posted on March 31, 2003 08:36:37 PM new
From the Guardian (UK). Don't know if I agree or not.
George Monbiot
Tuesday April 1, 2003
The Guardian
So far, the liberators have succeeded only in freeing the souls of the Iraqis
from their bodies. Saddam Hussein's troops have proved less inclined to
surrender than they had anticipated, and the civilians less prepared to revolt.
But while no one can now ignore the immediate problems this illegal war has
met, we are beginning, too, to understand what should have been obvious all
along: that, however this conflict is resolved, the outcome will be a disaster.
It seems to me that there are three possible results of the war with Iraq. The
first, which is now beginning to look unlikely, is that Saddam Hussein is
swiftly dispatched, his generals and ministers abandon their posts and the
people who had been cowed by his militias and his secret police rise up and
greet the invaders with their long-awaited blessing of flowers and rice. The
troops are welcomed into Baghdad, and start preparing for what the US
administration claims will be a transfer of power to a democratic government.
For a few weeks, this will look like victory. Then several things are likely to
happen. The first is that, elated by its reception in Baghdad, the American
government decides, as Donald Rumsfeld hinted again last week, to visit its
perpetual war upon another nation: Syria, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, North Korea or
anywhere else whose conquest may be calculated to enhance the stature of the
president and the scope of his empire. It is almost as if Bush and his advisers
are determined to meet the nemesis which their hubris invites.
Our next discovery is likely to be, as John Gray pointed out some months ago,
that the choice of regimes in the Middle East is not a choice between secular
dictatorship and secular democracy, but between secular dictatorship and
Islamic democracy. What the people of the Middle East want and what the US
government says they want appear to be rather different things, and the tension
between the two objectives will be a source of instability and conflict until
western governments permit those people to make their own choices unmolested.
That is unlikely to happen until the oil runs out. The Iraqis may celebrate
their independence by embracing a long-suppressed fundamentalism, and the
United States may respond by seeking to crush it.
The coalition might also soon discover why Saddam Hussein became such an
abhorrent dictator. Iraq is a colonial artefact, forced together by the British
from three Ottoman provinces, whose people have wildly different religious and
ethnic loyalties. It is arguable that this absurd construction can be sustained
only by brute force.
A US-backed administration seeking to keep this nation of warring factions
intact may rapidly encounter Saddam's problem, and, in so doing, rediscover his
solution. Perhaps we should not be surprised to see that George Bush's
government was, until recently, planning merely to replace the two most senior
officials in each of Saddam's ministries, leaving the rest of his government
undisturbed.
The alternative would be to permit Iraq to fall apart. While fragmentation may,
in the long run, be the only feasible future for its people, it is impossible,
in the short term, to see how this could happen without bloodshed, as every
faction seeks to carve out its domain. Whether the US tries to oversee this
partition or flees from it as the British did from India, its victory in these
circumstances is likely to sour very quickly.
The second possible outcome of this war is that the US kills Saddam and
destroys the bulk of his army, but has to govern Iraq as a hostile occupying
force. Saddam Hussein, whose psychological warfare appears to be rather more
advanced than that of the Americans, may have ensured that this is now the most
likely result.
The coalition forces cannot win without taking Baghdad, and Saddam is seeking
to ensure that they cannot take Baghdad without killing thousands of civilians.
His soldiers will shelter in homes, schools and hospitals. In trying to destroy
them, the American and British troops may blow away the last possibility of
winning the hearts and minds of the residents. Saddam's deployment of suicide
bombers has already obliged the coalition forces to deal brutally with innocent
civilians.
The comparisons with Palestine will not be lost on the Iraqis, or on anyone in
the Middle East. The United States, like Israel, will discover that occupation
is bloody and, ultimately, unsustainable. Its troops will be harassed by
snipers and suicide bombers, and its response to them will alienate even the
people who were grateful for the overthrow of Saddam. We can expect the US, in
these circumstances, hurriedly to proclaim victory, install a feeble and doomed
Iraqi government, and pull out before the whole place crashes down around it.
What happens after that, to Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, is anyone's
guess, but I think we can anticipate that it won't be pleasant.
The third possibility is that the coalition forces fail swiftly to kill or
capture Saddam Hussein or to win a decisive victory in Iraq. While still
unlikely, this is now an outcome which cannot be entirely dismissed. Saddam may
be too smart to wait in his bunker for a bomb big enough to reach him, but
might, like King Alfred, slip into the civilian population, occasionally
throwing off his disguise and appearing among his troops, to keep the flame of
liberation burning.
