With Trembling Fingers
By Hal Crowther
The Independent
Durham, North Carolina
7-5-4
Despite the worst foreign policy blunder in American history, George
W. Bush and his millionaire supporters don't know the meaning of the
word shame.
I used to take a drink on occasion with a network newsman famed for
his impenetrable calm--his apparent pulse rate that of a large mammal
in deep hibernation--and in an avuncular moment he advised me that I'd
do all right, in the long run, if I could only avoid the kind of
journalism committed to the keyboard "with trembling fingers." I
recognized the wisdom of this advice and endeavored over the years to
write as little as possible when my blood pressure was soaring and my
face was streaked with tears. The lava flows of indignation ebb
predictably with age and hardening arteries, and nearing three-score I
thought I'd never have to take another tranquilizer--or a double
bourbon--to keep my fingers steady on the keys.
I never imagined 2004.
It would be sophomoric to say that there was never a worse year to be
an American. My own memory preserves the dread summer of 1968. My
parents suffered the consequences of 1941 and 1929, and my grandfather
Jack Allen, who lived through all those dark years, might have added
1918, with the flu epidemic and the Great War in France that each
failed, very narrowly, to kill him. Drop back another generation or
two and we encounter 1861.
But if this is not the worst year yet to be an American, it's the
worst year by far to be one of those hag-ridden wretches who comment
on the American scene. The columnist who trades in snide one-liners
flounders like a stupid comic with a tired audience; TV comedians and
talk-show hosts who try to treat 2004 like any zany election year have
become grotesque, almost loathsome. Our most serious, responsible
newspaper columnists are so stunned by the disaster in Iraq that
they've begun to quote poetry by Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen. They
lower their voices, they sound like Army chaplains delivering eulogies
over ranks of flag-draped coffins, under a hard rain from an iron sky.
Yeats' "blood-dimmed tide is loosed." The war news had already
deteriorated from bad to tragic to pre-apocalyptic, which left no
suitable category for these excruciating reports on the sexual torture
of Iraqi prisoners.Fingers, be still. In less than a year, the morale
of the occupying forces had sunk so low that murder, suicide, rape and
sexual harassment became alarming statistics, and now the warriors of
democracy--the emissaries of civilization--stand accused of every
crime this side of cannibalism. Osama bin Laden has always
anathematized America's culture, as well as its geopolitical
influence. To him these atrocities are a sign of Allah's certain
favor, a great moral victory, a vindication of his deepest anger and
darkest crimes.
Where does it go from here? The nightmare misadventure in Iraq is
over, beyond the reach of any reasonable argument, though many more
body bags will be filled. In Washington, chicken hawks will still be
squawking about "digging in" and winning, but Vietnam proved
conclusively that no modern war of occupation would ever be won. Every
occupation is doomed. The only way you "win" a war of occupation is
the old-fashioned way, the way Rome finally defeated the
Carthaginians: kill all the fighters, enslave everyone else, raze the
cities and sow the fields with salt.
Otherwise the occupied people will fight you to the last peasant, and
why shouldn't they? If our presidential election fails to dislodge the
crazy bastards who annexed Baghdad, many of us in this country would
welcome regime change by any intervention, human or divine. But if,
say, the Chinese came in to rescue us--Operation American Freedom--how
long would any of us, left-wing or right, put up with an occupying
army teaching us Chinese-style democracy? A guerrilla who opposes an
invading army on his own soil is not a terrorist, he's a resistance
fighter. In Iraq we're not fighting enemies but making enemies. As
Richard Clarke and others have observed, every dollar, bullet and
American life that we spend in Iraq is one that's not being spent in
the war on terrorism. Every Iraqi, every Muslim we kill or torture or
humiliate is a precious shot of adrenaline for Osama and al Qaeda.
The irreducible truth is that the invasion of Iraq was the worst
blunder, the most staggering miscarriage of judgment, the most
fateful, egregious, deceitful abuse of power in the history of
American foreign policy. If you don't believe it yet, just keep
watching. Apologists strain to dismiss parallels with Vietnam, but the
similarities are stunning. In every action our soldiers kill innocent
civilians, and in every other action apparent innocents kill our
soldiers--and there's never any way to sort them out. And now these
acts of subhuman sadism, these little My Lais.
