Unleashing Evil

An interview by Tom Engelhardt with Andrew Bacevich The Arrogance of American Power gives some interesting insights into the US military and the current situation in Iraq.

There are a couple of important implications that we have yet to confront. The war has exposed the limited depth of American military power. I mean, since the end of the Cold War we Americans have been beating our chests about being the greatest military power the world has ever seen. [His voice rises.] Overshadowing the power of the Third Reich! Overshadowing the Roman Empire! Wait a sec. This country of 290 million people has a force of about 130,000 soldiers committed in Iraq, fighting something on the order of 10-20,000 insurgents and a) we're in a war we can't win, b) we're in the fourth year of a war we probably can't sustain much longer.

Bacevich also questions the view that it is the neo-cons alone responsible for this defeat.

I object to the generals saying that our problems in Iraq are all due to the micromanagement and incompetence of Mr. Rumsfeld -- I do think he's a micromanager and a failure and ought to have been fired long ago -- because it distracts attention from the woeful performance of the senior military leaders who have really made a hash of the Iraq insurgency. I remember General Swannack in particular blaming Rumsfeld for Abu Ghraib. I'll saddle Rumsfeld with about ten percent of the blame for Abu Ghraib, the other ninety percent rests with the senior American military leaders in Baghdad

The takeover of the arm forces by neo-con interests is explaned but some interesting comments on Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are made.

I would emphasize that it's not because Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz are diabolical creatures intent on doing evil. They genuinely believe it's in the interests of the United States, and the world, that unconstrained American power should determine the shape of the international order. I think they vastly overstate our capabilities. For all of their supposed worldliness and sophistication, I don't think they understand the world. I am persuaded that their efforts will only lead to greater mischief while undermining our democracy. Yet I don't question that, at some gut level, they think they are acting on your behalf and mine. They are all the more dangerous as a result.

I would imagine few people in power don't justify their actions through the belief they are acting for the best. Cheney et al may not be motivated by the desire to do evil but their actions in seeking to control the might of the US miltary so they can impose their will on the rest of the planet has surely unleashed evil. It is their belief they have access to an assured knowledge that causes them to act this way. This is why they are so dangerous. That they are prepared to act this out even while others die and suffer to inform them they have no such knowledge involves them in evil. Even though the creepy precence projected by Cheney and Wolfowitz sometimes seems to suggest otherwise one does not have to be evil to do evil. People are still responsible for the consequences of their actions when assured knowledge lets them surrender to hubris and abandon the duties of morality. That they may not be evil in no way way absconds them from responsibility of the evil they have unleashed.

Truth and Illusion

Mike Whitney at The Smirking Chimp gives a summary of the conditions in Iraq appropriately entitled ‘Kicking open the gates of Hell’ The horror and chaos reported gives the lie to Republican administrations message of ‘alls well’ and exposes the futility of ‘staying the course'.

Whitney gives a couple of quotes that help illustrate the disconnect between the reality of Iraq and the official explanation.

“There's no plan!" Murtha said on Meet the Press. "You open up this plan for victory. There's no plan there. It's just, 'Stay the course.'
“The war in Iraq is not going as advertised" Murtha said. "It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion”

He also quotes from Robert Fisk

"Sometimes I wonder if there will be a moment when reality and myth, truth and lies, will actually collide. When will the detonation come? When the insurgents wipe out an entire US base? When they pour over the walls of the Green Zone and turn it into the same trashed blocks as the rest of Baghdad? Or will we then be told -- as we have been in the past -- that this just shows the 'desperation' of the insurgents, that these terrible acts only prove that the 'terrorists' know they are losing?" (Robert Fisk, "What does Democracy really mean in the Middle East" Aug, 2005)

Meanwhile Fisk's moment of truth and illusion comes closer as the Iraqi government calls a state of emergency and a curfew while troops battle insurgents within earshot of the green zone. Back in the USA illusions continue to be spun when Rick Santorum announces that WMD’s have been found in Iraq.Although the story was quickly debunked the lie has served its purpose. Unclaimed Territory provides links to some right wing blogs that feverishly maintain the WMD illusion, and news sources that obscure the truth of what they are reporting.

The Republicans have decided on their stratergy but it addresses their election chances not the actual conflict they have caused. Expect their hired lackeys and the willingly duped to increasingly pump out this illusionary fog in the the run up to November.

Selling Iraq

Walter Benjamin once pointed out

The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values. All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.

