People like to do a moralistic take on big issues such as geopolitics and global policy, and in doing so they get sidetracked into confrontational mumbo-jumbo and tend to fall into a vortex of pointless ideological righteousness and propaganda. Some issues are too important to be matters of right or wrong, of left or right. They are matters of fact and pragmatism.
The fact is, the invasion of Iraq has been a massive and miserable failure. It was evident from the beginning that the motives for the invasion were suspect, but because of the moral outrage after the 9/11 massacre, the subsequent jingoism was hardly evitable. The reaction to the calamity served certain interests, specifically, “homeland” interests centering on internal political maneuvering and ostensible conservative “values”. Not to mention vengefulness and naked greed.
Curious how moral outrage tends to provoke moral turpitude. And that a vigorous defense of values tends to devalue the ultimately expectable results every time. This is what’s happened in the post 9/11 world. The results have been incompetence, denial, regression.
Cultural jingoism, laced with religious intransigence and moralistic value-laden reactions, have done little more than validate the twisted criminal logic that led to the act of terrorism in the first place - in fact, jingoism, intransigence and ill-advised reactions form part of the very vortex of terror itself. Terror feeds off of, legitimizes terror.
The fact is, the West has become less tolerant of individual rights and privacy, less rational, less safe. It has become more like the evil it purports to combat. How is ultimate victory supposed to be measured? Whose interests have been enhanced? Who won?
Evil won, dudes, and incompetence, and paranoia, and corruption. I’m not saying the West should have turned the other cheek, I’m not advocating some wishy-washy appeasement, I’m just saying that our “leaders” have taken advantage of a critical situation to further their personal political or economic agendas, using moralistic and religious propaganda, with scant regard for the general commonwealth.
In this, the major US political parties, the major Western nations, the major media and corporations, the major organizations, have played a negative part, have acted, in fact, against their own best practices and interests. Even those opposing the invasion of Iraq have acted selfishly, further complicating the issue.
It’s one thing to “support the troops”, quite another to support the general mayhem and ignorance that leads to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. When leadership fails, a trooper, credibly an honorable and fearless defender of freedom, becomes little more than a lame patsy.
Troopers do what they are told, because their code of honor limits them to trust their leaders and believe that they always act in the interest of general welfare. Thus, naysaying is a no-no, even doubt itself is anathema to the military code.
So when warriors break the code of submissive acquiescence, when they criticize and condemn the actions of the “leaders” that brought them into harm’s way, when they take that unnatural step forward, people need to sit up and listen. When it comes to rectifying the situation, to learning from our mistakes, it’s always better late than never.
Do we give these “leaders” the benefit of the doubt, say that gruesome mistakes were definitely made, and leave it at that? Don Rumsfeld, one of the architects of the current situation and the person perhaps most responsible for the failure of the military side of the current conflict, has been accused of being “intellectually bankrupt”. These are big words, coming from the officer who led the British army during the Iraq invasion, Retired Gen. Sir Mike Jackson.
Maj. Gen. Tim Cross, the most senior British officer involved in the postwar planning, has said that he posed early questions concerning an exit strategy to Rumsfeld, who dismissed them outright. Would you have bought stock in this enterprise?
"There is no doubt that with hindsight the U.S. postwar plan was fatally flawed and many of us sensed that at the time," Cross has said.
Ordering troops into harm’s way without a clear exit strategy is not only a “fatal flaw”, constitutes not just intellectual bankruptcy, it’s also a clear sign of moral turpitude, something we attribute to terrorists and with good reason. As a result, our world is less safe, we are all less free, and all this constitutes a massive failure of capitalist democracy.
Assumption of responsibilities? Judging by recent history I suppose the next step will be to propose George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and perhaps even Rumsfeld himself, as candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize. Right on.
