That’s very nice of you, Andrew. If you were to adopt
all of my views as your own, I suspect that you would
still dislike Bush and co (as is certainly reasonable)
and see the war as wrong;
but you wouldn’t see a genocidal lunatic thirsty for
oil and blood, but something more interesting.
There is a sense of people going by each other–
I don’t like seeing things in terms of demons,
because explanations in those terms, while
they have the virtue of simplicity, are, for me,
less interesting than what I see when I
try to approach things without them.
This is, perhaps for me, an aesthetic thing;
I like an interesting world.
Also I want, more than anything else, to understand
what is going on in the world; so i try not to bash
anybody (though I appreciate that this can be pleasant), because
I find that this doesn’t help me
understand things. I have my partisan leanings
and doubtless they affect what I perceive sometimes,
but I do make an effort to put them on a back
burner–even if objectivity is unattainable, I
aim for it, because I think approaching the
world in partisan terms obscures what is
happening. Of course what partisans say may be
entirely true, but I want to see for myself how
things look without an axe to grind.
If you look at the political thread, I have
been a fierce critic of Bush–
I raised the torture issue over two years ago,
I have desciribed his policies on Palestine
as horrific in many, many posts. But I
don’t demonize him or bash him. I don’t think
these things are happening because he
is the Black Beast Who Thinks Moslems
Are Expendable Because They Are Not
Christians–but for other reaons that I have
gone into that may better help predict what we will do next.
Not that these other reasons are good reasons, but they
are more interesting, I think. We know, of course,
what the Black Beast will do; but I prefer
political analysis–
though Bush, who is not,
IMO, the Black Beast, may well do what
the Black Beast will do. Still there’s something
more to think about.
I like history, and trying to understand why
things happen. I notice also that the world isn’t
a moral pushbutton machine; that sometimes
good comes of evil and vice versa.
Well, you see, it’s hard to talk to people who
are bashing, not because everything they say is
mistaken (some of what you are saying above is
correct, I think) but because two very different
kinds of discourse are going on, and they
miss each other. I’m not particularly interested
in defending Bush, but some of what I say
will strike bashers as defending and they tend
to respond by bashing–so it’s like
apples and oranges.
Of course it isn’t about Bush himself who is only the feeble tool of those who surround and control him. The neoconmen, who seem to work for big business and the Israelis and damn everybody else.The trouble is they are trampling at will on the rest of the world.
Of course their feeble and seemingly ignorant opponent in the recent"election" looked no better. These seem completely evil people who care nothing for the welfare of the world now or in the future.
Well I don’t like it,and billions like me feel helpless.How can one do anything against perceived evil without a bit of ridicule and other bsashing ? I could stand on a street corner for a little while with a poster, or bomb the White House, but that would not do much good. It would merely help the evil people in disguising what they are really up to.World domination of trade and resources.
The political thread you refer to is far too self-indulgent to read much. The posts are disgracefully long for those not writing them to readthemselves, and very cliquey.
Perhaps my main objection to what is going on is that the American machine, in apparant ignorance of the outside world allows the Israelis to treat the Palestinians almost as badly as the Nazis treated the jews, in their long drawn out genicide of the most downtrodden people on earth. Not, I should say the Jews, but the Zionists. The old jews and the Palestinians got on as good neighbours for millenia.
Also the treatment of the Iraqi middle classes who were traditionally western oriented and well educated (as opposed , it would seem to the majority of the invading farm boys ) who not only were the hope for the re-establishment of the country ( if US pillaging is not rendering the prospect impossible ).They have been treated as dirt by the illegal invader, and forced abroad or generally alienated. America is going to be hated around the world for generations to satisfy a little cabal of Israeli controlled neoconmen, and all for so little good reason.
If there had been any sense in the world The US would have removed some of Israel’s nuclear and chemical weapons ! But they don’t have the oil to steal. What has happened to this year’s Iraqi oil receipts in the hands of the US ? Nobody who knows is telling !!!
I’ve read Bob Woodward’s book ‘Plan of Attack.’ Woodward
is very well respected; he is one of the two reporters who
brought down Richard Nixon. Bush does not appear in this
book (which is well researched) as a feeble tool of those
who surround him, nor does he appear to be controlled
by anybody. I take this to be a pretty good reason,
not coming from somebody who hates or loves Bush but
a respected neutral and highly professional source,
to think Bush is not a tool of others. Perhaps I’m mistaken,
but it’s not an unreasonable view.
As to the Neocons–it’s plain that they came into office wanting
to invade Iraq. Regime change was the idea of the previous
administration, but these people were spoiling for a war.