The Republican administration mired in failed policies and mindful of the upcoming elections is flailing about for issues to run on. Politics in the USA has long escaped dealing with things of substance in favor of appearance. The shiny surface image is everything as practice honed in the world of advertising replaces political discourse. Mentally impaired snitches become canonized and personality cults form around mean spirited dunces. So when it comes to talking up the Republican record it is a matter of deciding which pigs ear can be turned into a silk purse. The recent killing of Abdul Zarqawi has been seen as an opportunity to talk up the success of the Iraq war and Vice President Cheney has sallied forth to convince the electorate that the debacle in Iraq is a triumph of statecraft.
The Washington Post reports

Speaking at the National Press Club, Cheney predicted that 10 years from now people will look back at 2005 and say, That's when we began to get a handle on the long-term future of Iraq.

Cheney also stated

I don't think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we've encountered

The article goes on to point the basic untruth of this statement. Cheney has been at work for some time trying to dress up the rotten meat of the Iraq war as something more palatable . Famously in 2003 he informed Meet The Press

I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators

and of course the turning point in 2005 that he refers to above is his statement.

The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency

Cheney bases his analysis of the situation in Iraq on what he percieves as a the continuing success of the institution of a stablee and viable political structure.

Nevertheless, Cheney said he was "absolutely convinced we did the right thing in Iraq." He said the United States was making "major progress" in Iraq, where a transitional government took power in April and was working on drafting a new constitution.

This is an extension of his view expressed in 2003 before the war.

But the point is this is not a nation without resources, and when it comes time to rebuild and to make the kinds of investments that are going to be required to give them a shot at achieving a truly representative government, a successful government, a government that can defend itself and protect its territorial integrity and look to the interests of its people, Iraq starts with significant advantages. It’s got a well- trained middle class, a highly literate work force, a high degree of technical sophistication. This is a country that I think, but for the rule of Saddam Hussein and his brutality and his diversion of the nation’s resources and his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, can be one of the leading, perhaps the leading state in that part of the world in terms of developing a modern state and the kind of lifestyle that its people are entitled to.
They understand the importance of preserving and building on an Iraqi national identity. They don’t like to have the U.S., for example, come in and insist on dealing with people sort of on a hyphenated basis—the Iraqi-Shia, Iraqi-Sunni—but rather to focus on Iraq as a nation and all that it can accomplish as a nation, and we try to be sensible to those concerns. I think the prospects of being able to achieve this kind of success, if you will, from a political standpoint, are probably better than they would be for virtually any other country and under similar circumstances in that part of the world.

Cheney has maintained a consistent story of success and this is what is going to be sold in the runup to November.

Unfortunately for the Republicans inconvenient facts have kept emerging of massacres, torture and increasing American casualties that keep tearing holes in the flimsy fabric they try to dress the horror of Iraq in. The Washington Post has also published a memo (pdf) from within the US embassy that gives a very different view of the progress of governance within the country.

Our staff report that security and services are being rerouted though ‘local providers’ whose affiliations are vague. As noted above, those who are admonishing citizens on their dress are not known to the residents. Neighborhood power providers are not well known either, nor is it clear how they avoid robbery or targeting. Personal safety depends on good relations with the “neighborhood” governments, who barricade streets and ward off outsiders. The central government, our staff says, is not relevant; even local mukhtars have been displaced or co-opted by militias. People no longer trust most neighbors.

It is a well known axiom that nothing sells like success and under aestheticized politics it is only the illusion of success that needs to be projected. Cheney's lies will be sold to an electorate that only buys shiny surfaces and even though the tinsel is fast wearing off, they may be preferable to the dull reality of failure and defeat.

The End of Capitalism

Gabriel Kolko has a post up on Counterpunch that outlines problems within the world economic system.

It seems that that Neo Liberal economics don’t work. How many times will laissez faire policies have to crash and burn before that message sinks in?

The entire global financial structure is becoming uncontrollable in crucial ways its nominal leaders never expected. Instability is increasingly its hallmark. Financial liberalization has produced a monster, and resolving the many problems that have emerged is scarcely possible for those who deplore controls on those who seek to make money, whatever means it takes to do so. Contradictions now wrack the world's financial system, and if we are to believe the institutions and personalities who have been in the forefront of the defense of capitalism, it may very well be on the verge of serious crises.

One conclusion he reaches seems of particular interest.

The rules some once erroneously associated with capitalism -- probity and the like--no longer hold even on paper.

This raises the question; what exactly is capitalism? Most of its defenders trot out the usual stuff about freedom, democracy, opportunity, choice etc. But it seems to me that these are merely the ideological justifications that mystify its true nature. History should show us that any freedoms, liberties and wealth gained by the masses during the modern era have been fought and struggled for rather than benignly bestowed by capital. A lot of these have been lost over the last generation and now with rationality, probity, and sustainability being stripped away, what is left? The almost unthinkable question may now be be asked. Can capitalism fail? And if it does, what then?