[Dialogue] A brainstorm + a news feature

[Del Hunter Morrill]

I felt this worth sharing more broadly.  The first comments are from a
friend, the rest of it is from a newsman:

In the midst of pale apologies, wanton scapegoating parading as "taking
responsibility," etc., I keep wondering what acts of historical repentance
would be appropriate for us Americans. Someone... suggested that we turn the
Abu Ghraib prison into an electronics school for Iraquis with Dell,
Microsoft, etc. contributing all the equipment
needed. I keep thinking we should announce the closure of the School of the
Americas at Fort Benning, GA, where we train folks in techniques of torture.
That's one economic and one political baby step. Where has your thinking
taken you? It's the kind of thinking I would like to hear coming from our
journalists, politicians, etc.
In the meantime, here's a scathing one:


With trembling fingers, By Hal Crowther
May 12, 2004 News Feature

I used to take a drink on occasion with a network newsman famed for his
impenetrable calm--his apparent
pulse rate that of a large mammal in deep hibernation--and in an avuncular
moment he advised me
that I'd do all right, in the long run, if I could only avoid the kind of
journalism committed to the
keyboard "with trembling fingers." I recognized the wisdom of this advice
and endeavored over the years to
write as little as possible when my blood pressure was soaring and my face
was streaked with tears. The lava
flows of indignation ebb predictably with age and hardening arteries, and
nearing three-score I thought
I'd never have to take another tranquilizer--or a double bourbon--to keep my
fingers steady on the keys.

I never imagined 2004. It would be sophomoric to say that there was never a
worse year to be an American.
My own memory preserves the dread summer of 1968. My parents suffered the
consequences of 1941 and 1929,
and my grandfather Jack Allen, who lived through all those dark years, might
have added 1918, with the flu
epidemic and the Great War in France that each failed, very narrowly, to
kill him. Drop back another generation or two and we encounter 1861.

But if this is not the worst year yet to be an American, it's the worst year
by far to be one of those hag-ridden wretches who comment on the American
scene. The columnist who trades in snide one-liners flounders like a stupid
comic with a tired audience; TV comedians and talk-show hosts who try to
treat 2004 like any zany election year have become grotesque,  almost
loathsome. Our most serious, responsible newspaper columnists are so stunned
by the disaster in Iraq that they've begun to quote poetry by Rupert Brooke
and Wilfred Owen. They lower their voices, they sound like Army chaplains
delivering eulogies over ranks of  dead soldiers.

Yeats' "blood-dimmed tide is loosed." The war news had flag-draped coffins,
under a hard rain from an iron
sky. Already deteriorated from bad to tragic to pre-apocalyptic, it left no
suitable category for these latest excruciating reports on the sexual
torture of Iraqi prisoners. Fingers, be still. In less than a year, the
morale of the occupying forces had sunk so low that murder, suicide, rape
and sexual harassment became alarming statistics, and now the warriors of
democracy--the emissaries of civilization--stand accused of every crime this
side
of cannibalism. Osama bin Laden has always anathematized America's culture,
as well as its geopolitical influence. To him these atrocities are a sign of
Allah's certain favor, a great moral victory, a vindication of his deepest
anger and darkest crimes.

Where does it go from here? The nightmare misadventure in Iraq is over,
beyond the reach of any reasonable
argument, though many more body bags will be filled. In Washington, chicken
hawks will still be squawking
about "digging in" and winning, but Vietnam proved conclusively that no
modern war of occupation would ever be won. Every occupation is doomed. The
only way you "win" a war of occupation is the old-fashioned way, the way
Rome finally defeated the Carthaginians: kill all the fighters, enslave
everyone else, raze the cities and sow the fields with salt.

Otherwise the occupied people will fight you to the last peasant, and why
shouldn't they? If our presidential election fails to dislodge the crazy
bastards who annexed Baghdad, many of us in this country would welcome
regime change by any intervention, human or divine. But if, say, the Chinese
came in to rescue us--Operation American Freedom--how long would any of us,
left-wing or right, put up with an occupying army teaching us
Chinese-style democracy? A guerrilla who opposes an invading army on his own
soil is not a terrorist, he's
a resistance fighter. In Iraq we're not fighting enemies but making enemies.
As Richard Clarke and others have observed, every dollar, bullet and
American life that we spend in Iraq is one that's not being spent in the war
on terrorism. Every Iraqi, every Muslim we kill or torture or humiliate is a
precious shot of adrenaline for Osama and al Qaeda.