(Things changed considerably when senior members of
the Republican party nixed our going unilateral and Britain
had to be brought along-- non-neocons became involved,
Powell, Blair, we began to give other arguments in an
effort to internationalize, so there was a changing process
in the way we went to war, finally. We would have avoided
war entirely if the UN had accepted the British compromise
proposal, which provided clear benchmarks (negotiable)
for Iraq to prove no WMD within a definite timeframe.)
Why did the Neocons want war? I’ve followed some of these
people for a long time. These are highly intelligent men,
some of whom have accomplished good things, for example
in negotiating nuclear disarmament treaties. First, I don’t
think it was oil, principally. As best i can tell, oil companies
didn’t want war; to the contrary, their view was that we
should end sanctions and do business with Iraq.
One thing that I do think is that these people are veteran politicians,
and they aren’t going to cut their own throats politically;
Karl Rove is definitely in charge of a lot of what’s going on.
Well, you see, if the name of the whole game was oil, and we
were serving the oil companies, there was an easy way
to get it–do what France and Russia did. Say Iraq had
suffered enough, surely there are no WMD left and those
are by now defunct. End the sanctions.
With one/tenth of the money the war
cost, we could bribe Saddam to sell us all we wanted;
and there would be no political risk of getting involved
in a foreign war. Again I don’t think they were demons,
idiots, etc, but more or less rational, self-interested professional
politicians–so while oil was certainly part of the motive,
I don’t think this was the driving force behind their drive to
invade Iraq; for there was a much less expensive and
much less politically risky way to get Iraqi oil–the one
the oil companies had wanted.
Then why? Part of it was that they believed Saddam
had WMD and that he was really dangerous. This was
widespread. Jacque Chirac described Iraq as ‘a rogue
nation with WMD.’ John Kerry said that the intelligence
showed that Saddam was too dangerous to leave in power.
But this isn’t enough, IMO, for senior members of the
American military who had served in the middle east
pointed out with some plausiblility that, while Iraq
was definitely a problem we would have to deal with,
containment would work for two or three more years.
‘There are several wolves chasing the American sled
through the frozen forest’ General Zinni said. ‘The
Iraqi wolf is three or four wolves back.’ This rather
had the ring of truth, I thought. Where others
saw the glass half empty they saw it as half full.
Something more was operating.
I think you are right that defending Israel played
a part. Saddam was supporting terrorism;
they wanted it to stop. They may have felt, too, that
this was a precondition for working out a solution
to the Palestinian problem. In any case, they
seemed to be strongly Zionist, too much so for me.
So I think that’s part of it.
I think what motivated them most, when added to these other
concerns. was a vision–the vision of a democratic middle east,
with democracies in Egypt, Syria, Iran. They would rid
Iraq of this ferocious tyrant and help create a democracy,
and they believed that
a democratic Iraq in the midst of all these nations
would change things–people would see democracy
was possible and want it for themselves. It would be
the beginning of the end of autocratic regimes,
and there would ultimately peace and stability
in this tormented and oppressed region of the world,
a region we cannot ignore, because
of our need for oil.
Visions are very dangerous, of course. And this one
may well have been foolish, arrogant, imprudent, destructive,
with catastrophic consequences to innocent people. But they weren’t
principally motivated by a desire for world domination
nor the lust to plunder the world’s resources.
(Which once again is not to say that economic concerns
played no role–but I don’t think the standard Marxist
explanations capture well enough what motivated
them (generally such explanations fail to do this even though
they get a piece of the truth sometimes)). This wasn’t a vision
of men who cared nothing for the welfare of the world,
now or in the future. Part of what made them dangerous,
part of why they saw the glass as half full, was that
they saw this as an opportunity not only to get rid
of Iraqi WMD, control nuclear proliferation by scaring
Libya et al, open up
Iraqi oil spigots without funding Saddam, rid Iraq
of a tyrant, and protect Israel, but also they saw this as an opportunity
to take a decisive step in
making the world better and more peaceful for the people in it, especially
in the middle east.
To the best of my ability and with all sincerity (and full awareness
of my fallibility), having studied this with all my might,
this is what motivated the neocons, I believe. I’ve followed
some of these people through several administrations. I find
this interesting, and perhaps helpful in predicting what we will do.
I find viewing them as evil incarnate less so, FWIW.
Very quickly, because i’m about to fall asleep. I think a good
deal of our one-sided support for Israel comes down to
voting demographics in the USA. It is very dangerous
for an American president to stand up to Israel,
which is why Kerry was falling over himself to
out gung ho Bush on Israel. I don’t think it has
much to do with whether or not Israel has oil.
Night. Thanks for the conversation.
