Provisional
Truth | Essays | May 1, 2007
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Presidential Vanity of Vanities 2007, Vol. 4
As we remember
on May 1st the fourth anniversary of what
then was proclaimed the end of major combat operations in
Iraq, many rightly have re-examined, as should all
Americans, our opinions of a war now lingering far longer
and exacting an American and Iraqi human and financial toll
far greater and more terrible than we were led to expect
when the drums began beating for regime-change in Iraq in
2002.
In his 2003 speech on the
deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, with the now much-maligned
“Mission Accomplished” banner behind him, President Bush
said, “The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror
that began on September 11, 2001, and still goes on.” And so
it goes, as the recently late Kurt Vonnegut might have said.
War, it has been observed, is
much easier to begin than to end, and, once started takes on
an existence of its own which defies those efforts of men to
end it. We now are bogged down in a conflict which clearly
now is a full-fledged civil war that four years ago, so we
were told, had the noble promises of a safer world and the
birth of a fledgling democracy.
In 2002 many of us were led
to believe it was high time for Saddam Hussein to go. Saddam
had unspeakable weapons of mass destruction and certainly
had hosted in his deserts our terrorist enemies who trained
and practiced and refined their murderous craft with his
blessings and support. Most tactlessly, he managed to remain
in power despite Gulf War I, mocking us as he looted his
country of what little wealth it could generate and,
allegedly, plotting the assassination of George H.W. Bush,
the President's father, in 1993.
And, of course,
Iraq had all those addictive barrels of oil under its sands,
of which precious little was flowing to the world's
refineries, keeping our gasoline prices well-above $2.00 a
gallon in early 2003, trickling out of Iraq under what we
now know to be the disastrously corrupt United Nations
Food-For-Oil program. More importantly, we were told, it was
the right thing to do and our unilateral right
to do so. After all, if the United States couldn't be
counted upon to keep the world's peace with the most
powerful military in the history of the planet, who would?
Four years
later, many of us – yet not enough – have changed our minds.
We now believe the United States should not, as a matter of
foreign policy, maintain the unilateral right to initiate
preemptive regime change. Outside the United States,
this opinion is unanimous. In a Time magazine interview a
year ago, former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, now 76,
said, “I think some people may have been pushing President
Bush in the wrong direction. I don't think the U.S. can
impose its will on others. This talk of preemptive strikes,
of ignoring the U.N. Security Council and international
legal obligations – all this is leading toward a dark
night.”
September 11,
2001 began our global war on terror, perhaps, as we now
know, within minutes of these murderous attacks as
administration neo-cons hit the “print” button to produce
Iraq invasion plans developed years earlier. As they
collectively, and quickly, realized as that day's horror
unfolded, 9/11 was to be that “catalyzing and catastrophic
event – like a new Pearl Harbor” described in the infamous
Project for a New American Century's 2000 white paper
“Rebuilding America's Defenses” (p.51).
As such the tragedy of 9/11
was used as a catalyst (pretext) to put into motion the
long-standing Iraq invasion plans, much as the use of
nuclear weapons in Japan in World War II was not to
end the war – Japan already had made inquiries regarding
terms of surrender – but to scare the hell out of the Soviet
Union.
But at this date, and after
such a costly “victory” in Iraq, we truly wonder what is the
real reason we made war against Iraq now that the president
has acknowledged the absence of both WMDs and terrorist
training camps?
To rid the world of a
notorious despot who might
have caused more serious trouble for us and our allies? That
we did. To prevent future terrorist attacks – fight them
“over there” so we will not have to “over here?” Maybe.
To light the beacon of
democracy – flickering dimly here at home – in the far-off
sands of the Middle East? Conceivably. To have better access
to a huge source of oil? Possibly (it was
represented that the war would pay for itself with Iraq's
renewed oil exports). To build a group of fortified
permanent military bases and an “embassy” which has been
dubbed “Pentagon East?” Definitely.
Or also, perhaps, underneath
it all, our invasion of Iraq simply was an opportunity to
settle a personal score – a family vendetta – that has
festered for more than a decade? Was the Iraq war sold to
George Bush as a way for him finally to be a source of pride
to his father and to improve his stature as a president? As
unthinkable as we would hope, presidential vanity is not
without precedent.
At the beginning of our
involvement in Vietnam, conspiracy theorists suggested that
oil had discovered in Vietnam and that the United States
wanted it. In fact, our involvement largely was predicated
on President Kennedy's view that, after committing more than
20,000 troops as military advisers to South Vietnam, he, as
he told friends, had “to go all the way with this one” to
secure his stature as a “wartime” president.
“Without
the Civil War,” Kennedy is quoted, “whoever would have heard
of Lincoln?” Kennedy expected Vietnam would be a short test
of U.S. resolve to – officially – contain the advance of
communism after his embarrassing Bay of Pigs failure in Cuba
and the construction of the Berlin Wall. It also would be a
chance to demonstrate – again – to our Cold War enemies the
capabilities of our Special Forces in a “brush fire” war,
much the way President Truman in 1945 demonstrated, using
Hiroshima and Nagasaki as targets, the efficient
destructiveness of our newly invented nuclear weaponry.
The
Vietnam-era conspiracy theorists had it wrong, as no one
then in government had in mind anything so “reasonable” as
the mere theft of oil, as
author Gore Vidal has observed, which,
coincidentally, also has been suggested by present-day
conspiracy theorists to explain the true, underlying motive
behind our current war in Iraq.
Regrettably, Iraq also may
have begun as a war of vanity – presidential
vanity – under the cover of national security and terrorism
and our inalienable right to cheap gasoline, as Vietnam was
vanity in the guise of a free, democratic Southeast Asia.
As we should never forget, a
misguided insistence on an “honorable exit” from Vietnam by
Richard Nixon beginning in 1969 ultimately led to the deaths
of more than 20,000 additional young American men over the
next six years, countless wounded and a significantly
greater number of dead and wounded Vietnamese.
Ultimately for what purpose
were those nearly 60,000 lives sacrificed, hundreds of
thousands wounded and families torn apart and a country
destroyed? Eventually we left Vietnam, humiliated, with a
bitterly divided country at home. As Bruce Springsteen
observed in his song Born in the USA, ”Had a brother at Khe
Sahn, fighting off the Viet Cong. They're still there, he's
all gone.”
And today, more than three
decades later, a united Vietnam isn't the evil land we
sought to “liberate” from the oppressive yoke of communism,
as most effectively demonstrated late last year when
President Bush attended the Asia-Pacific Economic
Cooperation summit in Hanoi (having missed an opportunity to
visit during his military service).
We yet believe the
president and his administration want to protect us from
further terrorist attacks. But we have changed our minds
about our continuing involvement in this exercise of
preemptive presidential power (is Iran next?) that, four
years after “victory,” now has us searching – as with
Vietnam – for any
exit, the opportunity for an honorable exit from Iraq now
long since passed.
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