I The Oil War (Iraq 2003-? )
By now it should be well established that the number and breadth and persistence of the mistakes and failures made by this government in the war in Iraq are unprecedented in our history. The war has featured catastrophic failure across the board in all departments of government. The eyes of American history have slowly shifted from the failings of the war to become increasingly fixated on the people who took us into it.
They have failed to uphold our finest traditions. They have not proven they have the character, capacity, values, integrity or knowledge to lead a free people. Failure this comprehensive can only be attributed to the underlying moral decay of our entire political class. In the process the war in Iraq has become a permanent stain on the history of the United States.
Yet for their part, the partisans, enablers and promoters of the war in the Iraq refuse to admit their own part in this war. They say it isn’t their fault, this policy, they say the idea was fine, it was only the execution of the war they were for that was poor. “Mistakes were made,” is the weasely tagline of our times when put forward by the very persons who made them.
This overlooks the obvious problem that George Bush is their creation, the creature of their ethics, greed and desires. They voted for him, gave money to him, supported him with speeches and legislation, did his dirty work for him and followed him loyally on this path to ruin, loudly and belligerently criticizing anyone who dared question his authority to be as wrong as he wants as often as he likes. By and large his supporters are still supporting him unquestioningly today, or till the end of time, which ever comes first, as long as they discern some selfish, partisan profit to themselves in doing so.
Nor can they be said to have been deceived or to have merely been following orders as in a military chain of command. George Bush is not so much an exception to the pervasive failures of our government but its product and finally its apotheosis. No one told his supporters to support his policies even when wrong. It is precisely the policies of this administration that they’ve acceded to unquestioningly that is the entirety of the problem. There was no crying need. No one put a gun to their head. They did it of their own volition. They were not forced to follow in servitude in opposition to all their better instincts of heart and mind to take this country into a disastrous policy and a self destructive war.
Of course, it would not have been easy for any single individual to stop this mad rush into global overreach via dishonest warfare, but it was easy enough to dissent from blindly following along. Many (one is tempted to say all) honest and brave Americans did dissent. At the very least it would have been very easy not to have become a storm trooper for one of the most ruinous and misguided policies in American history. And not only didn’t they do the wise thing and object prior to the war, many supporters of it still haven’t done the honest thing by disavowing it since, even as we have all been forced to watch its slow, steady descent into catastrophe.
After all, the leaders of the United States of America, the most powerful nation in the world, actually saw fit to attack a weak and unarmed country preemptively and without provocation because they were allegedly petrified that that nation was about to attack us. And they paint themselves as farsighted and courageous for this. These brave patriots have casually led us into the most cynical and imperialistic war in American history and rather than base it on justifiable cause they enacted it with pseudo legalistic justifications based on fear, greed and belligerence in the profound knowledge that since no one could stop us we may as well do what we wanted now and worry about the consequences later. This is the corruption that absolute power creates in small minds.
But then torturers must torture logic and legal definitions before they can graduate to torturing human beings. So even after all the disasters that have followed in its train the supporters of this war still refuse to address the initial flaw in their thinking, the preemptive war against an unarmed country, betraying along the way every historical principle and democratic ideal on which this country was founded. This is the original sin and improbity which has been the weak as sand foundation which has inevitably led to the collapse of the entire fraudulent façade on which they constructed their policies.
Even worse for domestic tranquility and national unity of purpose, as fear and division are the first refuge of a bad government, rather than put right their errors when they could, they chose to divide this country by crassly politicizing this war in order to cover them up. Rather than openly and honestly debate the pros and cons of the progress and strategy of the war like literate adults and well intentioned patriots would they, like fiercely yapping little poodles hiding behind military lines, yelped that if you criticized them or their illegitimate policy you were really secretly criticizing our troops and in league with terrorists. This is especially pernicious because it is precisely the continuance of the dishonest delusion that has marked this war that has led directly to the unnecessary loss of life of our troops in the field and abetted, rather than curtailed, the continuing rise of terrorism in the world.
