Read All About It: Great Nation Still Perplexed Over Why it Went to War

Whoever tells the truth is chased out of nine villages.

Turkish proverb

The books pile up. Commentators liberally critique. Critics liberally comment. In a kaleidoscopic rush of analysis, disseminated mostly on the internet, the reasons and the causes for the Iraq War ceaselessly tumble forth. Sad, many of the moves are made to cover someone’s ass. Tenet didn’t mean ’Slam Dunk’ but ’Foul Shot’ it turns out. And he didn’t want to release the information he had before the election, well, because he didn’t want it interfering with the results. Why not continue with the same inept, immoral administration that supported his work? Finally, into its fifth year, and now much closer to election day, Hillary wants to end it all.

Turns out Perle didn’t really want the war as bad as the press has stated, or so he says. Wolfowitz had a better plan but despite his awesome powers wasn’t able to execute. The Neocons still defend the neoimperialistic intent of the PNAC, convinced it would’ve worked in the hands of a more competent Decider in Chief. Cheney’s convinced things are working out ’cause you gotta scramble eggs if you want an omelet. McCain is similarly disposed, as is the undeclared Fred Thompson. The majority of Democrats say one thing, but do another, mostly supportive of the status quo. And peace rallies have lost their sex appeal. The washed and unwashed masses now wonder, Is Paris really gonna do time?

Most of the media is still befuddled, periodically running those GIs sharing bubblegum with a few of the local lads pictures. The word, democracy, is being used so frequently and inappropriately that it will soon lose its meaning throughout much of the world if it hasn’t already. And, oh yeah, oil. The one word summation for why we went in the first place. Or is it?

Add it all up and you’ve got a cart load of delusion, misinformation, blatant deception, and mass confusion, which is perfect for W. Now even former supporters are piling on, accentuating just how ignorant the man is. But how ignorant is he? He’s got the rest of the country acting as stupid as people claim he is.

Most fingers point to the White House, but historians aren’t going to be so simplistic. In fact, there’s a cornucopia of reasons the ’War on Terror’ and the Iraqi War have been supreme tragedies, and ones that should’ve been anticipated by Congress, Neocon ideologues, the media, and, last but not least, the public at large. Actually, since W. had a Shakespearean motive to best his dad, who was always disappointed in his boy, he at least has a case of Dysfunctional Trauma Syndrome - the latest popular rationale for unacceptable behavior. Just as Nixon was reduced by revisionists to a man looking for adolescent acceptance as a leader, Bush too will get the Freudian label of damaged goods. The rest of the country, however, will have to bear its responsibilities for making the world a far more tumultuous place to live in for the foreseeable future.

How should the existing events been anticipated? A reasonably brief understanding of Iraqi history, the fascist roots of the Baathist party, the causes for Islamic militancy promulgated by the original Muslim Brotherhood and writers such as Sayyid Qutb, and the restless discontent among Muslims, particularly Arabs, illustrated (and at times skewed) in books like Bernard Lewis’s "What Went Wrong?" Sounds like you’d need an advanced degree in international studies to garner such an education. Actually, a couple evenings scrolling through Wikipedia will be sufficiently illuminating so that even a Martian could see the difficulties involved in America’s woeful foreign policy activities.

Yet somehow, acquiring that information still doesn’t explain why America invaded Iraq, what it really expected, why troops are still there, and how long will they stay there. This is the conundrum wrapped in a puzzle buried in an enigma surrounded by a layer of ambiguity, spinning recklessly in that infamous fog of war - the force field of uncertainty unaccounted for by the laws of entropy and quantum mechanics. Odd, when you think about it, that a planet similar to Earth’s dimensions millions of light years away can be captured for all to see while at the same time what goes on in front of our eyes still remains a mystery nearly four+ years after it began. Is it because we really don’t want to understand it? Is the truth too bitter to swallow?

