onsdag 19 november 2008
lördag 23 augusti 2008
The Demise of Conscience
"But that’s not what the president did. Instead, he shifted to what had been a secondary, alternative rationale for invading Iraq – to bring democracy to the Iraqi people. He continued the invasion, which everyone knew would entail the killing and maiming of countless more Iraqis in the process.
Now, think about that for a moment. On the one hand, the president has the American people view Iraq as an enemy nation – one that is threatening the very survival of America – one that we must defend against. On the other hand, the president is telling the American people that another reason he’s invading Iraq is to help out the Iraqi people by giving them a democratic system.
In fact, the entire “We’re from the U.S. government and we’re here to help you” secondary rationale for invading and occupying Iraq is laughable because the actions of the U.S. government were clearly inconsistent with that notion. For one thing, there was absolutely no remorse or regret for having killed countless people under a mistaken WMD rationale. For another, the manner in which Iraqi people were tortured, sexually abused, and murdered at Abu Ghraib prison is inconsistent with the idea that U.S. officials were in Iraq out of love for Iraqis. So was the fact that U.S. officials nonchalantly permitted Iraqi museums containing priceless antiquities to be ransacked, an action that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld described as an “untidy” aspect of “freedom.”
Ultimately, the rationale for invading and occupying Iraq – and killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in the process – has morphed from one of protecting America from a WMD attack, to spreading democracy, to fighting the terrorists there so that we don’t have to fight them here in the United States.
The third rationale is the so-called magnet rationale, which entailed using U.S. troops in Iraq to serve as a “magnet” for terrorists who otherwise would come to the United State and commit terrorist acts. The idea is that it’s okay to kill Iraqis because they’re living in the country that is serving as a magnet, which, in turn, helps to keep America safe from “the terrorists.”
Notice the moral bankruptcy in that reasoning, however. Where is the moral justification for using Iraq or any other country as such a “magnet”? What responsibility did the Iraqi people have for President Bush’s “war on terrorism”? What did they do to deserve the deadly consequences of serving as a “magnet”?
Finally, we cannot ignore the fact that the invasion of Iraq, just like the sanctions and other U.S. interventions, produced the very terrorist threat that the U.S. government then uses to justify its continued killing of Iraqis. Let’s not forget, however, that under both legal and moral principles, the people of an invaded country, regardless of what label you put on them, have the right to use deadly force in self-defense against an aggressor power.
The notion adopted by extreme right-wing neocons that it was necessary to invade Iraq to oppose some centuries-old plan by Muslims to conquer the Christian world is perhaps the most ludicrous justification of all for killing Iraqis. After all, isn’t it odd that we never heard about this “threat” during the entire Cold War, when communism, not Islam, was the big bugaboo?"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/hornberger/hornberger150.html
Now, think about that for a moment. On the one hand, the president has the American people view Iraq as an enemy nation – one that is threatening the very survival of America – one that we must defend against. On the other hand, the president is telling the American people that another reason he’s invading Iraq is to help out the Iraqi people by giving them a democratic system.
In fact, the entire “We’re from the U.S. government and we’re here to help you” secondary rationale for invading and occupying Iraq is laughable because the actions of the U.S. government were clearly inconsistent with that notion. For one thing, there was absolutely no remorse or regret for having killed countless people under a mistaken WMD rationale. For another, the manner in which Iraqi people were tortured, sexually abused, and murdered at Abu Ghraib prison is inconsistent with the idea that U.S. officials were in Iraq out of love for Iraqis. So was the fact that U.S. officials nonchalantly permitted Iraqi museums containing priceless antiquities to be ransacked, an action that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld described as an “untidy” aspect of “freedom.”
Ultimately, the rationale for invading and occupying Iraq – and killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in the process – has morphed from one of protecting America from a WMD attack, to spreading democracy, to fighting the terrorists there so that we don’t have to fight them here in the United States.
The third rationale is the so-called magnet rationale, which entailed using U.S. troops in Iraq to serve as a “magnet” for terrorists who otherwise would come to the United State and commit terrorist acts. The idea is that it’s okay to kill Iraqis because they’re living in the country that is serving as a magnet, which, in turn, helps to keep America safe from “the terrorists.”
