What would happen if...?

What's with this 'civil war' stuff in Iraq? From what I've read Iraq is supposed to be the least religious country in the region. It's supposed to be a tribal culture; thus, Saddam's ruling Sunnis were less Sunnis than Tikritis, the town and region whence he came. And while I can imagine religious tension and strife are we missing something (or being misled) by all this talk of a religious civil war? Picture Catholics at war with Baptists in the United States. Most religious denominations in Christianity contain a full spectrum of ideologies: think the Vatican versus liberation theology priests in Latin America, or pacifists versus flag-wavers in Protestant groups. Maybe this Sunni-Shiite 'war' is just a simplistic gloss on more basic struggles among different interest groups. I can imagine some Iraqis backing the US occupation and wanting strong ties to the US while other groups, more nationalistic or with different economic agendas, being in serious opposition. Reporters may be limited in their understanding, or limited in their space or time, or they could have ideological biases of their own. Perhaps what we have in Iraq is a central government that wants to consolidate power and is basically sending out death squads to eliminate the opposition (many reports claim the killers or kidnappers wear police or army uniforms, as though there were costume or uniform stores in Iraq to buy them). The US has an infamous, though not widely known, history in designing and implementing and supporting such policies. Think El Salvador, or Indonesia, or Guatemala, or the Philippines. Or Iran. And perhaps this is why US officials - Rumsfeld et al. - seem at a loss to do anything about the bloodshed: it's all happening by design. And that would then lend some kind of sense to Bush's statements this week about Iraqis building democracy. Most reports and analyses were struck by the seeming incongruity of the President's upbeat remarks juxtaposed with the carnage in the news; maybe what's happening in Iraq is what's supposed to be happening. This is a frightful thought. In the past, when the US supported murderously repressive regimes, few reports made it into the mass media. But Iraq is in our faces every day, every hour of every day. That is what makes it like Vietnam: the involvement of large groupings of US armed forces. And the steadfast determination of our "leaders" to stay the course is to buy time for a compliant Iraqi regime to arise and then it can become a proxy war.

This is a cynical interpretation implying malevolence. Depressingly, I have no trouble imputing malevolence to political leaders and their henchmen. What does slow me down is the seeming incompetence. Why, after three years, is there so much and constantly increasing turmoil within Iraq? Love 'em or hate 'em, there are some very smart people in Washington. But they may not have anticipated the opportunity that 9/11 presented and they have been scurrying frantically since then making hay. What the US is attempting in Iraq (and Iran) is not something new, or something that arose as a reaction to 9/11. Domination of the world is US policy. Did you know that is where your tax dollars go? To make us the biggest, baddest bully on Earth? All for democracy, of course. Some reports indicate that our President is 'out to lunch' with no interest other than being thanked by Iraqis for our 'sacrifices' on their behalf. If the chief isn't setting policy then the warriors choose their own and some may make decisions incompatible with others. Perhaps the chaos that is today's Iraq mirrors chaos in Washington. As I said, our government's goals are not new, or simply reactive. I think our Vice President was a founder of the Project for a New American Century which spells out the current Pentagon policy of projecting dominating military force worldwide and making other countries hew the line set by the Washington/Wall Street Consensus. And these things didn't arrive with Dubya. Colin Powell as a general bought into it and one of the 'deep' thinkers about it is Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Brzezinski. In fact, I think the utilization of unexpected catastrophe as a cause for projecting this power, of using such an event to unify our multicultural society for foreign excursions may have been one of Ziggy's ideas. Still, the incompetence. Or maybe it's just reality.

It's funny how the Congress wants to pass legislation to legalize Bush's spying, obviously indicating they don't think that heretofore it was legal. If that is the case then why have only three, count 'em 3, Senators bought into the Censure motion? And why have only a few dozen Representatives signed onto John Conyers' Impeachment inquiry? Personally I favor the cowardice explanation: with lamentably few exceptions, our politicians are spineless worms. I do think that covers a lot of ground. It's a tough job stroking yourself as a pampered representative in DC, but somebody's gotta do it. Would we be better off, or worse, if our politicos declared themselves unabashed fascists who want to build the Fourth Reich? (As the page title reads, I'm into simple things.)

