What Is Happening To The United States?

In a scarcely reported speech given on the Senate floor on 19 March, the day the war was launched againstIraq, Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia and the most eloquent speaker in that chamber, asked "whatis happening to this country? When did we become a nation which ignores and berates our friends? When did wedecide to risk undermining international order by adopting a radical and doctrinaire approach to using ourawesome military might? How can we abandon diplomacy when the turmoil in the world cries out fordiplomacy?" No one bothered to answer him, but as the vast American military machine now planted in Iraqbegins to stir restlessly in other directions in the name of the American people, their love of freedom, andtheir deep-seated values, these questions give urgency to the failure, if not the corruption of democracy thatwe are living through.

Let's examine first what US Middle East policy has wrought since George W. Bush came to power almost threeyears ago in an election decided finally by the Supreme Court, not by the popular vote. Even before theatrocities of 11 September, Bush's team had given Ariel Sharon's government a free hand to colonise the WestBank and Gaza, to kill, detain and expel people at will, to demolish their homes, expropriate their land,imprison them by curfew and hundreds of military blockades, make life for them generally speaking impossible;after 9/11, Sharon simply hitched his wagon to "the war on terrorism" and intensified his unilateraldepredations against a defenseless civilian population, now under occupation for 36 years, despite literallytens of UN Security Council resolutions enjoining Israel to withdraw and otherwise desist from its war crimesand human rights abuses. Bush called Sharon a man of peace last June, and kept the five billion dollar subsidycoming without even the vaguest hint that it was at risk because of Israel's lawless brutality.

On 7 October, 2001, Bush launched the invasion of Afghanistan, which opened with concentrated high-altitude bombing (increasingly an "anti-terrorist" military tactic, bearing in its effects andstructure a strong resemblance to ordinary, garden variety terrorism) and by December had installed in thatdevastated country a client regime with no effective power beyond a few streets in Kabul. There has been nosignificant US effort at reconstruction, and it would seem the country has returned to its former abjection,albeit with a noticeable return of elements of the Taliban, as well as a thriving drug-based economy.

Since the summer of 2002, the Bush administration has conducted an all-front campaign against the despoticgovernment of Iraq and, having unsuccessfully tried to push the Security Council into compliance, began itswar along with the United Kingdom against the country. I would say that from about last November on, dissentdisappeared from a mainstream media swollen with a surfeit of ex-generals and ex- intelligence agentssprinkled with recent terrorism and security experts drawn from the Washington right-wing think tanks. Anyonewho spoke up and actually managed to appear was labeled anti-American by failed academics who mounted Websites to list "enemy" scholars who didn't toe the line. E-mails of the few visible public figureswho struggled to say something were swamped, their lives threatened, their ideas trashed and mocked by medianews readers who had just become the self-appointed, all-too- embedded sentinels of America's war.

An overwhelming torrent of crude as well as sophisticated material appeared everywhere equating the tyrannyof Saddam Hussein not only with evil, but with every known crime: much of this in part was factually correctbut it eliminated from mention the extraordinarily important role played by the US and Europe in fostering theman's rise, fuelling his ruinous wars, and maintaining his power. No less a personage than the egregiousDonald Rumsfeld visited Saddam in the early 80s as a way of assuring him of US approval for his catastrophicwar against Iran. The various US corporations who supplied Iraq with nuclear, chemical and biological materialfor the weapons that we supposedly went to war for were simply erased from the public record.

But all this and more was deliberately obscured by both government and media in manufacturing the case forthe further destruction of Iraq which has been taking place for the past month. The demonisation of thecountry and its strutting leader turned it into a simulacrum of a formidable quasi-metaphysical threat whereas-- and this bears repeating -- its demoralised and basically useless armed forces were a threat to no one atall. What was formidable about Iraq was its rich culture, its complex society, its long- sufferingpeople: these were all made invisible, the better to smash the country as if it were only a den of thieves andmurderers. Either without proof or with fraudulent information Saddam was accused of harboring weapons of massdestruction that were a direct threat to the US 7000 miles away. He was identical with the whole of Iraq, adesert place "out there" (to this day most Americans have no idea where Iraq is, what its historyconsists of, and what besides Saddam it contains) destined for the exercise of US power unleashed illegally asa way of cowing the entire world in its Captain Ahab like quest for reshaping reality and imparting democracyto everyone. At home the Patriot and Terrorist Acts have given the government an unseemly grip over civillife. A dispiritingly quiescent population for the most part accepts the bilge, passed off as fact, aboutimminent security threats, with the result that preventive detention, illegal eavesdropping and a menacingsense of a heavily policed public space have made even the university a cold, hard place to be for anyone whotries to think and speak independently.