I very much agree with this, it is so easy to paint people and events in black and white. I sometimes think this only happens because despicable villains and evil plotters just make an easy story to tell (or sell). All our books, myths, histories and films are littered with cackling villains. But mostly they are probably just like you or I… trying to do the best as they see it. I wonder if we tallied up the woeful outcomes from good intentions and those from bad which would come top… I’ve a nasty suspicion that the ‘good intentions’ would win easily.
When one sees evil being done all around the world , even if unintentionally, does one draw attention to it and even perhaps lessen it in the long run by understating it or overstating it , perhaps by ridicule ?
Jim ,as usual, has some very good points, even when he is asleep !
By all means draw attention to it, and if ridicule helps,
ridicule away. You are, after all, of all the bashers
I know here, the most considerate of other views.
Yes I’d be in favour of ridicule every time! Or more exactly satire which is becoming a dead art, polemic having taken it’s place. Politicians often look especialy absurd when a favoured policy tumbles into chaos but the situation can’t be admitted publicly. It’s a strange and unfortunately frequent sight to see a probably perfectly intelligent spokes-person writhing in an interview chair trying not to admit the obvious. I’m sure a good public laughing at does them the world of good.
Yes, this is very sensible, I think. Above all, everybody is in
over their heads. The world really is mind boggling.
The neocons, as I depict them anyway, had an arrogant
confidence in their ability to make predictions–they had
their Vision.
I’ve spent the last three months reading contemporary history,
including 1400 pages of Ambrose’s biographies of Eisenhower.
Ambrose, who is leftish, describes Ike as ‘a great and good man.’
Well, I could see why. Just looking at his presidency
one thanks heaven he was there, because anybody else
would almost certainly have used nukes on maybe five
occasions when he didn’t . He wanted more than anything
else to end the arms race, which he described as
‘humanity hanging from a cross of iron.’ He offered to
give the Soviets airfields in the USA, so that they could
fly about the country at will every day forever, to
see how many bombers we had, how may missile
silos (‘Open Skies’ was the name). Repeatedly he refused
to expand the military, he resisted mounting insistence
in both parties for more weapons, more nukes, more
troops; the Soviet military and nuclear threat was being exaggerated,
he said. He warned against the ‘military industrial
complex.’ On numerous occasions when others would
have gone to war with China, say, he just sat there
and waited until the crisis slipped past–he was like
the Taoist sage who understand the value of
doing nothing. But he could be decisive–he forced the
Israelis to withdraw from the Suez by stopping
aid, without which Israel couldn’t get through the
month.
But Ike backed the war in Vietnam to the hilt after he
left office; continually advised Johnson to commit
more troops. On two occasions during his administration
he used the CIA to topple Marxist leaning governments,
Iran and Guatemala–the latter democratically elected. Why?
Not because he was evil
or in the grip of Big Oil or whatever, but because
he saw Communism as a mammoth conspiracy,
orchestrated from Moscow and Beijing, and because
he thought that, given the poverty in the third world,
it would spread like cancer. He was willing to covertly
overthrow governments when it came to the crunch.
He mistook in Vietnam
a nationalist war led by communists for a Chinese conspiracy
to spread communism through Southeast Asia.
He couldn’t get it ALL right–nobody could.
And given his position and power, his
mistakes mattered considerably.
Plenty of people were bashing Eisenhower,
covertly overthrowing democratically elected
governments, a lackey of the CIA, spying
on the Soviets, and on and on. Ike the Demon,
who, by his very nature does the worst thing
imaginable, and when it doesn’t look that way has
a covert agenda, invariably a bad one. People
were saying many bad things about the USA then,
especially Marxists, and, if Ike was a demon,
probably one should believe the worst things
being said about him, as they were most likely to
accurately represent what a demon would do.
I am opposed to reductionist explanations
of American foreign policy, because repeatedly I find
they fail to fit the details–which are far messier
than reductionists allow–nor the human reality
of the people making the decisions. Bush didn’t
invade Iraq out of inverted penis envy, either.
Let me just add this thought, as we all seem to
be communicating well enough from our respective
positions. Bertrand Russell once posed a skeptical
problem. How do you know the world (the whole
universe) didn’t start yesterday, complete with
you and me with memories of lives we never lived,
rusty automobiles with 100,000 miles on the odometers,
libraries full of yellowed books about the
civil war. If the world had a beginning, why couldn’t
it have started like THAT?
Set aside the (interesting) skeptical question for a moment
and consider this question, please. Suppose the world
started yesterday with an American army in Iraq,
no government except an interim one, elections
scheduled for January 30, and insurgents, mostly
Sunnis who are afraid of losing the power they
believe they’ve wielded for generations to the
Shiite majority, using every means possible to
stop the elections (until recently occupying a whole
city); also ethnic tensions
between Kurds and Shiites, and powerful
neighbours with an interest in Iraq
breaking up, and 25 million Iraqis, most
of whom probably want a democracy but
resent the American presence.