The irreducible truth is that the invasion of Iraq was the worst blunder,
the most staggering miscarriage of judgment, the most fateful, egregious,
deceitful abuse of power in the history of American foreign policy. If
you don't believe it yet, just keep watching. Apologists strain to dismiss
parallels with Vietnam,
but the similarities are stunning. In every action our soldiers kill
innocent civilians, and in every other
action apparent innocents kill our soldiers--and there's never any way to
sort them out. And now these
acts of subhuman sadism, these little My Lais.

Since the defining moment of the Bush presidency, the preposterous
flight-suit, Fox News-produced photo-op
on the Abraham Lincoln in front of the banner that read "Mission
Accomplished," the shaming truth is that
everything has gone wrong. Just as it was bound to go wrong, as many of us
predicted it would go wrong--if
anything more hopelessly wrong than any of us would have dared to prophesy.
Iraq is an epic train wreck,
and there's not a single American citizen who's going to walk away
unscathed.

The shame of this truth, of such a failure and so much deceit exposed, would
have brought on mass
resignations or votes of no confidence in any free country in the world. In
Japan not long ago, there
would have been ritual suicides, shamed officials disemboweling themselves
with samurai swords. Yet up
to this point--at least to the point where we see grinning soldiers taking
pictures of each other over
piles of naked Iraqis--neither the president, the vice president nor any of
the individuals who urged and
designed this debacle have resigned or been terminated--or even apologized.
They have betrayed no
familiarity with the concept of shame.

Thousands of young Americans are dead, maimed or mutilated, 100 billion has
been wasted and all we've
gained is a billion new enemies and a mouthful of dust--of sand. Chaos
reigns, but in the midst of it we
have this presidential election. George Bush has defined himself as a war
president, and it's fitting
that he should die by the sword--in fact fall on it, and quick. But even now
the damned polls don't
guarantee, or even indicate, his demise.

Conventional wisdom says that an incumbent president with a $200 million war
chest cannot be defeated, and
that one who commands a live, bleeding, suffering army in the field is
doubly invincible. By this logic, the
most destructively incompetent president since Andrew Johnson will be
rewarded with a second term. That
would probably mean a military draft and more wars in the oil countries and,
under visionaries like Dick
Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, a chance for the United States to emulate
19th-century Paraguay, which
simultaneously declared war on Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay and fought
ferociously until 90 percent of the
male population was dead.

What hope then? Impeachment is impossible when the president's party
controls both houses of Congress,
though Watergate conspirator John Dean, who ought to know, claims in his new
book that there are compelling
legal arguments for a half-dozen bills of impeachment against George W.
Bush. Peer pressure? At the White
House, world opinion gets no more respect than FBI memos or uncomfortable
facts. Many Americans seem
unaware that scarcely anyone on the planet Earth supported the Iraq
adventure, no one anywhere except
the 40-50 million Republican loyalists who voted for George Bush in 2000.

Among significant world leaders he recruited only Great Britain's Tony
Blair--whose career may be ruined
because most Britons disagree with him--and the abominable Ariel Sharon,
that vile tub of blood and
corruption who recently used air-to-ground missiles to assassinate a
paraplegic in a wheelchair at the door
of his mosque. (Palestinians quickly squandered any sympathy or moral
advantage they gained from this
atrocity by strapping a retarded 16-year-old into a suicide bomber's kit.
Such is the condition of the
human race in the Middle East, variously known as the Holy Land or the
Cradle of Civilization.) Says Sharon,
oleaginously, of Bush: "Something in his soul committed him to act with
great courage against world
terror."

The rest of the known world, along with the United Nations, has been dead
set against us from the start.
But they carry no weight. Thanks to our tax dollars and the well-fed, strong
but not bulletproof bodies of
our children--though mostly children from lower-income families--George Bush
and his lethal team of oil
pirates, Cold Warriors and Likudists commands the most formidable military
machine on earth. No nation, with
the possible exception of China, would ever dare to oppose them directly.

But the Chinese aren't coming to save us. Nothing and no one can stop these
people except you and me, and
the other 100 million or so American citizens who may vote in the November
election. This isn't your
conventional election, the usual dim-witted, media-managed Mister America
contest where candidates
vie for charm and style points and hire image coaches to help them act more
confident and presidential. This
is a referendum on what is arguably the most dismal performance by any
incumbent president--and inarguably
the biggest mistake. This is a referendum on George W. Bush, arguably the
worst thing that has happened to
the United States of America since the invention of the cathode ray tube.

