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COMMENTARY
Distractions of the age of
Bush
By Tom Engelhardt
At a breakfast meeting with
reporters, [Paul] Wolfowitz said he hasn't read
the [Downing Street] memos because he doesn't
want to be "distracted" by "history" from his
new job as head of the world's leading
development bank. He returned this weekend from
a tour of four African nations. "There's a lot I
could say about what you're asking about, if I
were willing to get distracted from the main
subject," Wolfowitz said. "But I really think
there's a price paid with the people I've just
spent time with, people who are struggling with
very real problems, to keep going back in
history."
- Jon Sawyer, "Wolfowitz won't
talk about war planning", St Louis
Post-Dispatch. For at least 30 years,
the right has fought against, the Republican Party
has run against, and more recently, the Bush
administration has claimed victory over the "moral
relativism" of liberals, the permissive parenting
of the let-them-do-anything-they-please era, and
the self-indulgent, self-absorbed,
make-your-own-world attitude of the Sixties.
Since September 11, 2001, we have been
told again and again that we are in a different
world ... finally. In this new world, things are
black and white, good and evil, right and wrong.
You are for or you are against. The murky
relativism of the recent past, of an America in a
mood of defeat, is long gone. In the White House,
we have a stand-up guy so unlike the last
president, that draft dodger who was ready to
parse the meaning of "is" and twist the world to
his unnatural desires.
In his speeches,
George W Bush regularly calls for a return to or
the reinforcement of traditional, even eternal,
family values and emphasizes the importance of
personal "accountability" for our children as well
as ourselves. ("The culture of America is changing
from one that has said, if it feels good, do it,
and if you've got a problem, blame somebody else,
to a new culture in which each of us understands
we are responsible for the decisions we make in
life.")
And yet when it comes to acts that
are clearly wrong in this world - aggressive war,
the looting of resources, torture, personal gain
at the expense of others, lying and manipulation
among other matters - Bush and his top officials
never hesitate to redefine reality to suit their
needs. When faced with matters long defined in
everyday life in terms of right and wrong, they
simply reach for their dictionaries.
You
want to invade a country not about to attack you.
No problem, just pick up that Webster's and rename
the act "preventive war". Now, you want an excuse
for such a war that might actually panic the
public into backing it. So you begin to place
mushroom clouds from nonexistent enemy atomic
warheads over American cities (Condoleezza Rice:
"[W]e don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom
cloud."); you begin to claim, as our president and
other top officials did, that nonexistent enemy
UAVs (unmanned airborne vehicles) launched from
nonexistent ships off our perfectly real East
coast, might spray nonexistent biological or
chemical weapons hundreds of miles inland, and -
voila! - you're ready to strike back.
You
sweep opponents up on a battlefield, but you don't
want to call them prisoners of war or deal with
them by the established rules of warfare. No
problem, just grab that dictionary and label them
"unlawful combatants", then you can do anything
you want. So you get those prisoners into your
jail complex (carefully located on an American
base in Cuba, which you have redefined as being
legally under "Cuban sovereignty", so that no
American court can touch them); and then you
declare that, not being prisoners of war, they do
not fall under the Geneva Conventions, though you
will treat them (sort of) as if they did and,
whatever happens, you will not actually torture
them, though you plan to take those "gloves" off.
Then your lawyers and attorneys retire to
some White House or Justice Department office and,
under the guidance of White House counsel Alberto
Gonzales (now attorney general), they grab those
dictionaries again and redefine torture to be
whatever we're not doing to the prisoners. (In a
50-page memo written in August 2002 for the
Central Intelligence Agency - CIA - and addressed
to Gonzales, assistant attorney general Jay S
Bybee, now an Appeals Court judge, hauled out many
dictionaries and redefined torture this way: "Must
be equivalent in intensity to the pain
accompanying serious physical injury, such as
organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or
even death.")
And if questioned on the
subject, after e-mails from Federal Bureau of
Investigation observers at the prison lay out the
various acts of abuse and torture committed in
grisly detail, the vice president simply insists,
as Dick Cheney did the other day, that those
prisoners are living the good life in the balmy
"tropics". ("They're well fed. They've got
everything they could possibly want. There isn't
any other nation in the world that would treat
people who were determined to kill Americans the
way we're treating these people.")
