JOHN THE OBSCURE ™
By John Ruch
© 2007
The
“How stand I then…
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That for a fantasy and a trick of fame
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!”
—Shakespeare, “Hamlet”
President Bush sold the war against Iraq with ever-shifting rationales, a ridiculous Sturm-und-Drang mission title and outright lies. The term “weapons of mass destruction” entered the common lexicon, with Bush warning that Saddam Hussein was within a year of building an atomic bomb that somehow stayed lost in the mail. It was a war of “good versus evil” to protect “our way of life,” Bush said. But it eventually became crystal clear that the war was only about oil, a personal vendetta, war profiteering and demagogic glory. Ultimately, it led to further Middle East destabilization, human rights abuses and a dramatic increase in terrorism.
Heard it all before? That’s right—and for longer than you remember, chumps. I speak not of G.W. and the ongoing Iraq War but of his father and the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Of the myriad reasons to oppose the Iraq War—like basic logic and elementary skepticism—this was by far the most simple and persuasive: We had already heard this joke before.
Indeed, we had heard it a mere 12 years before—within the careers of the senior journalists who helped stupefy the public and within the lifetimes of the teenagers who were being ordered to kill and die in Round Two.
How many flowerpots would have to fall from how many windowsills and hit how many heads to cause this much amnesia? I suppose the simplest explanation is that 99 percent of people are dumber than a box of rocks, so it doesn’t really matter what rattles around in there.
But clearly, it is the content rather than the process of memory that is the problem. The Gulf War (a name so aptly echoing a gas station chain) was a rapid, triumphalist, pep rally war. It sent America into an appalling necrophiliac frenzy, a nationalistic manic episode manifesting as an enormously overinflated sense of self-esteem. Such cities as Pittsburgh seriously believed they would host annual Gulf War victory parades for decades to come. The war was like a pagan sacrifice: Sure, the slaughter was inane, but the after-frenzy felt so good—so who cares? As Hitler so perspicaciously put it in words and later in deeds, “I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war—never mind whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory.”1 The Gulf War proved that in spades—and parades.
Hitler, thankfully, lost his war, so questions got asked. The US “won” its war and got a memory wipe to boot. Next thing you know, the same people who spoke of “weapons of mass destruction” in 1991 actually believed they were hearing it for the first time again in 2003. Meanwhile, Hussein still didn’t have that darn nuke.
War always involves lies, cynical ploys and thuggish tribalism—how else could you convince utter strangers to kill each other by the thousands? But there was something special, and deliberate, in Bush I’s pioneering use of miniature wars as Snickers bars—a quick, easy sugar high for American morale.
Bush I in his inaugural address: “It’s been this way since Vietnam. That war cleaves us still. But, friends, that war began in earnest a quarter of a century ago; and, surely, the Statute of Limitations has been reached. This is a fact: The final lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory.”
Bush I after the Gulf War: “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”
The biggest lie of the Gulf War wasn’t in its spurious beginnings but in this illusory ending. We “liberated” neither Kuwait—a barbaric oil monarchy—nor Iraq. We merely fed the delusion that we were now an omnipotent, undivided, sole superpower—that “what we say goes,” as Bush I explained it. By “Vietnam syndrome,” Bush I meant the Vietnam lesson—that starting a stupid war based on a bald lie tends to wreck our economy and, more importantly, our honor, morals and integrity.
The horrendous irony, of course, is that the Vietnam syndrome is back with a vengeance—right there in Iraq. G.W., that twisted Oedipal monster, had been so successful at his master plan of besting his father—getting re-elected, getting a tax cut, getting Hussein. Why couldn’t he have the quick, sugar-high war, too? Why shouldn’t the model work this time? It’s what 80 percent of the American public expected. It’s what many of them were raised to expect by raised expectations of virtually painless, sacrifice-free TV wars.
