Brazzil
Bush War
March 2003
Is the situation desperate? Perhaps. Have we used up our last ideas? Hardly.
If ever the Bush administration started worrying about the massive international opposition that has mounted against its every policy, foremost among them the aggression on Iraq, would it have a way out that is not completely humiliating?
Recall Tolstoy's description of Napoleon's retreating "Grande" army from the psychotic Russian campaign. Not only was the French emperor confused over his apparent victory at Borodino, but he entered Moscow after it had been completely rid of its inhabitants. Squatting there, he gazed at his men turning to pillage, rape and plunder until, finally, he summoned retreat from a city engulfed into a raging inferno. In the meantime typhus and dysentery had set in. In what can only be called a panicked run, Napoleon chose to take the same paths out of the country which his army had taken in.
Chasing the forces of the former ally, Czar Alexander I, 422 000 men had ravaged the South-western Russian countryside, stripping out food and livestock. On their retreat, they found only their consumption's waste, when the winter hadn't pushed even that into hibernation. Russian militia and cavalry attacked Napoleon's hind ranks until his army lines dispersed, separated and stampeded to their deaths. When the French crossed the Beresina River on 28 November, only 28,000 troops remained. Another 20,000 would die from cold and disease before reaching Vilna.
Needless to say, the greatest military strategist of his day, who was also touted a mathematical genius, failed to allow for a contingency plan. At this point in Bush and Rumsfeld's campaign, they seem equally propelled into a situation that grows more severe by the day for the credibility of the USA, to say nothing of the plight of Iraqi citizens—and from which there is no way out.
Even back in the days of the Cold War, the US as an empire innovated on history by incorporating benevolence as a value to be spread. The inhabitants of Greece, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Serbia, to name just a few of America's targets since the end of WWII, were given a reality check. Still, many aspects of American society and its influence on Western Europe and the recent central European democracies have proved to government elites the advantages of offering their citizens stability and purpose. "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" has become a crowd controller far more effective than religion, let alone opium, ever were.
Yet after these past two years, with 9/11 and the inability to quash al-Qaeda, the stretched-out stock market crash, corruption of American corporations and slowly vanishing savings into a future that may never come, what is America thinking? What traces of the conviction in America's benevolence, of its own God-given mission to spread the Good throughout the world still convince its citizens beyond that of a Manichean masquerade? I imagine that apart from those no longer relying on the television media to be provided with news, America must seem immortal. But no virtual reality is so powerful as to short-circuit imagination and intuition. Over and above the dramatically repressive response the American administration has issued to 9/11, its most profound impact is the reality check being given to US people.
When Lyndon Johnson spoke to Americans, his speeches echoed to the sound of deference addressed to a mature, intelligent people. As streets and campus flared up, President Johnson had to watch his words to prevent a potentially insurrectional situation from boiling over.
Contrast that with Ronald Reagan's image of the American crowd in many of his speeches. Here was a grand-father speaking to his `kids'—most of whom were quick approaching retirement age and chose to jackknife into regression. The maturity of the sixties had withered into the material denial of the eighties, in which the five-and-dime years since the end of the Vietnam War and Watergate evaporated; history was made obscure. In its wake, the Iranian hostage-taking crisis set the stage for a different nation.
The image of the citizen grew into on e of defeat and helpless captivity. Succumbed with plummeting confidence, the American's inferiority complex was soon compensated in salvation by the military-industrial complex. If the citizen could still believe in the values of his country, then those values would have to be organized by the Good facing off against Evil. Plato was sleeping with Machiavelli.
Today, though, people know their government is lying to them, falsifying facts and desperately ironing out the tatters of well-worn ideological clichés. Yet they've contemplated in suspended animation their gradual numbing as political citizens, failing to believe that change in America does not spell defeat for Americans. The people will not rise up because it is America's honor that's at stake.
And if there's anything we of the international anti-war movement must do know, is undertake the unpleasant task of providing the Bush administration, and the representation made of it by the people, with the contingency plan for retreating from the Gulf that it has obviously not drafted itself, and until latest report, refuses to.
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Rice, Fleischer and Wolfowitz are in a corner. Politically, they've lost the battle. Even John H. Brown and John Brady Kiesling, senior diplomats and men of intelligence, can read the danger lying in obsession—especially when the military is its only exit. Their resignation is a cry in the neo-conservative desert.
Honor, already a tenacious concept of individual and collective self-worth, grew and prospered in the days of clan-structures and retribution. Is this an imperial war, clash of cultures, or merely family settlements? At one time, nations and parties fought. For the past two years, we've had the Bushes and Cheneys against the bin Ladens and Saddam Hussein. No age has seen ethics grow as broadly as a common philosophy, yet politically we remain almost defenseless.
So here's an invitation on measures to get the administration to move without losing face. They are simple ones because they have to be. Creating a contingency plan to slowly slide out of this dramatic, tense moment in history. Avoiding complete humiliation. The objective is to make a different plan look like the same one.
