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“If I were George W. Bush's karmic defense attorney,
I would argue that his best chance to avoid conviction as a purveyor of false
morality would be to pray for a hung jury in the afterworld.” By Norman MailerThis
article is based on Norman Mailer's Commonwealth Club speech in San Francisco
on February 20, 2003. Mr. Mailer received the Club's Centennial Medallion, in
honor of the organization's hundredth anniversary. An audio stream of the
speech can be heard on commonwealthclub.org. 1.
It
is probably true that at the beginning of the present push of the
administration to go to war, the connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama
bin Laden were minimal. Each, on the face of it, had to distrust the other.
From Saddam's point of view, bin Laden was the most troublesome kind of man,
a religious zealot, that is to say a loose cannon, a
warrior who could not be controlled. To bin Laden, Saddam was an irreligious
brute, an unbalanced fool whose boldest ventures invariably crashed. The
two were in competition as well. Each would look to control the future of the
Muslim world—bin Laden, conceivably, for the greater glory of Allah, and
Saddam for the earthly delight of vastly augmenting his power. In the old days,
in the nineteenth century, when the British had their empire, the Raj would have had the skill to set those two upon each
other. It was the old rule of many a Victorian crazy house: Let the madmen
duke it out, then jump the one or two who are left. Today,
however, these aims are different. Security is considered insecure unless the
martial results are absolute. So the first American reaction to September 11
was to plan to destroy bin Laden and al-Qaeda. When the campaign in
Afghanistan failed, however, to capture the leading protagonist, even proved
unable, indeed, to conclude whether he was alive or dead, the game had to
shift. Our White House decided the real pea was under another shell. Not
al-Qaeda, but Iraq. Political
leaders and statesmen are serious men even when they appear to be fools, and
it is rare to find them acting without some deeper reason they can offer to
themselves. It is those covert motives in the Bush administration upon which
I would like to speculate here. I will attempt to understand what the
President and his inner cohort see as the logic of their present venture. Let me begin with Colin Powell's presentation
before the UN on February 5. Up to a point, it was well detailed and looked
to prove that Saddam Hussein (to no one's dramatic surprise) was violating
every rule of the inspectors that he could get away with. Saddam, after all,
had a keen nose for the vagaries of history. He understood that the longer
one could delay powerful statesmen, the more they might weary of the
soul-deadening boredom of dealing with a consummate liar who was artfully
free of all the bonds of obligation and cooperation. It is no small gift to
be an absolute liar. If you never tell the truth, you are virtually as safe
as an honest man who never utters an untruth. When informed that you just
swore to the opposite today of what you avowed yesterday, you remark, "I
never said that," or should the words be on record, you declare that you
are grossly misinterpreted. Confusion is sown rich in permutations. So,
Saddam had managed to survive seven years of inspection from 1991 to 1998. He
had made deals—most of them under the counter—with the French, the Germans,
the Russians, the Jordanians; the list is long. He also knew how to play on
the sympathies of the third world. He convinced many a good heart all over
the world. The continuing cruelty of America was starving the Iraqi children.
The Iraqi children were, in large part, seriously malnourished by the embargo
Saddam had brought upon himself, but, indeed, if they had been healthy, he
would have kept a score of six-year-olds starving long enough to dispatch a
proper photograph around the world. He was no good and he could prove it. He
did so well at the games he played that he succeeded in declaring the
inspections at an end by 1998. There
had been talk before, and there was certainly talk then in the White House
that we had to send troops into Iraq as our reply to such flouting of the
agreement. Unfortunately, Clinton's adventure with Monica Lewinsky had left
him a paralyzed warrior. In the midst of his public scandal, he could not
afford to shed one drop of American blood. The proof was in Kosovo where no
American infantry went in with NATO and our bombers never dropped their product
from any height within range of Serbian antiaircraft. We did it all from
15,000 feet up. So, Iraq was out of the question. Al Gore was a hawk at the
time, ready, doubtless, to improve his future campaign image and rise thereby
from wonk to stud—a necessary qualification for the presidency—but Clinton's
vulnerability stifled all that. So,
in 1998, Saddam Hussein got away with it. There had been no inspections
since. Colin Powell's speech was full of righteous indignation at the
bare-faced and heinous bravado of Saddam the Evil, but Powell was, of course,
too intelligent a man to be surprised by these discoveries of malfeasance.