Notice the moral bankruptcy in that reasoning, however. Where is the moral justification for using Iraq or any other country as such a “magnet”? What responsibility did the Iraqi people have for President Bush’s “war on terrorism”? What did they do to deserve the deadly consequences of serving as a “magnet”?
Finally, we cannot ignore the fact that the invasion of Iraq, just like the sanctions and other U.S. interventions, produced the very terrorist threat that the U.S. government then uses to justify its continued killing of Iraqis. Let’s not forget, however, that under both legal and moral principles, the people of an invaded country, regardless of what label you put on them, have the right to use deadly force in self-defense against an aggressor power.
The notion adopted by extreme right-wing neocons that it was necessary to invade Iraq to oppose some centuries-old plan by Muslims to conquer the Christian world is perhaps the most ludicrous justification of all for killing Iraqis. After all, isn’t it odd that we never heard about this “threat” during the entire Cold War, when communism, not Islam, was the big bugaboo?"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/hornberger/hornberger150.html
lördag 3 november 2007
perhaps not very original, yet true nontheless :
"Because the current government of Russia, and the United States, whatever evidence to the contrary, do not identify themselves as tyrannies, but rather, as federalist democracies that supposedly set certain limits to the government’s use of force, terrorism—in particular, suicide terrorism—poses a special problem, because it is a type of violence that cannot be brought to court, as it were. And yet, suicide terrorism—at least, in the case of the female Chechens—can also be a violence of last resort. It does not represent the first time the stranger-Other, who is also a citizen, has knocked on (or blown open) the door of the State and demanded recognition. And in the case of Chechnya, especially, where the perpetrators of abuse against civilians, in “the vast majority of cases. . .are unquestionably government agents,” the avenue of legal recourse for redress of abuses against civilians is obviously not open, except as an apparition.
We must never forget that terrorists are real persons with real lives grounded in all the material and psychic particularities of the local—Zulikhan Elikhadzhiyeva, for instance, lived with her sister in a brick house in a small Chechen village and studied at the medical vocational school there. The two Chechen women, Amanat Nagayeva and Satsita Dzhbirkhanova, who brought down two Russian passenger planes in August of 2004, killing themselves and eighty-nine other passengers, lived with two other women in a cramped, bombed-out apartment building in Grozny and worked selling clothing and other goods in the central market. In his study My Life Is A Weapon, Christoph Reuter writes that suicide attackers “are not cruise missiles on two legs, killing machines who come out of nowhere with the wrath of God or the murderous orders of a cult leader programmed into them. They are, whatever lengths they or we will go to forget it, people—individuals with families rooted in a given society.” The Chechen women who have become suicide bombers have been living in conditions of absolute poverty and desolation—both physical and psychic—and their acts of terrorism can be seen as the last gestures of an extreme desperation. But we cannot forget that these gestures are also immoral acts of violence that maimed and killed others who were, like the female bombers themselves, “ordinary civilians.”
Just as “we” refuse to negotiate with terrorists—just as we withhold, in other words, the gift of welcoming through language—“they” also refuse to welcome us through language, and instead, write their suicide letters on our collective body with their weapons and render us incapable of returning anything to them except our hatred, which they do not stay to receive. But our understanding of these women, if we are willing to embark on such a project, will have to begin with an understanding of the general perception of them, grounded in the order of the symbolic, as monsters. As Jeffrey Cohen reminds us, the monster’s body is always a cultural body: “The monster is born. . .as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place. The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (ataractic or incendiary), giving them life and an uncanny independence.” In his “seven theses toward understanding cultures through the monsters they bear,” Cohen argues that the monster always embodies difference writ large (usually along lines that are sexual, racial, and cultural), and “the boundaries between personal and national bodies blur” in the body of the monster which always threatens “to fragment the delicate matrix of relational systems that unite every private body to the public world.” The female Chechen suicide bombers are especially troubling in this scenario because they bring together in their cultural bodies two “signs” that have traditionally terrified through their Otherness: “woman” and “nonwhite” (what Cohen terms She and Them!).