Women and children last
What
the Bush administration has proved is that, if you
have a mind to do so, there's no end to the ways
you can define "is". No administration has reached
not just for its guns but for its dictionaries
more often, when brought up against commonly
accepted definitions of what is.
Why, just
the other day, faced with a downward spiraling
situation in Iraq and plummeting public-opinion
polls, Cheney went on Larry King Live and declared
that the Iraqi insurgency was actually in its
"last throes". In this case, he had perhaps
reached for his dictionary a little too fast. The
phrase was taken up and widely questioned. So
Cheney, who, as Juan Cole reminds us, claimed he
"knew where exactly Saddam Hussein's alleged
weapons of mass destruction were and who was sure
Iraqis would deliriously greet the US military as
liberators", simply returned to the
administration's definitional stockpile. When
asked by CNN's Wolf Blitzer whether General John
Abizaid's description of the Iraqi situation -
that the insurgency was "undiminished" (with ever
more foreign fighters entering Iraq) - didn't
contradict his, Cheney responded:
No, I would disagree. If you look at
what the dictionary says about throes, it can
still be a violent period - the throes of a
revolution. The point would be that the conflict
will be intense, but it's intense because the
terrorists understand if we're successful at
accomplishing our objective, standing up a
democracy in Iraq, then that's a huge defeat for
them. They'll do everything they can to stop
it. Actually, according to my own
patriotically correctly named and so indisputable
reference book, The American Heritage
Dictionary of the English Language, a "throe"
is "a severe pang or spasm of pain, as in
childbirth" and the "throes" of a country in, say,
revolution or economic collapse would also be
brief spasms.
Of course, just the other
day Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, looking
into his murky crystal ball, claimed that this
"spasm" could last up to another 12 years. I
suppose from now on we should all speak of that
period from birth to death as the "throes of
life". As it happens, the American people seem
uncomfortable with our vice president's latest
definitional forays.
Here's the strange
thing, then: no one in our lifetime has found the
nature of reality to be more definitionally
supple, more malleable, more ... let's say it ...
postmodern and relative (to their needs and
desires) than the top officials of the Bush
administration.
Their watchwords might be
defined, if you don't mind my reaching for my
dictionary of sayings, as - batten down the
definitional hatches, full speed ahead, and if you
hit a mine, women and children last. In that way,
they have redefined "accountability" as never
having to say you're sorry; or, as then-governor
of Texas evidently put it to the man ghostwriting
his campaign autobiography in 1999, "... as a
leader, you can never admit to a mistake"; or as
former under secretary of defense Wolfowitz put it
when telling reporters he hadn't bothered to read
the Downing Street memos, you shouldn't let
yourself be "distracted" by messy old "history".
In the Bush administration, accountability has
largely meant promotion.
Let's throw in
just a few other moments of high Bush
postmodernism: no administration in memory has
been quicker to lie in its own interests and never
stop doing so, no matter what. (For instance, to
this day the president never ceases to push the
absurd link between the war in Iraq and the
September 11 attacks). No one in recent memory has
been quicker to lie about or smear its opponents,
or had, in political hand-to-hand combat, a
nastier, sometimes filthier mouth, publicly (as
Karl Rove proved in recent statements) or
privately. None has, in fact, seemed to care less
about any of the moral categories of behavior it
was ostensibly promoting, when those happened to
run aground on the shoals of its own political
desires and fantasies.
A five-star
rendition and other acts of relativity
Every administration sets a mood. You can see
the one this administration has established
reflected way down the line - in, for example, the
depths of Abu Ghraib's interrogation chambers. As
it happens, you can also catch a glimpse of it in
five-star Italian hotels.
The other day,
Stephen Grey and Don Van Natta of the New York
Times reported ("Thirteen With the CIA Sought by
Italy in a Kidnapping") that an Italian judge had
ordered the arrest of 13 American agents,
assumedly working for the CIA, for performing an
"extraordinary rendition" in Italy. They kidnapped
an Egyptian cleric named Hassan Mustafa Osama
Nasr, who may or may not have been linked to
al-Qaeda, and flew him to Egypt to be tortured.
