The 20th Anniversary of the American Empire's Self-Immolation

On the evening of March 19, 2003, I went with a friend to the movies to see The Quiet American, adapted from Graham Greene's novel about American idealism's failure to understand Vietnam. Little did I know how appropriate that choice would be.

I came home, and a couple of hours later in the basement room, I watched the start of "shock and awe" with absolute horror. Rumors of war had been circulating for months, with a whole kabuki theater of nuclear inspections and Congressional testimony making the public believe this was about "weapons of mass destruction." I was in the minority of Americans who knew this was all bullshit. I had shown up to anti-war protests, had been yelled at by "patriots" from their pickup trucks and told I was ignoring threats to this country. Sitting there watching Baghdad being blown up on television I felt such profound despair. So many other awful things have happened since then (the 2008 crash, multiple police murders, Trump's election, COVID, January 6th, etc.) that we have failed to account for the consequences of the Iraq invasion. Beyond the human consequences, it represented the end of the United States' post-Cold War predominance. 

The invasion of the anniversary has passed unmarked in this country because so many people pretend they never supported it when it had been very popular in the moment. Its boosters cannot deny that it was a disaster, so they must deny their connection to it. Even ultra-nationalists like Trump have done this, allowing his supporters, the same people yelling at me back in 2003, to wash their hands of the whole affair. 

Even if the majority in this country may not feel the Iraq invasion to be an act of grave immorality as I do, they still understand that it meant the destruction of America's post-Cold War dominance in the world. After 1991 the United States stood as the lone superpower. 9/11 gravely shook the feelings of invincibility, but those same feelings spurred Bush's actions in Iraq. It was a completely elective war. Iraq posed no threat to the United States, nor was it threatening any of our key allies. Bush's crew really thought they could use this invasion to remake the Middle East to America's liking. Many of its own allies cautioned against it and the "weapons of mass destruction" had not been located, but no matter. 

The Quiet Amerian, both the Graham Greene novel and the 2003 film, concerns Alden Pyle, a CIA agent in 1950s Vietnam in the twilight of French colonialism. He naively believes that he can create a "third force" in the country that is both democratic and anticolonialitst that will push both the French and the Vietnamese communists aside. Furthermore, Pyle is willing to fund terror attacks and sacrifice lives for his unrealistic vision. The narrator, a British journalist named Fowler, understands the country's realities far better and is not surprised when Pyle meets a bad end. Greene wrote the book years before American "escalation" in Vietnam, but like many of us on that night in March of 2003, he clearly saw what was coming. 

Like Alden Pyle, Bush and the neo-cons soon discovered that not every group of people in the world are just Americans trying to come out. They hadn't even bothered to consider the most basic issues in the war's aftermath, watching mobs loot priceless artifacts from museums and calling it "the price of freedom." Any moral credibility the United States had managed to amass in its post-Cold War humanitarian interventions was erased in that moment. But it wasn't just America's moral hypocrisy that was exposed by the invasion. The American military's inability to win a decisive victory against Iraqi insurgents or to quickly capture Saddam Hussein revealed the clay feet of a supposed Colossus. 

And so thousands died, including someone I went to college with. We wrecked Iraq, with the ultimate strategic winner being our regional rival, Iran. We destroyed homes, killed civilians, and shredded infrastructure for less than nothing from a strategic standpoint. Hussein is no longer in power, but I get the feeling that's cold comfort for those mourning their dead. 

I want to remember the dead, but also that the vast majority of Americans supported the invasion at the time. It is easy to blame this all on politicians, but if there had been more robust opposition, those politicians would have changed their tune. The media helped too, treating protestors like me as unserious or naive. Practically every media outlet became a cheerleader for the invasion. Country music stations banned The Chicks when they criticized George W Bush. All of this has been forgotten because it is inconvenient for so many to recognize that the self-immolation of the American empire happened with the majority's full faith and support. Right-wingers certainly need to be held to account for their cheerleading of this conflict, but I should hope that this would prompt the Left to rethink their naive ideas about "the masses." 

Iraq Returns To American Politics

The first part of The Power of Nightmares, still relevant as an examination of how the neocon invasion of Iraq came to be

I have been taken aback at how the invasion of Iraq in 2003 has suddenly become a political issue again.  Republican candidates have been made to say whether they would have made the same decision Bush did, and have been memorably maladroit in their desire to say what people want to hear while not admitting that the whole enterprise was a massive failure.  The main dodge so far has been to say that "we went to war based on false intelligence."

