Undecided? The devil with undecided, and to heck with those bozos who plan to wait to the last minute to make up their minds about who to vote for in what promises to be the most important presidential election in a generation.
I was decided, if you must know, as far back as four years ago, soon after those slivers of punched paper, those infamous chads, determined his fate and he snatched the election from his opponent — and the loser became the winner.
I was decided the day he went to the microphones on an aircraft carrier, under a banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished,” and signed on to the neocons’ vision to transform the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates into a neocolonial way station for corporate greed and the “establishment of a US-Middle East free-trade area within a decade,” where a “free Iraq means a secure Israel.”
I was decided when it became clear that the American occupation, overseen by a proconsul with a penchant for issuing diktats, did not come near scratching the itch of ordinary Iraqis for economic reform, rebuilding of infrastructure and political equity.
And, yes, how could I have been undecided as he called Ariel Sharon “a man of peace” to whom he gave carte blanche to do as he pleased in Palestine? Undecided as I watched, in recent days, images of Israeli troops ravaging Gaza, deploying 60-ton Merkava tanks, AH-64 Apache helicopters and unmanned aerial drones firing into congested refugee camps, images that one watched in tandem with footage of the violence in Iraq, with American troops poised to fight for control of Fallujah in a battle that promises to be both bloody and nasty?
I’m totally decided about George W. Bush, a man whose administration, by its unilateralist and, yes, imperialist posture, has alienated the entire world against the US.
His name, just days before the election, is on everybody’s lips, but what his administration has wrought is on everybody’s mind.
I wonder if, in the end, George W. Bush’s crowd, dominated by neoconservatives such as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, brusque men with an ambitious and inflexible ideological agenda, were not after all (and indulge me here for a moment) a kind of American Taleban who, convinced that they were in possession of an exclusive arsenal of insight, went about dictating how the rest of the world should succumb to their literal, unyielding and histrionic interpretation of the sacred texts of neoconservatism.
To that extent, the neoconservative creed, like of that Taleban, is the ultimate code of the bully, for it seeks to impose on the fragile plurality of human conduct — in this case international relations — an artificial ideal of what constitutes right and wrong.
OK, OK, we know the neocons are no ninnies — they want the world and they want it now — but Taleban? OK, then, let’s just say that in their Hobbesian view of the world, their Huntington-Lewis conception of “Islamic terrorism,” they projected on a man from Tikrit called Saddam Hussein (the pathetic appeal from the hole in the ground was: “Don’t shoot, I’m the president of Iraq!”) their own neoconservative mindset.
These folks had come to office itching to cut to the chase in Iraq, finish the job started in 1991, force Colin Powell to join them (effectively drinking the Kool Aid), humble Syria and Iran by breaking their legs, and then sit back and watch their vision for a reordered, no longer recalcitrant Middle East prevail. Meanwhile, they urinated on everybody’s wedding cake all the way from Paris to Bonn and from Cairo to New Delhi.
And what did they achieve in the end? Not an Iraq that is a “beacon of democracy,” a light unto the nations in the region, as some of us had innocently hoped at one time, but an Iraq that is a killing field, a blight unto the countries of the Arab world.
Oh, ya, I’m decided all right. Have been for a long while. So give me wide berth as I enter that polling booth a few days from now.