If this happens, then the US will have transformed him from the hated oppressor
into the romantic, almost mythological hero of Arab and Muslim resistance, the
Salah al-Din of his dreams. He will be seen as the man who could do to the
United States what the mujahideen of Afghanistan did to the Soviet Union:
drawing it so far into an unwinnable war that its economy and its popular
support collapse. The longer he survives, the more the population - not just of
Iraq, but of all Muslim countries - will turn towards him, and the less likely
a western victory becomes.
The US will almost certainly then have engineered the improbable chimera it
claims to be chasing: the marriage of Saddam's well-armed secular brutality and
al-Qaida's global insurrection. Even if, having held out for many weeks or
months, Saddam Hussein is found and killed, his spirit may continue to inspire
a revolt throughout the Muslim world, against the Americans, the British and,
of course, Israel. Pakistan's unpopular leader, Pervez Musharraf, would then
find himself in serious trouble. If, as seems likely in these circumstances, he
is overthrown in an Islamic revolt, then a fundamentalist regime, deeply
hostile to the west, would possess real nuclear weapons, primed and ready to
fire.
I hope I've missed something here, and will be proved spectacularly wrong, but
it seems to me that the American and British governments have dragged us into a
mess from which we might not emerge for many years. They have unlocked the
spirit of war, and it could be unwilling to return to its casket until it has
traversed the world.
posted on March 31, 2003 09:05:37 PM new
The second possible outcome seems to me the most likely of the three. None assume an enlargement of the conflict before much reconstruction occurs though, which I think is also a real possibility--into Syria at least. But from there, who knows. Much will depend on how the rifts within the Bush administration play out.
edited to separate my new sig line from the text. This is the first time I've used one.
Don Quixote is the neoconservative prototype.
[ edited by antiquary on Mar 31, 2003 09:07 PM ]
posted on April 1, 2003 03:00:20 AM new
Bush is betting the Iraqis will accept a secular democracy. Seems hard to imagine, but it worked in Germany and Japan. If it works, Iraq will be a model for the rest of the Arab world. I believe that it's worth a try.
If it doesn't work, the world is in big trouble. Possibly WWIII with the US and allies vs. Islamic countries. Terrorist attacks with WOMD's won't be uncommon.
posted on April 1, 2003 05:03:20 AM newThe Iraqis may celebrate their independence by embracing a long-suppressed fundamentalism, and the United States may respond by seeking to crush it.
Nah,..there aren't any fundamentalists in Iraq, it's a secular dictatorship, heck..Tarik Aziz is a Christian.
[ edited by profe51 on Apr 1, 2003 05:04 AM ]
posted on April 1, 2003 05:29:17 AM new
It was hard to get past the first paragraph. Do you think he leans a little one way or another? Is this the opening to his new novel?
Amen,
Reverend Colin
"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both boldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar."
- Julius Caesar
posted on April 1, 2003 06:13:53 AM new
It amazes me how the wacko press knows the ins and outs of everything going on at the highest gov levels. It also amazes me how quickly people embrace this crap. If this were to be presented in a formal debate, the other side's retort could be: "or maybe not".
posted on April 1, 2003 06:37:14 AM new
It really amazes me how the wackos can totally embrace everything that proceeds from the mouth of proven liars. The never question the truthfulness of statements made by politicians who got their positions by being the biggest liar.
How can you tell if a politician is lying? His lips are moving....
How can you tell if Bush the lesser is lying? Cheney's lips aren't moving.
"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both boldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar."
- Julius Caesar
[ edited by mlecher on Apr 1, 2003 07:58 AM ]
posted on April 1, 2003 06:37:39 AM new
"When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart."
posted on April 1, 2003 08:18:40 PM new
Here's another excellent analysis by Freeland in The Guardian. You see the same observations and deep concerns in the mainstream American press, but in bits and pieces. He brings the crises with our present government into a coherent and well-articulated synthesis.
Emperor George
What has become of American values and idealism? All swept away in this thoroughly un-American war
Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday April 2, 2003
The Guardian
This war is un-American. That's an unlikely word to use, I know: it has an unhappy provenance, associated forever with the McCarthyite hunt for reds under the beds, purging anyone suspected of "un-American activities". Besides, for many outside the US, the problem with this war is not that it's un-American - but all too American.
But that does an injustice to the US and its history. It assumes that the Bush administration represents all America, at all times, when in fact the opposite is true. For this administration, and this war, are not typical of the US. On the contrary, on almost every measure, they are exceptions to the American rule.
