Bush's War on its Quinceanera

Matt Taibbi on the Iraq War fifteen years on:

But that's not how our rulers sold the war to themselves. They weren't overcome with emotion, or some post-9/11 yearning for vengeance. They knew what they were doing.

The Iraq invasion, one of the great crimes of this or any age and destined to be a crossroads event in the history of America's decline, was instead a cold, calculated, opportunistic power grab, aimed as much at future targets, and even our own population, as at the Iraqi "enemy."

As citizens, we haven't started to reckon with any of this. We write it off rather than deal with it. In fact, when we think of Iraq at all, we often describe the invasion as a mistake. Embarrassingly, even I did this a few weeks back, talking about how we "blundered" into Iraq.

It's understandable. There are superficial plot elements from the Iraq narrative we lean on to soothe ourselves that the invasion was caused by an unlikely confluence of accidents and errors, not the inherent venality of our system.

The mainstream's embrace of Bush's absurd and criminal invasion of Iraq bears for me a striking resemblance to its embrace of "diversity" or the problem of "racism" or any other element of the poz. It's as if there's a silent agreement that no one will challenge the operating assumptions because the end goal has been successfully framed as a moral imperative.

Taibbi goes through the well-known litany of US invasions and abuses of weaker countries (which from this vantage looks like one long squandering of the remarkable power and wealth the US held relative to the rest of the world at the end of WWII). For him all roads lead to a right-wing impulse behind this. For me, now, they all lead to the Land of Poz, where militarism is now quartered, and I see the affinity between them in the similarity of their methods:

The consistent thread throughout all of these foreign policy losses was our relentless, stubborn belief that would have succeeded, if only we'd been allowed to use more force and violence.

Likewise, diversity and equality are only failing because we haven't tried hard enough. The Iraq War could only go on as long as people were willing to endure the cost and carnage. The Diversity War conceals its damage--indeed, recasts its negative effects, such as racial hatred, as proof of its necessity (like WMD)--and will go on.
For the time.

Howdy Doody, Master of the Universe

Via Zero Hedge, here's WINEP warrior Patrick Clawson  lamenting the prospects of a successful "crisis initiation", read false flag operation (or suggesting one, I can't really tell; he appears to be responding to a question from the audience here), to provoke a war over the resistance of President Obama, Congress and the Pentagon. By his lights this is the "traditional way America gets to war" (and here would be "best for US interests").
He also suggests escalating the current covert war on Iran from sabotage and assassination to, say, sinking an Iranian submarine (but he's not "advocating" it, mind you), delighting his fellow ghouls with this bit of mischevious wit (I've got to party with you, man!):

The Audacity of Expedience

From this NYT article on Obama's drone war:

They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action [drone strikes] without hand-wringing.
(...)
Yet the administration’s very success at killing terrorism suspects has been shadowed by a suspicion: that Mr. Obama has avoided the complications of detention by deciding, in effect, to take no prisoners alive. While scores of suspects have been killed under Mr. Obama, only one has been taken into American custody, and the president has balked at adding new prisoners to Guantánamo.
(...)
David Axelrod, the president’s closest political adviser, began showing up at the “Terror Tuesday” meetings [where that week's drone assassination targets are decided upon], his unspeaking presence a visible reminder of what everyone understood: a successful attack would overwhelm the president’s other aspirations and achievements.

Earlier I had taken to calling Mr. Axelrod "the Undertaker" because he looks like one with that somber visage, but now the moniker seems apt for other reasons.

All out of transformation: Chewing bubble gum and keeping the president's "aspirations" in the black.

Barry Bugs Out

Tom Englehardt nails the true nature of President Obama's address to cadets at West Point:

Certainly, the choice of venue, and so the decision to address a military audience first and other Americans second, not only emphasized the escalatory military path chosen in Afghanistan, but represented a kind of symbolic surrender of civilian authority.

Rush Limbaugh's wistful musing about a military coup is more oblivious than devious: after a perfunctory, brief struggle, the coup is victorious (Of course, if the president had been arrested at West Point and replaced with a military junta, I'm not entirely sure Limbaugh wouldn't find a way to justify it. Are you?). Under political duress, the president has accepted the role of conditional, if not yet nominal, Commander-in-Chief, surrendering an authority he doesn't want and wouldn't know what to do with anyway. Now he bites his nails and waits, like the rest of us.

But it's not the president's prerogative to divest himself of command over the armed forces to avoid its political consequences--elite convention notwithstanding. The extraordinary executive power over war itself remains, insulated from legislative or judicial interference, nominally vested in an elected president, wielded by a cabal. This is dereliction of duty of the highest order. The Commander in Chief has abandoned his post to cower in the rear while his mutinous subordinates take command.

