Winston Churchill Bush? Nah. Guess Again.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_david_mi_070524_winston_churchill_bu.htm

May 24, 2007 at 21:21:16

Winston Churchill Bush? Nah. Guess Again.

by David Michael Green Page 1 of 2 page(s)

http://www.opednews.com

George W. Bush’s all-in gamble of other people’s stakes in Iraq has
become the mother of all disasters. Even relatively conservative
members of the Washington establishment have labeled it the biggest
foreign policy debacle in American history. Heck, even Henry Kissinger
has consigned it to Bummerville. If you’re a Republican president, you
know you’re hurting when your foreign adventure is too stinky for even
the likes of Kissinger – a guy who hardly ever met an American
invasion he didn’t applaud.

Indeed, so ugly is the situation in Iraq, there’s just about only one
good thing that can still be said about it, which is that it is not
yet nearly as bad as it could turn out to be. One country has been
destroyed and turned into a textbook case of a failed state. Perhaps a
million of its people have been murdered, several million more have
departed as refugees from the violence, and there are now multiple
civil wars going on, alongside other wars between Americans and Iraqi
forces and militias and al Qaeda elements. Could even Hobbes have
envisioned this Hell? Probably not. Probably it’s more Dali’s speed.


But that’s the good news, ladies and gentlemen. The bad news is that
the potential for this first-class debacle to go world-class is quite
significant. Among the possible exponential exacerbations we’re
staring at here is the potential to bring on World War III, pitting
Sunnis versus Shiites in a Muslim version of Christianity’s
devastating Thirty Years’ War between Catholics and Protestants.
Fortunately, only some of those countries have nukes, so we can all
breathe a big sigh of relief there. And now that gasoline prices have
doubled in the United States, it’s also not hard to envision a serious
global depression whacking industrialized countries everywhere, not
unlike the effects produced when OPEC cranked down on the spigot twice
in the 1970s.

So, in short, there are basically two possible outcomes here. Iraq
either turns out to be just a giant disaster, or – instead – it
becomes an epic disaster. A thing of biblical proportions. Something
for people to fight over two thousand years from now.

This, of course, leaves certain folks in a rather uncomfortable
position – namely, George W. Bush and the conservative clones who have
celebrated his depravities. In order to avoid appearing (at least to
themselves – most of the rest of us are not fooled) as the purveyors
of catastrophe they actually are, they are desperately scrambling to
find some sort of cover for their cataclysmic foreign policy
disasters.

These face-saving inanities take multiple forms, but the leading
explanation offered by Bush and his neocon acolytes for their grand
failure is that it is actually a brave success that historians will
later recognize, even if we wimpy appeasers of the present tense lack
the wisdom to recognize Great George’s leadership, courage and
prescience.

The model for this, of course, is Winston Churchill, who got a lot of
things wrong in his political career, but managed to get one big thing
right. While the rest of the world was either admiring Hitler or
hoping that if they pretended hard enough he’d just go away, Churchill
identified – accurately and early – what was perhaps the greatest
menace in human history.

Now comes George W. Bush, comparing himself to Churchill, believing
that he (almost) alone recognizes the new epochal peril, and that his
policies in Iraq and elsewhere will be judged by history just as
Churchill’s lonely vigil of the 1930s has been, despite – or
especially because of – the effete public indifference during our time
to the grave existential threat only the solitary seer Bush wisely
divines. Laughable, eh? It’s actually even worse than that. At least
Churchill never claimed – that I know of – that god told him to go
fight Hitler. Not so Bush, who has said that his "higher father" told
him, "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq". Probably you think I’m
making this up, huh? I wish.

Apart from the effect that such a comparison to Churchill has of
causing legions of people to fall off their chairs in shock and hurt
themselves (could that be part of their secret plan for defeating
progressives and other thinking members of the species?), this claim
has all sorts of logic problems associated with it. Not that either
logic nor fact matter any more to our good friends of the post-
empirical right, but for those of us still proudly inhabiting the
"reality-based community", a little analysis of this proposition might
prove more than a bit enlightening (which is precisely why the other
guys find it so very frightening).

So let’s unpack this hail-mary desperation pass attempt at saving the
right’s reputation, and see what we find. And what we find are a whole
bunch of built-in assumptions that we’re not supposed to question.
There’s very good reason for that, of course. The notion of Bush as
some sort of latter-day Churchill unravels faster than Jerry Falwell’s
soul went south if one departs even slightly from gross
superficialities to examine these assumptions.

We have, unfortunately, to start with the assumption that 9/11 was
perpetrated by bin Laden and his merry band of jihadists. Most
Americans can’t even go there, but if you do, you find that – at the
very least – the story told to us by the government as to who did 9/11
(and, more importantly, who didn’t), and how, is chock full of some
jaw-dropping anomalies and enormously suspicious behaviors. I’m not
prepared to render a verdict on what happened that awful day – and
neither are the best scholars on the subject, whose commitment to
truth and integrity rightly constrains them from making conclusions
which out-run the presently available facts, however tempting such
determinations may be. But I would say that there is enough in
question from what I’ve read to wonder about the deepest assumption of
all – that we’ve even attacked the proper enemy, on any of the fronts
of the so-called "war on terror".

