Mea Culpa

GW Bush wears his apish smirk so much because he appreciates irony. He knows that while he talks about a global war on terror, terror has been and will continue to be an important instrument of US foreign policy. When he says that he expects to be vindicated by history, he knows that history will be written by criminals just like himself. He has witnessed the apotheosis of Ronald Reagan, terrorist and usurper, and other evil men who darkened the White House with their presence and expects that, short of a revolution, he will enjoy the same treatment.

I have to check myself from time to time because I sometimes start to believe that electoral politics in the US matters, that a change in administration will make a difference in the nature of the beast that the US has become. It won’t. Whomever Americans elect as president in 2008, the policies that have been in place for over a century, where the US seeks to impose its will on the world for the benefit of the ruling elite, will continue. Congressman Paul, if elected by the people, will be thwarted at every turn by every aspect of the establishment. God speed to him.

GW Bush’s regime just happens to be spectacularly incompetent and has, in fact, endangered the program by getting bogged down in a quagmire. The lessons of Vietnam were utterly lost on his crew, perhaps because they did not participate in it except from the sidelines. You can’t “win” that kind of conflict. Military power can’t accomplish every objective. In fact, you can push it so far that you risk revealing to the world your true agenda.

GW Bush would be well advised to declare victory and get out of Iraq as he should have done four years ago. He has accomplished the aims of intervention: he punished the Iraqi government for resistance to US hegemony, he showed the rest of the world that such resistance is futile, and he established the doctrine of preventive war as a threat to every other state and to the people of those states who might choose to follow their own destiny without reference to the will of the US. He has frightened the American people and Congress into submission and has helped to create more enemies of the US and he has enriched his constituency within the military-industrial complex.

There was never any humanitarian impulse behind the war, and hanging on to the legitimizing discourse of humanitarianism at this point is overplaying the hand. Perhaps GW aims to squeeze out every dollar he can for his friends. He knows that the worst-case scenario for overplaying his hand is a temporary loss of the White House and loss of a few seats in Congress for his party. There will be no other accounting.

The imperialism of the United States has been a bipartisan affair pursued by every administration for over a century. What the US decries as criminal by any other state or entity other than when acting as the agent of the US, it claims the right to do itself. It does so under cover of the idea that the US is different, that the US is destined to bring democracy and enlightenment to the world, that the US is morally superior and the policemen of the world. Of course, the ruling elites do not really believe any of this, and that is why they sometimes smirk when they speak of it. If they do believe it, they are among the deluded dupes of other elites and are, frankly, possibly even more dangerous than the evil men who know exactly what they are up to. (A certain Senator from Connecticut comes to mind as such a dupe.)

Ordinary Americans are indoctrinated with this view of their special role in history almost from the womb. History texts in government schools (and church schools and private schools for that matter) are storybooks that relate a narrative about the special contributions and destiny of the US in effecting the perfectibility of mankind in the image of America, the “Shining City on the Hill”. The media reinforce this view in adults in the way they frame public discourse and in the way they ignore inconvenient facts.

Ordinary Americans believe this fairy tale in appalling numbers. To believe otherwise is to be part of the “Blame America First” crowd. Nobody wants to be blamed for unfortunate events and consequences when we are all so well intentioned. Even intelligent and highly educated people I know have been heard to say things like: “[America] is too good; that’s why we can’t win in Iraq.”

I regret that I ever voted. I feel ashamed and foolish for believing, even for a moment and even a little bit, that a change in the majority party in Congress in 2006 would make any difference at all. It didn’t. I regret following electoral politics at all. I should know better.