But okay, this is all retrograde and simplistic, I know. Just the sort of thing to set elite eyes rolling, like taking the Constitution and sovereignty too seriously. Let's crassly accept the "political reality" and acknowledge the asymmetry between the White House and the the military establishment :

The Pentagon dictates policy directly to the Republican Party, Fox News, conservative radio and Internet, while fighting to a draw in the contested middle that is the the unallied media.
Obama, on the other hand, leads a party divided on the war and has a more conditional alliance with a media complex--MSNBC, NPR, etc.--that is both less powerful and less subservient than their adversaries. It's no great boast, but the liberal media and Democratic Party have, on this issue, shown superior independence and character. The difference casts in relief the decadence of the Republican Party and its staunchest media organs.

Meanwhile, in the Boy Wonder's White House Joseph Biden, garrulous and glib, self-imagined Caesar to Iraq's Gaul, is what passes for a pragmatist and sage. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (her position the product of a previous political capitulation), known for taking flight in hectoring recrimination before the galling indignity that is the unscripted media encounter, is sent abroad to placate a resentful world. The charmless representing the clueless. God help us.

Make Believe and Reality

Last summer, as Barack Obama directed the subtle intimidation of fawning European crowds (millions of charisma-intoxicated Germans can't be wrong!) at those Americans still retaining the quaint notion presidential elections are domestic affairs not subject to global opinion, at least one of his acolytes in the media here in the formal remnant of the United States gushed that Senator Obama had thereby assumed the leadership role vacated by President Bush--by acquiring the geopolitical equivalent of an impressive TVQ score. "Power begets more power, absolutely" Mr. Rich enthused, apparently without irony.

We'll leave aside for the moment the interlocutor's widely shared confusion--that President Bush does, or that President Obama can be expected to, maintain a leadership role that is more substantial than ceremonial. The inverse relationship between the freedom of action afforded a president and the power vested in the executive office continues to grow, along with the complexity of the job and Congress' by now institutional cowardice. Likewise the relationship between the caliber of man drawn from the electable and the reverential expectations we have of the office. For this we have only ourselves to blame. Remarkable leaders are possible only by astounding coincidence in this environment, and they will not be fashioned out of creative desperation (witness the fiction of President Bush's post-9/11, thrust-upon greatness).

Of course, before Barack Obama's world tour touched down amid the automatic adulation of the children and the childlike of Europe, he'd already performed a much smaller gig in front of a tougher crowd in Israel, where he dutifully asserted that any amount of force (or US munitions) Israel deems necessary to deter Hamas' crude rocket attacks is justified, because he has children of his own (the children of Gaza, and how their deaths might perpetuate the cycle of violence--something the president-elect has at least feigned awareness of in the past--would not be allowed to complicate this simple calculus). Yes, he doesn't really believe this, he was just saying--which is precisely the point. Even now, three weeks before the nation changes administrations in a state of bewildering economic and geopolitical crisis, the next president of the United States has little experience beyond just saying.

That rhetorical bet of last July is now being called, before the president-elect has even sat at the table in earnest, as sanction for a gruesomely disproportionate military response leveled upon an all but powerless adversary. The precocious senator, having grown used to posturing before people intoxicated by the imagined wisdom inherent in his mulatto moral superiority, and having his elegant vapidities received as profundities, has forgotten, or never properly learned, that words have meaning. Of course he's not alone; we've all forgotten this. Barack Obama wouldn't be possible otherwise.

More to the point, this man who's made a religion of power (with which he has, like the born-again Christian and his savior, a close personal relationship), has ascended with such absurd ease and rapidity to its pinnacle he hasn't had the opportunity to develop sufficient respect for its consequences. His make-believe of last summer, playing at global "leadership", is suddenly harsh reality. Israel's hard bargainers weren't just looking for him to genuflect properly (this much is to be expected), but were looking for something a little more concrete. Obliterate the Gazan ghetto with America's finest military hardware before an outraged world, burning through American soft power as rapidly as we expend her munitions? Yes we can!

So the presumption and airs of that heady summer last are nowhere to be found as the president-elect ducks questions on his way from gym to golf course, his sudden shyness papered over by embarrassing beefcake shots. "One president at a time" is how the dodge is put into words, even as Israel's actions and Ehud Barak's assertions, placing limitations upon the incoming administration with the complicity of the current one, reveal it for what it truly is, capitulation to a forced reality. The economic crisis warranted no such respectful inaction, but rather haste in supporting the status quo; Obama's duck-and-cover in this instance is really the same thing after all, reassurance to the players upon which the new president's cherished power is utterly dependent that he will not step out of line. As for that much-hyped esteem which the rest of the world so cheaply bestowed on our frail young prince, it will wear out as quickly and to the same disappointment of any cheap purchase if Mr. Obama doesn't redeem it with real, yeah, "change".

