Political Views

My New Year’s Resolution for 2006: delete the expression WAR ON TERROR from my vocabulary.

PART ONE – WHAT’S A META FOR?

Almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks, the "WAR!" word was brought out. It was a moving word. It expressed the magnitude of our outrage and America’s desire for retaliation for innocents so senselessly murdered. It seemed to escalate the feeling we had for the enormity of the wrong committed against us and, as we were quick to add, our civilization.

Little did we suspect how swift would be the neocon's well-framed response - almost as if it had been somehow anticipated. Perhaps "hoped for" is a more charitable characterization. As the smoke began to clear from Ground Zero a new colossus became visible. The Project for a New American Century was born full-blown from the pit of our humiliation and despair. With it emerged a new vision and bold programs to transform our democracy. When presented to Congress, I’ll bet the ink on the document of what was euphemistically called the Patriot Act had been dry for at least a year.

Let’s not reincarnate the conspiracy theories for now. What I want to address here is perhaps a fatal mistake we have all made in the earlier days of what has come to be agreed upon as THE WAR ON TERROR. Like the tacit agreement, on the part of both sides in the debate over women’s reproductive health, to use the pejorative label, "Pro Abortion" instead of "Pro-Choice", there appears to be no turning back from our unconscious acquiesce to our opponents’ clever frames – no chance to reframe - to say: "That is not what I meant at all – that is not it at all…"

I must admit, even at first, I did not look upon THE WAR ON TERROR in much more than a metaphorical sense, like "The War on Poverty", "The War on Drugs", or "The War on Crime".

I regarded the Islamic terrorists who organized the attack on the World Trade Center as only a slightly greater threat to our way of life than Timothy McVeigh, Paul Hill and Eric Rudolph. I did not go around after the bombing of the abortion clinics and the murder of the doctors advocating a "War on Fundamentalist Christianity". My mistake. Even if I had advocated such a thing, I would have been using "war" in a purely metaphorical sense. I would not have suggested anything more of a military nature than what the FBI was already doing to bring the criminals to justice. Parenthetically, Janet Reno’s exceptional Waco disaster is a good example of the kind of results you can expect with poor intelligence, poor planning and paramilitary jingo. In fact, the whole Waco debacle is a good example of the inappropriate use of a military solution instead of more standard (and hopefully subtler) law enforcement procedures in dealing with radical fundamentalists and terrorists.

You might be able to make a case for demented pro-life (sic) trerrorists being a part of some worldwide Christian conspiracy against women’s reproductive health, or in McVeigh’s case, the presumed atrocities of Clinton’s Attorney General. It is interesting to note that there has been almost no negative blowback on the right-wing fundamentalist Christian supporters of these lunatics and their continuing violent rhetoric as a result of the Murrah Federal Building bombing and the assaults on women’s clinics and their personnel. I suppose the Bush administration considers them just the ill-behaved, wacky extreme end of their own base. The same fundamental beliefs are shared. It’s just that the tactics differ…somewhat.

WAR is being used in its most specific, most literal sense by Bush to justify everything from direct military action to overthrow sovereign governments abroad to the stealthy GST (so stealthy that the meaning of the acronym is classified ? !) to the most egregious human rights abuses all over the world and to suppress and extinguish our constitutional rights at home.

PART TWO – NEW RULES

I think in order to understand the reasoning behind THE WAR ON TERROR we need to look at the assumption that predicated the actions that have taken place in the name of this WAR.

The primary assumption is that there has been some sort of a sea change that took place on 9/11. Certainly, prior to this event, no one was advocating a war on terror or terrorists. Even the Bush administration did not hold their own intelligence that there was an impending attack by bin Laden on US soil as being of much import or consequence.

Again the reminder: I will not be relying here on the arguments of the conspiracy mongers who contend that the 9/11 attacks were a part of a premeditated conspiracy to quicken an assault on world and national security, the attack on citizen’s rights and an overthrow of the Constitution by an imperial presidency.

President Bush has made it clear, almost from the outset, that we live in a post 9/11 world. The rules would be different in the 21st Century and we had better get used to it. The events of 9/11 have been used as the reason, perhaps the only reason, to advance the neocon argument for U.S. absolute military global dominance. This is the only thing on this administration’s agenda, domestic or foreign. Everything else is secondary: world opinion, Geneva Convention, human rights, the Constitution – all quaint artifacts of a pre 9/11 world. The main arm of this agenda; the one thing we must not question is the WAR ON TERROR. This WAR will never be over; it will consume the Middle Class and those below; it will relegate our noble experiment in democracy to an historic footnote; it must be nourished at the expense of our lives, our fortunes and our honor.