Since the defining moment of the Bush presidency, the preposterous
flight-suit, Fox News-produced photo-op on the Abraham Lincoln in
front of the banner that read "Mission Accomplished," the shaming
truth is that everything has gone wrong. Just as it was bound to go
wrong, as many of us predicted it would go wrong--if anything more
hopelessly wrong than any of us would have dared to prophesy. Iraq is
an epic train wreck, and there's not a single American citizen who's
going to walk away unscathed.
The shame of this truth, of such a failure and so much deceit exposed,
would have brought on mass resignations or votes of no confidence in
any free country in the world. In Japan not long ago, there would have
been ritual suicides, shamed officials disemboweling themselves with
samurai swords. Yet up to this point--at least to the point where we
see grinning soldiers taking pictures of each other over piles of
naked Iraqis--neither the president, the vice president nor any of the
individuals who urged and designed this debacle have resigned or been
terminated--or even apologized. They have betrayed no familiarity with
the concept of shame.
Thousands of young Americans are dead, maimed or mutilated, 100
billion has been wasted and all we've gained is a billion new enemies
and a mouthful of dust--of sand. Chaos reigns, but in the midst of it
we have this presidential election. George Bush has defined himself as
a war president, and it's fitting that he should die by the sword--in
fact fall on it, and quick. But even now the damned polls don't
guarantee, or even indicate, his demise.
Conventional wisdom says that an incumbent president with a $200
million war chest cannot be defeated, and that one who commands a
live, bleeding, suffering army in the field is doubly invincible. By
this logic, the most destructively incompetent president since Andrew
Johnson will be rewarded with a second term. That would probably mean
a military draft and more wars in the oil countries and, under
visionaries like ***** Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, a chance for the
United States to emulate 19th-century Paraguay, which simultaneously
declared war on Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay and fought ferociously
until 90 percent of the male population was dead.
What hope then? Impeachment is impossible when the president's party
controls both houses of Congress, though Watergate conspirator John
Dean, who ought to know, claims in his new book that there are
compelling legal arguments for a half-dozen bills of impeachment
against George W. Bush. Peer pressure? At the White House, world
opinion gets no more respect than FBI memos or uncomfortable facts.
Many Americans seem unaware that scarcely anyone on the planet Earth
supported the Iraq adventure, no one anywhere except the 40-50 million
Republican loyalists who voted for George Bush in 2000.
Among significant world leaders he recruited only Great Britain's Tony
Blair--whose career may be ruined because most Britons disagree with
him--and the abominable Ariel Sharon, that vile tub of blood and
corruption who recently used air-to-ground missiles to assassinate a
paraplegic in a wheelchair at the door of his mosque. (Palestinians
quickly squandered any sympathy or moral advantage they gained from
this atrocity by strapping a retarded 16-year-old into a suicide
bomber's kit. Such is the condition of the human race in the Middle
East, variously known as the Holy Land or the Cradle of Civilization.)
Says Sharon, oleaginously, of Bush: "Something in his soul committed
him to act with great courage against world terror."
The rest of the known world, along with the United Nations, has been
dead set against us from the start. But they carry no weight. Thanks
to our tax dollars and the well-fed, strong but not bulletproof bodies
of our children--though mostly children from lower-income
families--George Bush and his lethal team of oil pirates, Cold
Warriors and Likudists commands the most formidable military machine
on earth. No nation, with the possible exception of China, would ever
dare to oppose them directly.
But the Chinese aren't coming to save us. Nothing and no one can stop
these people except you and me, and the other 100 million or so
American citizens who may vote in the November election. This isn't
your conventional election, the usual dim-witted, media-managed Mister
America contest where candidates vie for charm and style points and
hire image coaches to help them act more confident and presidential.
This is a referendum on what is arguably the most dismal performance
by any incumbent president--and inarguably the biggest mistake. This
is a referendum on George W. Bush, arguably the worst thing that has
happened to the United States of America since the invention of the
cathode ray tube.
One problem with this referendum is that the case against George Bush
is much too strong. Just to spell it out is to sound like a bitter
partisan. I sit here on the 67th birthday of Saddam Hussein facing a
haystack of incriminating evidence that comes almost to my armpit.
