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June
20, 2003
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June
21, 2003
Republocrats &
Weapons of Mass Destruction
The
Most Dangerous Game
By LAWRENCE MAGNUSON
Time will tell if the Democratic Party electeds
fell for it again. If they have, it will be unfortunate because
untangling the WMD issue and the questionable intelligence surrounding
it is a battle worth waging, and progressives haven't seen a
decent congressional fight in years. A centrist party now, since
Health Care Democrats have avoided both big legislative setbacks
and claims of large victories because of an increasing agreement
between parties. Now with the right moving beyond the visible
spectrum, the dialectical engine that once powered key legislative
fights may finally be firing back up. But both parties' gift
for sensing, snatching and even manufacturing defeat (gay military
rights, cooking Big Bird's goose) has become the stuffing of
legends, and could always throw an unexpected setback into any
renewed dueling. As the saying goes, "Watch out for incoming!"
And it may be friendly fire.
Now Democratic office holders gingerly
are publicly suspecting no WMD in Iraq. So far so good, but they'd
better be sure. Crystal balls are poor sources of light, and
choosing their words carefully is not enough. Now Senator Levin
earnestly wants to know if the intelligence reports about WMD
were distorted (the reports he did have before and after the
attack Iraq vote were more than sufficient to damn a war enterprise).
And now, and this is worse, the other party has sworn to help
them find out the truth. Is this a case of Republicans helping
Democrats down a path they are too eager to follow all on their
own? For starters, some of the Democrats' own bad intelligence
must be admitted in this process. To gain credibility vis a vis
WMD issues, these Democratic (re)searchers must also retrace
their own complicity in voting for war on dubious terms. More
generally as they move forward, the public will be nervously
watching a Democratic party that has helped the right wing more
than any previous one in living memory. Are they in the Republican
shadows again? Are they stuck there with no issues to really
call their own?
In September and early October 2002,
when CIA and other intelligence documents were clearly saying
No to an Al Queda connection and No to an imminent weapons threat,
what weren't the Democrats reading and whose alarming but unsubstantiated
speeches weren't they listening to? Despite authentic danger
signals, Democrats helped to produce a 77-23 Senate war vote.
In less monolithic times, the 1991 vote to oppose Iraq's take-over
of Kuwait was 52-47. More than ever, the Democrats have significantly
closed ranks with the Republicans, but the latter are in a grand
plan, winner take all frame of mind, and they may be offering
to let the Democrats lead on the WMD for calculated reasons.
It's certainly not opened-handed generosity or candor--this administration
classifies everything--Bush's March, 2003 Executive Order expanded
the authority to reclassify much previously declassified information.
So why only minor objections and swift agreement to proceed to
investigate WMD intelligence issues? (Update: since this was
written a few days ago, closed door hearings are proceeding,
but Republican howling has begun).
Full of their own odd millennialism,
the neocons may now believe they are so near their plotted end
times that the ideological and political opposition has fatally
wavered and exists on a life support system where Republicans
themselves supply the oxygen. But you don't need a crystal ball
to see that. Indeed as the Gulf War vote suggests, when the Democrats
are on the winning side, the triumphs too often have been Republican.
More symptomatic of Democrats' loss of independent political
will, they looked inept in the worst electoral failure in the
nation's history. It shouldn't have happened this way, but Democrats
began this new century in a dazed defeatism, and they haven't
gotten up yet. Tomorrow morning or the next, when Donnie Rumsfeld
cackles and brings home the WMD goods, will he most astound Democrats,
some of whom are edging out on a speculative limb hardly more
fibrous than the rotten whole cloth of the Supreme Court's "equal
protection" ruling?
THE REPUBLOCRAT DECADE,
LAST THINGS FIRST
In 2000, the corporate media rushed down
the darkened December steps of the Supreme Court Building, glanced
quickly over the unsigned ruling, and told the popular vote winners,
"Get over it!" Gore grew a beard, gained weight, and
he did quickly disappear. After the weak decision of a Supreme
Court whose majority had been slathering at the jaws to devour
them, was it a collective delusion about The American Way of
Truth and Justice that did not lead Democrats right back to a
manageable and even winnable sit-in at the racially managed election
in Florida? With national enfranchisement the stakes, the fighting
should have never stopped, at least not on that onerous day.