Of course, anyone with a brain and a memory knows that this is the usual political bullshit.  The crummy, doctored intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq was created to give public support for a decision that the Bush administration had already made.  Hell, Donald Rumsfeld was talking about the invasion of Iraq on 9/11.  Most people in this country were either too nationalistic, too desirous of post-9/11 revenge, or just too damn lazy to see the truth back in 2003.  Polls at the time showed that most Americans thought that Saddam Hussein was connected to the 9/11 attacks.

Twelve years later, things have changed.  The invasion of Iraq has turned out to be an even bigger catastrophe than I predicted at the time.  I figured that the war would create a fake democratic American puppet state and embroil the United States in a whole host of "regime change" in the region for the forseeable future.  I did not predict that American troops would watch while the country was looted, that armed resistance to occupation would continue for years, that civil war between different factions would erupt, and certainly not that an institution like ISIS would rise from the ashes of conflict.  Basically, the absolute worst case scenario actually happened, and it's a long way from "we will be greeted as liberators."  It is now the majority opinion that the invasion was a mistake, something blindingly obvious even to the biggest nimrods drooling their way across this land of ours.

I feel a big part of Iraq's comeback in political discourse isn't just because of ISIS, but due to a major miscalculation by Republicans.  They know that the economy is improving, and thus need to steer towards foreign policy in the 2016 election.  Conservatives have long painted liberals as "weak" and themselves as "strong," but seem to have forgotten what their "strong" neocon policies have wrought.  When they try to tell the electorate that they will keep them same from ISIS, members of the electorate reasonably ask them where ISIS came from in the first place.

Republican presidential candidates have also been pretty brazen in continuing the neocon foreign policy and even taking advice from architects of the Iraq invasion. Paul Wolfowitz, for example, is an advisor to Jeb Bush.  Chris Christie has vigorously defended the NSA, employing the kind of "give up your freedom or the terrorist boogie men will get you" rhetoric favored by Dick Cheney at the height of the 2001-2005 neocon fever dream.  Lindsey Graham has jumped in the ring, declaring his love of drone strikes on anyone who even THINKS of joining ISIS.  Only Rand Paul has only questioned this, and even he is pretty limited.

Of course, it's not like the Democrats have a much better track record.  Many of them voted for the invasion, and president Obama has unleashed American air power in what amounts to a third American war in Iraq.  While Iraq has become an issue again, it won't actually lead to any true reckoning with America's global role, just a lot of finger pointing.  Republicans will use the old scare tactics, and Democrats will continue military interventions lite.  For all the talk about Iraq, little will change, I fear.

Torture Report Time Machine

Based on what happened at Abu Ghraib, as well as the definitions of "extraordinary rendition" used by the Bush administration, I expected this week's torture report to be harrowing.  It ended up being even worse than I imagined, a catalog of crimes that ought to bring lasting shame on this country.  There has been outrage, but I wonder of its limits.  President Obama has been mum, and Secretary of State Kerry had tried to prevent its release.  Most Congressional Republicans opposed its release full stop, and Fox News has claimed its release was meant to distract from Obamacare.

 

Why haven't tales of people tortured due to mistaken identity moved the nation's conscience?  Why is there only limited disgust at rectal feeding and sleep deprivation techniques of the kind used by Stalin's secret police?  Why is there no outcry to have the criminals responsible for these enormities clapped in irons and made to bow to justice?  You could argue that torture, like practically everything else, has been turned into a partisan issue.  Perhaps, but that does not explain why the outrage is only limited to the left of center, and the large, soft American middle appears to be almost completely unmoved.  No, there is so little outrage because this is what most Americans secretly wanted to happen.

Let's take a trip back in time, shall we?  We live in a world where everything is forgotten, where all goes down the memory hole almost as soon as it is brought into existence.  I have made it one of my personal missions to remind people of the reality of American life in the period of hysteria that lasted roughly between 9/11 and the summer of 2005.  The 9/11 attacks provoked a kind of fearsome bloodlust in the American public, only abetted by the Bush/Cheney regime's desire to funnel that hate towards military action.  Muslim Americans were physically assaulted, and their mosques attacked.  Sikh men were murdered for the crime of wearing a turban.  In 2003, most Americans believed that Saddam Hussein had a hand in the 9/11 attacks.  They didn't just believe it because of propaganda, they believed it because they wanted revenge, and any group of Arab Muslims would do for that purpose.

