Page 3 of
4 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The
clock ticks for thee By Tom Engelhardt
second be an era in which
the lion lay down with the lamb; it would be a US
military-enforced era of "freedom". In the
American military's ability to crush enemies
without harming civilians, the kind of war being
fought, he swore, was nothing less than "a great
moral advance".
The highest calling in
history! The peace of the world! Something
the
world had not seen before! A new era! A great
moral advance!
Given all this, Perino was
absolutely on the mark. The president didn't
consider his mission accomplished - not by a long
shot. That's why he never used the two words
together in a speech otherwise filled to the brim
with "victory", flushed with success, high on
winning. Yes, "major combat" was over in Iraq, but
that represented only "one victory in a war on
terror". The "mission" - and it was indeed a
mission he was talking about - was nothing as
small as a world historic success against one
brutal dictator. No indeed.
True, the
regime of the monster in Baghdad had been felled
or, as the term of tradecraft of that moment went,
"decapitated"; Saddam's program of weapons of mass
destruction had been thwarted ("We've begun the
search for hidden chemical and biological weapons
and already know of hundreds of sites that will be
investigated ..."); and Saddam's (implied) links
to al-Qaeda and the September 11 attacks
handsomely repaid. Naturally, as well, American
military personnel wanted to return home after
such a successful venture, but that was not yet
possible.
The planet must first be set
right and the president's speech that May Day four
years ago was nothing less than a trumpet call to
the troops - and a warning to planet Earth. "[A]ll
can know," the president intoned, "friend and foe
alike, that our nation has a mission: we will
answer threats to our security, and we will defend
the peace ... We do not know the day of final
victory, but we have seen the turning of the
tide." The mission, despite that fatal banner, was
not "accomplished". Not in the least. As the
president said ringingly, quoting the Bible and
thanking God, "Our mission continues."
Looking back across the vast expanse of
disaster that is Bush policy in Afghanistan, Iraq,
"the Greater Middle East" (aka the oil heartlands
of the planet), and elsewhere (including our own
country), his was, in fact, a particularly
chilling speech - a ringing reaffirmation that one
war was so many too few; a resounding endorsement
of what would later be dubbed by Centcom Commander
John Abizaid, "The Long War". Our president was
already imagining an Orwellian future in which
military power beyond compare was to actively
remake the planet, cruise missile by cruise
missile, under the banner of "peace". Above all
else, his speech was a reaffirmation of an
American "mission" in which time, maybe even all
eternity, was on the US side.
As it
happens, those Pax Americana pipedreams would
never make it out of Iraq. That speech, suffused
with Bush's personal sense of pleasure,
satisfaction and all-American war play ("When I
look at the members of the United States military,
I see the best of our country, and I'm honored to
be your commander-in-chief ..."), would be
destroyed by "all the citizens of Iraq who
welcomed our troops and joined in the liberation
of their own country".
Put more precisely,
it would be done in by a ragtag minority Sunni
insurgency and a ragtag Shi'ite government that
shared hardly a shred of his particular vision.
Perhaps the moral here, if there is one, might be:
beware the man who praises himself and his nation
too highly.
Tick ... tick ... tick
(2007) "No man is an island, entire of
itself," wrote John Donne. "... [A]ny man's death
diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind;
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell
tolls; it tolls for thee."
Unfortunately,
the president was, four years ago, already a man
on an island, or the deck of an aircraft carrier
doubling as a movie set, separated from the
mainland of this world. He already had his
military outfits to dress up in and his cowboy
language ("bring 'em on") straight from the films
of his childhood to wield. Back in those days, he
was already favoring appearing in specially
tailored military jackets in front of military
crowds that would hoo-ah him enthusiastically -
and his handlers and enablers were already making
ever so sure that no challenging human ever made
it onto that island of his.
When he moved
globally, he did so only on his bubble-island,
surrounded by specially flown-in protection and
entourage. To offer but a partial list from one
such trip: armored escort vehicles, the
presidential car (known to insiders as "the
beast"), 200 Secret Service agents, 15 sniffer
dogs, a Blackhawk helicopter, five cooks and 50
White House aides. From London to Manila, his
arrival automatically emptied whole central cities
of life.
Not surprisingly, then, when the
bell first began to toll for him, when those first
signs of trouble began to appear in Iraq, he and
his aides, officials and advisors simply dismissed
reality. As former Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) director George Tenet's new memoir evidently
makes clear, the island looked so much more
appealing.
According to New York Times
book reviewer Michiko Kakutani, for instance: "Mr
Tenet writes that the CIA's senior officer in Iraq
was dismissed as a 'defeatist' for warning in 2003
of the dangers of a growing Iraqi insurgency,
though it was already clear then that United
States political and economic strategies were
failing. Although the trends were clear, he adds,
those in charge of policy 'operated within a
closed loop'. In that atmosphere, he says, bad
news was ignored: the agency's subsequent
reporting, which would prove 'spot-on', was
dismissed."
As a senior advisor to the
president told journalist Ron Suskind in 2002:
[G]uys like me were "in what we call
the reality-based community", which he defined
as people who "believe that solutions emerge
from your judicious study of discernible reality
... That's not the way the world really works
anymore", he continued. "We're an empire now,
and when we act, we create our own reality ...
We're history's actors ... and you, all of you,
will be left to just study what we
do."
Four years after the president's
smooth landing, it's hard even to express just how
unaccomplished their non-reality-based "mission"
remains. New Centcom Commander Admiral William J
Fallon is complaining about the use of "the Long
War" ("unhelpful") to describe our world and even
the president
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
