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Sometimes, when things
are on your mind and you can't quite find the words to pin down what it is that's bothering you it helps to do some reading.
It's that old thing about language and epistemology - the medium of thought is language, not just the words, but the words
put together in such a way that, when they fall just right, you finally realize what the issue is. Otherwise you just have
a vague, uncomfortable mix of unsettling feelings. But then you find someone providing the words to "express" that unease
and, often to your surprise, you have the thing in hand - you can think about it, not just mope around and feel ill at ease.
Good poetry is like that, finding the exactly words for what disconcerts, and making it something that can be considered.
It was hard to explain that to the students in the English class back in the seventies, as it's one of those odd ideas, that
the poem they don't want to discuss anyway really doesn't "mean" anything at all - as Archibald MacLeish puts it Ars Poetica,
"A poem does not mean, but be" (text here). It's expression, not description, and certainly not an essay out to make a point. It's bringing what was outside language,
and not accessible (not "thinkable"), and making it actually available to the mind. And that's pretty neat, and too, often
a great relief - you finally get the words that make it possible deal with the big stuff in life, or the small and funny stuff.
No one wants to go through life feeling vaguely uneasy, or even vaguely happy, and not be able to explain or express either,
or much of anything, even to themselves. We all want to make sense of things. And that takes words. It takes language.
But
it's not just poetry that does that. Many are uneasy about what's happening in the world, and in this country, and read everything
they can, or listen to the talking heads on the radio or television, hoping someone will say the "Ah Ha!" words that ease
the uneasiness, as it were - the words that pull all the uneasy feelings into the words that make it all accessible. We all
want to make sense of things. And that takes words. It takes language. Yes, some find such "relief" reading or listening to
Ann Coulter, or Rush Limbaugh. Some prefer Al Franken or Bill Clinton. The impulse is the same - making sense of things. The
primary sources are all spinning you this way or that - John Murtha one way and George Bush the other, for example. You try
to sort it all out. You turn to the words of those who say they have done just that. You get a match with the words that ease
your inarticulate discomfort - or you don't and keep trying.
This is all complicated by the net. There are a million
voices out there, and many million words. How do you find a match - the "Ah Ha!" words that ease the uneasiness?
Here's
a shortcut. Try Arthur Silber at "The Power of Narrative" here - and yes, the name of his site indicates he knows just what he's doing, building the narratives you might find useful, finding
the words that make it possible to think about things that made you really uneasy but you just couldn't nail down.
And
this particular link he's trying out some ideas, some language, that offers a way to think about the big issue of the day,
our war in Iraq. He pulls in some stuff from Jacob Hornberger and tries out some formulations
that might help.
A few days earlier he had written this regarding the invasion and occupation of Iraq,
something he says almost all politicians and our media ignore entirely -
This is the foundational
point, one that is almost never acknowledged in our public debates. Iraq
constituted no threat to us, and our leaders knew it. Therefore, our invasion and occupation of Iraq were and are naked acts of aggression. To fall back on the defense of "good
intentions" is to confess that your actions have caused nothing but disaster and death - but that you "meant well." None of
the Iraqis who have suffered so grievously or who are now dead, and none of the Americans and others who have been horribly
wounded or killed, gives a damn about anyone's intentions, good or otherwise. Neither should any decent and compassionate
human being.
That's blunt, and of course
no one discusses it, but with the majority of us now thinking the war in Iraq
was a stunningly stupid idea, and having any number of reasons to think so, this cuts deeper. It's not really one of those
"what was oft' thought but ne'er so well expressed" things, because no one was probably "thinking" this, they just sensed
it was so, but didn't have the words. No WMD, no ties to al Qaeda, so we're told the real reason for the Iraq move
was to bring democracy to these people, because that's a good thing to do. People were uneasy with that, and still are. This
nails it - it's been a deadly mess but we really, really meant well, just doesn't cut it. We know better.
Then there
was this interesting question in the Detroit News - "Some war critics are suggesting Iraq
terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi should have been arrested and prosecuted rather than bombed into oblivion. Why expose American
troops to the danger of an arrest, when bombs work so well?"
