Rage and Light: Militarism and its Discontents

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Sun, 23 Apr 2006 23:29:49 -0700 (PDT)

Rage and Light: Militarism and its Discontents

 

 

 

 

http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_frontpage & Itemid=1

 

 

 

Rage and Light: Militarism and its Discontents

 

Saturday, 22 April 2006

 

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.