The speech was an attempt to heat up America's readiness to go to war. By the
measure of our polls, half of the citizenry were unready. And this part of
his speech certainly succeeded. The proof was that a good many Democratic
senators who had been on the fence declared that they were in on the venture
now; yes, they, too, were ready for war, God bless us. The major weakness in Powell's presentation of the
evidence was, however, the evidential link of Iraq to al-Qaeda. It was, given
the powerful auspices of the occasion, more than a bit on the sparse side.
With the exception of Great Britain, the states with veto power in the Security
Council, the French, the Chinese, and the Russians, were obviously not eager
to satisfy the Bush passion to go to war as soon as possible. They wanted
time to intensify inspections. They looked to containment as a solution. Not
a week later, al-Jazeera offered a recorded
broadcast by bin Laden that gave a few hints that he and Saddam were now
ready, conceivably, to enter into direct contact, even though he called the
"socialists" in Baghdad "infidels." But this last
statement was in immediate contradiction to what he had just finished saying
a moment earlier: "It does no hurt under these conditions [of attack by
the West] that the interests of Muslims [will ultimately] contradict the
interest of the socialists in the fight against the Crusaders." Bin
Laden may have chosen to be ambiguous and two-sided in his remarks, but the
suggestion of a common interest, despite all, between al-Qaeda and Saddam was
also there. Was it finally happening? Had the enemy of Saddam's enemy now
become Saddam's friend? If so, that could prove a disaster. We might vanquish
Iraq and still suffer from the catastrophe we claimed to be going to war to
avert. Iraq's weapons of mass destruction could yet belong to bin Laden. Without
those weapons, al-Qaeda would have to scrape and scratch. But if Saddam were
to make transfer of even a sizable fraction of his bio-warfare and chemical
stores, bin Laden would be considerably more dangerous. The
inner diktat of George W. Bush to go to war with Iraq as rapidly as possible
now had to face the possibility that Saddam had come up with an exceptional
countermove. Was he saying, in effect, "Allow me to string along the
inspections, and you are still relatively safe. You
may be certain I will not rush to give my very best stuff to Osama bin Laden
so long as we can keep playing this inspection game back and forth, back and
forth. Go to war with me, however, and Osama will smile. I may go down in
flames, but he and his people will be happy. Be certain, he wants you to go
to war with me." Since
the sequence of these kinds of moves was present from the beginning, it could
be asked, as indeed more than a few Americans were now asking: How did we
allow such choices in the first place—these hellish Hobson choices? Meanwhile, the world was reacting in horror to the
Bush agenda for war. The European edition of Time magazine had been
conducting a poll on its Web site: "Which country poses a greater danger
to world peace in 2003?" With 318,000 votes cast so far, the responses
were: North Korea, 7 percent; Iraq, 8 percent; the United States, 84
percent.... As
John le Carré had put it to The Times of
London: "America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but
this is the worst I can remember." Harold
Pinter no longer chose to be subtle in language:
According
to Reuters, on February 15 more than four million people "from Bangkok
to Brussels, from Canberra to Calcutta...took to the streets to pillory Bush
as a bloodthirsty warmonger." 2.
A
quick review of the two years since George W. Bush took office may offer some
light on why we are where we are. He came into office with the possibility of
a recession, plus all the unhappy odor of his investiture through an election
that could best be described as legitimate/illegitimate. America had learned
all over again that Republicans had fine skills for dirty legal fighting.
