January 30, 2007
Bush the empire slayer.
Excellent article by Bernard Chazelle entitled
Bush The Empire Slayer, which does a great job of summarizing all of the damage that these people have done to the world. This is from the ending.
The war has given the American mainstream media a brilliant opportunity to prove its essential worthlessness. It has shown itself to be little more than a circus of entertainers and cheerleaders for whom every season is the silly season. Tragically, the media has failed in its sacred duty to keep a vigilant, skeptical, critical eye on the centers of power. Who is the American Robert Fisk, Gideon Levy, or Amira Hass? Whoever they are (and Sy Hersh proves they exist), why are their writings not filling the op-ed pages of the great American newspapers? How can the nation that produces the bulk of Nobel prize winners be stuck with such a sullen bunch of journalistic mediocrities? The sycophantic enablers of the Fourth Estate have blood on their hands.
T he unfolding catastrophe in Iraq had a single cause: the reassertion of US hegemony after 9/11. Its trigger was a rare astral alignment. Big Oil, the neocons, the Christian fundamentalists, the liberal hawks, AIPAC, the MSM, and 9/11 all formed cosmic dots in the sky that only one power could—and did—successfully align: the president of the United States. No American leader has so much owned a war.
And none has so little owned up to it. Victors are never war criminals. That's because they get to write the history books. Bush won't have that chance. The die has been cast and the hour is too late for him or anyone to alter the unforgiving judgment of posterity. Therein, paradoxically, lies our quandary. For, if freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, then Bush is a free man—free to pursue the most malignant policies, heedless of the consequences to his unworsenable presidential standing. Beware the desperation of a cornered man.
The apostle of imperial dominance, Bush slew the “last empire.” The towering figure of our time, he is a piteously small man. The self-anointed emissary of a “higher father,” he is servant to no power but himself. The captain of the sinking ship has laid his command upon his fellow Americans: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for me.” No sacrifice of life shall be too great, no damage to civil liberties too high, no expenses too vast for a vainglorious man deluded by fantastic dreams of redemption by force.
But who besides the bereaved will mourn? Who besides the orphan will whimper? Who besides the humiliated will stare back? Who besides the thugs and the craven will lead? Patriotism is a lovely thing. In its name, some go dying by the side of an Iraqi road in twitching agony; others go shopping in oversized automobiles festooned with yellow ribbons. We all play our part—and nobody else's.
Yeats bemoaned an era when the best lacked all conviction, while the worst were full of passionate intensity. Today, Kristol blusters and hectors, Cheney scolds and forebodes, Bush struts and smirks. Meanwhile, the giant, timid chorus listens politely to the deafening silence of the outraged—and the mad march of war goes on.
This is all very true and all, and people should understand what Bush and company have done. But I stil think it misses the main point. In the larger sense it is the American military-industrial-legal-financial-corporate complex that has done all of this. And, by extension, all those in the US and throughout the world who, for many decades now, have been gleefully trying to profit from it, directly or indirectly. The complex has been building up for decades, and everyone in the world has watched it grow and done nothing. Absolutely nothing. The root cause of it all is GREED. And until people change their ideas about money, and stop thinking so damn much about their own lifestyles and comforts, and until the ENTIRE military-industrial-legal-financial-corporate complex is dismantled, the wars and the bombings and the suffering will go on. Eliminate the Republicans, eliminate the neo-cons, eliminate Israel, it will make no difference. Sure it will slow it down for a while. But the root cause will remain, and sooner or later, it will come back, like a multi-headed hydra, meaner and nastier than ever. The Democrats too, in their entire 200 year long history, have never met a war they didn't like. It's time that people looked deeper, and, above all, deeper into themselves, and stopped blaming everyone else. And the one and only way to make sure that America does not nuke the world is to take their nukes away. Once and for all. Nothing short of that will do.
And this also has to be said and repeated over and over: It is not Bush and Blair who have waged this war. It is the American and British people. All of them. With the complicity of the entire so-called western world. Period.
