I revised and renamed the post I put up yesterday, but I wanted to add a few thoughts today. The most serious objection to what I wrote in yesterday's post and in some of the others in the last week is that I'm defending precisely what I'm condemning the Bush administration of doing. Couldn't it be said, for instance, that the neocons had a dream for the Middle East and that they had the courage to act on in the hopes of draining the swamps of hatred that foul the entire region?
I think that sincere, idealistic supporters of the war wanted to believe that this was the Bush administration's objective. But there are two reasons why this is different from what I've been trying to argue about faith-based action in the last week or so. First, the kind of not-limited-by-empirical-reality "dream" that I described in yesterday's post broadens one's view of what is real and what is possible, but it does not negate what is true on the empirical level of sense and history.
So, for instance, the fossil record is clearly established. There is no question that biological evolution proceeded much in the way that the biologists understand it to have done. But the mechanics of evolution are not the whole story. There's a bigger story to be told, and the source for our understanding of that story comes from a different kind of consciousness than ordinary, sense-based consciousness. And scientific knowing has no way of evaluating the validity of what one learns in that kind of consciousness.
So my objection to the administration's policy in the Middle East on one level has to do with both the quality and source of its dream, and on another level its ignorance of the historical, empirical reality of the region.
That's what distinguishes their "truthy" case from the cases of Gandhi, Mandela, King. These three believed that the existing empirical social/political reality could be transcended, and they were able to a remarkable extent to realize their dream to create a different social reality. They were similar to the neoncons, at least the ones that were truly idealistic, in that they believed in their cause. But these three differed from them in two ways. First, they understood their enemy, its culture and psychology. They lived with it all their lives and understood it from the inside. That is not a trait they share with the neocons. It has been pointed out time and again how uninformed they were about the history and culture of the region. They thought that military power was enough, and they believed Chalabi's fairy tale about being greeted with the hallelujahs and palm branches.
Secondly, they differed in their motivation and tactics. The causes of the three had a less ambiguously noble motivation than the complex motivations that drove the neocons and the parties that supported their ambitious objectives in the Middle East. And the nonviolent tactics of the three did not incite such significant numbers of their enemies to violent revenge, but rather shamed them into embracing a better alternative. And it's also interesting to point out that they were themselves continuously physically vulnerable in a way that the neocons are not. They put themselves at significant personal risk for their cause. What's Paul Wolfowitz doing these days?
The neocons moved into the region without knowing much about its culture and history because they didn't really care about it or about the people who lived there. They were not motivated by a desire to right an historical injustice. Liberating the Iraqi people from the tyranny of Saddam was at best a third- or fourth-level consideration. For them the Middle East is just so many squares on a geopolitical chess board. Iraq's critical strategic geographic location and its immense oil fields were always out of bounds for the U.S. during the Cold War because they were in the Soviet Union's back yard.
But as soon as the USSR collapsed, the neocons started to clamor for the the invasion of Iraq. It was as if the U.S. had retained all its chess pieces and all that was left on the board were a few pawns. It was an historical opportunity to grab what all the world coveted, and the U.S was foolish and cowardly not to move. (You're not naive enough to think Europe, China, India wouldn't do the same thing if they were in the U.S.'s position, are you? So the neocons laced into Bush 1 for failing to go into Baghdad after Desert Storm, and they kept prodding Clinton through the nineties to little effect. But with Bush 2 they finally had their guy, and 9/11 gave them their pretext.
But the dream of easy victory and all the benefits that would come with it morphed into a nightmare. Many who knew something about the region predicted this would happen. No longer were they playing chess with a weak enemy, but now a horrifically violent video game that never ends. And that's a nightmare that we each wake up to every morning.
Leave a Reply