They were able to call, after all, on a powerful gene stream. The Republicans
who led the campaign to seize Florida in the year 2000 are descended from 125
years of lawyers and bankers with the cold nerve and fired-up greed to
foreclose on many a widow's home or farm. Nor did these lawyers and bankers
walk about suffused with guilt. They had the moral equivalent of teflon on their soul. Church on Sunday, foreclose on Monday. Of course, their descendants won in
Florida. The Democrats still believed there were cherished rules to the game.
They did not understand that rules no longer apply when the stakes are large
enough. If
Bush's legitimacy was in question then from the start, his performance as
president was arousing scorn. When he spoke extempore, he sounded simple.
When more articulate subordinates wrote his speeches, he had trouble fitting
himself to the words. Then
September 11 altered everything. It was as if our TV sets had come alive. For
years we had been watching maelstrom extravaganzas on the tube, and enjoying
them. We were insulated. A hundredth part of ourselves could step into the
box and live with the fear. Now, suddenly, the horror had shown itself to be
real. Gods and demons were invading the US, coming right in off the TV
screen. This may account in part for the odd guilt so many felt after
September 11. It was as if untold divine forces were erupting in fury. And,
of course, we were not in shape to feel free of guilt about September 11. The
manic money-grab excitement of the Nineties had never been altogether free of
our pervasive American guilt. We were happy to be prosperous but we still
felt guilty. We are a Christian nation. The Judeo in Judeo-Christian is a
grace note. We are a Christian nation. The supposition of a great many good
Christians in America is that you were not meant to be all that rich. God
didn't necessarily want it. For certain, Jesus did not. You weren't supposed
to pile up a mountain of moolah. You were obligated
to spend your life in altruistic acts. That was still one half of the good
Christian psyche. The other half, pure American, was, as always: beat
everybody. One can offer a cruel, but conceivably accurate, remark: To be a
mainstream American is to live as an oxymoron. You are a good Christian, but
you strain to remain dynamically competitive. Of course, Jesus and Evel Knievel don't consort too
well in one psyche. Human rage and guilt do take on their uniquely American
forms. Even before September 11, many matters grew worse.
America's spiritual architecture had been buttressed since World War II by our
near-mythical institutions of security, of which the FBI and the Catholic
Church were most prominent, equal in special if intangible stature to the
Constitution and the Supreme Court. Now,
all that was taking its terrible whack. Old and new scandals of the FBI were
brought into high focus by the Hanssen case which
broke in February of 2001. An ultra-devout Catholic, Robert Hanssen had been a Soviet mole for fifteen years. No one
in the FBI could believe it. He had seemed the purest of the pure anti-Communists.
Then after September 11 came the pedophile lawsuits against the Catholic
Church, and that opened an abyss of a wound in many a good Catholic home. It
certainly injured the priesthood grievously. How could a young or middle-aged
man wearing the collar walk down the street now without suffering from the
averted eyes and false greetings of the parishioners he met along the way? And
then there was the stock market. It kept sinking. Slowly, steadily,
unemployment rose. The CEO scandals of the corporations became more
prominent. America
had been putting up with the ongoing expansion of the corporation into
American life since the end of World War II. It had been the money cow to the
United States. But it had also been a filthy cow that gave off foul gases of
mendacity and manipulation by an extreme emphasis on advertising. Put less
into the product but kowtow to its marketing. Marketing was a beast and a
force that succeeded in taking America away from most of us. It succeeded in
making the world an uglier place to live in since the Second World War. One
has only to cite fifty-story high-rise architecture as inspired in form as a
Kleenex box with balconies, shopping malls encircled by low-level
condominiums, superhighways with their vistas into the void; and, beneath it
all, the pall of plastic, ubiquitous plastic, there to numb an infant's
tactile senses, plastic, front-runner in the competition to see which new
substance could make the world more disagreeable. To the degree that we have
distributed this crud all over the globe, we were already wielding a species
of world hegemony. We were exporting the all-pervasive aesthetic emptiness of
the most powerful American corporations. There were no new cathedrals being
built for the poor— only sixteen-story urban-renewal housing projects that
sat on the soul like jail. Then
came a more complete exposure of the economic
chicanery and pollution of the corporations. Economic gluttony was thriving
at the top. Criminal behavior was being revealed on the front pages of every
business section. Without September 11, George W. Bush would have been living
in the nonstop malaise of uglier and uglier media. It could even be said that
America was taking a series of hits that were not wholly out of proportion to
what happened to the Germans after World War I, when inflation wiped out the
fundamental German notion of self, which was that if you worked hard and
saved your money, you ended up having a decent old age. It is likely that
Hitler would never have come to power ten years later without that runaway
inflation. By the same measure, September 11 had done something comparable to
the American sense of security. For
that matter, conservatism was heading toward a divide. Old-line conservatives
like Pat Buchanan believed that America should keep to itself and look to
solve those of its problems that we were equipped to solve. Buchanan was the
leader of what might be called old-value conservatives, who believe in
family, country, faith, tradition, home, hard and honest labor, duty, allegiance,
and a balanced budget. The ideas, notions, and predilections of George W.