Granted, there are a number of different, complex factors involved that can’t be simply distilled in 2 minute soundbites - Americans preferred method of digesting global affairs. The main one is that the American people were (and remain) unprepared to see how the world changed during and after the demise of the U.S.S.R. In other words, beneath the bivalent Us versus Them that, accordingly, dominated the "1st world" there were many different variants of Us versus Them in the "3rd World," which were summarily ignored because they weren’t considered to be relevant, in large part because those people weren’t considered to be relevant enough to understand. In the process the chief event that was overlooked was the revitalization of religion, particularly in Islamic cultures, as well as the rising level of concomitant frustration.

Fukuyama’s End of History thesis had lulled many intellectuals - particularly the PNAC crowd - into believing the absolutist notion that democracy had won and thus would soon, naturally, spread around the world. This perspective, spun by the incipient Neocons, neglected what Chalmers Johnson calls Blowback - the deeply felt resentment by the 3rd world, and the Islamic cultures in general, against the legacy of imperialism and neoimperialism that brutally reshaped and exploited those areas of the world. (See: http://www.americanempireproject.co... and http://www.harpers.org/RepublicOrEm...)

For instance, many Muslims, including bin Laden, were disturbed by America’s support of Hussein’s fascist regime. And why wouldn’t they have been disturbed? Indeed, it’s a joke that today’s right wingers call Islamic militants, Islamo Fascists, when, in fact, they had no difficulty supporting just such a regime 20 years ago.

Second, there was a conjunction of Zionist goals with the End-of-History thesis and the Globalization forces that all were unified into one neat (PNAC) package as if by fate. The logic behind such grandiosity predicted that a secure, prosperous Israel would, eventually, serve as a beacon of democratic values, which would spread from one ragged country to another. Show ’em the baubles, bangles and beads, and presto, the ascetic, tribal Arabs will want a piece of that action. Then, engage the secular businessmen throughout the region in trade deals they can’t refuse, and, before you know it, McWal-Martville everywhere you turn. Playing over the ubiquitous speakers? It’s a Small World...

Gee whiz, the right wingers, modern mercantilists, union busting monopolists, and red, white and blue blooded card-carrying Reagan worshippers were insisting, just bring them the good life, the high life and we can switch those bastards. In their hands The White Man’s Burden had morphed into the Bourgeois Burden - the investor’s credo of our time: Wherever there’s a dollar take it.

Meanwhile, the hard push, the stinking capitalist exploitation, the secular nature of an uncontrolled culture with an Invisible Hand that remains Invisible (45 million uninsured Americans?) were hardening attitudes and resistance among Muslims to this capitalist crusade. The more the West expected it to work, the less of a chance it had. But the self-deluded ideologues and the bloody professors who had rubber stamped such a radical strategy refused to recognize this simple fact about nature: Hit another creature and that creature wants to strike back.

And then, of course, there’s the oil, which for many is the one-word, defacto reason for going to Iraq. True, if Iraq had no oil, interest would be limited. As it was, it synchronized neatly with the Globalization aims of Free societies = Free markets. The more ambitious ideologues following the End-of-History thesis argued that, yes, democracy was spreading around the world, but a few more million Visa cards and fast-food restaurants would expedite the process. The industrial wing of the now famous Military-Industrial Complex, particularly Bechtel and Halliburton, eagerly joined the fray in an effort to liberate more oil from the depths of the Earth in order to promote the First International Church of Consumerism, all in the name of growing democracies.

The common accusation is that America wanted to steal the oil, as if 20th century imperialism were alive and well. Ha! Do you really think the Administration’s that stupid? It too was reshaped by Political Correctness, just as the rest of society was. OK, maybe America would drain the pipes to pay for the war, and a few cronies here and there, but that was all that could be expected. The aim included extravagant contracts for extracting oil and maintaining its flow. Then after having reached the appropriate threshold Iraqis could, like the rest of the self-respecting bourgeois world, drive expensive foreign imports, replete with DVD players, satellite radios and GPS systems and be able to visit all the outlet stores in the region. This plan, which appears on paper to benefit the exploited clients represents a new fangled kind of imperialism: Neoimperialism - exploitation through economic as opposed to military means. For more information see: http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mh... - a brilliant must-read piece by Michael Schwartz.

In the end, not one of these aims were viable. Soon, the Iraqi government will fall and by then people won’t dwell on why we went but how to get our stuff out of there as quickly as possible.