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April
21, 2003
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April 23,
2003
Desolation Row
Bush
Barbarians Teach by Example
By
CHRIS FLOYD
In recent days, the perverse moral calculus that
guides the masters of war in the White House has revealed itself
with startling clarity--laid bare like the gurgling intestines
of a three-year-old child whose skin has been flayed by a fragmentation
bomb.
As the desolation--sorry, liberation--of
Iraq continued apace, the Masters moved quickly and efficiently
to secure the country's oilfields, but they blithely and deliberately
failed to secure the lives of innocent people left in bombed-out
cities without any system of law or governance. Unlike oil rigs--which,
after all, could be restored if something happened to them--the
actual human beings destroyed in the chaos that followed the
invaders' high-tech blitzkrieg cannot be replaced--not even by
no-bid, $7 billion reconstruction contracts to Dick Cheney's
Halliburton.
You'd think that conquerors who'd come
to "liberate" a suffering people would have brought
enough troops to actually secure the territory--and the lives
and livelihoods of said suffering people--as they conquered it.
Of course, this kind of thing is unglamorous work, not very telegenic;
what's more, you can't just farm it out in fat contracts to your
political cronies. So why bother? Who cares? What's a little
"untidiness"--as Don Rumsfeld called the slow, agonizing
deaths of worthless "collateral damage" lying untreated
in ransacked hospitals--when you're remaking the world? As that
other breaker of nations, Joe Stalin, used to say: "When
wood is chopped, chips fly."
Rumsfeld's British counterpart, UK Defence
Minister Geoff Hoon, went even further. While Rumsfeld did at
least acknowledge that the shootings, lootings, ethnic strife,
revenge killings, fatal checkpoint "accidents" and
"regrettable" crossfire incidents were a bit "untidy,"
Hoon--whose penchant for Bush-style exercise sessions has earned
him the all-too-apt sobriquet "Buff" Hoon--actually
declared in Parliament that the mothers of innocent children
killed by cluster-bombs would one day be "grateful"
for sacrificing the fruit of their wombs to the invaders. (We're
not making this up. You couldn't make it up.)
The oil-securing conquerors also failed
to safeguard Iraq's storehouses of antiquity--irreplaceable treasures
from the earliest days of civilization, which first arose on
this land's now-cratered, uranium-soaked soil. Here humanity
first learned to write, to count, make medicine, form cities,
create laws, map the stars. Here humanity first began its excruciatingly
slow--and obviously incomplete--emergence from the dictatorship
of instinct, the shackles of genetic programming, the blind,
voracious animal need that still thrashes in the mud of our monkey
brains.
Priceless artifacts that recorded this
millennia-long struggle for emergence and transcendence were
destroyed in the space of a few hours during the orgy of looting
that swept Iraq in the conquerors' wake. Although in Baghdad
a few ordinary American soldiers tried to intervene at first,
they were quickly ordered away by their superiors (sic) and forced
to stand idle while mobs of destitute Shiites--brutalized by
the former CIA asset Saddam Hussein, by punitive sanctions that
devoured their society and strengthened the hand of their oppressor,
and by days of indiscriminate bombing that blew their loved ones
to bits--smashed the heritage of our human commonality.
But let's be fair. The Oval One's occupiers
did manage to secure two important buildings in the midst of
the rampage: the Interior Ministry, with all of Saddam's juicy
intelligence files--why let good torture go to waste?--and, of
course, the Oil Ministry. In fact, the file-grab has already
produced a shocking revelation: it seems that Moscow and Baghdad
were sharing intelligence in a joint effort to combat Osama bin
Laden--you know, the guy whose "close connection" to
Saddam was the main reason that the terror-rattled (and deliberately
deceived) American public finally supported Bush's war of aggression.
Unfortunately for that rattled and deceived
populace, the chaos in Iraq will only mean more repression in
the Homeland. For it confirms the deepest fears of the Bushist
ruling clique. They believe that the veneer of civilization is
wafer-thin, that a single terrorist attack can crack it--thus
the panicky discarding of civil liberties after Sept. 11. A few
more such blows, they think, will shatter American society to
pieces. So measures even more draconian will now be promulgated.
Last week, the White House began moving to have the "emergency"
powers of the notorious PATRIOT Act made permanent. Secret arrests,
internment camps, centralization of personal data, classification
of citizens into ranks of "security-worthiness," unrestricted
surveillance and more--all are in the works or even now being
implemented.
That's how little faith these so-called
super-patriots really have in America. It is they, not the dissenters,
who despise their own country, who believe it's too weak and
unworthy for freedom.
Of course, their concerns aren't completely
unfounded. For the breakdown we saw in Iraq is indeed an ever-present
risk for vastly unequal societies, where the rich and powerful
commit crimes with impunity while the poor and powerless fill
the jails. Where rulers practice the most blatant deceit, lie
and cheat their way into authority, propagate absurd myths about
themselves, paint their common thuggery in the colors of patriotism
and religion. Where, above all, they set the ultimate example
of lawlessness for their people: launching wars against countries
that haven't attacked them, teaching that killing, corruption
and ruin--not law, not communion, not transcendence--are the
supreme expressions of civilization, the basis of human society.
It's a dangerous lesson, especially for
people shaken by disaster: war, repression--or terrorist attacks.
That's why the Bushist clique is worried. True, they are also
physical cowards--dodging wars they were glad for others to fight--and
weaklings as well, dependent on sugar daddies and crony contracts
to make their way in the world. Such timorous specimens would
naturally underestimate the resilience of American society.
Yet perhaps they have reason to worry.
Perhaps what they see in Iraq's desolation is not just the ruin
of an evil regime they once gladly succored--but the kind of
moral rot they are now engendering by their own example.
Perhaps we should all start worrying.
Chris Floyd
is a columnist for the Moscow Times and a regular contributor
to CounterPunch. He can be reached at: cfloyd72@hotmail.com
Yesterday's
Features
Uri
Avnery
Operation "Syrian Freedom":
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Jorge
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"They Died Trying to Become
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Perry
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