The US was, after all, a country founded in a rebellion against imperialism. Born in a war against a hated colonial oppressor, in the form of George III, it still sees itself as the instinctive friend of all who struggle to kick out a foreign occupier - and the last nation on earth to play the role of outside ruler.
Not for it the Greek, Roman or British path. For most of the last century, the US steered well clear of the institutions of formal empire (the Philipines was a lamentable exception). Responsibility was thrust upon it after 1945 in Germany and Japan. But as a matter of deliberate intent, America sought neither viceroys ruling over faraway lands nor a world map coloured with the stars and stripes. Influence, yes; puppets and proxies, yes. But formal imperial rule, never.
Until now. George Bush has cast off the restraint which held back America's 42 previous presidents - including his father. Now he is seeking, as an unashamed objective, to get into the empire business, aiming to rule a post-Saddam Iraq directly through an American governor-general, the retired soldier Jay Garner. As the Guardian reported yesterday, Washington's plan for Baghdad consists of 23 ministries - each one to be headed by an American. This is a form of foreign rule so direct we have not seen its like since the last days of the British empire. It represents a break with everything America has long believed in.
This is not to pretend that there is a single American ideal, still less a single US foreign policy, maintained unbroken since 1776. There are, instead, competing traditions, each able to trace its lineage to the founding of the republic. But what's striking is that George Bush's war on Iraq is at odds with every single one of them. Perhaps best known is Thomas Jefferson's call for an America which would not only refuse to rule over other nations, it would avoid meddling in their affairs altogether. He wanted no "entangling alliances". If America wished to export its brand of liberty, it should do it not through force but by the simple power of its own example. John Quincy Adams (before Bush, the only son of a president to become president), put it best when he declared that America "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy". Could there be a better description of Washington's pre-emptive pursuit of Saddam Hussein?
The Jeffersonian tradition is not the only one to be broken by Operation Iraqi Freedom. Last year the historian Walter Russell Mead identified three other schools of US foreign policy. Looking at them now, it's clear that all are equally incompatible with this war.
Those Mead calls Hamiltonians are keen on maintaining an international system and preserving a balance of power - that means acknowledging equals in the world, rather than seeking solo, hegemonic domination. So Bush, whose national security strategy last year explicitly forbade the emergence of an equal to the US, is no follower of Alexander Hamilton. Jacksonians, meanwhile, have always defined America's interests narrowly: they would see no logic in travelling halfway across the world to invade a country that poses no immediate, direct threat to the US. So Bush has defied Andrew Jackson. Woodrow Wilson liked the idea of the US spreading democracy and rights across the globe; banishing Saddam and freeing the people of Iraq might have appealed to him. But he was the father of the League of Nations and would have been distressed by Washington's disregard for the UN and its lack of international backing for this war.
Which brings us to a key un-American activity by this Bush administration. Today's Washington has not only broken from the different strands of wisdom which guided the US since its birth, but also from the model that shaped American foreign policy since 1945. It's easy to forget this now, as US politicians and commentators queue up to denounce international institutions as French-dominated, limp-wristed, euro-#*!@ bodies barely worth the candle, but those bodies were almost all American inventions. Whether it was Nato, the global financial architecture designed at Bretton Woods or the UN itself, multilateralism was, at least in part, America's gift to the world. Every president from Roosevelt to Bush Senior honoured those creations. Seeking to change them in order to adapt to the 21st century is wholly legitimate; but drowning them in derision is to trash an American idea.
The very notion of unprovoked, uninvited, long-term and country-wide invasion is pretty un-American, too. When it thinks of itself, the US is a firm believer in state sovereignty, refusing any innovation which might curb its jurisdiction over its own affairs. Hence its opposition to the new international criminal court or indeed any international treaties which might clip its wings. Yet the sovereignty of the state of Iraq has been cheerfully violated by the US invasion. That can be defended - the scholar and former Clinton official Philip Bobbitt says sovereignty is "forfeited" by regimes which choke their own peoples - but it is, at the very least, a contradiction. The US, which holds sovereignty sacred for itself, is engaged in a war which ignores it for others.
The result is a sight which can look bizarre for those who have spent much time in the US. Americans who, back home, resent even the most trivial state meddling in their own affairs are determined to run the lives of a people on the other side of the planet. In New Hampshire car number plates bear the legend, Live Free or Die; a state motto is Don't Tread on Me. If a "government bureaucrat" comes near, even to perform what would be considered a routine task in Britain, they are liable to get an earful about the tyranny of Washington, DC. Yet Americans - whose passion for liberty is so great they talk seriously about keeping guns in case they ever need to fight their own government - assume Iraqis will welcome military rule by a foreign power.