Also central to the issue of what might be called the troubling, yet intimate alterity of these women, is the name given to them, as a collectivity, by the Russian government and quickly picked up and broadcast widely by the international press: they are the “black widows” of Chechnya—that is to say, they are the actual widows (the wives, yes, but also the mothers, sisters, and daughters) of men killed in an ongoing war with Russia that has claimed over 100,000 lives, but they are also venomous black widow spiders who kill with one bite. Apparently, the Chechen women first earned this moniker during the rebel takeover of the Dubrovka Theater when they were seen on Russian television wearing black hijabs and explosive-laden belts. Furthermore, the supposed leader of these women has been referred to as “Black Fatima,” a nickname that incorporates racial and religious fears. They are therefore both intimately familiar, yet also monstrously Other, and it is precisely because of their intimacy—because they are, ultimately, like us—that they drive us to the language of exteriority: we say that they are inhuman, and even, monstrous, and their acts, evil and unspeakable. We say, in as many ways as we can, they are not like us.
According to Cohen, the monster resides in the “marginal geography of the Exterior, beyond the limits of the Thinkable, a place that is doubly dangerous: simultaneously ‘exorbitant’ and ‘quite close’.” The female Chechen terrorists are strange to many Russians (and even to some Chechens), yet also lie very close to the heart of what Russia is—a state that originated and maintains its hegemonic authority with violence against persons and groups of people who do not possess equivalent force: they are, in Levinas's words, the “isolated and heroic being[s] the State produces by its virile virtues”—and therefore, it will never be a matter of simply driving them back to the wilderness from which they supposedly came, nor of just destroying them (Russia’s “official policy”).
If the only policy against terrorists is to hunt them down and destroy—i.e., to kill—them, without conversation, they will keep returning to us, bearing the gift of their deaths and our own murder. If we cannot approach these figures except as monsters, as inhuman, as illegible, then we cannot embark on what Levinas calls the “absolute adventure” of pluralistic being, which is peace itself, but only when we understand that peace “cannot be identified with the end of combats that cease for want of combatants, by the defeat of some and the victory of the others, that is, with cemeteries or future universal empires. Peace must be my peace, in a relation that starts from an I and goes to the other, in desire and goodness, where the I both maintains itself and exists without egoism.” But this kind of desiring, which requires that we turn our home (our recollection of ourselves–to–ourselves) into a kind of wandering that allows us to meet and welcome the stranger-Other and even behold her—behold the face of Zulikhan Elikhadzhiyeva—on the plane of the expression of her most enraged and suicidal being, currently exceeds our grasp. It is almost too much to ask. And yet, by her death, she both demands and escapes our judgment."
http://jjcohen.blogspot.com/search/label/terrorism
"Because the current government of Russia, and the United States, whatever evidence to the contrary, do not identify themselves as tyrannies, but rather, as federalist democracies that supposedly set certain limits to the government’s use of force, terrorism—in particular, suicide terrorism—poses a special problem, because it is a type of violence that cannot be brought to court, as it were. And yet, suicide terrorism—at least, in the case of the female Chechens—can also be a violence of last resort. It does not represent the first time the stranger-Other, who is also a citizen, has knocked on (or blown open) the door of the State and demanded recognition. And in the case of Chechnya, especially, where the perpetrators of abuse against civilians, in “the vast majority of cases. . .are unquestionably government agents,” the avenue of legal recourse for redress of abuses against civilians is obviously not open, except as an apparition.
We must never forget that terrorists are real persons with real lives grounded in all the material and psychic particularities of the local—Zulikhan Elikhadzhiyeva, for instance, lived with her sister in a brick house in a small Chechen village and studied at the medical vocational school there. The two Chechen women, Amanat Nagayeva and Satsita Dzhbirkhanova, who brought down two Russian passenger planes in August of 2004, killing themselves and eighty-nine other passengers, lived with two other women in a cramped, bombed-out apartment building in Grozny and worked selling clothing and other goods in the central market. In his study My Life Is A Weapon, Christoph Reuter writes that suicide attackers “are not cruise missiles on two legs, killing machines who come out of nowhere with the wrath of God or the murderous orders of a cult leader programmed into them. They are, whatever lengths they or we will go to forget it, people—individuals with families rooted in a given society.” The Chechen women who have become suicide bombers have been living in conditions of absolute poverty and desolation—both physical and psychic—and their acts of terrorism can be seen as the last gestures of an extreme desperation. But we cannot forget that these gestures are also immoral acts of violence that maimed and killed others who were, like the female bombers themselves, “ordinary civilians.”