The bitter and incredible truth of the matter is that this nightmare war never had any national interest to it outside the fevered minds of its proponents and is only being continued at extraordinary costs to the nation mainly to keep its consequences from being visited upon its authors.
America has never been so poorly and dishonestly led as this. In that sense, this war has long since become an unprincipled political cover up of its own corrupt instigation and is being maintained as an ongoing, futile search for a legitimate justification that it has never possessed. So after four years we are still told that we must continue a failed and erroneous policy primarily, it seems, so that our President and his intrepid followers don’t have to admit not only that it has failed which is bad enough, but that it was wrong to begin with, which is even worse.
While political denial may start as a cynical strategy it eventually winds up as a cancerous way of life and corrosive character flaw which infects every other policy it comes in contact with. Given the aberrant psychology among our leadership today, rest assured that this war’s promoters will use any temporary glimmer of hope from the surge as an excuse to embed us further into Iraq rather than as a way to extricate us from it.
II Deceiving Boss Public
After all is said and done it seems as if the terrorists succeeded in their purpose. Not only did they viciously and spectacularly murder a lot of innocent and unsuspecting Americans on 9/11, but they executed this attack in our power centers where our authority figures reside, expressly to frighten our leadership. At this they have succeeded spectacularly.
Members of Congress, the President and his cabinet, opinion makers, think tanks and even journalists have not come crawling out from under the desks they’ve been hiding under since. The terrorist attacks tempted us into over reactions militarily, morally, legally and diplomatically and our leadership eagerly complied. They dared us into harming ourselves worse in reaction to 9/11 than the original attack ever could to diminish our position in the world and we boldly accepted the challenge to do just that.
Washington is still operating from the depths of this primordial fright. Apparently the world is too big for them, too dangerous for these titans to handle. They see enemies everywhere, some real and some imaginary, and are unable to distinguish which is which. They were jumping at shadows when they bravely attacked an unarmed nation that couldn’t possibly attack us at the same time they let the people who actually attacked us and were swearing to do it again, go. Clearly, the leaders of our country are in way over their heads when it comes to accepting the challenge of upholding even the most elemental traditions of our democracy in a time of crisis.
They have displayed a singular lack of courage both internally and externally, the one flowing from the other, while exhibiting a total absence of the democratic capacity, diplomatic acumen and basic moral strength we have come to expect from our leadership in this country.
Instead, this generation of American leaders are like the irresponsible, unprepared youths who have inherited the great industry that their fathers and grandfathers toiled so long and hard to build. This spoiled flock that can’t balance a budget, find money to run the country properly, won’t invest in our future or our infrastructure, can’t solve a problem, never missed extending an extended vacation, only show up two days a week for work half the year and will walk a mile for a bribe, now have unheroically started a wholly unnecessary war that they aren’t brave enough to finish. They seem determined to squander in a few years most of the respect and power that it took generations of Americans a century and more to acquire.
The interesting thing is how bellicose, unrepentant and self-righteous the proponents of this war remain who, like thieves caught red handed with their hands still in the till, pockets bulging, bluster as if the mistakes of this war and its aftermath have all been someone else’s fault. Presumably the vehemence of their irrational support for the war must reflect in some visceral way the guilt they feel for starting it. Problem is, they have grown so corrupt in their practices and used to avoiding their duty to the country that they have no experience at accepting responsibility for their own malfeasance. When the going gets tough when have you ever known any of them to do anything but get going in the opposite direction?
Unless they are pandering to lobbyists, stealing elections, taking bribes and voting tax breaks to billionaires, they are lost souls. They can’t even be bothered to get the proper life saving equipment into the field for the safety of the troops or properly care for our desperately wounded when they get back home. When Washington was attacked they behaved like so many terrified terriers, running around like little old hens with their heads cut off, wailing wildly and weeping that the sky was falling on them.
Yet they hold no allegiance to the truth and have no innate sense of ethics that is not enforced with threat of penalties. They have no self-restraint, they will get away with exactly what we let them get away with as soon as our backs our turned. At the same time there is no principle of hard work or oversight they will not evade. Fiscal mismanagement is a way of life to them. There is no drive to excellence anywhere in this government, or accountability, or sound management technique.
