Page 1 of
3 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Uh, uhhm: Say no
more, Iraq is a slam
dunk By Julian Delasantellis
On August 24, Miss Teen South Carolina,
Lauren Caitlin Upton, in the Miss Teen USA beauty
pageant, had no choice but to ignore Abraham
Lincoln's sage advice: "Better to remain silent
and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove
all doubt." In between the skimpy-bikini and
clingy-evening-dress competitions, the contestants
were tasked to answer questions based on current
events to prove that their minds and intellects
were as well
rounded as their other
previously displayed qualifications.
Upton
was asked: "Recent polls have shown a fifth of
Americans can't locate the US on a world map. Why
do you think this is?"
Without missing a
beat, Upton replied: "I personally believe that
Americans are unable to do so because, uhmmm, some
people out there in our nation don't have maps and
uh, I believe that our, I, education like such as
uh, South Africa, and uh, the Iraq, everywhere
like such as, and I believe that they should,
uhhh, our education over here in the US should
help the US, uh, should help South Africa, it
should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we
will be able to build up our future, for us."
No matter how gruesome this reads as text,
it's infinitely worse on video, assuming that
you're one of the planet's few sentient beings who
have not seen the video on YouTube.
Upton
finished as third runner-up in the pageant; press
reports are that it'll never be known for certain
whether her labyrinthically Delphic insights were
the main cause of her disappointing result. (Of
course it was; if Upton had won the crown after
producing this response, the reputation of the
pageant, or, as its promoters say, the
"scholarship contest", would have fallen to
somewhere just above softcore pornography.)
Still, we must all be grateful to Upton.
In fewer than 100 words, she has produced the most
lucid, coherent and internally consistent
justification ever stated for America's continuing
involvement in Iraq.
As summer 2007 fades
into autumn, the hay is cut and the flowers wilt,
but one blossom that didn't even make it to
September was the anti-war movement in the United
States, which withered and died on the vine weeks
ago. Its fate was sealed in the spring, when the
anti-war Democrats in the US Congress acquiesced
to continued Iraq war funding, even with George W
Bush's approval ratings then cratered down around
historical lows for any US president.
Since then, the association of the war
with al-Qaeda (at a July 24 speech at the
Charleston, South Carolina, air base, Bush
referenced al-Qaeda 94 times), the pro-war
advocates' seizing of the supposedly anti-war
commentators Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack
(well covered on August 28 in Asia Times Online -
see 'Critics' give Bush a
'surge'), and the grand gambol that
Bush foisted on the Democrats in getting them to
believe that Iraq military commander General David
Petraeus was something other than a standard-issue
Bush administration policy barker have in essence
eliminated the anti-war movement from current
public debate. (I wrote about Petraeus mania in my
May 25 ATol piece A 'surge' in the wrong
direction.)
These days, the
majority Democrats in the US Congress can't even
keep their party together to support even the
meekest, most pointless of non-binding anti-war
resolutions, while the pro-war Republicans
continue to display a degree of iron party unity
that would have astounded Lenin at a 1920s meeting
of the Soviet Central Committee. Petraeus has
indeed proved himself an expert in defeating
insurgencies, except that the insurgency he has
vanquished is not the Iraqi insurgency in Baghdad
or al-Anbar province, but the anti-war insurgency
on Washington's Capitol Hill. Waiting in suspense
for Petraeus' upcoming testimony makes about as
much sense as waiting for the result of a
professional wrestling match - in both cases, the
outcome was determined long ago.
Even now,
I'm sure that there are loggers clearing whole
forests of trees, preparing the reams of paper
that will soon be used to print political-science
PhD dissertations on why, once again, the American
people rejected the self-evident rationality of
the anti-war left in favor of the coarse jingoism
of the president and the pro-Iraq-war lobby. I sat
through enough sessions defending this type of
viewpoint in the 1980s; the prospect of doing it
again soon is fairly unappealing . Karl Marx once
said, "History repeats itself, first as tragedy,
second as farce." When this train rolls back into
Academia Station as farce in a few years, one
won't even be able to fall back on the palliative
of indoor tobacco use to get you through all the
heaping mounds of turgid academic self-panegyric.
Sometimes, it seems that the political left in
the United States, including the anti-war movement
and the Democratic Party, operate under a
fundamental misconception as to just how the US
political system works. They do not act as if
political power is to be gained at the ballot box
through the winning of 50% + 1 of the electorate.
They seem to see it as a never-ending ninth-grade
social-studies/government class; if your arguments
are properly thought out, researched and logical,
and well sourced enough, you'll be sure to get an
A from the teacher, maybe a star affixed to your
forehead.
The electorate, like the other
students in the classroom, can see which
candidate/student the teacher decided was the
smartest, and give him (or her; after all, Senator
Hillary Clinton is running in 2008) their
friendship and loyalty in the classroom, or their
vote in the election.
Of course, in the
classroom, just the opposite happens; the rest of
the class hates the smarty-pants brainy kid, and
they do everything in their power to make the
teacher's pet kid's life miserable in the school
halls or playground. And in the last two US
presidential elections, the electorate rejected
the candidates seen as teacher's pets, Al Gore and
John Kerry, in favor of George W Bush.
In
2004, the online magazine Salon published an
interview with Yoshi Tsurumi, Bush's first-year
macroeconomics professor at the Harvard Business
School during the 1973-74 academic year, currently
a professor of economics at Baruch College in New
York. Tsurumi told Salon that it was only to tell
the tale of student Bush without fear of
government retribution or deportation that he
traded in his temporary, "green card" immigration
status for full US citizenship in 2001.
Bush was no teacher's pet. He frequently
came to class late, and rarely participated in
class discussions, choosing instead to sit up in a
back row of the class wearing his Texas Air
National Guard (Tsurumi reports that Bush bragged
that his father's political connections got him
out of the requirement of full service
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