Just as “we” refuse to negotiate with terrorists—just as we withhold, in other words, the gift of welcoming through language—“they” also refuse to welcome us through language, and instead, write their suicide letters on our collective body with their weapons and render us incapable of returning anything to them except our hatred, which they do not stay to receive. But our understanding of these women, if we are willing to embark on such a project, will have to begin with an understanding of the general perception of them, grounded in the order of the symbolic, as monsters. As Jeffrey Cohen reminds us, the monster’s body is always a cultural body: “The monster is born. . .as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place. The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (ataractic or incendiary), giving them life and an uncanny independence.” In his “seven theses toward understanding cultures through the monsters they bear,” Cohen argues that the monster always embodies difference writ large (usually along lines that are sexual, racial, and cultural), and “the boundaries between personal and national bodies blur” in the body of the monster which always threatens “to fragment the delicate matrix of relational systems that unite every private body to the public world.” The female Chechen suicide bombers are especially troubling in this scenario because they bring together in their cultural bodies two “signs” that have traditionally terrified through their Otherness: “woman” and “nonwhite” (what Cohen terms She and Them!).
Also central to the issue of what might be called the troubling, yet intimate alterity of these women, is the name given to them, as a collectivity, by the Russian government and quickly picked up and broadcast widely by the international press: they are the “black widows” of Chechnya—that is to say, they are the actual widows (the wives, yes, but also the mothers, sisters, and daughters) of men killed in an ongoing war with Russia that has claimed over 100,000 lives, but they are also venomous black widow spiders who kill with one bite. Apparently, the Chechen women first earned this moniker during the rebel takeover of the Dubrovka Theater when they were seen on Russian television wearing black hijabs and explosive-laden belts. Furthermore, the supposed leader of these women has been referred to as “Black Fatima,” a nickname that incorporates racial and religious fears. They are therefore both intimately familiar, yet also monstrously Other, and it is precisely because of their intimacy—because they are, ultimately, like us—that they drive us to the language of exteriority: we say that they are inhuman, and even, monstrous, and their acts, evil and unspeakable. We say, in as many ways as we can, they are not like us.
According to Cohen, the monster resides in the “marginal geography of the Exterior, beyond the limits of the Thinkable, a place that is doubly dangerous: simultaneously ‘exorbitant’ and ‘quite close’.” The female Chechen terrorists are strange to many Russians (and even to some Chechens), yet also lie very close to the heart of what Russia is—a state that originated and maintains its hegemonic authority with violence against persons and groups of people who do not possess equivalent force: they are, in Levinas's words, the “isolated and heroic being[s] the State produces by its virile virtues”—and therefore, it will never be a matter of simply driving them back to the wilderness from which they supposedly came, nor of just destroying them (Russia’s “official policy”).
If the only policy against terrorists is to hunt them down and destroy—i.e., to kill—them, without conversation, they will keep returning to us, bearing the gift of their deaths and our own murder. If we cannot approach these figures except as monsters, as inhuman, as illegible, then we cannot embark on what Levinas calls the “absolute adventure” of pluralistic being, which is peace itself, but only when we understand that peace “cannot be identified with the end of combats that cease for want of combatants, by the defeat of some and the victory of the others, that is, with cemeteries or future universal empires. Peace must be my peace, in a relation that starts from an I and goes to the other, in desire and goodness, where the I both maintains itself and exists without egoism.” But this kind of desiring, which requires that we turn our home (our recollection of ourselves–to–ourselves) into a kind of wandering that allows us to meet and welcome the stranger-Other and even behold her—behold the face of Zulikhan Elikhadzhiyeva—on the plane of the expression of her most enraged and suicidal being, currently exceeds our grasp. It is almost too much to ask. And yet, by her death, she both demands and escapes our judgment."
http://jjcohen.blogspot.com/search/label/terrorism
fredag 2 november 2007
The removal of Saddam Hussein
"In November 2001, General Wesley Clark, who had recently retired from his post as head of the US Southern Command, learned from a general he knew in the Pentagon that a memo had just come down from the office of the secretary of defense outlining the objective of the "take down" of seven Middle Eastern regimes over five years. The plan would start with the invasion of Iraq, and then go after Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan, according to an account in Clark's 2003 book, Winning Modern Wars. The memo indicated the plan was to "come back and get Iran in five years". The neo-cons were very serious about going after Syria. In the weeks following the initial US blow at Saddam, Paul Wolfowitz, the chief neo-conservative architect of the Iraq invasion, argued unsuccessfully for taking advantage of the presumed military triumph there to overthrow the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad, according to the right-leaning Insight magazine.