That sets off Jacob Hornberger here, suggesting one answer is so a five-year-old Iraqi girl isn't killed -
Of course, I don't
know whether the Detroit News editorial board, if pressed, would say that the death of that little Iraqi girl was "worth
it." Maybe the board wasn't even aware that that little girl had been killed by the bombs that killed Zarqawi when it published
its editorial. But I do know one thing: killing Iraqi children and other such "collateral damage" has long been acceptable
and even "worth it" to U.S. officials as part of their long-time foreign
policy toward Iraq.
This U.S.
government mindset was expressed perfectly by former U.S. official Madeleine Albright when she stated that the deaths of half
a million Iraqi children from the U.S. and UN sanctions against Iraq had, in fact, been "worth it." By "it" she was referring
to the U.S. attempt to oust Saddam Hussein
from power through the use of the sanctions. Even though that attempt did not succeed, U.S. officials still felt that the deaths of the Iraqi children had been worth
trying to get rid of Saddam.
Yeah, yeah. As Silber says,
some would argue that such "collateral damage" is just an unfortunate byproduct of war - "War is brutal. People get killed
in war. Compared with the two world wars, not that many people have been killed in Iraq,
proponents of the Iraq war and occupation
would claim."
Hornberger -
Such claims, however,
miss an important point: U.S. military forces have no right, legal or moral,
even to be in Iraq killing anyone. Why?
Because neither the Iraqi people nor their government ever attacked the United
States. The Iraqi people had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks in New
York and Washington. Thus, this was an optional
war against Iraq, one that President Bush
and his military forces did not have to wage.
The attack on Iraq
was akin to, say, attacking Bolivia or Uruguay
or Mongolia, after 9/11. Those countries
also had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks and so it would have been illegal and immoral for President Bush to have ordered
an invasion and occupation of those countries as well. To belabor the obvious, the fact that some people attacked the United
States on 9/11 didn't give the United States the right to attack countries that didn't have anything to do with the 9/11 attacks.
That made the United States the aggressor nation and Iraq the defending nation in this conflict. That incontrovertible
fact holds deep moral implications, as well as legal ones, for U.S. soldiers
who kill people in Iraq, including people who are simply trying to oust
the occupiers from Iraq. Don't forget
that aggressive war was punished as a war crime at Nuremberg.
... Moreover, what people often forget is that the United States
is no longer at war in Iraq. This is an
occupation, not a war. The war ended when Saddam Hussein's government fell. At that point, U.S. forces could have exited the country. (Or they could have exited the country
when it became obvious that Saddam's infamous WMDs were nonexistent.) Instead, the president opted to have the troops remain
in Iraq to "rebuild" the country and to
establish "democracy," and the troops opted to obey his orders to do so. Occupying Iraq,
like invading Iraq, was an optional course
of action.
But then, now we are an
occupation force serving a sovereign regime, however dysfunctional and new, and that makes us pretty much the domestic police
force there. What they have isn't up and running yet.
But the folks we have there now aren't thinking that way. That's
not what they were trained to do, and Hornberger sees a problem -
It's not difficult
to see that the military holds the Bill of Rights in contempt, which is precisely why the Pentagon established its torture
and sex abuse camps in Cuba and former
Soviet-bloc countries - so as to avoid the constraints of the U.S. Constitution and any interference by our country's federal
judiciary.
It is not a coincidence that in the Pentagon's three-year effort to "rebuild" Iraq it has done nothing
to construct a judicial system that would have independent judges issuing search and arrest warrants or that would protect
due process, habeas corpus, jury trials, and the right to counsel. To the military, all that is anathema, not only because
it would presumably enable lots of guilty people to go free but also because it might inhibit the ability of the military
to take out people without having to go through all those legal and technical niceties.
... More important, all too
many Americans have yet to confront the moral implications of invading and occupying Iraq. U.S. officials continue
to exhort the American people to judge the war and occupation on whether it proves to be "successful" in establishing "stability"
and "democracy" in Iraq. If so, the idea
will be that the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, including countless Iraqi children, will have been worth it. It would
be difficult to find a more morally repugnant position than that.
No kidding. That may be
bothering people, and now they have the words that make it possible to think about that, seriously.
Silber piles on
-
For obvious reasons,
neither our political leaders nor our media will confront this fact in a straightforward manner. As Hornberger says, to do
so would be to acknowledge that our government and our military have acted in the most profoundly immoral manner imaginable.
And ... an attack on Iran would multiply
the scope of the immorality involved by many factors.