One problem with this referendum is that the case against George Bush is
much too strong. Just to spell
it out is to sound like a bitter partisan. I sit here on the 67th birthday
of Saddam Hussein facing a
haystack of incriminating evidence that comes almost to my armpit. What
matters most, what signifies?
Journalists used to look for the smoking gun, but this time we have the
cannons of Waterloo, we have
Gettysburg and Sevastopol, we have enough gun smoke to cause asthma in
heaven. I'm overwhelmed. Maybe I
should light a match to this mountain of paper and immolate myself. On the
near side of my haystack,
among hundreds of quotes circled and statistics underlined, just one thing
leaped out at me. A quote I
had underlined from the testimony of Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg
trials, not long before Hitler's
vice-fuhrer poisoned himself in his jail cell:

 "It is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a
democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist
dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the
bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they
are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and
exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."

Goering's dark wisdom gained weight when a friend called me and reported
that Vice President Cheney was
so violently partisan in his commencement speech at Westminster College in
Missouri--so rabid in his
attacks on John Kerry as an anti-American peace-marching
crypto-communist--that the college
president felt obliged to send the student body an e-mail apologizing for
Cheney's coarseness.

If you think it's exceptionally shameless for a man who dodged Vietnam to
play the patriot card against a
decorated veteran, remember that Georgia Republicans played the same card,
successfully, against Sen. Max
Cleland, who suffered multiple amputations in Vietnam. In 2001 and 2002,
George Bush and his Machiavelli,
Karl Rove, approved political attack ads that showed the faces of Tom
Daschle and other Democratic senators
alongside the faces of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. And somewhere in
hell, Goering and Goebbels
toasted each other with a schnapps.

Am I polarized? I've never been a registered Democrat, I'm sick of this
two-party straitjacket, I wish to God
it didn't take Yale and a major American fortune to create a presidential
candidate. The only current
Democratic leaders who show me any courage are Nancy Pelosi and old Bob
Byrd--Hillary Clinton has been
especially cagy and gutless on this war--and John Kerry himself may leave a
lot to be desired. He deserves your vote not because of anything he ever did
or promises to do, but simply because he did not make this sick mess in Iraq
and owes no allegiance to the sinister characters who designed it. And
because his own "place in history," so important to the kind of men who run
for president, would now rest entirely on his success in getting us out of
it.

Kerry made a courageous choice at least once in his life, when he came home
with his ribbons and demonstrated against the war in Vietnam. But Sen. Kerry
could turn out to be a stiff, a punk, an alcoholic and he'd still be a
colossal improvement over the man who turned Paul Wolfowitz loose in the
Middle East. The myth that there was no real difference between Democrats
and Republicans, which I once considered seriously and which Ralph Nader
rode to national disaster four years ago, was shattered forever the day
George Bush announced his cabinet and his appointments for the Department of
Defense.

I'm aware that there are voters--40 million?--who don't see it this way. I
come from a family of veterans and commissioned officers; I understand
patriots in wartime. If a spotted hyena stepped out of Air Force One wearing
a baby-blue necktie, most Americans would salute and sing "Hail to the
Chief." Cultivating these reliable patriots, President Bush cultivated his
patriots by spending $46 million on media in the month of March alone.
Somehow I'm on his mailing list. (Is that because my late father, with the
same name, was a registered Republican, or can
Bush afford to mail his picture to every American with an established
address?) Twice a week I open an appeal
for cash to crush John Kerry and the quisling liberal conspiracy, and now I
own six gorgeous color photographs of the president and his wife. I'm sure
some of my neighbors frame the president's color photographs, and fill those
little blue envelopes he sends us with their hard-earned dollars.

I struggle against the suspicion that so many of my fellow Americans are
conceptually challenged. I want
to reason with my neighbors, I want to engage these lost Americans. What
makes you angry, neighbor? What
arouses your suspicions? Does it bother you that this administration made
terrorism a low priority, dismissed key intelligence that might have
prevented the 9-11 catastrophe, then exploited it to justify the pre-planned
destruction of Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with al Qaeda? All this
is no longer conjecture, but direct reportage from cabinet-level meetings by
the turncoat insiders Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill.