Now, you may imagine that our "shadow warriors"
operating in the dark zone of international
illegality in the name of our president's global
"war on terror", are Spartan men and women,
stripped down for action, ready to sacrifice
everything for missions they believe in. You
undoubtedly assume that, while in Italy, they laid
low, bunking in safe houses, while organizing
their covert kidnapping. But wait, these are
representatives of the Bush administration, so
think again. Here was a paragraph buried deep in
the Times piece that caught my eye:
The [CIA] suspects stayed in
five-star Milan hotels, including the Hilton,
the Sheraton the Galia and Principe di Savoia,
in the week before the operation, at a cost of
$144,984, the [Italian] warrant says, adding
that after Mr Nasr was flown to Egypt, two of
the officers took a few days holiday at
five-star hotels in Venice, Tuscany and South
Tyrol. A Washington Post report added
this little detail: "The Americans stayed at some
of the finest hotels in Milan, sometimes for as
long as six weeks, ringing up tabs of as much as
$500 a day on Diners Club accounts created to
match their recently forged identities." The Los
Angeles Times contributed the fact that the
$145,000 tab actually only covered accommodations.
As it happens, our luxury warriors were gourmets
as well. They ran up tabs at Milan's best
restaurants.
All of this fits so well with
general attitudes at the upper reaches of this
self-indulgent administration. Ours is, after all,
a war to satisfy our own desires, to make the
world the way we wish it - and who wouldn't wish
for luxury surroundings and a nice five-star,
post-kidnapping vacation in Venice or Florence,
all at the taxpayers' expense? (I guarantee, by
the way, that our agents also ate all the
macadamia nuts and drank all the liquor and downed
all the $10 cokes in their mini-fridges.)
And yet you can rest assured that no one
in this administration is going to demand
repayment. In fact, no one has even whispered a
word about these expenses so far, no less promised
taxpayers their money back, but you wouldn't
expect that from an administration that stonewalls
for a corporation, Halliburton, which seems to
have taken both the American taxpayer and the
Iraqis to the five-star cleaners. And while we're
at it, let's just note that our rendition teams
circle the world not on some scruffy cargo plane,
but on a Gulfstream V turbojet, the sort "favored
by CEOs and celebrities", as Dana Priest of the
Washington Post puts it. This is the mentality not
of warriors, of course, but of looters who never
saw a payoff or an opening they didn't exploit.
From top to bottom, Bush's people are, in
this sense, a caricature of their own caricature
of the 1960s. In fact, given their fixation on the
Sixties, it's worth revisiting their record in
that long-ago era when they were already the most
morally relative of beings. On the central issue
of those years, the Vietnam War, they were
essentially missing in action; or, as our vice
president so famously commented, "I had other
priorities in the '60s than military service." The
striking thing about the record of most of the
Bush administration's key players (and almost all
of the neo-conservatives) was that they used
privilege, legalistic tricks and every bit of
slyness they could muster to avoid any
entanglement with Vietnam (on any side of the
issue) and later on, coming to power, they had not
the slightest compunction about wrapping
themselves in the flag and the uniform, acting
like the warriors they never were, and attacking
those who had engaged in some fashion with the
Vietnam War.
It is perhaps not an irony
but a kind of inevitability that, having worked so
hard to avoid Vietnam (and its "mistakes") all
those years, they now find themselves tightly
gripped by a situation of their own making that
has a remarkably Vietnam-like look to it; and,
worse yet, they find themselves acting as if they
were now, after all these years, back in the 1960s
fighting the War in Vietnam rather than the one in
Iraq. In his testimony before the Senate last
week, Rumsfeld even managed to get the classic
Vietnam word "quagmire" and the equivalent of
"light at the end of the tunnel" into a single
sentence: "There isn't a person at this table who
agrees with you [Senator Ted Kennedy] that we're
in a quagmire and there's no end in sight."
As a group, the top figures in this
administration have often seemed like so many
aggressive children let loose in the neighborhood
sandbox by deadbeat dads and moms. Does nobody
wonder where those mommies and daddies, the people
who should have taught them right from wrong,
actually went? Certainly, their children are, in
the best Sixties manner, all libido. Let me, in
fact, suggest a label for them that, I hope,
catches their truest political nature: They are
immoral relativists.
Yet, even for the
most self-absorbed among them, the ones most ready
to twist reality (and the names we give it) into
whatever shape best suits their needs of the
moment, reality does have a way of biting back.
Count on it.
Tom Engelhardt, who
runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a
regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the
co-founder of the American Empire Project and the
author of The End of Victory Culture, a
history of American triumphalism in the Cold War.
(Copyright 2005 Tom Engelhardt)
(Used by permission of Tomdispatch.com) |
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