But as loyal (embedded?) opposition, they'd rehearsed cooperative
reaction for so long and worked so busily within the framework
of conservative arguments during the nineties, it had become
their nature to exist too comfortably in the shadow of their
Other. Even as Republicans tried to thwart them at every turn
and swing the election toward their own black-robed committee,
the Democrats had forgotten how to fight as hard. Surely, it
was part of the political amnesia they experienced in the nineties.
When Clinton terminated welfare without
a safety net for the women and children who would certainly fall
hard (and they have), Democrats perhaps thought they could win
on social justice issues in less obvious nooks and crannies.
They did, a bit. The Family Leave Act was a victory for some
of the middle class, but none of the working poor have jobs like
that. When Clinton ditched world workers rights with NAFTA and
gave the transnational corporations the hegemony of GATT, the
Democrats thought they could look like savvy internationalists
promoting laissez-faire. They helped to corrupt further that
specious term. When Clinton inaugurated media's despotism with
the Telecom Act of 1996, they thought the deregulation haywagon
had room for some affable hangers on. Of course four years later,
when corporate media gave the Flying Simpleton an AWOL pass and
pronounced Gore a wooden corpse, they probably didn't remember
voting Clear Channel in and themselves out. Abetting with consistency
a Republican agenda for eight years and willing to argue the
opposition but not seriously move the point, we locate the original
Coalition of the Willing in the two national parties.
Two years after conceding (yes) the White
House, does this duopoly still perpetuate among Democrats and
Republicans? Will battles like the WMD issue be joined by friendly
foes, with little gained in the public domain?
Here's a test: when prescription drugs
comes up, ask either party, "What's 10% of nothing?"
Sit back, relax, and listen to the duet. When the performance
concludes, don't tell your aging mother that you've been out
all night with two shady drug dealers. Just go fill her prescriptions
via Canada or Mexico--it will be years faster, much cheaper,
and she'll think more of you. Why have the Democrats allowed
themselves to engage in this faux tussle? Isn't national health
care their issue? As the cleaning lady remarked as she swept
out Gregor's insect remains in The Metamorphosis, "Is that
all there was?" No, there used to be more.
During the recent Take Back America conference,
Bill Moyers drew the progressive movement's egalitarian ideas
and substantial victories forward to the Great Society years
of the sixties. From there, the Democratic unhopefuls took turns
denying their own self-accusing charges of a "Shadow Republican
Party" and of drinking too much "Republican Lite."
Their idea to bring it up, these vigorous repudiations sounded
like much too protested an innocence "I did it," you
could hear Dave Matthews singing, "Guilty as charged."
The Democrats have not yet relearned to speak without reacting,
in detail, to the Other's agenda.
Today, if Democrats are treading cautiously
in an investigation of intelligence they knew was flawed nine
months ago, they also are perilously close to picking up the
issue of Iraqi WMD on Bush's terms (a lot of liberal press are
celebrating every fruitless day of weapons search, which is fine
as long as it lasts). But are the weapons there, as the Angry
Simpleton claims, or is he characteristically mistaken?
It does seem politically daunting to
entertain a claim of absence from eight thousand miles distance,
especially when the corporate media has already convinced 43
percent of Americans WMD exist. When they are found, how about
143 percent? Bush, modestly, will be awarded the French Legion
of Honor and the Nobel Peace Prize when the weapons caches are
uncovered. The Democrats' complementary part will be crowd scene
slackers and doubters. Don 't think it will happen? Hide behind
the Musco lights and prepare to watch the show.
Why have Democrats joined the WMD issue
that might be more wisely left to mature a while at little cost
to them? If there are electoral repercussions, the party hung
out to dry will be the party that's incriminated as wrong on
the facts. Besides, the progressive's best arguments against
WMD have been larger than Iraq. Have Democrats decided, like
the right, that the weapons themselves are of overriding importance?
No, although it is beginning to verge that way, and no, they're
mostly saying that if weapons are not there, they may have been
seriously misled--even though they'd been given enough poisonous
food for thought from intelligence sources to make the prudent
person stop way short of a 77-23 vote for war. Democrats have
been voting like the right. Are they still thinking too much
like them also?.