Talk like this is not that comfortable in America just now; you'd be denounced fairly swiftly as a Saddam apologist or a traitor. The limits of acceptable discussion have narrowed sharply, just as civil liberties have taken a hammering as part of the post-9/11 war on terror. You might fall foul of the Patriot Act, or be denounced for insufficient love of country. There is something McCarthyite about the atmosphere which has spawned this war, making Democrats too fearful to be an opposition worthy of the name and closing down national debate. And things don't get much more un-American than that.
posted on April 2, 2003 07:19:02 AM newWhat has become of American values and idealism? All swept away in this thoroughly un-American war
LOL...oh yes, a un-American war where close to 80% of American's support their President. ROFHMHO
The question is not what a man can scorn, or disparage, or find fault with, but what he can love, and value, and appreciate. J. Ruskin
posted on April 2, 2003 09:35:34 AM new
Maybe Eisenhower was unamerican,going by the standards put forth in this chatroom.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower
"When you put on a uniform there are certain inhibitions that you accept."
-General Dwight D. Eisenhower
(34th president of USA (1953-1961)
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
-General Dwight D. Eisenhower
"From behind the Iron Curtain, there are signs that tyranny is in trouble and reminders that its structure is as brittle as its surface is hard."
-General Dwight D. Eisenhower
"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid."
-General Dwight D. Eisenhower
"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity."
-General Dwight D. Eisenhower
"I deplore the need or the use of troops anywhere to get American citizens to obey the orders of constituted courts."
-General Dwight D. Eisenhower
"If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man's intelligence and his comprehension... would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution."
-General Dwight D. Eisenhower
"If the United Nations once admits that international disputes can be settled by using force, then we will have destroyed the foundation of the organization and our best hope of establishing a world order."
-General Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it."
-General Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Speeches are for the younger men who are going places. And I'm not going anyplace except six feet under the floor of that little chapel adjoining the museum and library at Abilene."
-General Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The sergeant is the Army."
-General Dwight D. Eisenhower
"There is no victory at bargain basement prices."
-General Dwight D. Eisenhower
"You don't lead by hitting people over the head-that's assault, not leadership."
-General Dwight D. Eisenhower
"In this war, which was total in every sense of the word, we have seen many great changes in military science. It seems to me that not the least of these was the develoment of psychological warfare as a specific and effective weapon."
-General Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you."
- General Dwight D Eisenhower, address to his troops D-Day 1944
"Without a doubt, psychological warfare has proven its right to a place of dignity in our military arsenal."
-General Dwight D. Eisenhower
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
- General Dwight D. Eisenhower
Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.
- General Dwight D. Eisenhower
posted on April 2, 2003 09:42:37 AM new
"No matter how well prepared for war we may be, no matter how certain we are that within 24 hours we could destroy Kuibyshev and Moscow and Lenningrad and Baku and all the other places that would allow the Soviets to carry on war, I want you [a group of military officers] to carry this question home with you: Gain such a victory, and what do you do with it? Here would be a great area from the Elbe to Vladivostok and down through Southeast Asia torn up and destroyed without government, without its communications, just an area of starvation and disaster. I ask you what would the civilized world do about it? I repeat, there is no victory in any war except through our imagination, through our dedication, and through our work to avoid it."
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity
posted on April 2, 2003 10:17:32 AM new
Helen,heres another quote you might enjoy:
"You know I could run for governor but I'm basically a media creation. I've never done anything. I've worked for my dad. I worked in the oil business. But that's not the kind of profile you have to have to get elected to public office." George W. Bush, 1989
posted on April 2, 2003 10:49:43 AM new
antiquary,I watched Mad TV Saturday night,A middle aged woman asked the Doctor for some Botox shots to her face,so she wouldnt have a surprized look,when George Bush blew up the world.LOL..
posted on April 2, 2003 06:37:20 PM newLOL...oh yes, a un-American war where close to 80% of American's support their President. ROFHMHO
Laugh out the other side of your face...a new poll George the Lesser has only 48%. It is one of those unfortunate things when somebody besides FOX NEWS does a poll...
I hear FOX has to poll tens of thousands to get 78% of 1217 polled....
"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both boldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar."
- Julius Caesar
[ edited by mlecher on Apr 2, 2003 06:38 PM ]