It’s remarkable how deeply the very architects of the Gulf War mirage bought into their own lie 12 years later. At the time, the US didn’t attempt to capture Hussein because that would mean starting an urban war within Baghdad—what many officials, including Bush I and then-defense secretary Dick Cheney, said would create a “quagmire” war, another Vietnam. (“This will not be another Vietnam,” Bush I pledged at the time.) Now, a nearly identical administration and advisers (notably excluding Colin Powell) have led us into exactly that kind of war and that kind of quagmire under a delusion of American superiority they didn’t even hold back then. We kicked the Vietnam syndrome, all right. Now it’s kicking back.
In a tragic, abominable way, this might be a good thing. America needs a bad war to teach it a lesson. But this isn’t that war. This is a virtual exercise that to most people exists only as headlines. Vietnam only taught us a lesson because it coincided with what was basically a civil war over civil rights in this country. A country grows wise only from wars on its own soil. Of course, 50,000 dead, drafted US troops also made the horror real to almost everyone in the country; 3,000 dead “volunteers” in Iraq is only enough to barely tweak the US conscience, a figure still potentially redeemable as a sugar-high sacrifice.
No, I think the lesson of Iraq will be that we need to get back to the sugar-high war as soon as possible. Or at least to the pointless, ineffectual, immoral carpet-bombing/long-range missile-shooting approach. We will do this again and again and again. Children now in kindergarten will die over some stupid lie 15 or 20 years from now.
I no longer believe that I, or anyone, can alter this; it’s patently clear that humans are in part deeply evil beasts that lust for murder. All I want is to win my own bloodless war by being able to say I was right—just like I can now say I’m absolutely, unquestionably wiser and smarter than our murderous freak of a president, his entire administration, the vast majority of Congress, everybody who agreed to fight in this thing and 80 percent of the unbelievably moronic American public. It’s about as satisfying as a grave-dirt sandwich, but there it is. It’ll be enough that I said no; that, while we all now have blood on our hands, I’m one of the few who didn’t put it there myself.
The only brake on my pessimism is the possibility that the US won’t last long enough for another circle jerk of mass murder. This war and our related barbarisms such as torture and military tribunals have gone beyond foolish, or dishonest, or even shameful and into the realm of national suicide. As we spit on our most cherished ideals in these acts of panicked bullying, wasting lives and treasure, the Chinese century is dawning.
The president who claims to be defending “our way of life” doesn’t even believe in it. Human rights? No, human luxuries, available only to select classes of Americans. Freedom? It’s too scary; the devil likes freedom. We’re not fighting for American freedom; we’re fighting against it, trampling it in an insane, chimp-like bluffing display to prove how tough we are. America is now too cowardly to live up to the radical promises of its founding documents; the Republicans want “strict constructionists” to interpret laws they stupidly consider too weak to protect us anyhow. I believe in the truth and resilience of our founding principles, but I don’t believe they’re granted by some deity; they’re either fought for or they go away. G.W. is exterminating them like pests.
And by “fought for,” I don’t mean a cheap excuse to put a bullet in the eye of some foreign mother’s son. I mean standing up for the sanctity of individual human integrity—saying that silencing someone or locking them in some extrajudicial prison is the moral equivalent of murder. That’s why I never want to hear another solider, torturer or tyrant talking about how my freedoms are the results of their bloodshed. It’s exactly the opposite cause and effect. It is the passionate products of independent minds that, through freedom of speech in particular, may imbue a soldier with honor. Any soldier can kill for any reason; that doesn’t create freedom or anything else. It is pre-existing freedom that gives soldiers purpose. Freedom lives in individuals, not in mass groups and certainly not in armies. The Continental Army didn’t empower Thomas Paine to speak his mind; Thomas Paine empowered the Continental Army to have something to fight for.
Exhorting troops not to kill is an entirely different task, and likely an impossible one. So my goal here will merely be to describe my observations like an astronomer predicting the return of a comet—or of an eclipse.
America has always had trouble figuring out what it was fighting for in wars, all the way back to the early Colonial rift between the comfy merchants who merely wanted independence and the Utopian radicals who were on the trail of liberty. We have had an alarming tendency to start wars based on complete lies, typically packaged as some vague assault on a national identity that barely exists in the first place.
