Thank
You CounterPunchers for an Overwhelming Response!
Once again,
you have rallied magnificently to our annual appeal and put us
past the $60,000 mark. The final returns are still flowing in,
but it looks as if more than 1,500 CounterPunchers contributed
to our annual (that means one-time only) appeal for your cash!
To those that gave, our
gratitude. To those who have not yet given: every extra
dollar helps! Christmas is just around the corner and what
better to give than CounterPunch subs
and books
and other gifts. What
better guide than CounterPunch, as we head towards a new Congress
in which the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee,
Charles Rangel, pledges a bill to reintroduce the draft and Rahm
Emanuel says the Democrats plan to increase the size of the US
military by more than 100,000! Welcome to the Democrats, Party
of War. Our new CounterPunch
newsletter, just out, offers Michael Neumann's plan for a just
settlement in the Middle East, and Manuel Garcia concludes his
widely applauded primer on the laws of physics and the myths
of conspiracists by explainging the not-so-mysterious collapse
of WTC 7. But
remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the
print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription
to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find
anywhere else, or by making a donation towards the cost of this
online edition.
Remember contributions are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now
Are we the eagle nation
Or have we but the talons and the maw,
And for the abject likeness of our heart,
Shall some less lordly bird be set apart?
Some gorger in the sun? Some prowler with the bat?
-William Vaughn Moody,
An Ode in Time of Hesitation
As Moody posed his birds, America was
in the throes of imperial disillusion. President William McKinley
having been reliably advised by God and Republican cronies to
"take the Philippines" as booty of the 1898 Spanish-American
War, the U.S. faced a fiery insurgency in the islands and at
home raging debate about the loss of America's anti-colonial
innocence. In the end, the Senate annexed by only a single vote,
poorly armed Philippine nationalists were put down at brutal
cost, and America moved on blithely to world power-albeit with
the poet's question increasingly begged.
The issue roils a century later
as a public urge to exit disaster in Iraq lifts Democrats in
the 2006 elections to slim if ruling Congressional majorities.
While U.S. motives and acts abroad may no longer inspire florid
poetry, there is no shortage of prose on the debacle that is
George W. Bush's less-than-excellent adventure in Mesopotamia.
More than a dozen books track the folly in, matched only by
the now warned-of folly out. Much as in 1898, America is told
it cannot stay in its conquest without chaos, cannot leave without
more. It recalls Churchill's richly Tory remark about Lenin
with a Stalinist succession: Russia's worst tragedy his birth,
next worse his death.
As Moody and McKinley suggest,
however, there is rather more to these entrances and exits than
people, circumstances, tactics of the moment. Deeper forces
are at work in the American plight-and the world's at its mercy-that
cannot be resolved by plebiscite. Far beyond Iraq, three timeless
books-two classics and a third in the running-capture larger
meaning.
True to its title, which more
narrowly describes the Pentagon's 2003 dash to Baghdad, Barbara
Tuchman'sThe
March of Folly places the calamity in indispensable wider
context. Across thirty centuries, from the fall of Troy to the
fallacies of Vietnam, from Renaissance Popes provoking the Reformation
to the British blindly alienating their American colonies, one
of our preeminent historians (certainly its most readable writer
in the genre) extracts the Ariadne's thread of preconception,
arrogance and deception, including self-deception, that mark
governments bent on policies at odds with their own interests-all
indulged in what Tuchman calls "wooden-headedness"
despite known, available alternatives. Iraq has it all:
rulers and ministers obsessed, bureaucrats overbearing and feeble,
intelligence confused, confusing and in any case misnamed, generals
as blundering as the politicians they later blame, oversight
so abdicated by legislature, journalism and the public as to
make them all complicit.
Contrary to the prevailing
Democratic demonology, itself dangerously self-deceptive, the
bleak history reminds us that Mr. Bush & Co. are hardly unique,
and that profoundly institutionalized penchants for folly will
not somehow magically vanish from Washington with their own departure
from power. Not least, Tuchman warns us that exits are seldom
what they seem. Lyndon Johnson driven from office in 1968 by
antiwar protests, Richard Nixon elected on his "plan"
to disengage from Vietnam, it would be four full savage years
before America's war actually ended, making that long black wall
of the dead in Washington twice as lengthy as it was when an
election seemed to put the exit at hand.