Within the administration, meanwhile, Wurmser was looking for the opportunity to propose a military option against Iran. In his September 2007 interview with the Telegraph shortly after leaving Cheney's office, he insisted that the United States must be willing to "escalate as far as we need to go to topple the [Iranian] regime if necessary". That opportunity seemed to present itself in the aftermath of Israel's failed attempt to deal a major blow to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Neo-conservatives aligned with Cheney argued that Iran was now threatening US dominance in the region, through its proxies in Lebanon, Iraq and the Palestinian territory and its nuclear program. They insisted that the administration had to push back by targeting Iran's Quds Force personnel in Iraq, increasing the naval presence in the Gulf and accusing Iran of supporting the killing of US troops." http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IK01Ak01.html
Within the administration, meanwhile, Wurmser was looking for the opportunity to propose a military option against Iran. In his September 2007 interview with the Telegraph shortly after leaving Cheney's office, he insisted that the United States must be willing to "escalate as far as we need to go to topple the [Iranian] regime if necessary". That opportunity seemed to present itself in the aftermath of Israel's failed attempt to deal a major blow to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Neo-conservatives aligned with Cheney argued that Iran was now threatening US dominance in the region, through its proxies in Lebanon, Iraq and the Palestinian territory and its nuclear program. They insisted that the administration had to push back by targeting Iran's Quds Force personnel in Iraq, increasing the naval presence in the Gulf and accusing Iran of supporting the killing of US troops." http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IK01Ak01.html
torsdag 25 oktober 2007
tisdag 23 oktober 2007
Intellectual fallacies of the 'war on terror'
"Holmes then points out that Yoo is a prominent member of the Federalist Society, an association of conservative Republican lawyers who claim to be committed to recovering the original understanding of the constitution and which includes several Republican appointees to the current Supreme Court. His conclusion on Yoo and his fellow neocons is devastating: "[I]f the misbegotten Iraq war proves anything, it is the foolhardiness of allowing an autistic clique that reads its own newspapers and watches its own cable news channel to decide, without outsider input, where to expend American blood and treasure - that is, to decide which looming threats to stress and which to downplay or ignore." (p. 301)
Holmes draws several interesting implications from this American overinvestment in Cold-War-type military power. One is that the very nature of the 9/11 attacks undermined crucial axioms of American national security doctrine. In a much more significant way than in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, a non-state actor on the international stage successfully attacked the United States, contrary to a well-established belief in Pentagon circles that only states have the capability of menacing us militarily. Equally alarming, by employing a strategy requiring their own deaths, the terrorists ensured that deterrence no longer held sway. Overwhelming military might cannot deter non-state actors who accept that they will die in their attacks on others. The day after 9/11, American leaders in Washington, DC, suddenly felt unprotected and defenseless against a new threat they only imperfectly understood. They responded in various ways.
By reacting to the threat of modern terrorism with an attack on a substitute target - without even bothering to calculate the enormous potential costs involved - the Pentagon greatly overestimated what military force could achieve. Both the regime-change and overawe-the-Muslims approaches carried with them potentially devastating unintended consequences - particularly if any of the premises, such as about who possessed WMD, were wrong. Overly abstract ideas were substituted for empirical knowledge of, and logical responses to, an enemy's capabilities. Thus, insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, two devastated, poor countries, have managed to fight one of the most powerful American expeditionary forces in history to a virtual standstill. In short, "America's bellicose response to the 9/11 provocation was not only dishonorable and unethical, given the cruel suffering it has inflicted on thousands of innocents, but also imprudent in the extreme because it was bound to produce as much hatred as fear, as much burning desire for reprisal as quaking paralysis and docility. Some of the sickening effects are unfolding before our eyes. That even more malevolent consequences remain in store is a grim possibility not to be wished away." (p 10)
There is, I believe, only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge, still growing military establishment that undergirds it. It is a task at least comparable to that undertaken by the British government when, after World War II, it liquidated the British Empire. By doing so, Britain avoided the fate of the Roman Republic - becoming a domestic tyranny and losing its democracy, as would have been required if it had continued to try to dominate much of the world by force
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IJ24Ak01.html
Holmes draws several interesting implications from this American overinvestment in Cold-War-type military power. One is that the very nature of the 9/11 attacks undermined crucial axioms of American national security doctrine. In a much more significant way than in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, a non-state actor on the international stage successfully attacked the United States, contrary to a well-established belief in Pentagon circles that only states have the capability of menacing us militarily. Equally alarming, by employing a strategy requiring their own deaths, the terrorists ensured that deterrence no longer held sway. Overwhelming military might cannot deter non-state actors who accept that they will die in their attacks on others. The day after 9/11, American leaders in Washington, DC, suddenly felt unprotected and defenseless against a new threat they only imperfectly understood. They responded in various ways.
