What Is Going Wrong?

It seems that the occupation of Iraq is not going the way our leaders thought it would, nor the way they told us it would. Chaos seems to reign supreme and "Lebanonization" is the current term of use. During the Reagan regime the US had forces in Lebanon and a truck bombing killed over 200 Marines that led to a hasty US withdrawal. What's happened to imperialism when we can't seem to keep the "little people" down and have them thank us for our presence?

One thought that occurs is the rise of technology, specifically satellite tv and the internet. Governments get away with a lot by controlling the message and that has become increasingly difficult over the past few decades. As people become more and more aware of the 'facts on the ground' they are less and less likely to believe messages, propaganda, that tell a different story. There have always been messengers and there have always been histories; now we have pictures, encapsulating presentations, and contemporaneous reporting. Once people know the facts and can track developments they stir into action. I'm sure the people of Iraq are glad to be quit of Saddam but they seem reluctant to become, once more, a client of the US. After all, it was from "US" that Saddam got those WMD components in the first place. In those days Saddam was our friend. (Maybe we should have picked up the hints then, that democracy can be a code word and a very fickle thing in our leaders' hands.) But then he went after Kuwait and then those bright neo-cons got the idea: Hey! Let's remake the world to our custom order, and let's start with energy supplies. On to the oil wells!

The ideology that has ruled America at least since Woodrow Wilson's day of 'democratizing' the world and which really took off with the dissolution of the Soviet Union has encountered hard reality. Part of hard reality is that democracy is what people want not what some leaders say it is. To the ruling regimes of the West democracy is the rule of capital, a rule enforced globally through the WTO and the IMF. But what serves the interests of capital does not equate to serving the wants of humans. Ruling regimes have always had to rely, in final analysis, on the use of brute force. As Mao put it, political power comes out of the barrel of a gun. And the US has a sorry history of using those guns, particularly in the Americas. I read a lot of discussions about "our" role in the world and the rightness or wrongness of interventions. In a theoretical sense there are three options: offer help without being asked; offer help after being asked; helping whether the victim wants us or not. As with vagrants or the mentally ill we only lock them up for their own good!

It seems that after occupying Iraq Mr. Bremer and his successors acted to uproot "socialism" by eliminating subsidies for gasoline and health care, by taking control of oil but opening all other industries to looting by international corporations, by insisting that the people of Iraq, in a physically devastated land and economy, were to be thrown to the wolves of international competition. I assume this didn't win too many hearts and minds among ordinary Iraqis. No wonder surveys there have something like 87% of Iraqis wanting "US" gone. In physics entropy is more or less the measure of disorder, of lower energy states, and seems to be an inexorable trend over time. Civilization has long been thought anti-entropic, bringing order out of chaos. Maybe the physical reality is catching up with us and entropy is taking over the human realm.

Of course, other empires have fallen; in fact, all of them. Should the American empire be any different? One worrying aspect these days is WMD. You know, the ones we possess and more than hint that we are willing to use. The potential exists that we, not some loony terrorists, might cause the death of humanity itself. I imagine the cockroaches will remain while mammals go the way of the dinosaurs. This is a pessimistic view. But other than the non-violent collapse (surrender?) of the Soviet Union (hey, remember the Evil Empire and how they were dedicated to destroying our way of life?) it seems no empires go down without a fight. Our leaders may not recapitulate Beirut and cut and run. They may stay there in Iraq for decades, hiding in their fortified enclaves and conducting sorties against the enemy (ordinary Iraqis?).

And they may continue that trend here in the US. Gated, well-guarded communities for members of the "ownership society" with a dog-eat-dog existence for the rest of us. And for those who get out of hand, no doubt KBR will do a bang-up job designing those detention camps. Jose Padilla may just be the first of many US citizens to discover that citizenship ain't all it was cracked up to be.