Our widespread determination to avoid these fundamental issues
leads to ludicrous results, including much of the reaction to the death of Zarqawi. Here I am not concerned with the fact
that Zarqawi's death will not make the slightest bit of difference to Iraq's future - although it certainly will not, the
unceasing propaganda of our government to the contrary notwithstanding. Zarqawi was a comparatively minor figure, and we have
unleashed much larger forces. At the moment, it would appear that no one and nothing can control or diminish those larger
forces to the required degree.
In the wake of Zarqawi's death, many supporters of Bush and our foreign policy strongly
condemned those of us who failed to adopt the celebratory tone they demanded.
... "Look how consumed you are by hatred
for America and for Bush!" the hawks bleated.
"You can't even be happy that this monstrous son of a bitch has been killed!" Zarqawi was certainly a monstrous son of a bitch,
and I shed no tears for him personally. But am I happy that he was killed? No, I most certainly am not - because our very
presence in Iraq represents an act of
unforgivable immorality. We should never have been there to kill him in the first place. But that is precisely the point that
the hawks want all of us to forget, and to never acknowledge under any circumstances.
This is what happens what you
forget basic moral principles, and when you seek to obliterate the chain of events that brought us to where we are today.
Each event is judged in isolation, completely disconnected from every relevant fact. But judgments made in this fashion are
completely meaningless and devoid of content: events occur in a complex, specific context, and it is that context that reveals
their meaning and their moral import. Discard the context, and judgments are utterly arbitrary. Yet this is essentially the
manner in which all our national debates now take place.
That really is what happens
when you can't find the words to express that something is wrong here. These two guys do. And yeah, this all is what many
of us were sort of thinking. But we didn't have the words. Now we do.
But then, given events of Thursday, June 22,
the war will go on -
The GOP-controlled
Senate gave an election-year endorsement to President Bush's Iraq
policy on Thursday, soundly rejecting Democratic demands to withdraw troops from the three-year-old war that has grown increasingly
unpopular.
Vice President Dick Cheney criticized the Democrats' position, saying on CNN, "Absolutely the worst possible
thing we could do at this point would be to validate and encourage the terrorists by doing exactly what they want us to do,
which is to leave."
... In back-to-back votes, the Senate agreed with the president and turned back two Democratic
proposals to begin withdrawing most of the 127,000 American forces in the war zone.
The first, offered by Sen. John
Kerry and supported by 11 other Democrats and one independent but no Republicans, would have required the administration to
start pulling troops out by year's end. It also would have set a deadline of July 2007 for all combat forces to leave.
...
Most senators didn't agree, and the proposal fell on a 86-13 vote.
Minutes later, the Senate defeated by 60-39 a resolution
to urge the administration to begin "a phased redeployment of U.S.
forces" sometime this year. The resolution would not have set a deadline for the end of the U.S.
presence in Iraq.
That vote was
largely along party lines.
... On Capitol Hill, the two parties' competing assessments previewed likely lines of attack
little more than four months before Election Day.
... Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill have staged debates
on Iraq for two weeks, with both sides
maneuvering for the political upper hand in a midterm election year. Both the House and Senate soundly defeated withdrawal
timetables last week. Thursday's Senate votes showed up in campaign literature shortly after they were cast.
The lines are drawn, and
what the Republican have left - with the war so unpopular and the chaos in the streets of Baghdad, Afghanistan going badly
and its prime minister turning on us, and the world turning on us even more, and the ongoing scandals from Tom Delay and Jack
Abramoff to the crew of thieves in Ohio, with the head of all government procurement just convicted on four felonies counts,
the Marine investigations of a possible massacre here and premeditated murder there - is name calling. Is seems proposing
options and plans makes you a coward who wants to cut and run.
How odd. And Josh Marshall puts it nicely here -
I'm a bit confused.
I'm hearing a lot of reports about Republicans chanting about staying in Iraq
forever, the danger of ever withdrawing our troops. There's Cheney. There's Frist. I can't say I've done a systematic scan
of all media. I'm just saying what I've happened across during a day of work. And I'm not seeing any Dems. Not hearing any
clear message.
What Republicans want is More of the Same.
That's the motto. More of the Same.
The president says he wants to stay in Iraq
for at least three more years. Virtually every Republican agrees. Three more years. They approve the course the president
has set.
They're for More of the Same. They don't have a plan. They just want to stay indefinitely.
They're
just for More of the Same.
I must say it drives me to distraction that Democrats aren't saying this more clearly.
