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CounterPunch
February
1, 2003
Bush and Hitler
The Stategy
of Fear
by DAVE LINDORFF
It's time to stop trying to explain why a war
on Iraq is a bad idea.
The logic, of course, is clear. The administration
has no evidence that Hussein has weapons of destruction. If it
did, it would have shown it to the American public and the U.N.
long ago. It has no evidence that Iraq is in league with Al Qaeda
for the same reason. And it's obvious that even if--a big if
according to Genernal Norman Schwarzkopf--a U.S. invasion does
succeed in easily toppling Hussein, the result of that unprovoked
assault, especially if it is carried out by the U.S. without
a U.N. endorsement, will be a wave of terror against Americans
and American interests that will dwarf anything seen in the past.
This is all self-evident, and even the
Bush Administration has tacitly admitted that increased terrorism
will be the result of an attack on Iraq: it has had the State
Department issue a warning to Americans overseas and to Americans
planning to travel that they should be prepared to be terrorist
targets.
The point, however, is that this is precisely
what the Bush Administration wants to happen.
A permanent state of American panic,
fortified by regular doses of terror attacks, hijackings and
building demolitions by crazed Muslim fanatics is  exactly what Bush needs to
stay in power, win re-election in 2004, stack the federal courts,
gut the Bill of Rights, and enrich its corporate sponsors.
Don't hold your breath waiting for some
politician on the Democratic side of the aisle to stand up and
confront the administration about this treasonous plan.
That means it is urgent for the left
to address the issue--to insert it into the public debate.
If Bush truly wanted to reduce the threat
of terror against Americans, he would not be harassing Arab-Americans
and Muslims at random and deporting people for minor alleged
visa violations after secret hearings and detentions (a teriffic
way to create blood enemies!). He would not be using cowboy rhetoric
and threatening to invate Iraq all on his own, knowing that one
result will be the political undermining of a whole series of
repressive secular Arab regimes, and their replacement by fundamentalist
Islamic governments. He would not be holding back funds for legitimate
homeland y defense efforts, such as bolstering fire departments
and police departments. y And if he was really trying to steel
America for a battle against the "forces of evil" in
Iraq and the rest of the world, he'd be using Churchillian language,
talking about mutual sacrifice and of fortitude under fire. Instead
he calls up dire warnings of fanciful nuclear or germ attacks
against urban centers, and the spectre of unimaginable horrors--things
that can only induce a cowering response.
The sad thing is that Americans, fattened
up and soft of muscle from their diet of McDonald's Whoppers
and dim-witted from an overdose of "reality" TV shows
and entertainment programs posing as news, suck up this kind
of fear-mongering (all of which is eagerly played up by ratings-hungry
media executives). If one plane gets highjacked, plane travel
plummets. If a few letters are found to be contaminated with
anthrax spores, people across the land stop opening their mail,
or start zapping it first in their microwaves. If a child is
reported missing in Arizona, parents across the land clutch their
children to their bosoms and begin lecturing them about the evils
of talking to "strangers," forgetting that this is
exactly what a child ought to do if she gets lost.
In Europe, Asia, Africa or South America,
where wars and terrorism, not to mention natural disasters, have
been a way of life, the loss of a few hundred, or even a few
thousand people, to a bomb, an earthquake, a flood or a civil
war, does not induce a national catatonia. People clean up the
mess as best they can, count their losses, and go on with their
lives.
The other sad thing about us Americans
is that we have no notion of the horrors of war, and so are quick
to wish it on others (Indian Americans and the MOVE and Branch
Davidian organizations aside, the last war on American soil was
fought 137 years ago). It's no wonder those people of "Old
Europe," as "chickenhawk" Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld disparagingly referred to Germany and France, are more
reluctant about going to war in Iraq. They know that dropping
bombs from B-52s all across the country and fighting door-to-door
in Baghdad will produce horrific casualties and create destruction
that will take years to repair (There are still several mountains
on the outskirts of Darmstadt, Germany, where I spent a year
as a highschool student--the stacked rubble, including many human
remains, of a city of 200,000 destroyed in one night by a British
fire-bombing. Similar man-made mountains can also be spotted
around Berlin.) Europeans also know that if terrorism on a wider
scale is the result, in the U.S. and in Europe, it will be a
grisly affair.
Americans have only the WTC to look at
when they try to contemplate the effects of war, and all in all,
that was a pretty antiseptic affair. One second you the towers,
another second, they were gone, and within a year or so, the
site was all cleaned up and ready for a nifty new building. Indeed,
the only institutional memory left of that attrocity is the unseemly
battle by survivors of the once high-flying investment banker
victims of the attack to get better reimbursements from the government
for their unfortunate loss of those six-figure incomes.
The naivity of Americans about the reality
of war was brought home to me years ago, when as a young journalism
student, I found myself working on a story aout a truck accident
and ended up in a local firehouse in Middletown, CT. It was 1970,
at the height of the Cold War, and the fireman on duty asked
me if I'd like to see the bomb-proof back-up government offices
that had been built under the station thanks to some federal
disaster funding. We walked down a stairwell through three feet
of case-hardened concrete, and through a blast door, into a spare-looking
room filled with desks. On each desk was an etched nameplate,
identifying the government bureau that would be represented by
the official seated there. I saw a sign for "Mayor,"
another of "Police," and a third for "Fire,"
but there were also desks for "Welfare," "Assessor"
and "Tax Collector," as though, after a nuclear holocaust
there would be need for these worthy bureaucrats!
That, of course, is not how wars look--especially
modern wars where military planners don't bother distinguishing
between civilian and military targets. Vietnam is still recovering
from its having been the target of all those bombs, napalm and
Agent Orange attacks, not to mention the loss of a generation
of its young men and women. Afghanistan may never recover from
the relatively minor recent war there.
If we Americans value our society, our
polity, our rights and liberties, and our security, we must begin
exposing George W. Bush and his War Party for what they are:
craven usurpers aiming at nothing less than the undermining of
all those things that most of us hold dear.
It's going a bit far to compare the Bush
of 2003 to the Hitler of 1933. Bush simply is not the orator
that Hitler was. But comparisons of the Bush Administration's
fear mongering tactics to those practiced so successfully and
with such terrible results by HItler and Goebbels on the German
people and their Weimar Republic are not at all out of line.
Dave Lindorff
is the author of Killing
Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
A collection of Lindorff's stories can be found here: http://www.nwuphilly.org/dave.html
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January 25
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