By reacting to the threat of modern terrorism with an attack on a substitute target - without even bothering to calculate the enormous potential costs involved - the Pentagon greatly overestimated what military force could achieve. Both the regime-change and overawe-the-Muslims approaches carried with them potentially devastating unintended consequences - particularly if any of the premises, such as about who possessed WMD, were wrong. Overly abstract ideas were substituted for empirical knowledge of, and logical responses to, an enemy's capabilities. Thus, insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, two devastated, poor countries, have managed to fight one of the most powerful American expeditionary forces in history to a virtual standstill. In short, "America's bellicose response to the 9/11 provocation was not only dishonorable and unethical, given the cruel suffering it has inflicted on thousands of innocents, but also imprudent in the extreme because it was bound to produce as much hatred as fear, as much burning desire for reprisal as quaking paralysis and docility. Some of the sickening effects are unfolding before our eyes. That even more malevolent consequences remain in store is a grim possibility not to be wished away." (p 10)
There is, I believe, only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge, still growing military establishment that undergirds it. It is a task at least comparable to that undertaken by the British government when, after World War II, it liquidated the British Empire. By doing so, Britain avoided the fate of the Roman Republic - becoming a domestic tyranny and losing its democracy, as would have been required if it had continued to try to dominate much of the world by force
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IJ24Ak01.html
lördag 20 oktober 2007
Bush's faith run over by history
the end-passage is hilarious :
"Along with bluster comes stern self-righteousness. Aznar asks whether "there's a possibility of Saddam Hussein going into exile" - "the biggest success," he tells Bush, "would be to win the game without firing a single shot" - and Bush answers that there is:
[The Egyptians] say he's indicated that he's willing to go into exile if they let him take $1 billion and all the information that he wants about the weapons of mass destruction.
And would such exile, asks Aznar, come with a "guarantee" (presumably against prosecution or extradition)?
"No guarantee," declares Bush. "He's a thief, a terrorist, a war criminal. Compared to Saddam, Milosevic would be a Mother Teresa." Though it's hard to evaluate whether Saddam was really willing to leave Iraq - the Egyptians, Saudis, and others who were then touting the possibility all had an interest in seeing Saddam leave and the Sunni power structure remain in place - it is inconceivable that he would do so without some sort of guarantee, a possibility Bush forecloses.
What is most interesting in this passage, and indeed in the entire transcript, is what it reveals about Bush's attitudes and character. One moment he blusters and threatens, the next he speaks reverently and self-righteously about how he is guided by "a historic sense of responsibility":
When some years from now History judges us, I don't want people to ask themselves why Bush, or Aznar, or Blair didn't face their responsibilities. In the end, what people want is to enjoy freedom. Not long ago, in Romania, I was reminded of the example of Ceausescu: it took just one woman to call him a liar for the whole repressive system to come down. That's the unstoppable power of freedom. I am convinced that I'll get that resolution.
He did not get it, of course. Despite his strong conviction, neither Chile nor Angola nor Russia proved ready to change their votes, threat or no threat. There is a difference between being sure and being right. Bush's conviction, here as elsewhere, came not from an independent analysis of the facts - of the interests and intentions of the nations involved - but from the wellspring of faith. He has confused rhetoric, however uplifting, and reality.
Aznar, the sophisticated European, comments wryly on this. It is the most Jamesian moment in the playlet of Crawford; one can almost see the subtly arched eyebrow:
Aznar: The only thing that worries me about you is your optimism.
Bush: I am an optimist, because I believe that I'm right. I'm at peace with myself. It's up to us to face a serious threat to peace.