Instead, no bid contracts are rewarded to friends out of sight of the public, bonuses given for nothing and theft ridden cost overruns covered up and “punished” with new, even more lucrative contracts. Mistakes are made and promptly denied rather than owned up to and never punished or corrected, raises are passed at midnight, grievous errors are forgiven and promotions duly handed out to the least deserving. Likewise, the most corrupt and bumptious politicians and their sniveling cronies are promoted to leadership positions and their worst failures are singled out for praise with medals and insulting ceremony.
If anything there has been no noticeable lessening of venality and corruption in Washington since 9/11 but, sensing the public’s attention would be distracted (by the ongoing peril to the country their dereliction never seems to lessen), a marked increase in waste and corruption over even the previous, historically unprecedented, unacceptably high levels.
If the Bush administration spent half as much time obeying and upholding constitutional law and international conventions as they’ve spent trying to avoid their legal responsibilities to the people they may have been able to accomplishment much more of value for their country. Instead, they have engaged in extra legal acts of wiretapping of Americans without warrants, illegal arrests without trials and egregious torture at secret prisons and renditions to torture in authoritarian regimes. At the same time through ever widening claims of executive privilege and expanded presidential prerogatives they have sought to subvert our system of checks and balances by evading all accountability to our representatives in Congress and through consistently less than honest representations of the truth to the people.
With the bizarre and wholly un-American principle of the “unitary” presidency the least capable president we’ve ever seen has tried to amass more unchecked power into his own hands than any other president has needed to accomplish far greater things in much tougher times and still achieved far less.
By assaulting the very openness, fairness, trust, balance, accountability, love of excellence and honest debate which has made our country exceptional it’s clear that the President and his friends have come to love democracy too much, unnaturally, so much that they believe it is too good a substance for everyday usage and like the fine china should be locked away and only sparingly used. So to protect our freedoms from tyranny we’re told they must be severely diminished, to preserve our way of life it must be changed into something radically different and to keep our country safe and strong we must destroy the very bases on which it has always thrived.
These days our politicians are alive with false reverence for the “greatest generation” - those who fought and primarily those who ran and planned World War II which started with the attacks on Pearl Harbor – which was a much more dire and comprehensive national crisis than the one we are faced with today. One wonders at how easily and obliviously these leaders of today lapse so far south of that ideal example so recently revived in our memories. In response to this crisis our leaders have shown but a barely measurable fraction of the knowledge, ethics, honesty, vigor, sacrifice, modesty, practicality and personal courage of those politicians they so blithely pretend to honor and so completely fail to emulate much less comprehend.
But since we’ve grown so accustomed to our politicians’ innate cowardice and political hypocrisies in small things that they have become a standing joke, why should we be surprised at this and expect more of them now? When they will cheat us for the smallest things, who expects them to be courageous when faced with larger difficulties? Politicians who wake up every day on their bellies groveling for handouts and payoffs and kickbacks cannot be expected to rise to Olympian democratic heights when a real threat arises. People this used to putting their own petty, personal and party interests over the greater good of the nation will certainly sell us out when a real calamity comes. Who can be surprised at how poorly they’ve performed when they are legendary for their lack of skill, diligence and ethics? How can people this unfree, this thoroughly bought and paid for - and for a pittance at that – possibly be expected to rise to the challenge of leading a free people in a time of crisis?
I read an article suggesting the American people should feel remorse for their eventual support of the war in Iraq as if it were their fault. This would only be true if they hadn’t been incessantly lied to by their own well paid political employees about the necessity of its being fought. We wish the people had noticed the hollowness of this administration’s claims. It would have been good if they had been sooner inured to the fear mongering demands of the howling demagogues of propaganda that the political class has set so fiercely against them. It would have been wise if the public could have seen through all the persiflage and lies. But let’s get real. This is not their job. The people have their own lives to lead. That’s why we hire the politicians to do these things for us. Obviously, if not for love of country or for sake of personal honor then just to earn their pay, we deserve a much better class of officeholders than we currently see posturing pompously before us.