Quiet. Too, Too Quiet

Even as it seems some sort of strike on Iran is not just inevitable but imminent, proof of widespread Iranian arming of Shi'ite militias is still the dog that hasn't barked. Via Laura Rosen, here the LAT's Tina Susman reports on a conspicuous absence:

There was something interesting missing from Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner's introductory remarks to journalists at his regular news briefing in Baghdad on Wednesday: the word "Iran," or any form of it. It was especially striking as Bergner, the U.S. military spokesman here, announced the extraordinary list of weapons and munitions that have been uncovered in recent weeks since fighting erupted between Iraqi and U.S. security forces and Shiite militiamen.

The omission is creepily un-reassuring. Further:

A plan to show some alleged Iranian-supplied explosives to journalists last week in Karbala and then destroy them was canceled after the United States realized none of them was from Iran. A U.S. military spokesman attributed the confusion to a misunderstanding that emerged after an Iraqi Army general in Karbala erroneously reported the items were of Iranian origin.

Last week the US military reported finding "very, very significant" amounts of Iranian arms during the offensives in Basra and Baghdad. We're waiting. Of course, even the excuse used above raises the unsettling suspicion that Iraqis are being encouraged to "find" Iranian weapons.
Evidence given to last week's United Iraqi Alliance delegation to Iran remains secret, and while US media reports characterized the visit, with much encouragement from the administration and the US command, as a confrontation, the Iraqi account of the the delegation's purpose substantively differs. The US finds itself in the dubious position of fostering hostility between Iraq and Iran, to preserve the occupation. In fact, with all the hedging Iran is doing, supporting various Shi'ite factions and engaging in the sort of development that was to be a centerpiece of US efforts, it's not certain the net effect of its involvement is negative--for Iraq's stability.

If not for the administration's previous and unrelenting hostility toward Iran, it might be arguing, if privately, that widening the war is dubious strategy, regardless of Iranian involvement. Despite aerial strikes on Quds force traininig camps that will be the loudly stated reasons for the coming escalation, it's hard not to conclude that our purpose will be to destroy Iran's nuclear program, a purpose predating the war, and it will be done to the detriment of the war effort, and those charged with it.

Hazard? What Moral Hazard?

Let's twist again, like we did last summer
Let's twist again, like we did last year
--Chubby Checker, Let's Twist Again

In understanding the madness of our entanglement in Iraq I find it helps to reject out of hand everything the administration says and ignore the distorted center of polite opinion maintained by the corporate press, while continually reminding yourself that the point of the occupation is the occupation. For all of the shifting goals and serial failure, what we have, still, is less a war seeking resoultion than a committed government enterprise experiencing cost overruns.

The administration has shown admirable resourcefulness in utilizing its very failures to obscure and further, even now, its intentions. But no matter how much our might has degraded our sense of national responsibility, I suspect that to operate on the premise that regardless of everything we must remain in Iraq to prevent the consequences of our invading Iraq, while refusing to impeach those responsible for this deadly chain of causality, indeed, while so much as an apology to the people of Iraq is absolutely out of the question, a notion for marginal cranks, must come with its own unanticipated consequences.

The prospect of losing Iraq’s oil to nationalization under a hostile government allied with a strengthened Iran was no more anticipated than the need for 150,000 besieged troops five years on–-to maintain what at this point was supposed to be a fraction of that number, welcome and paid for out of Iraq’s properly developed oil reserves. Still we behave as if the failure of the administration’s designs are evidence they never existed. Where then is all this oil, some have asked straight-faced.
But its failures only reveal the administration’s Iraq project as a hopeless gambit mistaken for a sure thing. This crime, of incompetence, too goes unpunished. A nation that produces and accepts this can be described as neither just in its relations with others nor sensibly self-regarding. But the faithful denial of these things is a requirement of public office or stature in the media. We have made a religion of the evasion of responsibility.

The pretences of the war have fallen away one by one, like the insubstantial bunting they were, but our purpose in Iraq is revealed by precisely where it is we will not allow tribes to defy the government, in contrast to our arming and encouragement of Sunni insurgents elsewhere: in Basra, the prize within the prize that is Iraq’s oil. But in this our first postmodern war, the pretences just keep presenting themselves anew, failure is construed as success and the public lives at one ironic remove from reality. A war of plunder is just so obvious.