The Spanish-American War, our first war of truly international imperialism, is the shining example and clear inspiration to the Bush family. Starting with a dubious incident, the government manufactured a cynical lie and embarked on a ruthless war with no other goal than acquiring an empire. It was the war that gave us the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, that illegal territory on which we now do illegal things (or rather, things that will be viewed as illegal three decades from now, when people look back on this time with shame). “Remember the ‘Maine’!” was the cry of the era. No one does, of course, but if they did, they might not be so quick to believe in forged uranium-trading documents and the like.
After that, we had wars started over outrageous lies, like Vietnam. And we had quickie pep rally wars, like Grenada.
What Bush I gave us was an extraordinary combination of the two, along with an amazingly Machiavellian new goal—to remove dictators who had been established by the US in general and Bush I in particular, but who had now become dangerous embarrassments. (Of course, we had done this before, but always off-stage via assassination, fomented coups, rigged elections, etc.)
The incredible lie, the Snickers bar war with a stupid nationalist mission title and the set-’em-up/knock-’em-down removal of Frankenstein’s monsters: this is the new recipe for America’s blood feast. The only reason G.W.’s in trouble is because he’s a very bad cook.
If the Gulf War is now forgotten except for peripheral items like the survival of Hussein, the 1989 invasion of Panama is as disappeared as your right to know whether the FBI is conducting searches of your home and library records. It is a lethal forgetfulness, because that is where Bush I invented this cynical new calculus that continues to formulize our fate.
Indeed, in its era, Panama was an incredible Orwellian spectacle, a war that no one understood but everyone loved to observe, a war that began hardening much of the American public into fascist vampires hungry for blood. I was in college at the time, where students gathered to watch the war on TV, cheering the tracer bullets flying in night-vision images.2 Most of them had no idea who the bullets were killing, or why; but rather than creating confusion, this somehow distilled to a rare purity the joy of American triumph. It was a lesson I, and Bush I, learned quickly.
The nominal problem in Panama was its effective dictator, Manuel Noriega. He was a tyrannical thug and a known drug trafficker. The only reason he was dictator was that he was on the CIA payroll from 1967 onward, including when Bush I was CIA director and a Noriega pal. Noriega had been trained in “intelligence” work by the government in the US, including at Fort Bragg. The US government participated actively in Noriega’s thuggery, including drugs-for-arms deals for Nicaraguan contra fighters; rigging of elections; and continued major funding of his praetorian Panamanian Defense Forces (PDF) even when it was clear they committed crimes up to and including murder.
Predictably enough, Noriega was becoming quite smug about this situation, and hence ever more outrageous. Worse still, he was becoming a blabbermouth braggart. With former crony Bush I now the US president, the situation was ripe for major embarrassment. Noriega had to go.
First came the big lie. After being prepped with the image of Noriega as a drug lord (minus any discussion of how the US made him so), we were hit with a “USS Maine” scenario: unarmed Americans soldiers were shot at a PDF roadblock. Worse still, there was a threat against white womanhood; a lieutenant’s wife was supposedly threatened with rape. It later became apparent that these soldiers were drunk and/or belligerent and certainly somewhere they weren’t supposed to go; but “later” means “forgotten” in the mythos of war.
The war began immediately after this pretext. But it had been the offing for months, as US troops built up and went on maneuvers. It was patently obvious—if one was looking—that there was a war looking for a cause.
The cause was found in the tautological name Operation Just (Be)Cause. The Snickers bar war began. It was an overwhelming military strike, including the first public revelation of the stealth bomber—an elephant gun used to swat a fly. Meanwhile, another precedent was set in the deliberate non-counting of massive civilian “collateral damage.”
The main goal, of course, was removing our Frankenstein’s Noriega. It worked beautifully. He was humiliated and demonized; his choice of underwear was mocked; it was announced that a huge amount of cocaine was found in his freezer (though it was later admitted it was just tamale flour, too late for anyone to remember). He was driven out of his palace and forced to take sanctuary in the Vatican embassy. In yet another precedent for American war and torture techniques, the military blasted the embassy with high-volume hard rock incessantly (and did the same to a hotel full of journalists that made them suspicious). Noriega eventually surrendered and was tossed into a US federal prison.