Given all this, those who hope for Congress to suddenly start to do the jobs they have always avoided doing and help end this war haven’t been paying attention. From the beginning all of our leaders have demanded maximum sacrifice from the troops in the field and the American people at home in exchange for a minimum of effort and inconvenience to themselves. For its part the administration, after grossly mismanaging the war planning and failing our troops at every step along the way, hasn’t even bothered establishing a coherent diplomacy or effective regional strategy for ensuring that the great sacrifices of this war may actually later be capitalized on rather than wasted altogether. Those who hope for an impotent Congress to act or an imperious, impervious administration to start at this late date to begin to do their jobs, are dreaming an impossible dream.
But make no mistake and don’t buy for a second the lie that any of this is the fault of the American people. Don’t let them shift the blame to us. There is no doubt that the American public would have never been in favor of this war if they had simply been given the real truth about it prior to it.
That is exactly why this administration was so boorishly threatening to any countervailing voice, so quick to tell scurrilous lies about those who would tell the truth about their lies and, finally, why they were far more scrupulous in keeping the true intelligence reports from leaking to the public than they ever were in finding out whether the actually claims they were making against Iraq were true to begin with. Even against this high tide of unrelenting disinformation, polls showed the public was deeply skeptical of the war’s necessity and only after frequent assurances by everyone in a position allegedly to know (and not otherwise silenced by pressure of the administration) that it was absolutely necessary did the majority reluctantly accede to it.
But the people know the intrinsic costs and dangers of warfare even if this amateurish and self-aggrandizing government doesn’t. It is the most dangerous and destructive act known to man. So polls also showed that the people would favor the war only if it was a just war, only if it was absolutely unavoidable, only if it was fought as a matter of last resort and only after all other diplomatic options had been fully exhausted. Then they would only support this war if it was done legally through the United Nations in support of international law and in accord with our own highest ideals in cooperative liability and shared costs with the rest of the international community. Not a single one of these conditions was met before the start of this war was hurried into and presented to the American people as a fait accompli.
Naturally, basic competence in the eventual execution of the war was presupposed. The people were soon to be disabused of that quaint expectation as well. And now, to compound the problem, though the vast majority of people in this country have seen the sheer self-destructive folly of continuing to fight a war that never should have been begun, this government continues to hold the nation hostage for their mistakes. This marks the complete collapse of responsible democratic government in America when a political class insists that the people must continue to pay for all their errors that they steadfastly refuse to correct.
No, the failure does not rest with the American people but the people we’ve hired to run our government. Find someone in Washington who has actually done their job in relation to the war in Iraq. The President and Congress did not even bother reading the undoctored official intelligence estimates prior to sending Americans off to die in Iraq. The Defense Department didn’t even bother to plan contingencies if things did not go optimally well there, while our armed forces let themselves be pressured into a military force too small to succeed at the mission they were given.
The administration has even increasingly outsourced the basic responsibilities we are paying them to perform – duties which have always been competently and more honestly and efficiently done in-house by previous administrations - to unoverseen private contractors at monumental costs to the taxpayer, sizeable kickbacks to themselves and massive waste and fraud in between. There is the failure. There is the cowardice, laziness and corruption at the rear of war that turns all bravery at the front to dust.
Even those in a position to know better kept silent. Those lower level officials who did try to speak up were silenced, threatened and eventually forced out by the people dead set on this war. Among all the huge mistakes and unprecedented misjudgments that have been made not one person has lost their job for being wrong – only for being right. In this bizarre world where nobody resigns and rampant hypocrisy reigns, no one is ever guilty, no one apologizes; no one’s ever punished and third rate work and corrupt practices are so unexceptional and have so much become the expectation that no one ever even bothers to speak up against them any more. Through the entire lead up and prosecution of the war, it is hard to find one instance of personal bravery or integrity where a person actually put the interests of the country and the lives of the troops in the field above their own petty convenience in timely enough fashion to have actually made a difference and done the nation some good.