If the vast majority of Americans were willing to smite Iraq with the hard hand of war, inevitably leading the the deaths of thousands of innocents, they hardly had any qualms about shoving food up the rectums of suspected terrorists.  They were the bad guys, after all, right?  Didn't torture work when Jack Bauer used it on 24?  You don't really want to risk letting the bad guys strike again, do you?  And so the CIA, at the behest of the highest authorities in the land, tortured and tortured and tortured.  There was a momentary shock after the revelations of Abu Ghraib, but voters returned Bush and Cheney to the White House nonetheless.  

It would be easy to limit the responsibility for the crime to Cheney/Bush, their henchmen, and the everyday jingoists who bayed for Muslim blood in the aftermath of 9/11.  However, they were enabled by a scared public willing to turn the other way while unspeakable cruelties were committed in their name.  While whistleblowers like Edward Snowden fear prosecution, those responsible for systematic torture walk free, not prosecuted by president Barack Obama.  And last of all, progressives like myself have been much too tolerant of the president's unwillingness to prosecute CIA men who probably earned promotions from their heinous acts.

I repeat: the revelations of the torture report should bring lasting shame on this country.  Perhaps more shamefully, our people have been shameless in ignoring it.  If there is any righteousness in this universe we will face a terrible reckoning.

War Without End

I first started blogging back in 2004, motivated by the apparent political insanity of the Bush administration.  Its ability to start a disastrous war based on lies without facing political consequences depressed me to no end.  When Barack Obama was elected, I figured that the neo-conservative obsession with "pre-emptive war" would be over.  Turns out that the joke was on me the whole time.

As the war drums beat in 2003, I attended anti-war protests.  I remember talking to a woman who figured that war in Syria would follow one in Iraq, all part of the Bush administration's crusade to remake the Middle East in the American image.  Turns out that war with Syria actually was on the horizon, but under a Democratic president.  Back then Obama was a local politician in the state where I lived (Illinois), and I appreciated him speaking out against the war.  So it goes.

We are hearing the familiar bromides while the bombs are falling this time.  America is supporting "moderates" in Syria, who will somehow magically defeat both ISIS and the Assad regime with a little know-how and  military support.  Considering how a similarly America-molded government in Iraq had totally failed against ISIS attacks, I doubt that the moderates in Syria will gain any more legitimacy than the Diem regime did in Vietnam, the Contras in Nicaragua, Hamid Karzai in Aghanistan or Nuri al-Maliki in Iraq.  The dangerous illusion that America can intervene in complex civil conflicts abroad and control the political process there by remote control just refuses to die.

By my reckoning, America has been engaged in war and occupation in the Middle East almost continuously since 1987, when the navy was sent to the Persian Gulf to escort Kuwaiti tankers during the Iran-Iraq War.  During this now forgotten action lasting into 1988, the US accidentally shot down an Iranian air liner (similar to the sad fate of the Malaysian flight over the Ukraine this summer.)  Less than two years later the American army flooded into Saudi Arabia after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.  Since then we've seen the Gulf War, the enforcement of No-Fly Zones, sanctions, the second invasion in 2003, a resulting guerrilla war, and now an intervention in the uprising by ISIS.  You could maybe even argue that America has been on a war footing in the region since 1983, when Reagan sent the marines to Beirut.  Although he sent them home after a horrific attack, he also simultaneously supported Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War, and supplied missiles to Iran in return for hostages.

Basically, the American government has been heavily involved in the Middle East for thirty years, with several interventions by ground troops and many more bombings and drone strikes.  After all of this, what's been accomplished?  ISIS taking down Iraq's government is the worst case scenario, and it looks like that just might happen.  I wonder why our foreign policy mavens haven't figured out after three decades of intervention in the Middle East that they simply aren't capable of bending the region to their will.  When will they stop?  Until there is a truly final moment, like the fall of Saigon, which capped off another thirty year failed American intervention, it will be war without end.