Why not just shoot Noriega if Bush I really wanted him silenced? You must understand the value of creating a political prisoner. Noriega was debased as a criminal, and even though he was put on trial and continues to rot in a Miami cell, no one paid any attention. The Snickers bar war was over; his news value and credibility were zero. Meanwhile Bush I—and his son, whose own coke probably ran through Noriega’s Panama on the way to his nose—remained securely unembarrassed in power. It was a war so short and triumphant that no one even had time to ask how illegal it is to violate national sovereignty by invading a country and arresting its president; and afterward, no one cared to ask. (Based on this precedent, I hereby offer G.W. to any other nation’s prison system.)
Americans were happy enough to see the downfall of this demon they were too ignorant to even understand or identify. But our nationalist joy really pumped over the invasion’s other stated goals: restoring democracy and ending drug trafficking.
The US immediately rigged another election, the winner of which was tied to drug trafficking by 1990.
“If I know how the sea is charted,
Then commerce, war and piracy
Are three in one and can’t be parted.”
—Goethe, “Faust”
Panama was little more than a training exercise for the Gulf War. Far more than Noriega, Hussein was another dictator set up by the US and becoming increasingly wild and embarrassing. He had been heavily funded by the US because he went to war with Iran (yet another country our demonizing and meddling had turned ugly), and because he was a secular leader in an increasingly destabilized Middle East.
But Hussein was also a maniac willing to gas people to death, and to hang a British journalist as a “spy.” This led Iraq to be gradually ostracized by virtually all of Europe, with Amnesty International repeatedly decrying its human rights abuses.
But right up until a few months before the war, Bush I was still allowing the sales of arms and dual-use technology that could be used to create chemical weapons to Iraq—making the US the only major industrial nation to still do so. (That continued the practice of the Reagan administration, in which Bush I was, of course, vice president.) Doing so even involved Bush I issuing an executive order allowing him to ignore a declaration by Congress that Iraq was a “terrorist state,” with Bush I saying it was “in the national interest” to continue arming Hussein.
Hussein has since been hanged for the crimes the US excused and enabled. I will never defend the death penalty, but I’m a big fan of logic; Bush I should’ve hanged alongside him.
But at some point, Bush I decided that Hussein was too embarrassing and had to go. This was likely before Iraq’s infamous invasion of Kuwait, the pretext for war. The murky circumstances of that invasion include the apparent thumbs-up that Hussein got from the US ambassador. The invasion involved disputed oil fields.
Suddenly, Bush I now believed that Hussein was “worse than Hitler,” that opposing him put us “on the side of God” and pitted “good versus evil.” And so, of course, did an American public whose knowledge of geography extends no farther than their driveway; of foreign policy no farther than World War II movies; and of skepticism nowhere at all.
As Bush I moved US forces into place, he struggled to invent a reason for the war. At first, it was “Operation Desert Shield”—a supposed defense of Saudi Arabia from Iraq attack, though Iraq never expressed interest in doing anything more than settling the Kuwaiti oil field dispute.
Eventually, the propaganda focused on one successful issue: the idea of “liberating” Kuwait, an act that would defend “our way of life.”
Kuwait was, and pretty much still is, a barbaric oil monarchy operating on virtual slavery. Twenty-five percent of the population were household servants. Torture and extrajudicial execution were commonplace. The country was nominally a democracy—in which only 8 percent of the men, and none of the women, were eligible to vote. (Women finally got the vote in 2005, though they must still use separate polling places.)3
Perhaps it reminded Bush I of Old Texas; other than that, he made no sense whatsoever. But, of course, America thrilled to the prospect of killing thousands and sacrificing hundreds of its own youths to rescue this undiscovered country. (The romanticizing of Kuwait continued in post-war victory parades, one of which featured 25 Kuwaiti children singing the US national anthem—a brainchild of Roger Ailes, the Joseph Goebbels of the Bush I administration and now mastermind of Fox News.)
Hussein was a maniac, but he wasn’t stupid. His valid understanding of dictatorship was that if you blustered enough, you would get attention and some sort of deal for backing down. By all accounts, he was quite willing to end the Kuwait occupation peacefully. But he didn’t understand that the US needed him to play the new role of devil.