III Behind the Front Lines of the Oil War
More than any other war in American history the Oil War in Iraq has become a one party war. This is just one reason among many as to why it has failed so badly. The party in power invented its need, promoted it, called anyone a traitor who opposed it, sold it and rigged it through Congress without responsible debate before and no responsible oversight afterwards. The Republican Party, to its eternal shame, early on decided to simply sell the country out running by deciding to use the terror attacks as a wedge issue for their own partisan political aggrandizement, picking our pockets as they went. Through their control of the presidency and both houses of congress they not only dumbed down democratic political debate to a useless minimum in regard to the war but used the cover of the war to ram their other policies through right or wrong, including the war, as if it were just another illicit pandering tax cut for their favorite well-heeled loyal “contributors”.
Even Americans who volunteered to help with the reconstruction of Iraq were in many cases not chosen for their expertise at their jobs or experience in the region but for their loyalty to right wing political theories. This had predictably disastrous results in post war Iraq. Even today our fearful little leaders still measure out truth about the war in eyedroppers and weigh the interests of the troops in the field on heavily rigged scales weighted down on their side with the narcotic of political expedience, misguided party loyalty and other extraneous considerations having nothing whatsoever to do with fighting and winning a war.
The opposition politicians too, the Democrats, have been only episodically vigilant and honest in their attentions to the truth. Some, including a few of the current front runners for the democratic nomination as the party’s next presidential nominee, were so afraid of being called out as weak that they literally ran out front of the parade to lead the march to war.
In the rush of the early days of the war, rather than any serious discussion of far reaching policy considerations and issues of national commitment and military deployments and oversight of intelligence matters and making efforts to ensure against profiteering and holding hearings for post war planning in Iraq – all duties that every other Congress in our history might have thought to have been their sacred responsibility to the nation – all these geniuses could think to do as their most memorable act in lieu of their jobs to help the war effort was to change the name of fried potatoes from french fries to freedom fries.
Then just last month they properly complained that the government of Iraq was taking a month long vacation while our troops were still forced to fight and die on their behalf every day in the streets and towns of Iraq. Their outrage may have been more trenchant, however, if they hadn’t been making this point from the plush resorts they had repaired to for yet another of their own multitude of recesses and long vacations.
Finally the press, as if the right hand didn’t care what its left was doing, systematically in the lead up to the war and its early years gave precedence to the most half baked jingoistic taunts and reports while shunting the countervailing questions about the actual truth of the case for war to the back pages or end of the news casts. Their prevailing attitude was, since it looks like the war is occurring anyway no need to be controversial and suffer the criticism and jeopardize their bottom line by troubling lies with the truth or propaganda with journalism.
When there is such a confluence of cowards and opportunists in charge, where is the opportunity for the democracy to make a well informed decision when the boss public is being so systematically misled and ill-served by its own degenerated employees? Even the slightest modicum of expectation of honesty, integrity, ethics and selfless service to the public good has been misplaced in them. No one in Washington has behaved well or up to minimal previously taken for granted standards of basic honest, ethical and essential patriotic service to their country. So far, and on the whole this is hardly even debatable, this crop’s record in office is well on its way to making them the worst generation of American leadership.
IV In our End is our Beginning
We know this is interminable and morbid, this examination of the comprehensive failure of our current government through the prism of this war, when everyone would rather write about brilliant and estimable achievements of our people and our nation. Obviously that is not to be our choice. The war in Iraq is symbolic of all their other acts only on a grander scale – all the necessary bills they don’t pass and the unnecessary ones they do, all the mismanagement, debt and fraud, the incessant influence peddling and campaign corruption, the pervasive political dishonesty to the public which has grown from the exception into the rule, etc.
As is to be expected, from the very outset of this gratuitous war the administration has not defined any reachable goal for it that was not as abstract, timid and intellectually vapid as their initial reasons for starting it. With massive ethical indiscipline and careless disregard they have then allowed our policy in Iraq to drift aimlessly counter to the public good explicitly and downwards toward ruin for years.