We are the Americans–the question is:
What should we do? We could leave, stay,
fight the insurgents at the cost of alienating
Sunnis and killing innocent people. This is the most
interesting and practical question I see facing
us now, IMO, not how we got there or whether
Bush is a lackey of Big Business or the Religious Right.
My own view is that we must have the elections
on schedule, fight the insurgents, and continue to do
what is necessary to move toward
an Iraqi democracy, at least partly because the
costs to Iraqis are higher if we don’t. Also, there
is at least the hope that the neocons arrogant
vision will prove true, ultimately–though it will
depend considerably on what we do in
Palestine.
I was finishing a long reply , involving flutes when, as so often happens now , the letter flew away.Why?
I don’t have the energy to go through it all again. I shall spare you all !
60 Dollars! I just managed to get through the Maids of Montcisco twice without messing up and not a cent! On the bright side, I could tell by the set of its foliage, that the begonia on my windowsill was quite impressed…
In a perfect world, yes. All of that. Peace and democracy in Iraq. And then some kind of punishment against the USA for waging a criminal war. In a perfect world…
Would you say what you think we should
do in this world? In terms of my odd parameters,
that it all started yesterday… That is–Right or wrong,
we’re there: what realistically should we
do now? Even if there
are other questions that matter, that one
matters a great deal, I feel.
Before the invasion and occupation I complained in a letter to The Times that " the excuse for the proposed outrage ( an illegal war ) was a very thin one ". I thaught it then and I think it now.
Jim, you say it was the work of clever people.
How much cleverer might they have been if everybody had stayed at home ?
I feel that people who prosecute illegal wars ( resulting, remember, in the murder of countless innocents ) should have their come-uppance and be prosecuted, or should we say impeached ?
As should Blair for his part in the conspiracy to murder the civilians killed in the attack on the television station in Serbia.
Cold blooded murder of civilians !
Does he mutter " out damned spot " when he looks at his bloodied hands ? Does he hell ! He has the psycology of a politician, otherwise known as psycopathy. All is seen in terms of possible success of self aggrandisement.
The bigger crimes are the more likely the perpetrators are to get away with them. I don’t like that recipe for a world we all have to live in.
All along the likeliest outcome has not looked like some kind of "democracy " foisted on a perhaps unready region, but the creation of an islamic state where a secular one had existed before. Or a partial subsumption of Iraq in the old enemy America encoraged Hussein in resisting, when it suited them. Iran. And at what cost ? And the paying won’t be over for a long time, whatever happens. Most of the trouble now is as a consequence of the illegal occupation, resisted mostly by indignant Iraqi citizens. Perhaps the running of what has been left of the Bush-blighted country should be left as soon as possible to the puppet regime. As it is the US has no intentions of leaving for the long forseeable future.
Andrew the decisions are the work of clever people, but not of individuals; groups of clever people make some pretty dumb decisions - as any committee experience will have shown you. To add to this, each member in a government type meeting is the spokesperson for group interest (Intelligence, military, finance etc.) Making the whole process even more cumbersome. Add into this mix problems that are intractable, unpredictable and may have no benign solution…
I think we are actually not smart enough to solve problems like Iraq, the variables and random elements are too complex. So we throw the dice and wait for them to land and while they bounce thousands die…
Rob
Or leave well alone, Treeshark.
Most of the problems in life come from people wanting change and wanting it now. Damn what other people want, or whether it can be assimilated.
All short termism and interfering.
And then you come across the really big consequences of interfering by those who do not know what they are doing, like the vapourising of 2000 tons of uranium over the country.
Nothing clever in that as far as I can see !
I never knew a committee yet with any common sense.
I’ve tried to capture what I take to be a difference
between two kinds of political discourse which tend to
miss each other, apples and oranges. The difference
is perhaps subtle but important, I think–well, having explained
my point of view as best I can, I leave it to you’all
to decide its merits.
Turning to things to do:
Glad, Andrew, that you wrote to the Times.
Let me say that if I were a Brit I would write
to Blair and the Times and whomever that
Britain must make clear demands that the USA
intervene to settle the Israeli/Palestinian conflict
and should refuse to settle for cometics gestures, having been
stiffed by Bush before. British soldiers are dying
in Iraq because of America’s failure to intervene,
for there is little question that the plight of
the Palestinians makes recruiting insurgents
much easier; this should be the price of continuing British
support. FWIW.