It is worrying, as Aznar remarks, to rely on optimism grounded only in belief. The Spaniard knows that gaining that second Security Council resolution, and thus the critical international legitimacy for the war, will be very hard; in many nations, launching a war against Iraq, particularly before the UN inspectors have finished their work, is deeply unpopular. Faith cannot replace facts, nor can a historic sense of mission. Both may be personally comforting - they plainly are to George W Bush - but they don't obviate the need to know things.
Bush came to office a man who knew little of the world, who had hardly traveled outside the country, who knew nothing of the practice of foreign policy and diplomacy. Two years later, after the attacks of September 11 and his emergence as a self-described "war president", he has come to know only that this lack of knowledge is not a handicap but perhaps even a strength: that he doesn't need to know things in order to believe that he's right and to be at peace with himself. He has redefined his weakness - his lack of knowledge and experience - as his singular strength. He believes he's right. It is a matter of generations and destiny and freedom: it is "up to us to face a serious threat to peace". For Bush, faith, conviction, and a felt sense of destiny - not facts or knowledge - are the real necessities of leadership."
more.....
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IJ19Ak01.html
"Along with bluster comes stern self-righteousness. Aznar asks whether "there's a possibility of Saddam Hussein going into exile" - "the biggest success," he tells Bush, "would be to win the game without firing a single shot" - and Bush answers that there is:
[The Egyptians] say he's indicated that he's willing to go into exile if they let him take $1 billion and all the information that he wants about the weapons of mass destruction.
And would such exile, asks Aznar, come with a "guarantee" (presumably against prosecution or extradition)?
"No guarantee," declares Bush. "He's a thief, a terrorist, a war criminal. Compared to Saddam, Milosevic would be a Mother Teresa." Though it's hard to evaluate whether Saddam was really willing to leave Iraq - the Egyptians, Saudis, and others who were then touting the possibility all had an interest in seeing Saddam leave and the Sunni power structure remain in place - it is inconceivable that he would do so without some sort of guarantee, a possibility Bush forecloses.
What is most interesting in this passage, and indeed in the entire transcript, is what it reveals about Bush's attitudes and character. One moment he blusters and threatens, the next he speaks reverently and self-righteously about how he is guided by "a historic sense of responsibility":
When some years from now History judges us, I don't want people to ask themselves why Bush, or Aznar, or Blair didn't face their responsibilities. In the end, what people want is to enjoy freedom. Not long ago, in Romania, I was reminded of the example of Ceausescu: it took just one woman to call him a liar for the whole repressive system to come down. That's the unstoppable power of freedom. I am convinced that I'll get that resolution.
He did not get it, of course. Despite his strong conviction, neither Chile nor Angola nor Russia proved ready to change their votes, threat or no threat. There is a difference between being sure and being right. Bush's conviction, here as elsewhere, came not from an independent analysis of the facts - of the interests and intentions of the nations involved - but from the wellspring of faith. He has confused rhetoric, however uplifting, and reality.
Aznar, the sophisticated European, comments wryly on this. It is the most Jamesian moment in the playlet of Crawford; one can almost see the subtly arched eyebrow:
Aznar: The only thing that worries me about you is your optimism.
Bush: I am an optimist, because I believe that I'm right. I'm at peace with myself. It's up to us to face a serious threat to peace.
It is worrying, as Aznar remarks, to rely on optimism grounded only in belief. The Spaniard knows that gaining that second Security Council resolution, and thus the critical international legitimacy for the war, will be very hard; in many nations, launching a war against Iraq, particularly before the UN inspectors have finished their work, is deeply unpopular. Faith cannot replace facts, nor can a historic sense of mission. Both may be personally comforting - they plainly are to George W Bush - but they don't obviate the need to know things.
Bush came to office a man who knew little of the world, who had hardly traveled outside the country, who knew nothing of the practice of foreign policy and diplomacy. Two years later, after the attacks of September 11 and his emergence as a self-described "war president", he has come to know only that this lack of knowledge is not a handicap but perhaps even a strength: that he doesn't need to know things in order to believe that he's right and to be at peace with himself. He has redefined his weakness - his lack of knowledge and experience - as his singular strength. He believes he's right. It is a matter of generations and destiny and freedom: it is "up to us to face a serious threat to peace". For Bush, faith, conviction, and a felt sense of destiny - not facts or knowledge - are the real necessities of leadership."
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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IJ19Ak01.html
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