What matters most, what signifies? Journalists used to look for the
smoking gun, but this time we have the cannons of Waterloo, we have
Gettysburg and Sevastopol, we have enough gun smoke to cause asthma in
heaven. I'm overwhelmed. Maybe I should light a match to this mountain
of paper and immolate myself. On the near side of my haystack, among
hundreds of quotes circled and statistics underlined, just one thing
leaped out at me. A quote I had underlined was from the testimony of
Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg trials, not long before Hitler's
vice-Fuhrer poisoned himself in his jail cell: "It is always a simple
matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist
dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or
no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the
leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being
attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and
exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."
Goering's dark wisdom gained weight when a friend called me and
reported that Vice President Cheney was so violently partisan in his
commencement speech at Westminster College in Missouri--so rabid in
his attacks on John Kerry as an anti-American peace-marching
crypto-communist--that the college president felt obliges to send the
student body an e-mail apologizing for Cheney's coarseness.
If you think it's exceptionally shameless for a man who dodged Vietnam
to play the patriot card against a decorated veteran, remember that
Georgia Republicans played the same card, successfully, against Sen.
Max Cleland, who suffered multiple amputations in Vietnam. In 2001 and
2002, George Bush and his Machiavelli, Karl Rove, approved political
attack ads that showed the faces of Tom Daschle and other Democratic
senators alongside the faces of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
And somewhere in hell, Goering and Goebbels toasted each other with a
schnapps.
Am I polarized? I've never been a registered Democrat, I'm sick of
this two-party straitjacket, I wish to God it didn't take Yale and a
major American fortune to create a presidential candidate. The only
current Democratic leaders who show me any courage are Nancy Pelosi
and old Bob Byrd--Hillary Clinton has been especially cagy and gutless
on this war--and John Kerry himself may leave a lot to be desired. He
deserves your vote not because of anything he ever did or promises to
do, but simply because he did not make this sick mess in Iraq and owes
no allegiance to the sinister characters who designed it. And because
his own "place in history," so important to the kind of men who run
for president, would now rest entirely on his success in getting us
out of it.
Kerry made a courageous choice at least once in his life, when he came
home with his ribbons and demonstrated against the war in Vietnam. But
Sen. Kerry could turn out to be a stiff, a punk, an alcoholic and he'd
still be a colossal improvement over the man who turned Paul Wolfowitz
loose in the Middle East. The myth that there was no real difference
between Democrats and Republicans, which I once considered seriously
and which Ralph Nader rode to national disaster four years ago, was
shattered forever the day George Bush announced his cabinet and his
appointments for the Department of Defense.
I'm aware that there are voters--40 million?--who don't see it this
way. I come from a family of veterans and commissioned officers; I
understand patriots in wartime. If a spotted hyena stepped out of Air
Force One wearing a baby-blue necktie, most Americans would salute and
sing "Hail to the Chief." Cultivating these reliable patriots,
President Bush cultivated his patriots by spending $46 million on
media in the month of March alone. Somehow I'm on his mailing list.
(Is that because my late father, with the same name, was a registered
Republican, or can Bush afford to mail his picture to every American
with an established address?) Twice a week I open an appeal for cash
to crush John Kerry and the quisling liberal conspiracy, and now I own
six gorgeous color photographs of the president and his wife. I'm sure
some of my neighbors frame the president's color photographs, and fill
those little blue envelopes he sends us with their hard-earned
dollars.
I struggle against the suspicion that so many of my fellow Americans
are conceptually challenged. I want to reason with my neighbors, I
want to engage these lost Americans. What makes you angry, neighbor?
What arouses your suspicions? Does it bother you that this
administration made terrorism a low priority, dismissed key
intelligence that might have prevented the 9-11 catastrophe, then
exploited it to justify the pre-planned destruction of Saddam Hussein,
who had nothing to do with al Qaeda? All this is no longer conjecture,
but direct reportage from cabinet-level meetings by the turncoat
insiders Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill.
If the Pentagon ever thought Saddam had "weapons of mass destruction,"
it was only because the Pentagon gave them to him. As Kevin Phillips
recounts in American Dynasty, officials of the Reagan and first Bush
administrations eagerly supplied Saddam with arms while he was using
chemical weapons on the Kurds. They twice sent Donald Rumsfeld to
court Saddam, in 1983 and 1984, when the dictator was in the glorious
prime of his monsterhood.
