Page 3 of 3 DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA Uh, uhhm: Say no
more, Iraq is a slam
dunk By
Julian Delasantellis
politically inspired process
of redefining victory, as the US now accepts the
Sunni tribal sheikhs' rejection of the central
Baghdad government that it fought and spilled
blood for the three previous years to force them
to accept. Americans would, as the football season
starts, much rather believe that they're driving
deep down into al-Qaeda territory, about to score
a touchdown in their end zone so they can spike
the football in bin Laden's face. As
Bush
told
Australian Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile at
last week's at Sydney Asia-Pacific Economic
Cooperation summit, when Vaile inquired about
Iraq, "We're kicking ass."
In the US,
that's called "trash talk". White Americans love
this macho, tough-talking rhetoric, unless, of
course, it's being to addressed to them in an
actual US ghetto.
Of course, the big one
that many Americans believe is, "We're fighting
them over there so we don't have to fight them
over here." No serious observer of contemporary
Iraq believes this; it's saying that the
insurgents, instead of traveling to the United
States to attack a sea-to-shining-sea of soft
targets, would rather stay in Iraq to be chewed up
and spat out from the maw of the most
technologically advanced killing machine in
history.
But the war's lies are a lot more
palatable than its truth, a fact that Bush or,
more likely, Karl Rove, very methodically and
scientifically testing these specific themes with
suburban focus groups, know far better than do the
anti-war forces.
There are two basic,
unspoken reasons that the US is still in Iraq. One
is that a large part of the US population sees the
Iraq war as the last battle of the Vietnam War, a
final chance to win a conflict that was seen as
lost in 1975. ( I wrote about this sentiment in my
June 6 ATol article Yes, Rambo, you get to win this
time.)
The other reason gets to
Bush's unique qualifications to lead this war. A
2004 poll found that, if asked whether they would
like to have a beer with either Bush or John
Kerry, 57% of Americans chose Bush. Of course, in
wishing to have a beer with Bush, one would hope
that the respondent had a taste for one of those
bizarre-tasting non-alcoholic brews.
There
is Bush, seen not as the lecturing patrician
scholar, not as the smart kid, but as just a
regular, down-to-earth average American guy.
And what the real American guy wants, but
is way too polite and reserved to tell the
pollsters, and what he doesn't trust the political
left to do, is to turn live Arabs, or live Muslims
(to most Americans there's no difference), into
dead Arabs and dead Muslims.
This is the
fatal flaw that doomed the US anti-war movement.
Far from responding to a rational, coolly logical
argument that the anti-war left might produce,
Americans, almost at the level of the primal,
tribal cave passions that conservatives repeatedly
tap into so well, want to see Americans kill Arabs
- whether they're our enemy or not is immaterial .
Heard again in this current war is a slogan that
so well defined America's method of
differentiating friend from foe in Vietnam: "Kill
them all and let God sort 'em out." A lot of
this results from a desire for September 11
payback, but it's deeper than that. If you're an
American male in your late 40s or 50s today, your
first realization that there was a people called
Arabs whose actions personally affected you might
have been in 1973 and 1979, during the first and
second Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries oil shocks. The "A-rabs" had raised the
prices on "our" oil, so gasoline became scarce and
its price skyrocketed. That meant that you
couldn't afford to cruise the teen hangouts as
long as needed to get a date. That meant you were
less likely to score that night. Put this seething
resentment in a pot, cover and let it simmer for
more than 30 years, and the Iraq war is what you
get.
The cerebral brainiacs of the
anti-war movement will never understand these base
motivations, but, in Bush, the US middle class
sees a regular guy who, just like them, acts more
on his emotions and passions than his intellect.
In sharing their emotion and passion to hurt the
Arab world, Bush perfectly reflected the desires
of his people - too bad the whole thing went
straight to hell when those Arabs had the cheek to
fight back.
But here is the true
brilliance of 2007 Miss Teen South Carolina Lauren
Caitlin Upton's answer to the question of why
Americans are so ignorant. What would have been
the point if Upton had produced a rational,
well-thought-out, coherent response (as she
actually did on US morning television two days
later; when you're cute and blond in the US,
unlike if you're poor and black in New Orleans,
you get second chances in life)?
In her
first response, her disjointed logic and
reasoning, her brutally tortured syntax, her
inappropriate bolting together of so many
well-sounding platitudes and cliches into one
terrifying mass of overarching incoherence
perfectly reflects the mental processes that
define the way in which the US looks at the world
in general, and the manner in which it has
prosecuted the Iraq war in particular.
In
the same manner in which Ronald Reagan appointed
Jeanne Kirkpatrick US ambassador to the United
Nations to reflect his conservative views, perhaps
Bush will do the same with Upton; more so than the
ineffectually combative John Bolton, at last Bush
might finally have someone at the UN who can best
explain the delicate nuance of his foreign policy.
Point of full disclosure: I was the kid
who did the term paper on the European Common
Market in the ninth grade, and somewhere around
here I've got the bent, rusted paper clip to prove
it.
Julian Delasantellis is a
management consultant, private investor and
educator in international business in the US state
of Washington. He can be reached at
juliandelasantellis@yahoo.com.
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