PART THREE – THE EMPEROR’S NEW WARDROBE

I find it interesting that George W. Bush has, rather late in life, taken up the dress, swagger and identification with the military trappings of the warrior-king-Georgy-come-lately-action figure-commander-in-chief. I have seen pictures of Bush in his fly-boy trappings, circa 1973, in the Texas Air National Guard. Ironically, instead of this being his wardrobe of honor and willing bravery, it has come only to symbolize young Bush’s attempt to amortize wealth and privilege to successfully dodge combat in Vietnam.

I remember a National Guard DVD a friend of mine gave me. His children had received it from a recruiter in their High School. In one of the files there was an entry entitled "Presidents in Service in the National Guard." It listed many past presidents who had served their country in their states’ guard and militia units. I vividly recall my shock when there listed was George W. Bush. After viewing the service of men like Harry Truman, Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, seeing Bush’s face appearing in this distinguished company seemed like a college fraternity prank or some horrid mistake.

9/11 has created many a strange metamorphosis. Not only have comedian, Dennis Miller and raconteur, Christopher Hitchens seen their rhetoric and audiences reversed, the president too has had a profound reversal of image.

It undoubtedly does take a certain kind of physical courage to be a war hero in the John Wayne mold. Many would say good riddance to the macho Presley-lipped sneer of Rambo. Not so the chicken-hawkish Bushmen of this administration. In spite of their own resumes’ (by and large) failure to list any military experience, these men are eager to don the façade of warrior militancy for press conference and photo op. It has been pointed out as well that these personages, who had pressing good reasons to be elsewhere when duty called, are eager to extol the virtues of others dying for the sole purpose of proving that their predecessors did not die in vain.

Speaking of John Wayne, I have a favorite quote of his to share:

"I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great county away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves."

Few remarks so sum up a life and worldview with such simple eloquence. It personifies the Duke’s unique qualities of blissful ignorance, callow selfishness, hubris and self-righteous chauvinism – the old-fashioned kind of chauvinism that meant blind love of country, right or wrong. Did we think that America had ever really eschewed these values? I could easily visualize a similar quote enshrined in Rumsfeld’s office wall - right above the bronze plaque on his desk that quotes our Rough-rider president, "Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords." It might read something like this:

"I don’t feel we did wrong in taking their county away from them. There were great numbers of (our) people who needed the oil and the Iraqis were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves."

I’m sure John Wayne, were he still with us, would be honored to voice the PSA. Bully!

Like father Reagan before them, Bush’s (mostly) white (mostly) men shamelessly harbor hallucinations of personally liberating the Nazi death camps and striking war-hero poses from the safety of a fighter plane’s cockpit in WWII training films like their immortal Gipper. They long to return us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear when the movies and the values were more often than not in black and white and no American died for a false cause. Many of the older ones among them still remember a far less troubled time when war was good for the economy, there was a comforting elemental stability to the phrase "nuclear family" and people loved and did not question their leaders. They all long for the bad old days of mutually assured destruction in a bifurcated world where it was US against The Evil Empire.

PART FOUR – THE WAGES OF IGNORANCE

In his December 4th Washington Post, Op-Ed entitled, "What Do These Things Have In Common?" Zbigniew Brzezinski takes George W. Bush to task for likening the war against Osama to the war against communism. I think that, while his critique underplays the true strength of international terrorism whose time clearly has come, he does make points for underscoring the contradictions in Bush’s equating the "war against the Godless communists" and "the war on terror."

Brzezinski also points out one dangerous drawback of this WAR ON TERROR mentality. This is blatantly demonstrated in the way Vladimer Putin has seized on terrorism to cause even more brutality to be visited upon the Chechnyans. These days, any third world, tin-pot dictator can denounce a homegrown movement for democratic change by calling the opposition "terrorists". They also stand a good chance of receiving US support by using such language. These same types used to use the epithet "communist" decades ago to the same effect.

Bush wants to have the bugbear of terrorism handy as a ready excuse to suppress popular uprisings at home as well. They are not patriots, rebels or Democrats, Ma; they are terrorists. That allows all manner of license from lifting Habeas Corpus to torture and illegal wiretaps of US citizens. The sky’s the limit.