Which brings us to the second great assumption – this one patently
bogus – that the war should be against terrorism in the first place.
Terrorism is a tool, a weapon, a strategy – and one, by the way, which
is almost always employed by the weakest of adversaries, who would
otherwise be using conventional weaponry if they had it. So why fight
a weapon, rather than those who wield it? If our enemy chose a
different weapon, would we be okay with them killing us, as long as it
wasn’t by terrorism? And what about when we use terrorism, or Israelis
do, or when we harbor an admitted terrorist from extradition? Isn’t it
odd that we haven’t been called to a war against al Qaeda (whom we
don’t even seem to be concerned about anymore, anyhow) or even
Islamofascism? Yes it very much is, but only until you realize that
the broader rubric of a supposed war on terror gives you better
leverage for selling a war in Iraq that was pre-planned well before
9/11. Then it makes perfect sense.

Third, is Islamofascism really a threat to the United States?
Probably, yes, at some level. But the insanity of gun policy in this
country takes out ten times the number of people killed in the 9/11
attack, every single year. Cigarettes claim more than one hundred
times the three thousand lives lost on September 11th, year in, year
out. And while I might actually favor sending the Marines in to invade
the NRA building or RJ Reynolds boardroom, I never hear the Bush crowd
doing anything other than helping these guys pimp their death
machines. So, yeah, there are enemies to America’s health and welfare
both at home and abroad, and yeah, we ought to combat them. But we
ought to do so in proper proportion to the threat. I do believe that
al Qaeda means us harm. But they ain’t Nazi Germany, and this ain’t
Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations either, though we can
certainly turn it into that if we’re stupid enough. Without question,
our invasion of Iraq has pushed us far further down that path than
we’ve ever been previously. Even our own intelligence agencies – not
exactly bastions of lily-livered, bleeding-heart Neville Chamberlain
groupies – have said so. The most credible reckoning recently produced
estimates that global terrorism has increased seven-fold since the
invasion of Iraq, and in large part because of the invasion of Iraq.
If Bush wants to play at being Sir Winston, fine. That makes this his
Global Gallipoli.

Next, even if we assume that Islamic radicalism represents a serious
enemy for the United States to deal with, the fourth assumption built
into the conservative face-saving program is that conventional warfare
is the proper strategic response to that threat. So foolish is that
assumption that it is hard to imagine it took the Iraq meltdown to
make it plain to most Americans. Would anyone believe in advance that
you could throw a rock to the moon if you just ate enough Wheaties?
Would anyone need to actually test that proposition before dismissing
it out of hand? What a surprise, then, to learn from the Washington
Post this week that two intelligence assessments from before the
invasion predicted chaos in Iraq and a boost to Islamic extremists
from the occupation. John Kerry was much ridiculed in 2004 for
discussing terrorism as a scourge best (though not exclusively) fought
using the tools of intelligence assets and police work. Much as it
pains me to say anything nice about Kerry after he ran a campaign so
abysmal that it bequeathed us another four years of the Creature from
Crawford, in this case he was right.

Fifth, this ridiculous Churchill proposition requires us to assume
that any kind of warfare, not just conventional, is the only response
to the threat. Bushoids want you to believe that what we do as our
country gaily cavorts about the world has nothing to do with the
hostility found out there toward the United States. Anytime you hear
somebody say something as manifestly absurd as "they hate us for our
freedoms" you should immediately have a powerful sense of how bankrupt
their casus belli actually is. Is it really imaginable that young
people with their whole lives before them would regularly volunteer to
blow themselves up into hamburger meat because they’re – what, anyhow?
jealous? – of somebody else’s freedoms? I absolutely believe there is
plenty of sickness going around amongst Muslim religious radicals.
Indeed, I am quite well acquainted with what it looks like from
observing our own homegrown religious radicals. But is it such a far
fetched idea that Americans would be hated for toppling Middle Eastern
governments or propping up brutal and hated puppet regimes in order to
drain the region of its one valuable natural resource? (And, no, I’m
not thinking of sand.) Is it so absurd to imagine that being the
primary sponsor of Israel, and winking as it builds nuclear warheads
and colonial settlements in occupied territories, that these aren’t
factors driving the hostility America encounters in the Muslim world?
And, therefore, would it be such a stretch to reject this assumption
that the problem is entirely on their side and can only effectively be
countered with more violence? George Bush says yes. In fact, George
Bush hopes you’re dumb enough never to even consider the question. My
own answer is somewhat different.

He also hopes that you don’t notice what is actually happening in the
supposed war on terror. The sixth assumption behind any attempt to
equate Bush to Churchill presumes that the former is actually making
any sort of serious attempt to deal with terrorists in general, or
even just the ones he claims did 9/11. In fact, though, just the
opposite is true. He’s even once admitted, regarding bin Laden, "I
truly am not that concerned about him". I would have loved to have
been monitoring Ari Fleischer’s EKG when Bush dropped that particular
stinker. The poor SOB was probably wondering if there was enough Spic-
N-Span in the whole world to clean up that mess. But even leaving
rhetoric aside, it’s been clear since 2002 that Bush doesn’t really
give a damn about terrorism or even al Qaeda. His long-time obsession
has been Iraq and Saddam – neither of which had anything to do with
terrorism – and he pulled forces from Afghanistan to indulge that
obsession, leaving Osama to roam, and paving the way for a wholesale
Taliban/al Qaeda resurgence already rolling across the country.
Moreover, he’s never done a damn thing about his pals in the House of
Saud, whose relations to Islamic radicalism are far stronger than
Saddam’s ever were. Sorry, man, but here’s the deal: If you’re gonna
claim that you’re Churchill incarnate, you can’t be doing the WWII
equivalent of indulging your personal obsession over Finland, while
the Wehrmacht rolls across France, Poland and the rest of Europe.

www.regressiveantidote.net

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra
University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions
to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time
constraints do not always allow him to respond. His website is
www.regressiveantidote.net

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