Go to Howard Dean's website. You'll find
the some of the Republican's most flawed internationalism mixed
in with the progressive and the socially responsible. Addressing
the Iraqi occupation, Dean leads with: "We must show an
unwavering dedication to the principles of democracy, tolerance,
human rights, and equal access for women to the levers of economic
and political power." Is he, too, already fine tuning the
new Camelot a la the American plan in this US vanquished and
rawly rights-stripped country? Wouldn't humanitarian aid and
swift self-determination have said it the progressive way? But
Democrats can't seem to certainly discern when they're in right
wing territory or that this fundamental confusion can carry them
onwards toward a lesser Nowhere, more bereft of progressive options,
ideas and principles.
THE MOST DANGEROUS
GAME
Bar none, in a political world where
even the past is revisioned according to current embarrassments
and exigencies, the most fatal pitfall is predicting the future
by probability, by prognostication or, more psychiatrically,
by wish-fulfillment. In their war-rattling perfidy, Bush's far
right handlers were willing to travel low and dark roads to mold
American opinion. "Mushroom cloud," "imminent
threat, and "Al Queda" were the shrill canards of the
planned invasion. Lately, Powell, Rice, and Rumsfeld have been
willing to mollify (lie) and mitigate (lie) about WMD and say
they'd never really lied about an imminent threat in the first
place. A journey into the lowlands of rhetoric to say the least,
yet the Democrats are staking out their own kind of swampland.
Have they no premonition of the Musco lights being hauled to
Tikrit, Bush arriving on a B2 bomber and speaking from atop a
500 ton stage of pure anthrax? You say it won't happen? How do
you know?
Democrats have joined the Republican
WMD argument too early in the game, even though they had visible
proof of the fate of impatient over-reachers. Remember the sand
storm hiatus, then Peter Arnett apologizing for his rash forecast
and sending out his vitae? Why not step back and be a bit more
Real Politick: Of course the UN documents were forgeries, and
of course the aluminum tubes proved nothing. So far so good.
But Saddam Hussein, the long-time local Arab belligerent, had
contended with deadly sparring partners like Israel and Iran,
and now also had a viciously armed little Kuwait to the south
(with as much oil to protect as Iraq). Lacking chemical and biological
weapons, especially as he realized what the world found out only
recently (that his armed forces were decimated and unwilling),
how would he protect his dictatorship in a local conflagration?
By bluffing? Ignominy and defeat. With his air force? He knew
it needed a propeller.
If Hussein's the belligerent brute and
anti-hero we all know him to be, could the lack of chemical and
biological weapons be his fatal flaw, his Achilles heel? Wrong.
Dictators and weapons go together as inseparably as Yin and Yang.
There remains a quite reasonable chance that the WMD are hidden
there --or worse for Democrats, that Carl Rove and his make-up
artists already know the WMD whereabouts. He's simply letting
the passenger compartments fill up with doubtful Democrats while
he scouts locations for the train wreck and The Speech. Remember
when Bush was so far from discovering them, he suggested a vast
network of caves? Geologically in Iraq, that's improbable. But
Hussein having WMD? That's a natural. In a more perennial and
also more urgent sense, and one Democrats have had peace-promoting
success with in the past, the most dangerous game is the world-wide
proliferation of WMD. It is their issue, there's no speculation
about it, and securing the world, not an election, is sum of
its equation. The US has every brand of devastating WMD. So does
Europe, Russia, Pakistan, Israel, and others. In every case,
from Livermore Labs to Dimona, these WMD make for a globe that's
armed imminently to the teeth, a hypocritical fact of life somehow
getting lost in the current lure of a small potatoes argument
about an effectively toothless though probably chemically or
biologically tainted Iraq.
Pursue short line tactics, carefully,
as you must, but above all don't visit the fortune teller for
long at all. It may leave time to pick up the pieces of an independent
progressive strategy that's missing in these internecine bouts
whose newest WMD encounters might seem only pious afterthoughts
of a 77-23 vote to unilaterally invade Iraq without any clearly
proven cause. Stepping out of the box may also provide a clearer
vision of the monopolistic capitalism now on the hunt, armed
with the real WMD that US and world citizens are frighteningly
concerned about. Doesn't an effective contemporary Social Contract
based on egalitarian principles first depend on national and
then world security? Doesn't global WMD proliferation destroy
that security as much or more than bin Laden terrorism? Isn't
the two-tiered imposture of nuclear have and have-nots in need
of immediate restraint and reform by the powerful to quickly
replace the new "policy" of endless deadly pursuit
and the selective, even nuclear, punishment of unfavored transgressors?
