convenience (driving, selling cars, retooling factories) is endangered by their personal and property rights. On the other hand it's in the West that you find the greatest misgivings about "collateral damage." While Jane has some good points to make in her commentary, I wonder why it is that she seems to blame the sins of these men on their whiteness. There's truth in the charge. The Faustian spirit of the white West is the parent not just of its science, engineering, medicines, but of its wars of conquest. By themselves, blacks don't form proper conquering armies. They just don't. The capacity to form armies is largely the complement of greater personal restraint and less casual, street violence. The good and the bad of all peoples are of a piece. You can't have one without the other.
"In popular articles that play down the genetical differences among human populations, it is often stated that about 85% of the total genetic variation is due to individual differences within populations and only 15% to differences between populations or ethnic groups. ...this argument ignores the fact that most of the information that distinguishes populations is hidden in the correlation structure of the data and not simply in the variation of the individual factors." In other words, this is a deceitful argument, and those who make it know that.
Jane, the author, must have some emotional animus and/or disdain for religion to be able to accord Christianity and religiosity to any of the vicious and evil thugs she lists herein.
flag
By themselves, blacks don't form proper conquering armies. They just don't. The capacity to form armies is largely the complement of greater personal restraint and less casual, street violence. um...might this have something to do with intelligence? i doubt that was Jane's reasoning though. ;)
i'm thinking she's a lez. :P
Indeed. The mean IQ is what it is for a reason. Intelligence correlates positively with neurosis, negatively with psychosis. People with IQs > 140 have triple the suicide rate and are less easily conditioned. People with IQs > 180 are positively menaces to society. The really smart ones just get others to do their killing for them. doubt that was Jane's reasoning though. Never mind the data. The principle is the thing.
"In popular articles that play down the genetical differences among human populations, it is often stated that about 85% of the total genetic variation is due to individual differences within populations and only 15% to differences between populations or ethnic groups. ...this argument ignores the fact that most of the information that distinguishes populations is hidden in the correlation structure of the data and not simply in the variation of the individual factors." In other words, this is a deceitful argument, and those who make it know that.
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