If we truly sought “political reconciliation” and mere “stability” we would, obviously, be attempting to reconcile Muktada al-Sadr, as a leader with popular legitimacy who has demonstrated political competence and even a good deal of helpful restraint, with his Shia adversaries within the government. Despite the habitual characterization of al-Sadr as a violent agent of Iran’s mullahs what actually distinguishes him from those we ally with is his categorical rejection of an American presence. If we were seeking simply reconciliation our work would be much easier, and Iran’s role would be welcome and encouraged. Our lies carry as much truth as they can bear; we seek a political accommodation alright, but it must serve our ends. We are submitting Iraq to a peculiarly American absurdity, the “conversation”; as in, we’re going to have a “conversation” until you come around to my point of view, even if it kills us (think of our recurring “national conversation about race”).

This year, like the last time General Petraeus testified before Congress, the deliberately provocative charge of American blood on Iranian hands was leveled, when Senator Lieberman’s helpful reach-around prompted General Petraeus to enthuse that, yes, Iran may be indirectly responsible for “hundreds” of US casualties. Moments later he would celebrate our erstwhile mortal enemies among the Sunni, their responsibility for thousands of American deaths, unlike the circumstances of Iran’s “proxy war”, direct and well-documented.

The assumption that, despite the grave moral error of invading and destroying Iraq, America retains objective moral legitimacy there while Iran, despite sharing a border and recent war with Iraq, categorically has none, reveals a disturbing inability to think morally or coherently about the United States abroad. That the public has gone beyond unwilling to become quite unable to recognize this grand moral contradiction and its immense consequences betray us as a people degenerating into catastrophic self-delusion.

Impotence in the Summer of Love, 2007

“When we catch you playing a nonconstructive role, there will be a price to pay.”
--President Bush, to Iran, in a news conference last Thursday.

"Your name's Lebowski, Lebowski...You're not dealing with morons here."
--dim thug;
"It's a complicated case, Maude. Lotta ins. Lotta outs. And a lotta strands to keep in my head, man. Lotta strands..."
--The Dude, The Big Lebowski

"You run it because people think you run it. Once they stop thinking it, you stop running it."
-- Miller's Crossing

"Good. Bad. I'm the guy with the gun."
-- The Army of Darkness

Can I be forgiven for wondering if that creepy chill wind on the back of my sun-burnt neck was a time-traveling echo of the approaching Fall, or the Administration taking advantage of the summer idyll to quietly set the premise for war with Iran? At this point I half expect that when President Bush announces the bombing campaign later this month he will muffle his words by coughing into his fist.

The unfortunate debate-corrupting effect of the presidential campaign (and the presumptive Democratic nominee's inconvenient complicity in the same catastrophic foreign policy that promises to deliver the White House, and her desire to signal to certain interested bureaucracies that she can be reasoned with—what the Pentagon's firing across the bow of the HMS Hillary, and the glee with which Clinton contrasted herself with Obama's callow enthusiasm for diplomatic promiscuity is all ultimately about, perhaps) produces a Congress for whom discretion is the better part of power.

Congress can't or won't act. Not by repealing the effected-through-deception Iraq War Resolution; not by de-funding the resulting fraudulent war; not by impeaching the President and Vice President for their astonishing culpability and incompetence.
The Democrats will be content to nip about the edges of the Bush Administration's colossal failure just enough to redeem this effective co-operation for a term in the White House. This is unmistakably a Republican war, but those additional casualties sacrificed to the Democrats' craven discretion represent yet another shameful misappropriation of American blood (and of the civilian innocents who will be sacrificed to the next Clinton Administration, well, even I, here in full puffed-up outrage mode, haven't the stomach to consider the brutality of that).
But I wouldn't detain you to bring your attention to the obvious.

The Iraq War was an "expression of power as its own justification."
The possession of unparalleled military might by the world's greatest democracy, under challenge by Islamist reaction, radically changed the political and moral calculus. The confident and bold application of overwhelming military force by this enlightened power, followed by the speedy introduction of Western governance, would so swiftly improve life for so many that when compared against the cost of inaction it is revealed as a moral responsibility. This then justified a radical break with custom and law, a re-figuring of the nation-state system.

Folderol from front to back, of course. More important is where this sort of thought originates. This heady talk, this swooning before military might, is entirely a product of that military might. It serves it. The mirage of absolute military primacy lures the intemperate into these delusions of grandeur.

Of course the swagger and confidence had to be backed up by holding down Iraq. Needless to say we have failed to deliver the much-hyped AmericaWorld franchise, thwarted by a handful of networks of the world's most heavily armed neighborhood toughs. George Bush adds the protection racket to his resume of failure. Pimpin' ain't easy, George.