This scandal, concurrent with Iran-Contra, was briefly called
"Iraqgate," and, yes, among the names of those officials implicated
you'll find most of the engineers of our current foreign policy. (They
also signaled their fractious client, Saddam, that it might be all
right to overrun part of Kuwait; you remember what happened when he
tried to swallow it all.) Does any of this trouble you? Does it worry
you that ***** Cheney, as president of the nefarious Halliburton
Corporation, sold Iraq $73 million in oilfield services between 1997
and 2000, even as he plotted with the Wolfowitz faction to whack
Saddam? Or that Halliburton, with its CEO's seat still warm from
Cheney's butt, was awarded unbid contracts worth up to $15 billion for
the Iraq invasion, and currently earns a billion dollars a month from
this bloody disaster? Not to mention its $27.4 million overcharge for
our soldiers' food.
These are facts, not partisan rhetoric. Do any of them even make you
restless? The cynical game these shape-shifters have been playing in
the Middle East is too Byzantine to unravel in 1,000 pages of text.
But the hypocrisy of the White House is palpable, and beggars belief.
If there's one American who actually believes that Operation Iraqi
Freedom was about democracy for the poor Iraqis, then you, my friend,
are too dangerously stupid to be allowed near a voting booth.
Does it bother you even a little that the personal fortunes of all
four Bush brothers, including the president and the governor, were
acquired about a half step ahead of the district attorney, and that
the royal family of Saudi Arabia invested $1.476 billion in those and
other Bush family enterprises? Or, as Paul Krugman points out, that
it's much easier to establish links between the Bush and bin Laden
families than any between the bin Ladens and Saddam Hussein. Do you
know about Ahmad Chalabi, the administration's favorite Iraqi and
current agent in Baghdad, whose personal fortune was established when
he embezzled several hundred million from his own bank in Jordan and
fled to London to avoid 22 years at hard labor? That's just a sampling
from my haystack. Maybe I can reach you as an environmentalist, one
who resents the gutting of key provisions in the Clean Air Act? My own
Orange County, chiefly a rural area, was recently added to a national
register of counties with dangerously polluted air.
You say you vote for the president because you're a conservative. Are
you sure? I thought conservatives believed in civil liberties, a weak
federal executive, an inviolable Constitution, a balanced budget and
an isolationist foreign policy. George Bush has an attorney general
who drives the ACLU apoplectic and a vice president who demands more
executive privilege (for his energy seances) than any elected official
has ever received. The president wants a Constitutional amendment to
protect marriage from homosexuals, of all things. Between tax cuts for
his high-end supporters and three years playing God and Caesar in the
Middle East, George Bush has simply emptied America's wallet, with a
$480 billion federal deficit projected for 2004, and the tab on Iraq
well over $100 billion and running.
"A lot of so-called conservatives today don't know what the word
means," Barry Goldwater said in 1994, when the current cult of
right-wing radicals and "neocons" had begun to define and assert
themselves. Goldwater was my first political hero, before I was old
enough to read his flaws. But his was the conservatism of the
wolf--the lone wolf--and this is the conservatism of sheep.
All it takes to make a Bush conservative is a few slogans from talk
radio and pickup truck bumpers, a sneer at "liberals" and maybe a
name-dropping nod to Edmund Burke or John Locke, whom most of them
have never read. Sheep and sheep only could be herded by a ludicrous
but not harmless cretin like Rush Limbaugh, who has just compared the
sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners to "a college fraternity prank" (and
who once called Chelsea Clinton "the family dog"--you don't have to
worry about shame when you have no brain).
I don't think it's accurate to describe America as polarized between
Democrats and Republicans, or between liberals and conservatives. It's
polarized between the people who believe George Bush and the people
who do not. Thanks to some contested ballots in a state governed by
the president's brother, a once-proud country has been delivered into
the hands of liars, thugs, bullies, fanatics and thieves. The world
pities or despises us, even as it fears us. What this election will
test is the power of money and media to fool us, to obscure the truth
and alter the obvious, to hide a great crime against the public trust
under a blood-soaked flag. The most lavishly funded, most cynical,
most sophisticated political campaign in human history will be out
trolling for fools. I pray to God it doesn't catch you.
.
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