We can start here:
1) Unscrupulously take the next bombing attack in Israel, and the PA's nomination of a new prime minister, as the reason to completely shift attention to forming a Palestinian state. The Saturday March 15 New York Times editorial spoke with skepticism about Bush's sudden interest in working to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is where an enlightened crowd should react with indifference. At this point, it is simply irrelevant whether Bush is sincere or not, so long as he is able to shift the sphere of his administration's attention from war on Iraq.
2) A Machiavellian remedy: instead of making up lies and force-feeding the public with disinformation in favor of an attack, make one up about Saddam's compliant destruction of some of the chemical and biological weapons that American, French and German companies had—foolishly — sold it. Make Saddam's compliance the humiliating act. Get Hill and Knowlton to do a marketing job like the one they did with "Nayirah" back in '90. And if that's too costly, just get CNN to work business as usual. Or, think of something, damn it: you, the administration, are the professional liars, and the taxpayer foots your salary.
3) Allow the UN to keep talking, and talking, and talking. So long as the US is still seated at the Security Council, the war is on hold. To lament the UN's powerlessness is to misplace expectations over its role. There can't be both an empire and a supreme power multinational organization running the world. But as long as speech continues to defer military attack, we keep witnessing its real power. That there are no guarantees about their longevity is obvious: words are only words. But how powerful they are when they produce the moral and ethical drive to restrain brute human force (and keep the non-human animals out of this.) The UN is showing resilience.
Now that the Bush administration has managed to turn the whole world against it and, worse, against Americans themselves, now that it has turned a spectacular fiscal surplus projection into a decade of mirror-image deficits to the tune of $1.4 trillion per annum, it might be a virtue for the anti-war movement to help it get out of this mess. The administration has wrought fear by announcing generalized eavesdropping on the entire thinking population of the US and beyond and threatens to bar access to the public forum to those unfooled by born-again Christian political focuses, i.e. just a few of the plans the new Patriot Act and Home Security Department have up their sleeves. But look closely at the situation: even these two responses to 9/11 have had their funding diverted to the logistics industry running the war.
For want of any right-wing manufacturers using their paranoid imagination too strongly: The anti-war movement's organizing, ethical devotion and demonstrating is a case of civil society putting beliefs into action against an undemocratic and double-standard State. Technological progress in communications, ethics and the institution of international law and justice has allowed the movement to assert the rightness of its cause. According to any and all of these principles, Saddam Hussein is a vicious dictator under whose reign nobody can be expected to live a fulfilling and deserving life. But nor can those who suffer the invasion of America's armies.
Last weekend, hundreds of thousands worldwide demonstrated again. The shifting views of the New Times, up to and including Thomas Friedman, are testimony to the voice of the people. If the war breaks out, opposition will only increase and intensify. We are approaching a moment when, internationally, we can begin to stress the highly positive aspects of the American social structure once again. Liberty of thought and expression exist here, and the government is being compelled to hear it.
Besides, Bush and his administration as well as his electoral-college coupmongers can only learn that it doesn't pay to fudge the figures. We've been saying it all along, Bush's pseudo-messianic appropriation of 9/11 is morally reprehensible. Even fear will betray this in the long-run. And if oil wasn't the bottom line with Iraq, then logistics and postwar reconstruction is. As reported last week by London's The Independent, Halliburton has capped the largest contracts to rebuild Iraq—democratically, it goes without saying, even if V-P Cheney was previously its chairman. The neo-Keynesean roundtable hand-outs of war and defense contracts are never a gift, free of brutal negotiation and lobbying. Capitalists aim to destroy each other before stomping on the people. Now their exuberance is a threat to the economy itself.e
When will the mainstream press and BBC quit their deluded bickering about how the anti-war movement may only appear to be the expression of a "special-interest or focus group"? How many of the warmongers running the aggression have been elected by the people? And if the anti-war movement is not the expression of a democratic will to peace, are we to believe that the pro-Israeli lobby working wonders on the Hill, and the military-industrial lobby funding house and senate campaigns are the summit of democratic progress?
The mass media has betrayed the people. We have witnessed the destruction of Soviet press censorship under the name of "Pravda", meaning "truth" in Russian, to see it arise in the now-mythical land of free speech. But in most free talks I've had recently with Americans, its citizens remain clear-spirited as to the administration's objectives.
The problem is how to stop it. These contingency plans may not be perfect. But others like them are what the president and his administration need to quell their reckless leap into war.
Untangling a shrub is never a pleasant task. Its growth is largely of its own doing, a type of natural distortion folded by green gravity. The Shrub is a lunatic threat to the harmony of our garden.
Norman Madarasz lives in Brazil and contributes regularly to Brazzil. He welcomes comments at normanmadarasz2@hotmail.com .