Page 2 of 3 DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA Uh, uhhm: Say no
more, Iraq is a slam
dunk By Julian Delasantellis
in the Texas ANG) bomber jacket
spitting chewing tobacco into a paper cup.
"Yup, one of those." I, and probably every
other teacher, groaned upon first reading that.
Every class has one of those. This one went on to
be president of the United States.
Bush
scored in the lowest 10% of his class; as for his
skills in, as
the
grade-school report cards put it, "getting along
with others", Tsurumi reported that even there
young Bush needed some remedial help.
"He
showed pathological lying habits and was in denial
when challenged on his prejudices and biases. He
would even deny saying something he just said 30
seconds ago. He was famous for that. Students
jumped on him; I challenged him. When asked to
explain a particular comment, Bush would respond,
'Oh, I never said that.'"
In other words,
even then he showed precisely the attributes
Americans really want in their president. In just
the same way that, in the 1978 film National
Lampoon's Animal House, the most beloved
character was the loutish, ill-mannered Faber
College perpetual student Bluto (John Belushi),
who later went on to become Senator John
Blutarsky, in 2000, then again in 2004, Americans
elected President George W Blutarsky.
So
when an anti-war candidate or activist gets up and
makes reasoned, factual, and logically
comprehensive arguments against the Iraq war, such
as there never were any weapons of mass
destruction (WMD), or that Saddam Hussein was
never a threat, or that the postwar occupation and
reconstruction were massively corrupt and bungled,
or that the war is now an in essence a sectarian
civil war with little or no connection to Osama
bin Laden's al-Qaeda, Americans are not impressed.
They are immediately taken back to their
ninth-grade classroom, sitting at their little
school desks as the smart kid finishes his term
paper on the European Common Market. The teacher
praises the smart kid, but the class hates him;
when the teacher turns to clean the blackboard,
the class pelts the smart kid with spitballs and
paper clips slingshot off elastic bands.
Very much in contrast to the actual truth,
Americans have repeatedly proved that they would
rather believe such a gross body of feel-good lies
regarding their nation's role in the world that it
makes Lauren Caitlin Upton sound like Arnold
Toynbee.
For instance, Americans grossly
overestimate their nation's beneficence toward the
world. When asked what government programs should
be cut in the name of fiscal integrity, the
overwhelmingly popular choice is to cut foreign
aid; a poll found that 64% of Americans believe
foreign aid is the largest discretionary line item
in the federal budget. (In reality, it's Pentagon
spending.) When asked what proportion of the
federal budget is spent on foreign aid, the
majority answers at around 20%; in that, they're
only off by a factor of 20 - the actual number is
1%. At 0.1% of national income, America's
foreign-aid contributions are by far the stingiest
of all the major industrialized countries; the
statistics look even worse when you realize that a
large proportion of US aid goes to Israel, not a
poor country, and to Egypt, which is, but only
gets US aid in quantity for signing the Camp David
peace accords with Israel in 1979.
It's
much the same in trying to get Americans to
understand the complicated dynamic that it has
engendered in Iraq.
The Sunni-Shi'ite
split? What's that? Bush had no idea that it even
existed prior to 2003, and even today, if
Americans see a discussion on that subject on TV,
it means a quick channel flip over to ESPN
Sportscenter.
There's a famous incident
from 1980, during the Iran hostage crisis. A TV
newsreader in Texas, seeing the word "Shi'ite"
pass by on her teleprompter, paused; instead of
pronouncing it in the way she thought it should be
pronounced (which would have brought down on the
station a US Federal Communications Commission
indecency fine), looked into the camera and
exclaimed on the order of, "Ahh, jest can't
po-nounce all these names!" She immediately got
thousands of letters of support from all over the
nation; the nerve of those foreigners using names
of people and religions that good ol' boys and
gals from Texas can't pronounce!
As for
the Sunnis, well, there's not a lot of
enlightenment regarding them, either. If Americans
were told that Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army had
been so successful in its murderous ethnic
cleansing of Baghdad that there was no more
significant Sunni presence in the city, they would
probably interpret that to mean that the people of
Iraq's capital no longer need sunscreen, because,
according to what they just heard on the news,
it's not Sunni anymore.
It's so much more
comforting to believe the lies told by the war's
supporters. No matter how many times they are told
that this is not true, about 40% of the US
population continues to believe that Saddam
Hussein had a key role in planning the attacks of
September 11, 2001. How could he not? Bin Laden is
Arab, and so was Saddam, so they must have been in
cahoots.
Fox News repeatedly pushes the
line that all of Saddam's WMD were trucked off to
Syria early in the war, even though there is no
evidence of this (if it had happened, it would
have stuck out like a sore thumb on the
surveillance grid of the Pentagon, which, you
might think, perhaps would have wanted to act on
the situation) and Iraqi and Syrian Ba'athism had
been at loggerheads for decades. Syria supported
the US-led coalition against Iraq in the 1990 Gulf
War. For the current war's supporters that doesn't
matter, for they're both Arabs. They must be
together, so that's what happened to all those
WMD.
What about that Shi'ite-Sunni split?
Well, that can't be real, either; that's why
Shi'ite Iran is supporting the Sunni insurgency.
"After all," the average American might say,
strutting proud his patriotic doggerel, "both
Iranians and Iraqis are Arabs," which, of course,
they're not.
Is the Nuri al-Maliki
government's failure to win broad popular support
indicative of a basic US failure to achieve a
better life for Iraqis? Of course not; the war's
supporters reply that even in the United States,
it took 12 years from the Declaration of
Independence to the adoption of the constitution
(1776-87). That ignores the fact that, back in
those days, you didn't have Virginians coming up
to Boston to detonate suicide bombs from their
horse-drawn buckboards at Faneuil Hall, much as
happens in the markets of Baghdad now.
The
success of the "surge"? Americans don't want to
hear that all that's really happening in Anbar
province right now might be just a
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
