I feel like Rip Van Winkle in reverse; like I’ve awoken years in the past instead of years in the future. Dubya Bush going from VFW to military academy assembly selling the Iraq war. Democrats hedging their positions, hoping to land on the winning side. Pro-war ad campaigns funded by arch-reactionary swift-boaters. Improbably optimistic National Intelligence Estimates, at least in their highly redacted declassified form. What is this, 2002? Are we starting from scratch yet again? This is the product of our political culture’s “ballgame” approach to foreign policy adventures, wherein the central question becomes “will it succeed?” Is this the question we ask when someone commits murder and holds a family hostage? Do we console our consciences with the notion that, well, he did kill that old man and that baby, but at least he’s finally got that household under control? (Right – before someone jumps all over my shit, let me make it clear that I don’t consider our troops to be the “murderer” here. They are the weapon, the instrument of policy that is initiated by our democratically elected leaders, so ultimately it is we who bear responsibility for what they are ordered to do.)

In his speech to the VFW, Bush drew some analogies between the Iraq war and the wars in Korea and Vietnam. (I should say his speechwriters drew the analogies, since he clearly knows nothing about U.S. foreign policy, past or present.) One point was that, like Vietnam and Korea, Iraq is an “ideological” struggle. This is truer than he knows. Both Korea and Vietnam – while very different wars – were fought over the establishment of a U.S.-led global economic system. Iraq was invaded to breathe life into that same superannuated imperial body. The “ideology” of which Dubya speaks was perhaps best articulated by his father – “What we say goes.” That position faces the opposing ideology of “yankee go home.” We fight for freedom – the freedom to do what we want with other people’s lives and property. They fight for, as Robert Fisk puts it, “freedom from us.” So in that way Bush is unintentionally correct, though he and his conservative pundit supporters (like the little fuck on the PBS News Hour) appear to know nothing about the Vietnam war (nor, apparently the Iraq war).

The rest of Bush’s selling points are just laughable, frankly. Grim as the situation is, I couldn’t resist a guffaw when I heard Dubya tossing around that hallucinogenic contention about how we left Vietnam too soon. (Strange argument for someone who did his level best to avoid going there himself.) He raised the specter of the “boat people” and the “killing fields” that await our departure from Iraq. Not sure if he’s quite been paying attention over the last four years, but that scale of human catastrophe has already been taking place in the unfortunate land he chose to invade, with more than 2 million external refugees, a similar number of internal refugees, and between 500,000 and 1 million killed, plus god knows how many grievously wounded, orphaned, widowed, etc. This is an upheaval easily on the scale of that which accompanied and followed our criminal invasion and destruction of Indochina. (See journalist Nir Rosen’s recent articles for some on-the-ground reporting on this.) So since what Bush claims to be his worst fears have already been realized, why are we staying in Iraq?

This is old wine in new bottles, folks. We are not wanted in Iraq, we have no right to be there, and we should leave with all deliberate speed. Once we get that underway, we can talk about reparations… and accountability.

luv u,

jp

The ample-assed “brain” of Dubya, Karl Rove, announced his departure from the White House this week, and the air waves were thick with pundit-wisdom on this supposed genius of the modern political arena. How easily public figures earn such designations. I always think of Henry Kissinger, hailed in his time as a brilliant geostrategist and practitioner of cold war realpolitik, whose ham-fisted policy of stalemate in the middle east contributed very substantially to the outbreak of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war (not to mention the continuing disaster in Israel/Palestine) and whose Nobel Prize-winning Paris Peace Accord was sabotaged by the man himself before the ink was dry. Rove’s reputation is similarly inflated, and we often hear about his meticulous district-by-district, precinct-by-precinct analysis, his get out the vote strategies, etc., but honestly – what did the guy really accomplish? He basically lost the 2000 election against Gore, who was about as flat-footed a candidate as could have been imagined at the time, then very nearly lost four years later (with all the advantages of 9/11 at his back) to John Kerry, more than Gore’s equal in the flat-footed category. Where’s the magic?

Seems much of Rove’s vaunted talent is about luck, much about a very entrenched G.O.P. electoral machine (crucial for Ohio in 2004), and three parts right-wing media echo chamber – the talk show yammerers, tabloids, and reactionary bloggers that push the pusillanimous and profit-obsessed mainstream media to the right on just about every issue. Without those natural advantages, Rove/Bush would have gotten nowhere. For Christ’s sake, the Democrats handed their ass to him on a plate and he practically handed it back… twice, pulling off razor-thin victories that made JFK’s 1960 win look like an electoral landslide. How do their two elections compare with LBJ in ’64, Nixon in ’72, Reagan in ’84, or even Dubya’s father in ’88? Pretty poorly, that’s how. And as a political strategist/advisor, what has he managed to accomplish between elections? His boss enjoys abysmal approval ratings, his administration in a shambles. If it weren’t for the total ineptitude and disingenuousness of the Democratic leadership, I doubt there would have been an administration left for Rove to quit by this time. Seems to me a bona fide political genius might have managed to keep his man from scraping his ass all the way to the finish line.

My guess is that the Democrats will miss Rove more than the Republicans. He makes a good target – he is obnoxious and despicable, to be sure – and it fits into the general narrative that everything was swell until the Mayberry Machiavellians came to town. That is the theme of the Hillary campaign… back to the future. Don’t buy it, friends. As much as Bush has been able to destroy the U.S. empire merely by strolling through it, Bill Clinton was culpable for considerable misery, including an eight-year campaign of economic strangulation and bombing against Iraq that cost at least 500,000 lives. There are marginal differences, but nothing to get too giddy about. And while Rove bears substantial responsibility for the carnage that has occurred since, he isn’t the mastermind the Dems make him out to be. In fact, a cursory look at the past fifty years of electoral history shows him to be a third-rate Svengali, less accomplished than Michael Deaver or James Carville.

The most influential figure over the past three election cycles was named Bin Laden. And that fucker cast his votes with hijacked planes.

luv u,

jp