By PLS
I’ve got my bruised and swollen feet propped up with an ice bag flopped over them, thanks to a weird fall that abused practically every little pedal tendon and ligament there is, so I just read very two long articles at one sitting. Now I’m trying to find the heart (not sprained, though heavy, and occasionally hurt) to write about the state of the very badly bruised and busted world that Bush 43 has created.
The articles are: “The Next Act: A Damaged White House Eyes Iraq” by Seymour M. Hersh and “Iraq: The War of the Imagination,” a review essay, by Mark Danner, which takes off from Bob Woodward’s State of Denial, Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine and James Risen’s State of War.
The Demolition Derby
All the while, of course, I have been watching the TV news and the images that pile up like palimpsests, one on top of the other: the NATO-bombed and destroyed villages in Afghanistan, the coalition-demolished homes, shops and neighborhoods in the cities of Iraq. (Not to mention the ghastly results of Sunni suicide-bombing and Shia militia activity, etc., but that wasn’t happening in Iraq or Afghanistan until we got involved, and I’m concerned here with our own policy failures.) So: acres and acres of rubble. Heaps, piles, virtual mountains of rubble. Tombstones all to a failed policy of physical force applied absent any faculty resembling human intelligence.
Spell that h-u-m-a-n-e, while thinking of the dead—the babies, the children, the infirm, the old, the adults political and apolitical alike. Tens of thousands. Maybe hundreds of thousands. And more dead, as Bob Herbert noted, even as thousands of oblivious Americans got up before dawn to go on a post-Thanksgiving shopping spree for non-necessities to prop up the US economy. More dying. More homeless. More orphaned or widowed. A country pretty close to out and out civil war, according to Jordan's King Abdullah, normally considered a good friend of the US in the Middle East, and UN Secretary General Kofi Anan, whose public statements are usually extremely measured.
So Who's Emotional?
Am I being emotional here? Am I being sentimental? Am I being soft? Or am I just being swayed by the emotions that don’t guarantee war? Was there was no anger, no contempt, no hate, no loathing, no swaggering arrogance, no irresistible bubbling over of negative emotions among the pushers of this disastrous death-and-rubble-creating policy, these architects of disaster who seem to have thought they could give Iraq a blown up (pun intended) copy of a policy which has utterly failed to build a realm of safety for the Israelis?
Now that Israel has come to mind, let’s add in the rubble in Beirut and Lebanon. And more dead people.
Same result: more insecurity.
And now, according to Seymour Hersh, the Bush administration is arming insurgents among minority groups in the border areas of Iran. The scheme, evidently, is to destabilize a country whose leadership the Bushies have long wished to topple and whose nascent nuclear industry it dearly wants to bomb. Since everything the Bush regime has touched in the Muslim world has turned literally to ash, the administration evidently wants to go out in one more blaze of martial glory.
And death. And destruction.
Remember Blowback?
Talk about the short American memory span! Not so long ago the US woke up to the awful blowback consequences of having armed proto-Taliban to chase the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Need I mention the name of the dread Osama bin Laden? Steve Coll is a good guide to that idiocy.
So who are we arming now? Iranian Kurds. Iranian Baluchis. Iranian Azeris. It’s hard to think that such actions are strengthening our ties to our allies in the so-called war against terror, the Pakistanis and the Turks. I don’t know a lot about Azerbaijan, but I rather doubt its leadership likes the idea of cocky armed Azeri insurgents on its borders, even if they are, officially, Iranian nationals.
Iraqi Kurds are already quasi independent, a situation that Turkey regards with a jaundiced eye, as setting a very dangerous example to Turkish Kurds. Once well armed Iranian-Kurds manage to weaken Iran’s control over the Kurdish patches of Iran, is it likely that the dream of a united Kurdistan will not seem within reach—or at least worth reaching for? Is Turkey likely to respond by bidding a fond and peaceful farewell to the Turkish Kurds whose systematic repression has gone a long way toward making it difficult for Turkey to enter the European Union?
Then there’s Pakistan. Turkey is democratic and admirably stable, but Pakistan is an unhappy agglomeration of not quite warring ethnic geo-concentrations. It is also a nuclear power. Pakistani Baluchistan, although the least populous, is the largest state in the union, and its mountainous terrain already hosts an insurgency, to say nothing of a more broadly shared dissatisfaction with Islamabad’s allocation of profits from Baloch natural gas. Neither the Sindhis nor the Mohajir emigrés from India are entirely happy with what they regard as self-serving Punjabi rule, and Islamabad (as the US has discovered) has little control over the Pashtun tribal territories between Pakistan and Afghanistan. I’m not so sure that Pakistan is on the verge of breaking apart, but it can get a lot more unstable and lot more fundamentalist, which would not be good news for the US or India. So a US-armed Iranian Baloch contingent promoting a Greater Baluchistan is a very bad idea.
Another Messiah?
For that matter, is a weak, chaotic Iran really in the interest of the US? Or do the neo-cons who fell in love with the hapless Iraqi Chalabi harbor a related fantasy: the ex-Shah’s exiled son can be parachuted in to re-create the docile US-supporting (and vice versa) Pahlavi dynasty?
Hello! Whether you like it or not, gentlemen, there has been a genuine revolution in Iran. Iranians like the idea of standing up to Uncle Sam. They like the idea of nuclear potency. No matter what happens to one Mahmoud Ahmedinajad, there is no going back to a simpler time. Trying to destabilize or fragment Iran will only create more rubble, more death, more insecurity.
Stop Him!
Americans are brought up on this largely admirable admonition: if at first you don't suceed, try, try again. They are also taught: don't knock your head against a brick wall. Wisdom lies in knowing when to apply which.
This Bush administration has failed this test. George W. Bush has the power to do a lot more damage before he hands over the executive’s responsibility for foreign affairs in 2009 to his successor. He must be restrained. When a policy has failed, there is no reason to believe that more of the very same will succeed.
Suddenly I have a very bad headache. Maybe I should transfer the icebag from my feet to my crown.