As a result, our weak willed leaders have proven their mental indigence and lack of moral fiber time and time again. That they have somehow managed, even while our troops have won the vast majority of our military goals, to maneuver us to the very brink of “losing” this war against a very poor and completely unarmed country (by the administration’s own shrill assessment of events in Iraq) will go down in the annals of time as one of the most grievous and unnecessarily self inflicted wound our or any nation has ever suffered on itself. (See the previous article, Bush’s Last Stand).
In the end, however we writhe and posture, we cannot escape the judgment of natural law weighing against us. In our end is our beginning. And in our beginning is our end. It is cardiovascular, circulatory and karmaic; what goes around comes around; the child is father to the man; and we will reap what we have sown. Rest assured, we will get exactly the kind of conclusion to this war that the lack of quality of our leadership deserves, because we have received exactly the quality of leadership that one would expect with the quality of mind inherent in people this easily paid for and bought.
The reason for the failure of the Oil War remains that the people who were most rabidly in favor of this unjust and irrational war are still in charge of it and have not and will never come to grips with their own errors. They have not and will never delve deeply enough into their own consciences, shallow as these are to begin with. They have not made and will never make moral restitution for their own ethical and intellectual failures that caused this destructive war. They haven’t the personal honor and courage to do this. Instead they will seek refuge in pale excuses and maintain that this war was a good idea only gone bad by bad luck and inadvertence and poor decisions made by everyone but themselves and learn nothing from it. And now at the eleventh hour to suggest that just a small “surge” of additional half hearted effort on top of a whole body of pigheadedness, idiocy and irresolution will somehow put the whole utter mess right, is at best fantasy, at worst, a scam.
Therefore, our prospects in Iraq cannot be seen as hopeful no matter what the troops on the ground do. Given their record our politicians in Washington will engage in any perverse course imaginable whatever the cost to the American people to continue to avoid responsibility for their own behavior while blaming their failures on everyone else. For its part, Congress will never miss a chance to let an opportunity to do the right and necessary thing pass, no matter how many lives must be sacrificed on the altars of their inertia in the meantime. Clearly, the eunuchs and losers who founded this war are determined to draw it out until the US has paid a thousand times over in blood and treasure for each and every one of the mistakes they have visited upon us. Meanwhile, the war in Iraq has already become a permanent stain on the history of the United States which sets deeper every day it is persisted in.
For if anyone still chooses to disregard the evidence of their own eyes and consider this war to be the result of an honest mistake or to be still “winnable” in some perverse rendering of the term, they need only look to its consequences. Effects cannot be separated from their source. Consequences this destructive to all concerned do not happen of themselves. All our mistakes in Iraq are self-made and once made they are owed and must be paid down. The cause of all the grief in Iraq is directly attributable to the dishonorable beginning of this war. Once committed such grievous mistakes have consequences that only continue to compound when they are persisted in. This is common knowledge. This is the inescapability of natural law.
So however long we try, we can never pound our square peg of policy into the round hole of Iraq or square the circle of incompetence and dishonesty on which this war was instituted. We cannot devise a successful end to Iraq until we have gone back to discover the roots of our original mistake and acknowledged its unwise and unjust beginning. You must first acknowledge an error before you can begin to rectify it. If you aren’t first man enough and haven’t the strength of character to admit your mistakes how can you ever expect to be man enough to correct them? After all, how else to explain the greatest country in the world being unable to subdue the weakest, other than due to a fatal flaw inherent in the original conception of the war?
Lincoln had an atonement or expiation theory of the Civil War. He thought it would not end until the amount of blood spilled in the war had become equal to the amount of blood shed by the abomination of slavery. “…until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword…the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether,” he said in his second inaugural.
If you want to know how this war will end look to its beginning - then reverse it. The same illusorily easy road we took to get into Iraq is the same suddenly and increasingly long, steep, hard, narrow, twisting road we must traverse to get back out again. The only way out of the war in Iraq is back through the very door we came in by. There is no alternative to this conclusion. The longer we deny it, this judgment of history on our actions, the worse it will be. The judgments of the Lord really are true and righteous altogether.