Our ally King Hussein (no relation) of Jordan said at the time, in words just as relevant about the current war, that peace was impossible because America was hellbent on conspiring for war: “I’m not angry [with the American people]. I’m maybe angry for them, really, because I believe the United States—with all of the changes that have occurred in the world, many [of] which came as a total surprise to us—had a great opportunity to help the world, [as] the strongest power on the globe, to see us move in a manner even towards helping us identify with the American people…in terms of upholding lofty ideals and principles and treating problems equally wherever they are in the world, and to use its power sparingly and constructively….I believe that every attempt that I made, that any of us made in this region to eliminate this bloodbath, this destruction, was unfortunately blocked….I found a new situation that developed over the last few years. And that is an attitude which I don’t believe is becoming of the United States….It is something along the lines of, ‘You are either for us or you are against us.’”
There was another lie as well—that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction ready to go against the entire world, even the US. He certainly did have some back then—thanks to us—but he showed no inclination to threaten much of anybody outside his own borders, with the notable exception of Israel. He was moments away from having a nuke, even, we were told.
Meanwhile, we allied ourselves with one definite terrorist state that already had killed US citizens—Syria, which was still harboring a Pan Am bombing suspect. Syrian troops were actually scheduled to march in New York City’s post-war victory parade, a grotesque spectacle prevented only by complaints from victims’ families and Jewish groups. (As I write, controversy has erupted over US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s plans to visit the president of Syria, with G.W.’s administration pompously protesting that Syria is “a state sponsor of terror.” So why isn’t Bush I being tortured in a Guantanamo hotbox?)
Virtually the same situation—only worse—unfolded during the current Iraq War. Saddam Hussein was irredeemable, a clear and present danger to American lives, we were told. Meanwhile, we resumed relations with Libya’s Muammar Al-Gaddafi, who actually has been directly responsible for terrorist deaths of US citizens (with the Pan Am bombing again, to boot). Why, friendship and economic incentives work, we were told there—not that anyone paid attention. Gaddafi got his picture taken shaking Tony Blair’s hand.
Syria was our ally because the Bush I administration pulled an amazing trick, both rhetorical and financial-incentive-laden, of converting the United Nations fully from an organization chartered to end war to one that now gives war a patina of righteousness. With a mythical “coalition” in place, Bush I was able to inflate this piddly little bullying session of a war into the second coming of V-E Day.
Like Panama, it was another overkill extravaganza, and an even bigger Nielsen’s hit. War used to mean sacrifice; now it meant entertainment. As “Newsweek” quoted a University of Oklahoma student at the time, “I’m gonna pop some popcorn and watch the war.” Arnold Schwarzenegger was convinced to purchase the first Hummer, the civilian version of the new military Humvee, in an advertising move. (You know, the vehicle he pledged to convert to hybrid on the eve of the next oil war in Iraq.) Oh, we had a grand old time.
The only downer was that Hussein, this diabolical, worse-than-Hitler madman stockpiling weapons of mass destruction in a bid to take over the entire world, was allowed to remain in power. This indeed remained unsatisfying and even inexplicable, but the high of victory was so great that it was easily forgiven. And that was the brilliance of Bush I—balancing those war ingredients. Getting rid of Hussein would be ideal, but a quick flashbulb war was even better.
And anyway, all the bluster about Hussein and Iraq was always mostly pretext for a hidden invasion—of Saudi Arabia.
On March 12, 1990—well before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait—the Associated Press reported: “The Army may keep a command center in the Saudi Arabian capital of Ridyah, and American troops may train on the Arabian peninsula as the U.S. military abandons its traditionally low-key presence in the Persian Gulf.” And after the Gulf War, with very little notice, the US military made those bases permanent presences (leaving only at the start of the current Iraq War, in which Saudi Arabia refused to participate).
This US occupation in Osama bin Laden’s home country rather correctly outraged him, and is specifically and directly what led him to orchestrate the Sept. 11 and other terrorist attacks against us. It was this, dear Pittsburgh et al., not victory parades, that is the true lasting legacy of the Gulf War.