Of foreign policy, as the Maréchal
de Saxe said of war, the starting point, essence and ending is
the human heart, and Edward Said'sOrientalism
takes us into its darker regions of cant and bigotry. It was
a revolutionary book when it appeared in the late 1970s, and
like many intellectual revolutions, gave literary form to the
politically denied yet obvious. One of the leading literary
critics of the twentieth century and a tireless champion of civilized
discourse about the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy, Said did nothing
less than expose the cultural scandal in Western approaches to
the Islamic world: the rotten alliance of enlightenment
and colonialism in which academics and novelists, clerks and
clerics, soldiers and tourists all confected our own accommodating
Muslim Orient, exotic, stagnant, weak yet threatening, prone
to despotism yet susceptible to liberation, and above all, relentlessly
different, inferior. Deep in the canon of American prejudice,
from Woodrow Wilson to Dick Chaney, no bond of ignorance, fear
and habit has been more powerful in Washington, save perhaps
the intimately related post-Holocaust laissez passer granted
Israel, though even that is fading as the Orientalism Express
barrels on.
Thus Washington's petty scapegoating
of retreat as Mr. Bush's neo-conservative mentors now regret
their underestimation of Iraqi "barbarism" and "depravity."
As the world's greatest superpower is humbled and humiliated
by one of the most skillful and successful guerrilla forces in
history, it's clear they hardly deserve our deliverance. Said
counsels us, of course, that exits, like entrances, must be informed
by cultural and historical sensibility-though that, too, seems
problematic at the moment.
Finally, what may seem an unlikely
key to the Washington scriptures-Joan Dideon's deeply affectingThe
Year of Magical Thinking. It is the story of the
eminent journalist's calamitous experience with the sudden death
of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, amid the mortal
illness of their daughter and only child. But Dideon's personal
account comes with such luminous simple truth-telling, fearless
honest detail and confronting of emotional meaning and human
limits-all virtues of integrity utterly missing in the process
of governance-that her small masterpiece seems today transcendently
political. It is not only that America has yet to face the grief
of losing the myth of who and what it has been in the world,
not only our desperate denials and ritual resorts. Mid-term
elections notwithstanding, the country is mired in magical thinking,
from the evangelicals' conviction that Mr. Bush's myopic, self-defeating
collusion with Israel is "God's foreign policy" to
the widespread liberal belief in some immunity from the ruin
of civil liberties or the looming economic disaster Mr. Bush
leaves in his wake. What could be more magical than the expectant
waiting of both Democrats and Republicans on the vaunted Iraq
Study Group, composed of aged policy derelicts with scant real
knowledge of the Middle East, to lead nicely out of the Babylonian
wilderness?
Dideon's is moving testimony,
again, of the heart's role in human affairs, that authentic transformations-exits-are
profoundly individual, and difficult, and that not all stories
end well, even if we manage some liberating awareness toward
the finish. It is something Washington should ponder.
These three, of course, should
be footnoted by glancing at a last irresistible title, Jean Paul
Sartre's classic dramaNo
Exit. As if speaking to an America inextricably tied to the
Middle East and world, yet whose hubris is so matched by ignorance
and denial, whose power is so vast yet so ebbing, the character
Inez says unforgettably, "It's not use trying to escape,
I'll never let you go." If only Sartre were in the White
House. "L'enfer, c'est les autres," he would
instruct them. "There's no escaping each other and there's
no escaping the truth."
Roger Morris, who served on the senior staff of
the National Security Council under Henry Kissinger and Richard
Nixon until resigning over the invasion of Cambodia, is an award-winning
author and historian whose new book, Shadows of the Eagle,
a history of US covert interventions and foreign policy in the
Middle East and South Asia, will be published by Alfred Knopf
next year.
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.
