Brussels And The Power of Nightmares

David Ortiz's fearless and unifying response to the terror attacks in Boston is one we ought to emulate, not the fearful hate mongering clogging up the airwaves today

After the attack in Brussels yesterday we saw the ever more predictable response. (Note as well we didn't see this response after similar attacks in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Turkey.) Trump renewed his calls to ban Muslims from entering America and use torture. Ted Cruz, ever the eager Eddie Haskell trying to curry favor with the talk radio masses, proposed that law enforcement "secure" and "patrol" Muslim neighborhoods within our own borders. If there is a similar attack in this country I can expect that internment camps will be Republican orthodoxy within a matter of days.

Of course, this kind of stuff only helps the extremists who plan these attacks. As anyone except the American news media appears to know, terrorism is a tactic intended to provoke a disproportionate response that will hurt bystanders and thus get the people affected to support the cause of the terrorists, which they would normally find to be too extreme. "Carpet bombing," torture, and mass detentions plays right into the hands of terrorists. Of course, Trump and Cruz could care less, since fear is their biggest selling point, especially for Trump. When people are afraid, their lizard brains kick in and they become children, looking for mommy or daddy to protect them. Authoritarians like Trump know this, and feed off of it.

Keep in mind, however, that Trump and Cruz are merely less subtle practitioners of this dark art, which had been mastered by Dick Cheney and his crew of neo-cons. I've said it before and I will say it again: the most important political documentary of our times is the BBC's 2004 tour de force The Power of Nightmares. In three parts it tells parallel histories of neo-conservatism and Islamist extremism. The basic thesis is that after the failures of the political elite to improve the lives of their constituents, many of them turned to using fear of the other as a justification for staying in power.

Dubya and his handlers certainly understood this. Before 9/11 he was a semi-legitimate president whose one accomplishment was pushing through tax cuts for the wealthy that had little broad support. He exploited the attacks (which his administration had failed to prevent) to both gain popularity and re-election, and also to make the neo-con wet dream of invading Iraq to come true.

While Bush, Cheney, and their gang used the power of nightmares to advance an imperialist agenda under the auspices of "preserving freedom" and "expanding democracy," Trump and Cruz are more nihilistic. Cruz seems willing to say anything if it will appeal to the hardcore conservative base (hence his "New York values" comment). He knows that these people hate and fear Muslims, and speaks to them accordingly. Trump, I am more convinced, is not putting on an act. I really and truly think that he is a committed fascist, even if he wouldn't use that term. (More on that in a future post.) Like any good fascist, he wants to "cleanse" the nation and make it great through military conquest ("we're going to take their oil!") Increasing fear only helps him.

People who are usually level-headed can lose their minds in moments like this, driven by the imperatives of their fear reflex. If we are to break out of the fifteen year nightmare we have been living in, we must stop living in fear and stop looking for some authoritarian daddy figure to protect us. If not, the nightmare will just keep going on and on and on.

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.