Let us not forget that it also directly produced our second-worst terrorist attack on US soil, thanks to Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh. From a post-conviction letter he sent to—naturally—Fox News: “Additionally, borrowing a page from U.S. foreign policy, I decided to send a message to a government that was becoming increasingly hostile, by bombing a government building and the government employees within that building who represent that government. Bombing the Murrah Federal Building was morally and strategically equivalent to the U.S. hitting a government building in Serbia, Iraq, or other nations. Based on observations of the policies of my own government, I viewed this action as an acceptable option. From this perspective, what occurred in Oklahoma City was no different than what Americans rain on the heads of others all the time, and subsequently, my mindset was and is one of clinical detachment. (The bombing of the Murrah building was not personal, no more than when Air Force, Army, Navy, or Marine personnel bomb or launch cruise missiles against government installations and their personnel.)”
McVeigh may be the only memorable Gulf War veteran among thousands revered as “heroes” for approximately nine months and then utterly forgotten. Bush I was eager to discuss the “Vietnam syndrome,” but not the Gulf War syndrome, that complex of chronic health symptoms that reportedly still plagues veterans. One of the possible causes still under consideration is an experimental anthrax vaccine that troops were forced to take as human guinea pigs—something I decried vociferously at the time, though it was overlooked then and forgotten today. America doesn’t want its heroes to complain. America wasn’t allowed to see US troops coming home in coffins, either—another precedent set. Children’s book author Philip Pullman has a good term for this: “the treachery of looking away.”4
Instead, we heard much about the low US troop mortality rate. Later (too late to matter) we learned that there was a high rate of friendly-fire deaths. There was at least one atrocity (the “turkey shoot” of a caravan including refugees and ambulances) and at least one more great wartime lie (very clever massaging and inventing of information about oil slicks deliberately created by Iraq as “environmental warfare”; the images of dying seabirds, etc., were actually from earlier spills caused by US air strikes).
In short, it was tidy exemplar for the Iraq War, which G.W.’s administration clearly intended to carry out from its first day in office, though only when the hunt for bin Laden went bad did it become pressing.5
Finally, the Bush family got greedy. It thought it could hang Hussein and have a Snickers bar war. Turns out the latter is a lot more fun than the former. As Bush I might have emphasized, it’s supposed to be the war that’s quick and the dictator who lingers.
All of this may well be setting up the Iraq War III, depending on what freakazoid we eventually convince to “run” that anarchic nightmare. We may well get another Hussein to set up and knock down. Or maybe it’ll be Iran, or Pakistan, or something even smaller and easier to push around.6
Or maybe we won’t be so lucky as to have such a solid puppet theater of war again. After the Cold War, we heard a lot about “new enemies”—narcostates, terrorists, rogue enemies of the New World Order. But there’s something very traditional about bin Laden. Like Noriega and Hussein, he’s yet another former US lackey (in his case, against the Soviets in Afghanistan) who decided to turn our training against us.7 The only differences are that he’s far more violent and doesn’t sit in some overblown palace politely waiting to get arrested or hanged. We used to create Frankenstein’s monsters; now we create ghosts, vampires, elusive creatures of our own nights. This ongoing war is creating more of them by the month.
So we certainly have more villains to look forward to. Of course, right now it seems impossible that the American public would accept the premise of a quick, easy war. But this too shall pass. Our lust for standing atop a pile of easily collected corpses is too strong. We shall fight this war again and again and again, trying to get it perfect. The Bush formula will be whipped up again. It may taste good; it may taste bad; but we’ll eat it either way.
Toddlers now in kindergarten will fight in it. Some cold, evil bastard now being trained by the US military will be the target of it. Lots of people just trying to live their lives will die by metal and fire in it.
Do you have children? Call them over, sit them down for a chat. Tell them this great nation that you hold so dear can’t promise them Social Security or health care or their next meal. But it can guarantee them a lifetime of war.
And you fucking look them in the eyes when you tell them.