13 Years Later, Still Imprisoned By 9/11

Yesterday brought news that the president wants to start bombing ISIS in Syria as well as Iraq.  While I don't care much for violent religious fanatics, there does not seem to be much evidence that this group is determined to strike the United States.  It was fitting that the news came a day before the anniversary of 9/11, since Obama's new war is entirely consistent with what people used to call "the post-9/11 world" before it just became "the world."

Like most, I remember that horrible morning very vividly, especially my immediate thoughts when I realized the scale of the attacks (I was listening on radio.)  I knew, right then and there, that this attack would bring years of war and bloodshed, which was the first time that day that I broke down into tears.  The thought that the deaths of that day would end of being just the tip of the iceberg was almost too horrific for me to bear.  Even over a dozen years later the cycle continues, with the vague "War on Terror" apparently never-ending.  (Hunter S. Thompson pretty much predicted this on 9/12.)

Despite the changeover from the neo-con Dubya to the most liberal president since LBJ, the war persists and even strengthens.  We still have Guantanamo Bay.  Despite bin Laden's death, the occupation of Afghanistan continues.  The mess made in Iraq has led to yet another military intervention.  Our government treats its citizens with suspicion, and spies on the people in an unprecedented fashion.  The teenagers I teach have never known a time when their country was not at war.

Thirteen years later, it's time to finally break the spell.  The bodies have piled up, but nobody is any safer.  Come home, America.

Why Iraq Will Be a Turning Point in America's History

A decade has passed since our nation embarked on its imperial debacle in Iraq, and there has been a lot of commentary and remembrance in the media, and little from our political elites, most of whom supported it.  I'd like to think of it in more historical terms, since the invasion of Iraq is a moment that I believe a century hence will be seen as a major turning point in this country's history.

All empires fall, and the rot typically sets in well before the columns of the imperial edifice crumble.  The harbingers of decline often come in the midst of what might appear to be an empire's apogee, and the invasion of Iraq is a great example of this phenomenon.  After the Cold War, America bestrode the earth like a colossus, the biggest kid on the block and the only remaining superpower.  During the 1990s, this power was usually wedded to upholding the order prescribed by the "international community."  The US intervened in the Gulf and the Balkans, in both cases with significant international support.

During those heady years, we heard folks like Francis Fukuyama theorize an "end to history," meaning that capitalist democracy, in the wake of communism's defeat, would soon engulf the world and perpetual peace would be the result.  Alas, the events of September 11, 2001, proved such hopes to be ill founded.  With neo-conservatives seated in the halls of power, they used this unprecedented crisis as an opportunity to put America's singular power to work on a misbegotten crusade to remake the Middle East.

As we all know now, the war in Iraq, as well as the prolonged quagmire in Afghanistan, have exposed the American colossus' clay feet.  I see a lot of parallels with the Boer War, when the British Empire provoked a conflict in South Africa that it eventually won, but which exposed its weaknesses, and whose atrocities called its supposed moral superiority into question.  This war came at a time when Britain controlled a quarter of the globe and seemed to be unstoppable.  Similarly, the US invasion, which promised that soldiers would be "greeted as liberators" brought grisly images from Abu Ghraib.  American armies failed to secure the nation they invaded, standing idly by while looters trashed Iraq's cultural heritage.  The American president declared "Mission Accomplished" with extreme bravado only to oversee a brutal and bloody guerrilla war that lasted for years afterward.  That war bankrupted the American treasury, and is a much more significant cause of our fiscal woes -combined with the economic downturn- than our nation's social spending.

Nowadays the Obama administration is looking to cut back the military, and isolationist conservatives like Rand Paul are back on the scene, after being all but absent since the 1930s.  China is flexing its muscles, and the Middle East is democratizing itself with regimes that are not always friendly with the United States.  The Cheney-Rice-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz fever dream of a dominant American empire able to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, the will of others be damned turned out to be a dangerous illusion.  The United States will never have the global power it did ten years ago.

On a personal note, I find some delicious irony in the fact when I was protesting the push to war and taking verbal abuse from the nationalist horde, I was actually supporting, in a roundabout way, the preservation of American power abroad.  Those who called me a traitor blindly followed the neo-con pied pipers to their beloved empire's destruction.  Of course, they still won't admit they were wrong.