It hasn’t come to fisticuffs yet, but the congressional debate over Iraq has soured to the point where it’s only a hair short of that.
In the shadow of news of daily horrors in that sad land, Democrats are mounting an aggressive challenge to President Bush by accusing him of having deliberately lied to the American people about the reason for going to war 30 months ago.
And Rep. John P. Murtha (D. Pa.), a 73 year-old former Marine who had served in Vietnam, called for an immediate withdrawal of American troops. Vice President Dick Cheney countered by calling war opponents on the Hill “dishonest and reprehensible.” And the White House claimed that Murtha was advocating “surrender to the terrorists, while Republican members called their fellow legislator a “coward.” Not to be outdone in this mud-slinging free-for-all, Rep. Murtha fingered Bush and Cheney as “guys who got deferments and never been there, and send people to war.”
For the United States, in the second half of the 20th century, waging war in countries whose complex histories, alien culture and national sensibilities are not even remotely similar to its own, has not been an easy enterprise. There always lay more behind the jungles of Vietnam, the civil conflict in Lebanon (where in October 1983 a suicide bomber killed 241 American servicemen at a Marines barracks in the capital), the urban morass of Somalia, the moonscapes of Afghanistan and the minarets of Iraq, than the American experience could assimilate.
You extrapolate from your own culture at your own peril — and you blunder into a situation that will confuse, not to mention trap, you as rebellion flows into rebellion, undercurrents of ethnic dichotomies morph into civil war and old sectarian grudges explode into a settling of scores. Things break down and break apart all around you. On the eve of war in Iraq, that was known as the perils of the “day after,” when nothing goes according to plan and everything appears beyond one’s comprehension.
The American sensibility draws its tone — its archetypal essence, as it were — from that weld of values that began to define it in the early 1800s with the struggle against the British Crown. Deeply ingrained in that sensibility is a paradox: The belief that common sense and human decency can rule the day in conflict resolution, and the notion that a big power is entitled to wield its resources so that the world can be reordered to its liking — a posture at once conciliatory and belligerent. Go for the carrot, in other words, or feel the swish of our stick.
Consider the radical cadence of American English, its sinew of pugnacious idiom, often borrowed from competitive sports (and sports define popular culture and social values), which attest to that.
One general’s instructions to his troops, as they prepared to deploy to Iraq, for example, were: “Wave at them, but have a plan to kill them.” Verbal reticence, I’ll have you know, is not an American trait.
In its decades-long intellectual effusions, the academic left’s great insight — that the exercise of military might, such as, shall we say, “shock and awe,” against lesser societies — is shown to be true. In the end, however, there is no such thing as “lesser” societies. Lesser societies, and the lesser species of men that inhabit them, will not knuckle under to the facile contempt that an outsider exhibits as he unloads his white man’s burden on them. Cultures and polities are marketed wholesale; they evolve on their own, and at their own pace.
In our time, the French, after 130 years of occupation in Algeria, finally found themselves having to lift anchor and sail away, along with a million of their Pieds Noirs settlers, when they discovered that they were pitted against an insurgency they could not defeat. The Soviets, in like manner, did not exactly leave Afghanistan with their heads held high. And let’s face it, the American retreat from Vietnam was not a pretty sight either.
After two and a half years of conflict, it doesn’t appear that the US is likely to make Iraq go its way, let alone advance it as a model of democracy for the entire region. That was both, we now know in the cold light of hindsight, a pipedream and a fantasy. Or in the words of Rep. Murtha, a “flawed policy wrapped in an illusion.” These are the political special effects that project for us the image of today’s Iraq: Sectarian hatred and schisms have increased. Shiite-led government security forces now brazenly operate torture chambers, and the armed wing of Abdul Aziz Hakim’s party, known as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, send out death squads to target Sunnis.
Well over 2,000 Americans, along with approximately 4,000 Iraqi troops, and reportedly 30,000 Iraqi civilians, have lost their lives. And to those who say, well, heck, this is happening only in the Sunni triangle, an area comprising a mere four of Iraq’s eighteen provinces, here’s a sobering fact: These four provinces contain the nation’s capital and roughly half its population.
It remains a mystery how the US plans to extricate itself from Iraq. As to how it got itself there in the first place, examine the occult rationale of the neocons, those ultimate bullies who set out to reorder the Middle East in a fashion that would fit their geopolitical agenda.
Perhaps at a seminal level of relating to this mess, there was always a foredoomed relationship between those ruthless neocon geopoliticians and the “uppity Arabs” they set out to subdue, whether Iraqi or Palestinian, Islamists or nationalists.
If that is the case, these neocons, who have sent young Americans to kill and be killed in Iraq, may have cut off the American people from all that is alive and decent about them, from their values and their culture, both beloved by people around the world, and alienated millions of Arabs, Muslims and Europeans against them.