Bush had to be, for the most part, not compatible with Buchanan's
conservatism. Bush
was different. The gap between his school of thought and that of old-value
conservatives could yet produce a dichotomy on the right as clear-cut as the
differences between Communists and socialists after World War I. "Flag
conservatives" like Bush paid lip service to some conservative values,
but at bottom they didn't give a damn. If they still used some of the terms,
it was in order not to narrow their political base. They used the flag. They
loved words like "evil." One of Bush's worst faults in rhetoric (to
dip into that cornucopia) was to use the word as if it were a button he could
push to increase his power. When people have an IV tube put in them to feed a
narcotic painkiller on demand, a few keep pressing that button. Bush uses
evil as a narcotic for that part of the American public which feels most
distressed. Of course, as he sees it, he is doing it because he believes
America is good. He certainly does, he believes this country is the only hope
of the world. He also fears that the country is rapidly growing more
dissolute, and the only solution may be—fell, mighty, and near-holy words—the
only solution may be to strive for World Empire. Behind the whole push to go to war with Iraq is the
desire to have a huge military presence in the Near East as a stepping stone
to taking over the rest of the world. That
is a big statement, but I can offer this much immediately: At the root of
flag conservatism is not madness, but an undisclosed logic. While I am hardly
in accord, it is, nonetheless, logical if you accept its premises. From a
militant Christian point of view, America is close to rotten. The
entertainment media are loose. Bare belly-buttons pop onto every TV screen,
as open in their statement as wild animals' eyes. The kids are getting to the
point where they can't read, but they sure can screw. So one perk for the
White House, should America become an international military machine huge
enough to conquer all adversaries, is that American sexual freedom, all that
gay, feminist, lesbian, transvestite hullabaloo, will be seen as too much of
a luxury and will be put back into the closet again. Commitment, patriotism,
and dedication will become all-pervasive national values once more (with all the hypocrisy attendant). Once we become a
twenty-first-century embodiment of the old Roman Empire, moral reform can
stride right back into the picture. The military is obviously more
puritanical than the entertainment media. Soldiers are, of course, crazier
than any average man when in and out of combat, but the overhead command is a
major everyday pressure on soldiers and could become a species of most
powerful censor over civilian life. To
flag conservatives, war now looks to be the best possible solution. Jesus and
Evel Knievel might be
able to bond together, after all. Fight evil, fight it to the death! Use the
word fifteen times in every speech. There
is just this kind of mad-eyed mystique to Americans: the idea that we
Americans can do anything. Yes, say flag conservatives, we will be able to
handle what comes. We have our know-how, our can-do. We will dominate the
obstacles. Flag conservatives truly believe America is not only fit to run
the world but that it must. Without a commitment to Empire, the
country will go down the drain. This, I would opine, is the prime subtext
beneath the Iraqi project, and the flag conservatives may not even be wholly
aware of the scope of it, not all of them. Not yet. Besides,
Bush could count on a few other reliable sentiments that are very much
present in our daily affairs. To begin with, a good part of American pride
sits today on the tripod of big money, sports, and the Stars and Stripes.
