2006-04-24
Chris Floyd
Rage and Light: Militarism and its Discontents
We have praised Boston Globe columnist and novelist James Carroll highly here, and will do so again soon in a review of his upcoming book, House of War, which I have had the privilege and great pleasure of seeing in proof. The book, subtitled, The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, is a masterpiece, a landmark work that popularizes, and personalizes, the largely hidden history of America's moral and political corruption by the disease of militarism – an illness now reaching a perhaps fatal crisis.
But today, reluctantly, we have to take issue with Carroll's latest Globe column – or at least with one of its central insights. Carroll writes, correctly I think, of how "Americans' anger and despair" is shaping US policy:
"…anger and despair so precisely define the broad American mood that those emotions may be the only things that President Bush and his circle have in common with the surrounding legions of his antagonists. We are in anger and despair because every nightmare of which we were warned has come to pass. Bush's team is in anger and despair because their grand and -- to them -- selfless ambitions have been thwarted at every turn. Indeed, anger and despair can seem universally inevitable responses to what America has done and what it faces now.
"While the anger and despair of those on the margins of power only increase the experience of marginal powerlessness, the anger and despair of those who continue to shape national policy can be truly dangerous if such policy owes more to these emotions than to reasoned realism.…"
Leaving aside the arguable notion that the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld power faction actually feels "selfless" in their quest to impose "full spectrum dominance" on the world (as opposed to pursuing this dominance with mindless avidity, oblivious to any consideration of whether it hurts others or not), Carroll's analysis here is penetrating. But then he goes on to say:
"It was the Bush administration's anger and despair at its inability to capture Osama bin Laden that fueled the patent irrationality of the move against Saddam Hussein. The attack on Iraq three years ago was, at bottom, a blind act of rage at the way Al Qaeda and its leaders had eluded us in Afghanistan; a blindness that showed itself at once in the inadequacy of US war planning."
But here I think that Carroll's novelist's sensibility – personalizing, psychologizing – which serves him so well in his columns and the book, in this case fails to encompass the full political reality. Yes, the Bush factionalists are obviously wrathful characters given to patent irrationality in their policies and their underlying paranoid vision of the world. But their attack on Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with their emotional reaction to Osama bin Laden's apparent escape from their clutches in late 2001.
As Carroll himself delineates in House of War, the plan for invading Iraq is part of a long-term scheme to ensure American dominance of world affairs that goes back to the 1992 "Defense Planning Guidance" document drawn up by Paul Wolfowitz at the behest of then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. This plan was then revised, refined and expanded by a series of intertwined "think tanks" and pressure groups during the 1990s, culminating in the Project for a New American Century group, whose "Rebuilding America's Defenses" document, issued in September 2000 – a year before the 9/11 attacks, and several months before the Bush team took power in Washington – provides a detailed blueprint of the vast expansion and "forward thrust" of American military might that we have seen in the past five years. (I've written of this in much greater detail here.)
As often noted here, this PNAC document from 2000 explicitly stated that America should establish a military presence in Iraq no matter what the political situation in that country might be; this was an urgent need that "transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." It is now abundantly clear, from a nearly overwhelming number of sources, including some from inside the Bush Administration itself, that the Bush Faction intended to invade Iraq from their first moments in power. As for the effect of September 11 on the faction, we also know that in the very first hours after the devastating attacks, Donald Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were pushing for an attack on Iraq. This urge had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden's escape; this was before the assault on Afghanistan, before bin Laden's legendary escape at Tora Bora – indeed, bin Laden had not even been identified by the Bush Administration as the author of the attacks at that time.
So with all due respect to Carroll – and the massive research, masterly analysis and hearts blood he put into House of War commands enormous respect – on this particular point, I believe he is mistaken.
He is on much stronger ground, however, in the rest of the column, describing the fevered irrationality at work behind the present warmongering against Iran. The main thrust of the policy, as he says, seems to boil down to this: "To keep you from getting nukes, we will nuke you."
He then concludes, with deep insight:
"Set the cauldron of Iraq to boiling even hotter by daring Iran to join in against us. Justify Iran's impulse to obtain nuclear capacity by using our own nuclear capacity as a thermo-prod. How self-defeating can our actions get?
"Surely, something besides intelligent strategic theory is at work here. Yes. These are the policies of deeply frustrated, angry, and psychologically wounded people. Those of us who oppose them will yield to our own versions of anger and despair at our peril, and the world's. Fierce but reasoned opposition is more to the point than ever."
This is the crux of the matter: how to channel the unavoidable anger and despair produced by the murderous unreason of the nation's leaders into a response that does not itself become infected by the madness it must grapple with.
I confess that I don't know how to do this. And for a long time, I never felt the need to do it; it seemed to me that the articulation of rage and despair at the criminal regime was itself a necessary and important act, given the vast cloud of official lies and media mythmaking that sustained the Bush Faction at such a high level of popularity and unaccountability. You first had to make people see that something was wrong, abysmally wrong, with the Regime and its policies before you could even start trying to rectify the situation.
Now, of course, the Faction has lost its popularity; its myths have been punctured, and the stench of its corruption is pouring out through the fissures, sickening – and awakening – millions of people across the land. But the unaccountability – from most of the media and from almost the entire Establishment – still remains. There is, I think, still a pressing need for, in effect, shouting down the lies and myths that continue to enshroud the Regime. There is still the need, to borrow Henry Miller's phrase, for "inoculating the world with disillusionment."
But it's also true that the times now call for something more than this. Disillusionment and anger are still required, yes – but so is something more constructive. I don't know exactly what that should be. Nothing utopian, certainly; nothing that requires more of human nature than it can give, nothing that posits an end to the manifold imperfections and corruptions endemic to all humankind. Nothing exclusionary, nothing dogmatic –and nothing that partakes of the sickness unto death that has brought us to this degraded state: violence, brutality, vengeance, domination.
Whatever it is, I think it must be some form – or many forms, on many levels – of satyagraha, the Gandhian principle of resolute, non-violent resistance to evil, a force based on compassion, that "seeks to liquidate antagonisms but not the antagonists themselves." If this is not the guiding principle of dissent against the gargantuan engines of militarism, sectarianism, corporatism, ignorance and inequality that maim the world, then we are well and truly lost, and will become, in one fashion or another, a creature of the malign forces we hope to dethrone.
But how best to balance cleansing rage and healing compassion is a wisdom far beyond me at this point. "I and my bosom must debate awhile" on this matter. Meanwhile, James Carroll – despite the slight disagreement here – provides rich material for such meditations.