I believe one problem finding mainstream opposition to the Bush agenda is precisely that it's the mainstream. Not all the "heavyweights" buy the full package of this New World Order, and most of them are too squeamish to have given the thumb's up to the current war, but they do live on the same side of the fence as the neo-cons: they only quibble over details, and it's only when the details become snags and catch the public's attention and worry that they mumble their profound inanities. In the deepest sense they don't provide leadership because they are already following their Leader. They may not like it but they stay inbounds, as though they were wearing those electronic dog collars.

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Riff
But most of the world, including most people in the US live on the other side of the fence. As the drive for profit is destroying our economic self-sufficiency and driving the majority of us towards anarchy and penury those relatively few who benefit can live the high life in their gated communities and watch us fight each other tooth and nail for the crumbs they throw our way. What is democracy? There is an argument that has been going on since the Articles of Confederation about this and there is a cogent body of analysis that our Founding Fathers weren't united about rule by the majority. If the Palestinians choose Hamas our leaders can try to scare us (and the Palestinians) about unwise and unacceptable choices, but what would happen if people in the US decided that they - the majority - wanted some fundamental changes? What if we wanted to curb free trade, to let all countries have protective tarriffs to prop up needed local industries? We are humans first, citizens second, workers third, and consumers last. Low prices mean low cost and low cost means mostly low wages and once you get to working poor what's left? Death? Slavery? Revolution? As with the New American Century, logic is only a tool, not a goal and can be used from any perspective.

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Still, why the morass in Iraq and what happens next and what are we to do about it? Motion pictures have been with us for more than three quarters of a century. While the pace of change in media and technology seems to have picked up in recent years and we are constantly flooded with sensory stimuli (and bewildered by it) I think it's fair to say that nearly everyone alive in the US today has lived in the era of mass media and movies may be the guide here. We all live with "stories" and stories follow scripts and good scripts are very tight: they must seem totally natural while being, in reality, totally unnatural. Reality is very messy; movies only allow messiness as a plot device. We are all so accustomed to "stories" - there's a beginning and plot development, climax and denouement, with all the loose ends nicely tidied up and even those few films that don't settle everything but have us leaving the theaters wondering and asking each other questions, even these are by design - that we are at a loss when things don't go as expected. In our personal lives we sigh or get angry when unexpected reality intrudes upon our plans. When it's our army overseas we just get scared.

Real life isn't a movie and our real conversations aren't as concise and portentous. But that doesn't mean that we don't want life to be a movie, with a great script, each of us our own Rocky. And reality doesn't stop us from trying to plan and constrain the future. So, the mass of Iraqis didn't toss flowers our way; Baghdad ain't Hollywood. Oh, yeah, right. I think the Big Worry is following the script. Flagging regimes seize upon crises to unify the peons and whip them into shape. If the war is going badly start another one. Another terrorist incident close to home and the bombs will be falling on Teheran. As the old statement goes: Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead! We can't be deterred by a few bumps in the road. Now, if this life we call our world were a movie the script would call for some dark, dangerous men to have the messiness already planned. If Osama won't comply they could make it seem as if he had. Sort of like the Gulf of Tonkin incident (see Truth is the First Casualty by Joseph Golden, probably out of print), a good script anticipates and plans everything, even the chaos. It would be nice to consider this line of thinking paranoid. The problem is that the fiction writers have managed to brainwash us all, including the politicos. They think they are hard-headed realists but propaganda is pervasive and what Woodrow Wilson unleashed upon us nearly a century ago has permeated all our minds. The line separating fantasy from reality has gotten blurry. The New World Order is pinching awake many of us in the "reality-based community" and the fall from the clouds is painful. Reality intrudes. Our leaders are still in dreamland. Maybe we need to awaken them from their dream, which is our nightmare.