Something like a third of our major athletic stadiums and arenas are named
after corporations—Gillette and FedEx are but two of twenty examples. The NFL
Super Bowl could only commence this year after an American flag the size of a
football field was removed from the turf. The US Air Force gave the
groin-throb of a big vee overhead. Probably half of
America has an unspoken desire to go to war. It satisfies our mythology.
America, goes our logic, is the only force for good that can rectify the bad.
George W. Bush is shrewd enough to work that equation out all by himself. He may even sense better than anyone how a war
with Iraq will satisfy our addiction to living with adventure on TV. If this
is facetious—so be it—the country is becoming more loutish every year. So,
yes, war is also mighty TV entertainment. 3.
More
directly (even if it is not at all direct) a war with Iraq will gratify our
need to avenge September 11. It does not matter that Iraq is not the culprit.
Bush needs only to ignore the evidence. Which he does with all the power of a
man who has never been embarrassed by himself. Saddam, for all his crimes,
did not have a hand in September 11, but President Bush is a philosopher.
September 11 was evil, Saddam is evil, all evil is connected. Ergo, Iraq. The
President can also satisfy the more serious polemical needs of a great many neocons in his administration who believe Islam will yet
be Hitler Redux to Israel. Protection of Israel is
OK to Bush, electorally speaking, but it is also obligatory, especially when
he cannot count on giving orders to Sharon that will always be obeyed.
Sharon, after all, has one firm hold on Bush. With the Mossad, Sharon has the
finest intelligence service in the Near East if not in the world. The CIA,
renowned by now for its paucity of Arab spies in the Muslim world, cannot
afford to do without Sharon's services. These
are all good reasons Bush can find to go to war. As for oil, allow Ralph Nader a few statistics:
I
would add that once America occupies Iraq, it will also gain a choke-hold on
Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Near East. One can also propose that we wish
to go into Iraq for the water. To quote a piece by Stephen C. Pelletiere in The New York Times of January 31:
So,
yes, oil is a part of the motive, even if that can never be admitted. And
water could prove a powerful tool to pacify a great many heated furies of the
desert. The underlying motive, however, still remains George W. Bush's
underlying dream: Empire! "What word but 'empire' describes the awesome
thing that America is becoming?" wrote Michael Ignatieff
on January 5 in The New York Times Magazine:
From
Timothy Garton Ash in The New York Review of
Books, February 13:
Perhaps
the most thorough explanation of this as yet unadmitted
campaign toward Empire comes from the columnist Jay Bookman of The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution. Back on September 29, five months ago, he wrote:
Back
in 1992, a year after the final fall of the Soviet Union, there were many on
the right in America, early flag conservatives, who felt that an
extraordinary opportunity was now present. America could now take over the
world. The Defense Department drafted a document which, to quote Jay Bookman
once more,
Now
he is deputy defense secretary under Rumsfeld. Afterward,
from 1992 to 2000, this dream of world domination was not picked up by the
Clinton administration, and that may help to account for the intense, even
virulent hatred that so many on the right felt during those eight years. If
it weren't for Clinton, America could be ruling the world. Obviously
that document, "Project for a New American Century," projected
prematurely in 1992, had now, after September 11, become the policy of the
Bush administration. The flag conservatives were triumphant. They could seek
to take over the world. Iraq could be only the first step. Beyond, but very
much on the historical horizon, are not only Iran,
Syria, Pakistan, and North Korea, but China. Of
course, not every last country had to be subjugated. Some needed only to be
dominated or brought into partnership. There could be firm and mutual
understanding. To speak of China as existing in a symbiotic relationship with
us is too exceptional a remark to make without some projection into possible
reasons and causes. It is not inconceivable that some of the brighter neocons do see some fearful possibilities in our
technological development. Iraq and the Near East can hardly be the end.