If the Pentagon ever thought Saddam had "weapons of mass destruction," it
was only because the Pentagon
gave them to him. As Kevin Phillips recounts in American Dynasty, officials
of the Reagan and first Bush administrations eagerly supplied Saddam with
arms while he was using chemical weapons on the Kurds. They
twice sent Donald Rumsfeld to court Saddam, in 1983 and 1984, when the
dictator was in the glorious prime
of his monsterhood.

This scandal, concurrent with Iran-Contra, was briefly called "Iraqgate,"
and, yes, among the names of those
officials implicated you'll find most of the engineers of our current
foreign policy. (They also signaled their fractious client, Saddam, that it
might be all right to overrun part of Kuwait; you remember what happened
when he tried to swallow it all.) Does any of this trouble you? Does it
worry you that Dick Cheney, as president of the nefarious Halliburton
Corporation, sold Iraq $73 million in oilfield services between 1997 and
2000, even as he plotted with the Wolfowitz faction to whack Saddam? Or that
Halliburton, with its CEO's seat still warm from Cheney's butt, was awarded
unbid contracts worth up to $15 billion for the Iraq invasion, and currently
earns a billion dollars a
month from this bloody disaster? Not to mention its $27.4 million overcharge
for our soldiers' food.

These are facts, not partisan rhetoric. Do any of them even make you
restless? The cynical game these
shape-shifters have been playing in the Middle East is too Byzantine to
unravel in 1,000 pages of text. But
the hypocrisy of the White House is palpable, and beggars belief. If there's
one American who actually
believes that Operation Iraqi Freedom was about democracy for the poor
Iraqis, then you, my friend,
are too dangerously stupid to be allowed near a voting booth.

Does it bother you even a little that the personal fortunes of all four Bush
brothers, including the president and the governor, were acquired about a
half step ahead of the district attorney, and that the royal family of Saudi
Arabia invested $1.476 billion in those and other Bush family enterprises?
Or, as Paul Krugman points out, that it's much easier to establish links
between the Bush and bin Laden families than any between the bin Ladens and
Saddam
Hussein. Do you know about Ahmad Chalabi, the administration's favorite
Iraqi and current agent in Baghdad, whose personal fortune was established
when he embezzled several hundred million from his own bank in Jordan and
fled to London to avoid 22 years at hard labor?

That's just a sampling from my haystack. Maybe I can reach you as an
environmentalist, one who resents the
gutting of key provisions in the Clean Air Act? My own Orange County,
chiefly a rural area, was recently
added to a national register of counties with dangerously polluted air. You
say you vote for the president because you're a conservative. Are you sure?
I thought conservatives believed in civil liberties, a weak federal
executive, an inviolable Constitution, a balanced budget and an isolationist
foreign policy. George Bush has an attorney general who drives the ACLU
apoplectic and a vice president who demands more executive privilege (for
his energy seances) than any elected official has ever received. The
president wants a Constitutional amendment to protect marriage from
homosexuals, of all things. Between tax cuts for his high-end supporters and
three years playing God and Caesar in the Middle East, George Bush has
simply emptied America's wallet, with a $480 billion federal deficit
projected for 2004, and the tab on Iraq well over $100 billion and running.

"A lot of so-called conservatives today don't know what the word means,"
Barry Goldwater said in 1994,
when the current cult of right-wing radicals and "neocons" had begun to
define and assert themselves.
Goldwater was my first political hero, before I was old enough to read his
flaws. But his was the
conservatism of the wolf--the lone wolf--and this is the conservatism of
sheep.

All it takes to make a Bush conservative is a few slogans from talk radio
and pickup truck bumpers, a
sneer at "liberals" and maybe a name-dropping nod to Edmund Burke or John
Locke, whom most of them have
never read. Sheep and sheep only could be herded by a ludicrous but not
harmless cretin like Rush Limbaugh,
who has just compared the sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners to "a college
fraternity prank" (and who
once called Chelsea Clinton "the family dog"--you don't have to worry about
shame when you have no
brain).

I don't think it's accurate to describe America as polarized between
Democrats and Republicans, or
between liberals and conservatives. It's polarized between the people who
believe George Bush and the
people who do not. Thanks to some contested ballots in a state governed by
the president's brother, a
once-proud country has been delivered into the hands of liars, thugs,
bullies, fanatics and thieves. The
world pities or despises us, even as it fears us. What this election will
test is the power of money and
media to fool us, to obscure the truth and alter the obvious, to hide a
great crime against the public
trust under a blood-soaked flag. The most lavishly funded, most cynical,
most sophisticated political
campaign in human history will be out trolling for fools. I pray to God it
doesn't catch you.
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