| So this is what a dictatorship feels like. Tens of millions of Americans deliver an absolutely unequivocal message on November 7: Get our troops out of Iraq. And the Generalissimo, who cares more about his Daddy issues than he does about respecting democracy (in the U.S. or anywhere else), responds by ordering an escalation, purging the military command of anyone who disagrees, and illegally executing the guy who (supposedly) tried to kill Daddy. On a Muslim religious holiday. While onlookers chanted the name of the cleric whose U.S.-sponsored death squads have helped tear Iraq apart. I'm going to be sick. Polls tell us that up to 70 percent of Americans want our troops out of Iraq. But since there is no mass movement on the streets threatening to shut down business as usual in this country until our participation in this war is ended (and why not?), our only recourse as citizens has been to express ourselves at the ballot box. Which we did. And which is now being ignored, just as it would be in any other country where the whims of the Dear and Beloved Comrade Leader trump all else. How sad (and frightening) it is that our only hope of mitigation, let alone prevention, of Bush's planned escalation rests with Congressional Democrats who have already pledged not to use their only weapon -- the blocking of budget requests -- to interfere with Bush's war. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi can (correctly) blow all the hot air they like about what a horrible idea Bush's escalation is, but unless they and their colleagues back it up with legislative action, their words and press conferences and letters to the White House are meaningless posturing. The most repugnant piece of this -- aside from the death of American democracy and the additional deaths of more U.S. soldiers and, no doubt, many thousands more Iraqis -- is that the Bush "surge," like every single other aspect of his Iraq policies over the last five years, is solely a PR campaign designed for American audiences. It doesn't matter that it will be militarily counterproductive and deadly. Trying to resuscitate poll numbers here is apparently far more important than living, breathing human beings there. Or, in the longer run, national security, the ability of our military to defend against genuine threats, or America's standing in the world. In this case, the Rovian "product" is a New! Improved! War in Iraq!, and the feel-good product rollout began with the execution of Saddam, expedited so that it would come just before New Year's Day: out with the old, in with the new, get it? Next, replace those annoying old generals who think escalating U.S. troop presence in Iraq is clinically insane with some new, agreeable apparatchiks, and this week, voila! The big product launch. Full color ads to follow. The question is, why bother? The American public has seen this all before, and isn't buying. And who cares what the public thinks, anyway? Bush will never run for office again, and legislators and presidential aspirants in both parties are generally running from this stunt as fast as they can. In the end, Bush is only amusing himself. Apparently, in Dubya's Democracy 2.0, that's enough. Meanwhile, the Bush rollout strategy, like every other time before, has made things infinitely worse, in Iraq and around the world. The Saddam lynching was a particularly disgraceful stunt. The hanging of Saddam Hussein was, in both the near and long terms, a costly exercise in vanity for a White House that controlled every step of the farce that was Saddam's trial, sentencing, and death. Some of those reasons have been mentioned -- in passing -- in American media. Most have not. They include: The timing of the execution for Eid, a holiday celebrated by all Muslims as a time of peace, joy, and reconciliation. By carrying out his act of vengeance at this time, Bush managed to insult and enrage Muslims around the world. And, no doubt, recruit more than a few new jihadists. It's not easy to turn a brutal, hated ex-dictator into a region-wide martyr. Dubya just accomplished it. Because the U.S. has consistently (and wrongly) held that the Sunni insurgency is motivated by loyalty to Saddam, as loathed as the ex-dictator was, his execution became a stand-in; Sunnis saw not Saddam but themselves as the targets of Bush's lynching. Way to pour gasoline on the fire, guys. Saddam's trial was in gross violation of Iraqi, American, and international norms. It was a kangaroo court, set up with American rather than Iraqi structures (e.g., adversarial prosecutor and defense teams) and controlled at every point by the U.S. embassy. In other words, we invaded a country -- illegally and without provocation -- and now, to compound the crime, have arbitrarily executed its leader. The deaths Saddam was "convicted" of were actually carried out within the Iraqi legal system. After a plot against Saddam's life, 152 people were tried as accomplices in a preordained legal proceeding, and then executed. In other words, Saddam was executed in exactly the same capricious way as his victims were, an "irony" lost on no Iraqi (or other Muslim). Nice advertisement for American democracy. (Oh, never mind. We don't do that any more.) The glee with which the execution was carried out -- by loyalists of Moktada al-Sadr, the radical anti-American Shiite cleric who the U.S. has inexplicably allowed to seize control of much of the country -- and the leaked video of the hanging underscored the barbarity of this lynching in particular. One result: an enormous global backlash against capital punishment. The scheduled execution of two more Saddam aides last Thursday has been postponed due to "international pressure," and Italy, a new Security Council member, has introduced a measure in the U.N. General Assembly calling for a global halt to executions. The unmistakable subtext is widespread global revulsion over America's barbarity. All this for a product rollout. And so George W., who always enjoys a good execution, could avenge his Daddy. Now, Junior is in the process of thumbing his nose at Daddy's advisors and trying to prove that Daddy was wrong for not invading Iraq in 1991. In the process, he has so completely divorced himself from reality that it makes one yearn for the days when Richard Nixon was walking the halls and talking with paintings. Unlike Bush's chats with God (or whomever is providing those voices in his head), at least the paintings weren't talking back, let alone directing a war effort in defiance of an overwhelming majority of military experts, the political establishment, and the American public. (That was Kissinger's job.) Rather than Nixon, the better analogy for Bush's Iraq behavior is the last years of Mao Zedong. Mao's Iraq was the Cultural Revolution, a successful gambit to maintain his grip on power (as Bush did in 2004) that threw his country into chaos and resulted in the deaths of countless millions of Chinese. As the country unraveled, Mao staved off a number of challenges to his policies, including what was probably a coup attempt by his designated successor, Lin Biao, in 1971. As Mao's health declined, various factions, including the more radical elements Mao had increasingly surrounded himself with, vied for power. The Cultural Revolution didn't officially end until Mao's death in 1976 and the expulsion of the radicals, led by the so-called Gang of Four. (Think Cheney et al.) Mao, in other words, wielded absolute power, was oblivious to the real-life consequences of his policies, was surrounded by acolytes, and was impervious to criticisms from even his closest allies. As a result, he is today thought of as one of the great butchers of the 20th century, and these days is rarely mentioned even by the government he founded and ran for 27 years. So how appalling is it that his story now seems so vaguely familiar? In a parliamentary system -- the kind most of the world's democracies outside the U.S. use -- Bush would have been expelled from office two months ago. Had that somehow not happened, his "surge" plan would surely provoke a vote of no confidence, and at this point his government would collapse. But instead, we live in the United States, with a chief executive who believes in his own unlimited "unitary" power and a single "opposition" party that rarely provides any true opposition. How many more Iraqis, and Americans, will die as a result? Or, as Emma Goldman noted nearly a century ago: "Poor as we are in democracy, how can we give it to the world?"  See more in the Geov Parrish archives. | |
The Bush "surge," like every single other aspect of his Iraq policies over the last five years, is solely a PR campaign designed for American audiences. |
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