Because You Never Asked

(6/05)

     Some of you out there in essay land might be familiar with an essay called "Introduction to Propaganda, 101". It was written about a year ago during my annual visit to the Spanish Mediterranean. With one year now in hand, we are moving into a more advanced course, as the title of this essay indicates.

     The inspiration for this essay was an article in the International Herald Tribune called "The Road Not Taken". Underlying its hostility to the foreign policy decisions of this Bush administration is a rather complete synthesis of the true essence of contemporary American propaganda as described in so many of these essays.

     What makes this article such a subtle form of propaganda is its unambiguous scorn for the unilateral actions of the W. Bush government and the reasons used to justify its military aggression. There is so much in this article I agree with, it took me awhile to understand just how much of its foundation is rotten, cracked, and still dangerous in a fundamental way.

     Just a few weeks before writing this essay, I penned another in this series called "Escape From America, III". It explained how the now obvious failure of this Iraqi gambit had mutated the original cheerleading approach of American media into a more somber examination of what has gone wrong; gloom, doom, what now? The piece of journalism now in question is a direct descendant of this more pessimistic look at Iraq.

     In getting more specific, we are discussing a book review by one H.D.S. Greenway. The book in question is entitled "The Opportunity", written by a Republican foreign policy wonk named Richard Haass. There is something about a person who foregoes his first name for 3 initials that is already cause for suspicion. I doubt if Mr. Greenway has any hip-hop music in his collection, but the spelling of Haass's name is even more blue-eyed oligargic. He is described as coming from the "traditionalist wing" of Republican foreign policy, but compared to what the neo-cons are currently up to, one could almost view him as another "Che" fighting for the downtrodden everywhere.

     And that is the danger here. The current Bush presidency is such a radical form of conservatism, that it makes the good old fashioned conservative we always reviled look like some kind of savior. As I read the article for the first time, I almost found myself yearning for Haass's brand of Republicanism to be back in power. It seemed so pure, so clean, so righteous. It was necessary to step back a bit from the detail and see it in its entirety, before one could realize that Mr. Haass, for all his criticism, was not much different from Cheney, Rummy, Rice & Company. Mr. Haass makes a lot of good foreign policy sense, but if we scrape away this thin cap of sobriety, underneath it all lies pretty much the same Republican-Tory animal of always . just a bit wiser, less naïve, and more patient. The goals are the same: neo-liberal, free market colonialism based upon a status quo that benefits the usual interests.

     Overly sympathizing with what Haass has to say is just another way of moving the center further to the right.

     Before riddling Haass's book with the machine gun fire it deserves, let's talk about some of the good sense he does make. Some of the passages H.D.S. attributes to the book almost seem plagiarized from this collection of essays, so much so that I'm tempted to call Haass a disciple of mine. We both bemoan the squandering of a unique moment in history for positive change. I quote, "Today there are no classic struggles for domination, no major territorial conflicts and no great ideological fault lines that so dominated the 20^th century." Compare that to what I wrote years ago in the essay "Palestinians and Europe". " . the Bush Gang has inherited a world where the big players, lead by the United States, have no appreciable predators and possess immense amounts of resources. It is a perfect moment in history to try and tackle some of the more pressing problems that have continued to be a ball and chain around the ankle of progress."

     Haass goes on to criticize the spreading of democracy as a legitimate foreign policy concern. "Democracy means power distributed and elections alone will not guarantee that. As a rule, 'electocracy' should not be confused with 'democracy'." I will only quote a nibbling amount of the similar material appearing in the essay "Spanish Tennis", but anyone reading the "full monty" can see, if not an identical twin, at least a sibling relationship with a strong resemblance. "The ideas 'democracy' and 'totalitarian', as given to us through our mainstream media outlets, can be very misleading. No matter how totalitarian a government might be, the popular will, with varying degrees of pain and suffering, will eventually become relevant. Conversely, even in the most democratic regimes, there are always backstage power brokers shaping the status quo to their own self-serving concepts of acceptability."

     H.D.S. goes on to distill Haass's book pretty much along these lines: no nation can act unilaterally; trying to impose democracy or some semblance of your idea of governance by force will fail; there were no WMD's; the human rights situation in Iraq did not warrant military intervention.

     This all sounds finger-lickin' good . until one begins to realize that "democracy", "human rights" or "WMD's" were only pretenses not reasons to go to war. Mr. Haass is criticizing policy decisions that were not credible factors to begin with. He is perpetrating the "Big Lie" of this war, to wit:

     I can only suppose that Mr. Haass knows a lot more about foreign policy than Post Consumer Man does. The mere suggestion that human rights abuses or the installation of a democratic government ever was, is, or will be the reason for an American military intervention (or any other imperial power), is a fable with an intellectual DNA similar to that of the tooth fairy. As for WMD's, for him to even remotely consider that these weapons ever really existed, or that Iraq, in 2002, was a security threat to the United States, could only be the result of a complete frontal lobotomy. There being no mention of such in the H.D.S's review of his book, one can only assume that Mr. Haass, as well as H.D.S., is not being sincere with us.

     Perhaps this would be a good time to mention that neither Mr. Haass nor the man who glowingly reviews his book, ever mentions the dreaded "o" word (oil).

     In the now hallowed tradition of American media coverage of this Iraqi war, the article currently being discussed will not go beyond criticizing policy decisions and into the realm of legality and, even more importantly, morality.

     Legality: in 2002, Iraq was a sovereign nation living within the rules of international law. For the sake of this moment in essay history, let's assume the Bush government actually acted because they really thought Iraq was not complying with certain U.N. treaty provisions dealing with weapons destruction. They attack, find nothing, but decide to continue the war anyway. This is something like convicting someone of murder, conclusively finding out later that this person is innocent, and executing this person anyway.

     In 2002, the United States attacked a sovereign nation at peace with the world without the use of any legal criteria permitting such action.

     But the morality issue is far more important. If you were to ask almost any American, "should we attack a country for no other reason than to improve our economy or enhance our material wealth?", I'm sure the answer would be "no". It took a complicated stage production to mount this burlesque and American media sources worked long and hard to do it. When so called experts like Richard Haass take the time to write a long book disagreeing with intellectual policies that did not even exist in fact, he is further legitimizing the "Big Lie" and giving the perpetrators of such a dastardly deed an excuse for their actions.

     No foreign policy can be a good one without some moral basis. Americans have to understand that this was not just a mistake in policy, it was a wicked act! If we cannot arrive to this conclusion, then the mistakes of history are doomed to be repeated.

     Just somewhere, sometime, in some mainstream American media outlet, I'd like to see someone like Haass or H.D.S. say, "you know, we've created death and destruction here in apocalyptic amounts that cannot be justified under any civilized code of behavior."

     Relevant Material: "I think there is an irremediable minority of wicked, cruel, unscrupulous people in the world that can't live any other way; and there is also a solid minority of honest, mature people, who can maintain their dignity even in the worst moments. Between these 2 extremes lie the rest of humanity, the living mass, well intentioned creatures who are weak; normal human beings, that is, in doubt and confused, that will be good if their surroundings are favorable and bad if the atmosphere in which they live is perverted."  From the novel "La Hija del Canibal" (The Daughter of the Cannibal), by the Spanish woman, Rosa Montero.