Greater nonmilitary specters and perils loom for the future. A late January
piece in The Boston Globe by Scott A. Bass sets it forth:
Flag
conservatives may yet be hoping to send some message like this to China:
"Hear ye! You Chinese are obviously bright. We
can tell. We know! Your Asian students were born for technology. People who
have led submerged lives love technology. They don't get much pleasure
anyway, so they like the notion of cybernetic power right at their
fingertips. Technology is ideal for them. We can go along with that. You
fellows can have your technology, may it be great! But, China, you had better
understand: We still have the military power. Your best bet, therefore, is to
become Greek slaves to us Romans. We will treat you well. You will be most
important to us, eminently important. But don't look to rise above your
future station in life. The best you can ever hope for, China,
is to be our Greeks." In
the 1930s, you could be respected if you earned a living. In the Nineties,
you had to demonstrate that you were a promising figure in the ranks of
greed. It may be that empire depends on an obscenely wealthy upper-upper class
who, given the in-built, never-ending threat to their wealth, are bound to
feel no great allegiance in the pit of their heart for democracy. If this
insight is true, then it can also be said that the disproportionate wealth
which collected through the Nineties may have created an all-but-irresistible
pressure at the top to move from democracy to empire. That would safeguard
those great and quickly acquired gains. Can it be that George W. Bush knows
what he's doing for the future of empire by awarding these huge tax credits
to the rich? Of course, terrorism and instability are the
reverse face of empire. If the Saudi rulers have been afraid of their mullahs
for fear of their power to incite terrorists, what will the Muslim world be
like once we, the Great Satan, are there to dominate the Near East in person? Since
the administration can hardly be unaware of the dangers, the answer comes
down to the unhappy likelihood that Bush and Company are ready for a major
terrorist attack. As well as any number of smaller ones. Either way, it will
strengthen his hand. America will gather about him again. We can hear his
words in advance: "Good Americans died today. Innocent victims of evil
had to shed their blood. But we will prevail. We are one with God."
Given such language, every loss is a win. Yet,
so long as terrorism continues, so will its subtext, and there is the horror
to its nth power. What made deterrence possible in the cold war was
not only that there was everything to lose for both sides, but also the inability
of either side to be certain they could count on any human being to turn the
apocalyptic switch. In that sense, no final plan could be counted on. How
could either of the superpowers be certain that the wholly reliable human
selected to push the button would actually prove reliable enough to destroy
the other half of the world? A dark cloud might come over him at the last
moment. He could fall to the ground before he could do the deed. But
this does not apply to a terrorist. If he is ready to kill himself, he can
also be ready to destroy the world. The wars we have known until this era
could, no matter how horrible, offer at least the knowledge that they would
come to an end. Terrorism, however, is not interested in negotiation. Rather,
it would insist on no termination short of victory. Since the terrorist
cannot triumph, he cannot cease being a terrorist. They are a true enemy, far
more basic, indeed, than third-world countries with nuclear capability who
invariably appear on the scene prepared to live with deterrence and its
in-built outcome—agreements after years or decades of passive confrontation
and hard bargaining. If
much of what I have said so far is the novelistic projection of my notion of neocon mentality—and I can hardly argue with you—the
opposite pole of the flag conservatives' campaign to invade Iraq is that it
is does have liberal support. Part of the liberal media, The New Yorker, The Washington Post,
and some on The New York Times are joined with Senators Hillary
Clinton and Dianne Feinstein, Senator Joe Lieberman and Senator John Kerry in
acceptance of the idea that perhaps we can bring democracy to Iraq by
invasion. In a carefully measured appraisal of what the
possibilities might be, Bill Keller speaks on The New York Times Op-Ed
page on February 8 of a war that might go quickly and well:
Or
perhaps, argues Keller, we will fashion a real democracy in Iraq after all,
and the Near East will benefit. It is as if these liberal voices have decided
that Bush cannot be stopped and so he must be joined. To commit to a stand
against fighting the war would guarantee the relative absence of Democrats at
the administration tables that will work on the future of Iraq. It is an
argument that can be sustained up to a point, but the point depends on many
eventualities, the first of which is that the war is quick and not
horrendous. The
old Bill Clinton version of overseas presumption is present. The argument
that we succeeded in building democracy in Japan and Germany and therefore
can build it anywhere does not necessarily hold. Japan and Germany were
countries with a homogeneous population and a long existence as nations. They
each were steeped in guilt at the depredations of their soldiers in other
lands. They were near to totally destroyed but had the people and the skills
to rebuild their cities. The Americans who worked to create their democracy
were veterans of Roosevelt's New Deal and, mark of the period, were effective
idealists. Iraq,
in contrast, was never a true nation. Put together by the British, it was a
post–World War I patchwork of Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, and Turkomans,
who, at best, distrusted one another intensely. A situation analogous to
Afghanistan's divisions among its warlords could be the more likely outcome.