Get on TV. Get on the radio. Why cede all the ground to the likes of Dick Cheney?
Why? Because you'll be
called out as a coward if you do. That's the real "power of narrative."
Yes, it makes no sense. Alternatives are not
treason. But in an election year they are, even sensible ones - not saying that these were. It's really not the substance
of any alternative, of course. It's proposing one at all. Doing that makes you a quitter who wants to cede the world to the
bad guys. That's the narrative. We'll see if that flies, come November.
And the president has famously said that when
the troops come home is up to the next president. That's three more years.
But there are alternatives.
James
Wimberley discuss them here -
The operative part
of House Resolution 861 - the one that just passed on a strict party split - was the refusal to set a withdrawal date from
Iraq. I found the half-baked rhetoric
of the preamble at least as interesting, for it shows the depths of confusion into which US policy has fallen; and, by the
same token, the extent of Osama bin Laden's strategic victory.
He started from a very difficult position. Most jihadi
Muslims, including the Taliban, Chechen autonomists, Hamas, and al-Zarqawi follow the fairly realistic "near enemy" strategy
aimed at "liberating" Muslim majority populations into the delights of fundamentalist rule. He leads a small minority group
of jihadis espousing an apparently insane "far enemy" strategy directed at the United States as the ultimate guarantor of
the vile regimes all jihadis want to overthrow: secular, corrupt rulers of Muslim countries and of course Israel.
That is discussed in detail,
and a good read, but what Wimberley works to is a hypothetical American policy aimed at actually winning in a reasonable time
frame, in perhaps then years.
What would that be?
This -
1. Counterattack
as narrowly as possible. Isolate bin Laden and his followers from other Muslims, even other jihadis; cut the links of sympathy
from the mass of Muslims.
2. Return to the best values of American tradition: integrity, steadfastness, due process,
magnanimity, and "a decent regard to the opinions of mankind". This is essential to the first objective.
Consequently
the third becomes:
3. When his movement is weakened and isolated, destroy it.
The style of the conflict should
be inspired by the half-century of containment of Soviet communism. Global jihadism as an ideology is worthless fantasy and
cannot survive more than a few decades. US
policy should be principled; Fabian; patient; calculating; multilateral and multi-level; and political ahead of military.
A few ingredients:
• Recognise and name your enemy. It is Al-Qaeda, a small jihadi faction, and its emulators.
It isn't even all jihadis. Near-enemy jihadis have a lot of different enemies, Russia,
Israel, Mubarak's Egypt,
Musharraf's Pakistan, etc. America's first problem is the few jihadis that kill Americans
as such.
• Refuse bin Laden's vainglorious gambit of defining the conflict as a war. Insist you fight
criminals: outlaws, pirates, enemies of humanity. When they are captured, try them as such. Take the direction of the
conflict away from the Pentagon.
• "Speak softly and carry a big stick." Avoid the hysterical and alienating
rhetoric that HR 861 exemplifies, advertising fear and weakness. This is a great power against a couple of hundred fanatics;
a threat, but not an existential one.
• Divide and conquer. Don't fall into bin Laden's trap of defining the
conflict as one. Set jihadis against each other; split jihadis from peaceful Muslim fundamentalists, fundamentalists from
modernizers.
• Cooperate with allies but don't let them set your priorities. Hamas is Israel's
enemy, not America's. The alliance with
Israel may lead America
to boycott Hamas; or an interest in splitting jihadism may point to a dialogue. Don't pretend there is no tradeoff or that
interests are identical.
• Show a determination to moralize the conflict with trials of American war criminals
and compensation to their victims. Close GITMO and other extralegal camps. Bring all detainees into the ordinary criminal
justice system, or release them.
• Accept civilian casualties stoically. This is the only area where the metaphor
of war is useful. There's no reason to think that al-Qaeda is capable of inflicting 9/11 casualties on a regular basis, but
make it clear that the USA could stand
them indefinitely without changing its core foreign policies.
• Accept failure in Iraq and get out.
Now there an odd concept
here - stop calling this a war and giving them status of some great military power. Call them thugs and go after them, all
out, as stupid thugs, and treat them with the appropriate contempt. Belittle them.
It is an alternative. For some
of us this is a match - the "Ah Ha!" words that ease the uneasiness, at it were.
It'll never happen. The administration
is too invested in the narrative they've got humming along now. But it's a thought.
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