1 Speaking on the eve of the
invasion of Poland—a war the Nazis started with a trick that made it seems like
Germany was under attack—in a private meeting with military chiefs on Aug. 22,
1939. No official record of the meeting and Hitler’s apparently improvised
remarks exists. William Shirer, in his “The Rise and Fall
of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany,” pieced together this and other
quotations from three collections of private notes made by meeting attendees
and submitted as evidence at the Nuremberg trials. Shirer
noted that all three versions were “similar in content” but not identical; a
fourth account that “may have been embellished a little by persons who were not
present” was rejected as evidence, though it’s unclear whether Shirer used it. It should be acknowledged that Shirer’s work, while broadly accurate, is crippled by ad hominem attacks and deliberate omissions, such as the Nazi
persecution of gays and lesbians. Incidentally, this quote has become popular
online, typically unsourced, and never with this sort
of contextualization—this is one of the benefits of knowing all my lefty-isms
from first-hand research, discoveries and experiences rather than from somebody
else’s pamphlet. The first place I ever saw this quote was in Shirer’s book, which I read cover-to-cover.
2 I was already an inveterate
collector of weird news clippings. I later assembled those related to Bush I’s wars into a collage collection eventually titled “Read
My Apocalypse.” It remains my main textual source for this column. As it was a
piece of political art, not historical research, I did not record the date and
source of most of the clippings. But the main source publications were the New
York Times, “Newsweek,” “The Nation,” The Village Voice and Associated Press
wire material in a variety of other publications.
3 Another glorious
outcome of the Iraq War, three months after the capture of Hussein, was massive
gains by fundamentalist Muslims and monarchists in Kuwait’s 2003 parliamentary
elections. Western-leaning liberals lost nine of their 14 seats. As the mythos
of the current Iraq War grew, the mythos of the previous Iraq war collapsed.
And yet, these election results were described only in a brief wire report in
the July 7, 2003 Boston Globe with no reference at all to the Gulf War—though
on the same page as a story headlined, “U.S. soldier shot dead at Baghdad
University.”
4 In “The Golden Compass:
His Dark Materials Book I.” The full line: “Her dear, her brave one, her
fearless defender, was going to die, and she would not do him the treachery of
looking away, for if he looked at her he must see her shining eyes and their
love and belief, not a face hidden in cowardice or a shoulder fearfully turned
away.”
5 To conflate the
arguments of a friend of mine and, of all people, Donald Trump, how is it that
a goofy ex-hippie metalhead can wander over to
Afghanistan and become Azzam the American, prominent
in the Al-Qaeda hierarchy, but the entire US military
and intelligence network cannot even begin to locate its 6’4”, reportedly
dialysis-dependent chieftain? My friend and I recently brainstormed our plan
for finding bin Laden, involving a DARPA-funded documentary action movie; it
made us laugh, but it would work better than this fascist government that is
great at cracking down on us and lousy at catching someone who matters. That is
to say, it actually would work. (Related observations: Is it merely coincidence
that all these names sound like they’re off 1980s GI Joe file cards? And I
believe I will eventually be proved correct that the name “Azzam”
has something to do with the Egyptian death metal scene.)
6 Two days after
publication of this column, ABC News revealed a great candidate—Jundullah, an Islamofascist, Al-Qaeda-allied terrorist/guerilla squad in Pakistan, and its
thuggish leader Abdulmalak Rigi
(or Abd el Malik Regi), which the US government has reportedly been aiding
and abetting since 2005 in its border raids of Iran. If this indeed proves
true, it means that: After Sept. 11 we went to war against Al-Qaeda; inexplicably decided to declare Iran “evil” in the bargain;
empowered Iran by destroying Iraq; and are now allied against Iran with a
partner of Al-Qaeda. (And also that G.W. has
committed treason and should be cowering in an embassy, stuffing his ears with
toilet paper against a perpetual blasting of the Dixie Chicks, as French troops
invade to arrest him.) Don’t worry about trying to follow all this—when we go
to war against a Jundullah-ruled independent Baluchistan or whatever the case may be, it will all be a
yummy little Snickers bar of “good vs. evil.”
7
Posted April 1, 2007. (Absolutely no fooling.) Updated
April 3 and 5 and June 29, 2007.