No one will certainly declare with authority that democracy can be built
there, yet the arrogance persists. There does not seem much comprehension
that except for special circumstances, democracy is never there in us to
create in another country by the force of our will. Real democracy comes out
of many subtle individual human battles that are fought over decades and
finally over centuries, battles that succeed in building traditions. The only
defenses of democracy, finally, are the traditions of democracy. When you
start ignoring those values, you are playing with a noble and delicate
structure. There's nothing more beautiful than democracy. But you can't play
with it. You can't assume we're going to go over to show them what a great
system we have. This is monstrous arrogance. Because democracy is noble, it is always
endangered. Nobility, indeed, is always in danger. Democracy is perishable. I
think the natural government for most people, given the uglier depths of
human nature, is fascism. Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy.
To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose
can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad.
Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy
freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it. The
need for powerful theory can fall into many an abyss of error. I could, for
example, be entirely wrong about the deeper motives of the administration.
Perhaps they are not interested in Empire so much as in trying in true good
faith to save the world. We can be certain Bush and his Bushites
believe this. By the time they are in church each Sunday, they believe it so
powerfully that tears come to their eyes. Of course, it is the actions of men
and not their sentiments that make history. Our sentiments can be loaded with
love within, but our actions can turn into the opposite. Perversity is always
ready to consort with human nature. David
Frum, who was a speech- writer for Bush (he coined
the phrase "Axis of Evil"), recounts in The Right Man: The
Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush what happened at a meeting in the
Oval Office last September. The President, when talking to a group of
reverends from the major denominations, told them,
That
is a dangerous remark. As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never
know for certain where our prayers are likely to go,
nor from whom the answers will come. Just when we think we are at our nearest
to God, we could be assisting the Devil. "Our
war with terror," says Bush, "begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not
end...until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped,
and defeated." Plus, asks Eric Alterman in The
Nation, what if America ends up alienating the whole world in the
process? "At some point, we may be the only ones left," Bush told
his closest advisers, according to an administration member who leaked the
story to Bob Woodward. "That's OK with me. We are America." It
must by now be obvious that if the combined pressures of Security Council
vetoes and the growing sense of world outrage, plus a partial collaboration
of Saddam with the inspectors, result in long-term containment rather than
war, if Bush has to turn away from an active invasion of Iraq, he will do so
with great frustration. For he will have to live again with all the old insolubles! Deep down, he may fear that he will not have
any answer then for restoring America's morale. Can it be that the prospect
of bringing these troops home again will prove so unpalatable that he will
have to go to war? Speaking to the Senate, Robert Byrd said,
If
I were George W. Bush's karmic defense attorney, I would argue that his best
chance to avoid conviction as a purveyor of false morality would be to pray
for a hung jury in the afterworld. For
those of the rest of us who are not going to depend on the power of prayer,
we will do well to find the rampart we can defend over what may be dire years
to come. Democracy, I would repeat, is the noblest form of government we have
yet evolved, and we may as well begin to ask ourselves whether we are ready
to suffer, even perish for it, rather than readying ourselves to live in the
lower existence of a monumental banana republic with a government always
eager to cater to mega-corporations as they do their best to appropriate our
thwarted dreams with their elephantiastical conceits. —February 27, 2003 Copyright © 1963-2003 NYREV, Inc |
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