The appalling consequences of the US and British intervention in Iraq are only just beginning to unfold,first with the coldly calculated destruction of its modern infrastructure, then with the looting and burningof one of the world's richest civilisations, and finally the totally cynical American attempt to engage a bandof motley "exiles" plus various large corporations in the supposed rebuilding of the country and theappropriation not only of its oil but also its modern destiny. In response to the dreadful scenes of lootingand burning which in the end are the occupying power's responsibility, Rumsfeld managed to put himself in aclass beyond even Hulagu. "Freedom is untidy," he said on one occasion, and "stuffhappens" on another. Remorse or sorrow were nowhere in evidence.

General Jay Garner, handpicked for the job, seems like a person straight out of the TV-serial"Dallas". The Pentagon's favorite exile, Ahmad Al-Chalabi, for example, has intimated openly that heplans to sign a peace treaty with Israel, hardly an Iraqi idea. Bechtel has already been awarded a hugecontract. This too in the name of the American people. The whole business smacks of nothing so much asIsrael's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

This is an almost total failure in democracy, ours as Americans, not Iraq's. Seventy per cent of theAmerican people are supposed to be for all this, but nothing is more manipulative and fraudulent than polls ofrandom numbers of Americans who are asked whether they "support our president and troops in time ofwar". As Senator Byrd said in his speech, "there is a pervasive sense of rush and risk and too manyquestions unanswered...A pall has fallen over the Senate Chamber. We avoid our solemn duty to debate the onetopic on the minds of all Americans, even while scores of our sons and daughters faithfully do their duty inIraq." Who is going to ask questions now that that Middle Western farm boy General Tommy Franks sitstriumphantly with his staff around one of Saddam's tables in a Baghdad palace?

I am convinced that in nearly every way, this was a rigged, and neither a necessary nor a popular war. Thedeeply reactionary Washington "research" institutions that spawned Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams, Feithand the rest provide an unhealthy intellectual and moral atmosphere. Policy papers circulate without real peerreview, adopted by a government requiring what seems to be rational (even moral) justification for a dubious,basically illicit policy of global domination. Hence, the doctrine of military preemption, which was nevervoted on either by the people of this country or their half-asleep representatives. How can citizens stand upagainst the blandishments offered the government by companies like Halliburton, Boeing, and Lockheed? And asfor planning and charting a strategic course for what in effect is by far the most lavishly endowed militaryestablishment in history, one that is fully capable of dragging us into unending conflicts, that task is leftto the various ideologically based pressure groups such as the fundamentalist Christian leaders like FranklinGraham who have been unleashed with their Bibles on destitute Iraqis, the wealthy private foundations, andsuch lobbies as AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, along with its associated thinktanks and research centres.

What seems so monumentally criminal is that good, useful words like "democracy" and"freedom" have been hijacked, pressed into service as a mask for pillage, muscling in on territory,and the settling of scores. The American programme for the Arab world is the same as Israel's. Along withSyria, Iraq theoretically represents the only serious long term military threat to Israel, and therefore ithad to be put out of commission for decades. What does it mean to liberate and democratise a country when noone asked you to do it, and when in the process you occupy it militarily and, at the same time, fail miserablyto preserve public law and order? The mix of resentment and relief at Saddam's cowardly disappearance thatmost Iraqis feel has brought with it little understanding or compassion either from the US or from the otherArab states, who have stood by idly quarreling over minor points of procedure while Baghdad burned. What atravesty of strategic planning when you assume that "natives" will welcome your presence afteryou've bombed and quarantined them for 13 years. The truly preposterous mindset about American beneficence,and with it that patronising Puritanism about what is right and wrong, has infiltrated the minutest levels ofthe media. In a story about a 70-year-old Baghdad widow who ran a cultural centre from her house -- wrecked inthe US raids -- and is now beside herself with rage, NY Times reporter Dexter Filkins implicitlychastises her for having had "a comfortable life under Saddam Hussein", and then piously disapprovesof her tirade against the Americans, "and this from a graduate of London University".

Adding to the fraudulence of the weapons that weren't there, the Stalingrads that didn't occur, theformidable artillery defenses that never happened, I wouldn't be surprised if Saddam disappeared suddenlybecause a deal was made in Moscow to let him out with his family and money in return for the country. The warhad gone badly for the US in the south, and Bush couldn't risk more of the same in Baghdad. On April 6 aRussian convoy left Baghdad. US National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice appeared in Russia on 7 April. Twodays later, Baghdad fell on 9 April. Draw your own conclusions, but isn't it possible that as a result ofdiscussions with the Republican Guard mentioned by Rumsfeld, Saddam bought himself out in return forabandoning the whole thing to the Americans and their British allies, who could then proclaim a brilliantvictory.

Americans have been cheated, Iraqis have suffered impossibly, and Bush looks like the moral equivalent of acowboy sheriff who has just led his righteous posse to a victorious showdown against an evil enemy. On mattersof the gravest importance to millions of people constitutional principles have been violated and theelectorate lied to unconscionably. We are the ones who must have our democracy back. Enough of smoke andmirrors and smooth talking hustlers.

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