Are these parts of the lost Democratic ticket restored? The right
will certainly never concede as much. But can this year's and
next year's Democrats move forward to claim these substantial
WMD issues?
Certainly, for more than half the Democrats
who first effectively ignored intelligence documents but more
lately intend to reexamine those plus others with reinvigoration,
further scrutiny is an outrageous, Janus-faced sham. The 2002
intelligence review involved a moral myopia that blinded congressional
readers from seeing a questionable, devastating war about to
begin. Now, if their vision remains as clouded (which it must
if their posture continues to be surprised and offended), whatever
they discover, they will certainly fail to see their own previous
high liner marks. The war 's threadbare rationale wasn't a secret.
It was full stage Kabuki, and the same tired political formula
for stirring up war. So most of what's seen now from the distance
of the galleries is a scuttling political opportunism trailing
too far behind grievous misjudgments and a rotten war. But there
is a neglected longing in American liberal politics that's had
enough of impersonating the opposition (centrist) or dancing
along in the dark with it (centrist). In times when business
as usual is to hold a small retrospective on an illegal war,
looking hard and perhaps in vain for its elusive imperfections,
many would prefer instead that every political sentence begin
clearly with "We, the People," and not "Look what
those guys have perpetrated with our help---let's argue it point
by point." What, again, is ten percent of nothing?
And stay away from other losing arguments.
Seeding Iraq with US surplus WMD may already be a remote contingency
plan (lots of Americans half expect it). But Bush is smirking,
not sweating like Nixon, and there's plenty of time before the
WMD issue could look fatally grim to his handlers. Though the
hubris of the world-conquering neo-cons could make possible such
a maneuver (taking the world for what it is), more certainly
the planted weapons accusation will be the only argument left
for Democrats when Rumsfeld chortles and brings the bacon home.
What's the plan then? Send over a team of inspectors to verify?
Or accuse the Angry Simpleton of lying about what he's just proved
true?
The Democrats have tried to set the hook
too early. Two national take-overs and a thrice sweeping out
of the National Treasury have swelled neocon egos, but the Democrats
own hubris could loom as large. For the Greeks, the dark actuating
heart of hubris was anagnorisis-- a too-late recognition of what
one has inadvertently become. Though coming late, anagnorisis
brings the ruin inward to roost, so tragic figures may sit and
know or wander and realize the imprudent miscalculations that
shaped their fallen world. Simply, it's realizing you didn't
know what you hoped deeply might be true. Are the weapons there?
Without the Delphic oracle or Kreskin, the issue is tantalizing
but not ripened.
Just how long does Bush have to finally
come up with WMD (and various murky intelligence mish-mash)?
Ten months, a year. Ashcroft will sign off on that, and expect
the administration to start acting as parsimoniously with documents
as the Democrats have let them be in the Cheney energy planning
and the 911 investigation. As for the dreaded photo-op, the longer
and more arduous a successful weapons hunt, the more pealing
the well lit ovations.
Less photogenically and more realistically
(hopefully), how much time do Democrats have to cut their symbiotic
ties, to see issues non-reflexively in their own terms, and develop
their arguments? On the issue of WMD? They're way out front on
that. Too far. On admitting both political sides dove into war
when contraindicating intelligence refuted its basis? It won't
happen. On disentangling their progressivism from the Other's
monopolistic conservatism? As many elections as it takes.
"My, my, my," said the spider
to the fly, "jump right ahead in my web." For a decade,
they have.
Lawrence Magnuson lives in rural Tennessee. He can be reached
at: lawrence@pmicomputers.com.
Today's Features
Elaine
Cassel
Bush Plays the Racial Profiling Card:
It's a Smokescreen
Brian
Cloughley
Punch-and-Judy in the West Wing:
The Powell-Rice Show
David Lindorff
What's Next?
Mark
Jacobs
A Serious Conversation: a Former Foreign Service Officer on Diplomacy
in the Age of Bush
Alfredo
Castro
Bloodbath in Colombia: The Army and the Death Squads
Saul
Landau
Lying, Flag Waving and Redefining
Conservative Values
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log, 6/19
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