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3 COMMENT Ideology wins, the people
lose By Julian Delasantellis
It's probably hard to believe or
comprehend these days, but not all that long ago,
many of the most learned minds of politics and
sociology actually postulated that we were
entering a time wherein the concept of ideology
would play a very minor role in the lives of the
citizens of the modern industrial state.
In 1960 Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell
published The End of Ideology: On the
Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, voted
by the
Times Literary Supplement as one of the 100 most
important books of the second half of the 20th
century.
In the book, Bell theorized that,
after the murderous ideological disputes of the
early 20th century, the second half of the 20th
century was shaping up as a period in which the
ideological differences that had led to two world
wars would be tamped down and blunted. Although
Bell primarily was looking at the political
cultures of the West, implicitly the theory also
saw the phenomenon occurring on the eastern side
of the Berlin Wall as well.
It was
believed and hoped that Joseph Stalin's death in
1953, and the subsequent arrest and execution of
his secret police chief Lavrenti Beria, would
herald a more managerial, less murderously
ideological brand of state socialism - at least in
comparison to Stalin and his party purges that
killed millions. In place of the fire-breathing,
death-delivering ideologue, the avatar of the next
age would be the bureaucrat, called a plant
manager, program director or executive vice
president in the West, the commissar or
apparatchik in the East, quietly and effectively
managing society's affairs to bring the soothing
balm of prosperity to happy, contented citizens.
Looking at matters today, at least as
President George W Bush's rule over America enters
its final 15 months, it seems that things have
turned out completely in contrast to what Bell and
his followers had prophesied. America is drenched
in ideology these days, superseding any and all
other considerations. Were a young sociologist to
look out over the political situation these days,
his tome would probably be more accurately titled
The End of Competence - On the Exhaustion of
the Expectation of Effective Governance in the
First Decade of the Twenty First Century.
This personal observation arrives on the
heels of reading two reports in the media last
week.
In it, Jamail provides probably the
best explanation for the recent decline in US
combat casualties that so contributed to General
David Petraeus' smashing victory in September's
battle of Capitol Hill. Quoting Iraq War veteran
Phil Aliff, "We decided the only way we wouldn't
be blown up was to avoid driving around [in their
still, after more than four years of battle,
unarmored Humvees] all the time. So we would go
find an open field and park, and call our base
every hour to tell them we were searching for
weapons caches in the fields and doing weapons
patrols and everything was going fine."
Another soldier, Eli Wright, reported to
Inter Press Service that, "We would just sit with
our binoculars and observe rather than sweep. We'd
call in radio checks every hour and say we were
doing sweeps. It was a common tactic, a lot of
people did that. We'd just hang out, listen to
music, smoke cigarettes, and pretend."
Being of a particular ripe age and vintage
these reports rang vaguely familiar to me. I
remember that, in the last stages of the Vietnam
War, particularly after the Tet offensive in 1968,
when the only thing that was still keeping America
in the war was its leaders not wanting to face the
facts and admit that they had made a catastrophic
error by getting into it, there were similar
reports of what were, in essence, American troop
mutinies.
CBS News filmed an actual
instance of troops refusing to leave their forward
operating bases for yet another pointless search
and destroy mission in the jungle, where success
would be achieved and proclaimed by spilling blood
and lives to win ground in the day that would be
handed back to the Viet Cong at night . More
serious forms of resistance signifying the
breakdown of morale was rampant drug use (a family
friend went to Vietnam a fairly average, for the
period anyway, occasional pot smoker, and came
back with the mainlining heroin addiction that
took his life in 1976), and "fragging", the
innocent sounding euphemism for troops who
murdered disliked superior officers by throwing
fragmentation grenades into their tents.
(In her own singularly genteel way,
conservative pundit Ann Coulter brought back the
wistful charm of that happy period by suggesting
things would have been better today had Vietnam
veteran and current Iraq war critic, Pennsylvania
Congressman John Murtha, been "fragged" by his
troops back then. It is truly indicative of just
how poisonously polarized the political discourse
in America now is, that a person such as Coulter
can still be counted among those who "support the
troops" even after advocating the murder of a
prominent former one of them.)
And so it's
happening again, today in Iraq. Karl Marx said
that "history always repeats itself, the first
time as tragedy, then as farce", but the tragedy
here is that the nation chose to forget everything
that it so painfully learned in Vietnam, and, in
doing so, assured that it would someday have to
suffer the same mistakes again.
It's not
really surprising that troop mutinies are
happening again, for nobody knows better than the
troops themselves how pointless their sacrifices
now are. The soldiers interviewed by Jamail all
expressed the sentiment that they did not feel
obligated to go out on patrols in Humvees that the
Bush administration has chosen to take its own
sweet time to "up-armor" against the roadside
improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that are the
principle lethal threat to US forces in Iraq.
The Pentagon's partial answer to the IED
problem, a new class of military transport
vehicles called MRAPs (mine resistant armor
protected) are well behind schedule for their
combat deployment in Iraq; the main function they
are now performing is making many of the
Republican Party's allies in the military
industrial complex very rich very fast. After all
the previous focus-group generated and tested
rationales for the war (WMDs, deposing Saddam
Hussein, inspiring Arab democracy, supporting the
al-Maliki government in Baghdad, the "surge"
spurring Iraqi political reconciliation) have
proved to be lies, many of the troops can see just
what purpose they now are actually serving.
In reality, their continued presence in
Iraq, driving around dusty hostile streets waiting
for insurgents to target them, serves no real
purpose other than to be a thumb in the eye of the
nominal Democratic Party majorities in Congress, a
bloody testament to the opposition’s ever
spreading impotence across this and other policy
issues.
So now many soldiers seem to feel
that is not a cause worth dying for. In 1971,
returning decorated Vietnam veteran and 2004
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