March 20, 2004 by lonbud

Someone Has To Pay Retail

According to the secretary of defense, in an Op-Ed piece published in yesterday’s New York Times, the REAL reason for the United States’ “adventure” in Iraq (able now, finally, on the one-year anniversary of its onset, to be revealed): is that Baghdad might ­some fifty years hence- be like Seoul, Korea.

That, on a table in the office of the secretary of defense fifty years from now, a nighttime satellite surveillance photograph of the middle east will boast, where Iraq is today, a place “ablaze in light, the light of freedom.” Give Donald Rumsfeld credit for the Big Picture view.

Let us set aside for a moment, as the secretary so happily wishes we would, EVERYTHING he and the other spokespersons for the Bush administration told the American people and the world in the “run-up” to our “adventure” in Iraq. He reminds us what a bad, bad man Saddam Hussein was, neglecting, however, to remind us how other U.S. administrations in which the secretary served, viewed and used the bad, bad man as an asset to advance our country’s interests in the middle east.

Let us set aside, for a moment, as the secretary so happily wishes we would, his being NAILED on last Sunday’s Face the Nation telling a very different story about our “adventure” in Iraq than the one he wishes us to believe today.

He paints now our raison d’etre as something akin to the glory we achieved on the Korean peninsula fifty years ago, adding, in case the luster of that splendid little war isn’t sufficient to make things clear, it’s also a little like what we did for Germany, Japan, and Italy by putting down the last century’s baddest, baddest man in World War II.

In Donald Rumsfeld’s view, This Is What We Do, y’all.

But the secretary is mistaken.

This is different. I’ve alluded before to the proposition that freedom cannot be imposed OR bestowed on people. Whatever may have been the dirty little particulars fueling the flames of war in Korea, the United States joined people willing to fight and die for their freedom against other, ideologically abhorrent people.

In World War II, people from many nations across the globe joined to combat and defeat two different though equally dangerous nationalist pathologies.

The fact is Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush administration don’t know squat about the Iraqi people or what they want.

Clearly, a bunch of them were just fine with Saddam Hussein at the helm. For a whole other bunch, it’s not so clear. There are those who are willing, for whatever their own personal reasons, to act as emissaries for The American Way, God bless ’em. On the whole, everything about our “adventure” in Iraq would indicate our motive has always been exactly what the secretary admitted yesterday: to bring “the light of freedom.”

Sounds like a good thing, right?

I guess we’ll see. Daniel Ellsberg, and others who have a contemporary understanding of the way our government operates, assures us we’ll have many years and plenty of additional casualties (not to mention the hundreds of billions of dollars we’ll spend supporting and preserving our emissaries who do not become casualties) with which to calculate the headline Times editors gave to Mr. Rumsfeld’s exhortation today: The Price of Freedom in Iraq.

I think we are overpaying. And we are asking our children, and their children, to overpay for whatever the nighttime satellite picture of the middle east is going to look like in fifty years.

If we have the hundreds of billions of dollars to spend (reasonable doubt about which exists), we should spend it not on a war on terrorism, not on a war on drugs, rather on a war on fear, on a war on hopelessness, and on worry, and want.

We should spend our money, our hearts, our last dying breaths on a war on ignorance, a war on hubris, a war on war.

I can hear the cries now: “appeaser!” But appeasement is a big red herring in the debate over the resources we have committed to the war on terrorism and to our bringing “the light of freedom” to the middle east.

Whatever the conflict between the trappings of modern, mostly western, mostly judeo-christian, mostly capitalist civilization, and modern radical Islam –the world is not faced today with a “choice” about something as heinous or menacing or truly “imminent” as was Hitler and Nazi totalitarianism.

We ought to be able to marginalize a few raving clerics in the hills of Asia minor without mortgaging the farm, don’t you think?

We as a nation, as a freedom loving people, are being stupid. We are being willfully ignorant about confronting things we believe to be wrong in the world. We are allowing a handful of raving despots in our own midst to plunder our vast resources and squander whatever good will remains of our previous efforts to champion the cause of freedom in the world, while they and their closest friends enrich personal fortunes in the bargain.

We are allowing our leaders to assume the role of the world’s policeman, the world’s scold, the world’s interpreter of the word of God. It’s as if we woke up one day and found ourselves being ruled by a band of Ayatollas.

I say we can do better. I say we can approach the problem of radical Islam far more effectively and at a far better cost in lives and resources than George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz would have us believe. First, however, we must abandon war as the answer. We must demand our leaders tell us the truth. And we must turn the current bunch of “crooked, you know, lying” leaders out of office immediately.