And still there is no one to hold us to account. Except us. In the world community we come to increasingly rely on intimidation. But the reality of Iraq, plain to the world--of just how horribly wrong we were, and are, remains. The American media maintains the fiction that we're still a virgin, physical evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Summer. Equestrian Camp. Yeah.

So twice we trump decency with power. First for the fraud of the invasion, and now for incompetence of the occupation. Consequences await. Out there, in the future, waiting to take form. Oh the things you'll see...

We are unable to pacify Iraq, but capable of expanding the effort into neighboring Iran. Indeed, the failure in Iraq will provide the pretext. In a disturbing suggestion that we really have crossed over into something altogether new, our response is not to recognize the error of Iraq and the failure of force to deliver as promised, and to stand down with as much dignity and order as possible, but to indict neighboring nations in our failure as a pretext to expand the war. To expand our domain of chaos. The disaster of military riches that lured us past the bounds of common decency now strands us there.
America the unstoppable force is checked in Iraq not by an immovable object, but absorbed by a black hole into which our effort disappears to no effect.

We are powerful and powerless at once. Remarkably, we don't see it yet. We still operate on the assumption of absolute moral authority--having discarded morality and failing to establish authority. We throw our weight around, oblivious to our rapidly eroding relevance. The world's resentment will outlast our brittle military strength.

The Iranians, for their part, share a border and a recent war with Iraq. Still, we expect them to sit still for the chaos we've created on their frontier, even as the MEK, an organization we ourselves have designated as terrorist, uses Iraq (with our support and against Iraqi wishes) as a base of operations that include collecting intelligence to be used in building a case for war against them. The Iranians are, as well, expected to content themselves with our official policy of undermining their government and funding its political opposition.

As we arm Sunni "allies" opposed to the Shi'ite government (ahead of an almost certain civil war), we characterize Iranian arming and training of Shi'ite militias as sinister. Yet these militias enjoy more popular support than the bunkered government, and are not armed against it, as are the previously mentioned Sunnis.

We would appear to be working against ourselves, backing factions that oppose the government we've spent so much to preserve on one hand, complaining of Iranian involvement in the south but cultivating our own relationship with Iranian-originated Sciri and its leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim on the other.

Muktada al-Sadr opposes the American military presence; al-Hakim has proven more malleable abut this and the all-important oil law. Words may have been rendered meaningless by our postmodern revolutionaries, but the course of real interest and power as it plays out reassures us that reality still holds. The oil law will be the last piece of Iraq we leave behind.

Perhaps the ultimate irony is that after playing the farce of an Iraqi threat to the United States, we now threaten the country with the most to legitimately fear from Iraq (where's Iranian gratitude, you say?--welcome to the city, kid).

The question isn't, is Iran responsible for arming Shi'ite militias against us in Iraq?, but why is the War Party pushing this question? The contingency plan to maintain the expansion of the war into Iran involves repeating this question with enough volume and frequency that the public will be fooled into over-estimating its relevance. It is a red herring.
Americans now must be fooled into thinking that their most exigent concern is Iranian involvement in Iraq, just as they once thought of Iraqi WMD (don't you just cringe a little with embarrassment when you read it now?). Be angry at the thought of American blood on Iranian hands, but remember, Iranian weaponry in the hands of Iraqis have killed far fewer Americans than Saudi money, Arab jihadis, and, sadly, our own weapons and money diverted through incompetence and corruption into the hands of insurgents, or given outright by us in our haste to stand up Iraqi armed forces that later faded into the chaos.

The proposed executive order floated on Tuesday, seemingly designed as much to thwart our own diplomatic efforts as to further pressure Iran, moving the bulk of Iran's army and virtually all of its intelligence apparatus into the terrorist category, combines the stupidity of leaving our adversary without an exit with the madness of leaving ourselves without one. The Administration quietly burns another ship.

Ironic, how the current president, always making such a show of "faith", proved tragically unable to recognize the real thing, when and where it has consequences. Bush's retail-outlet redemption is so cheaply purchased and pawned ("Mr. President, what role does faith play in your life?"), shamelessly minting and re-minting the base coin of conspicuous religiosity--that it not only fails to check but fortifies our hero's catastrophic pride.
The President is now capable of nearly anything, even pulling the trigger on Iran to stick it to his political opponents at home. Pride, thy name is Bush.

Meanwhile, we still operate on the assumption that we have both moral authority and material control. The American media maintains the fiction for us, and we all manage to avoid the obvious question: how would we judge our actions if they came from another? How then will history judge us?