[Dialogue] A brainstorm + a news feature

[Charles or Doris Hahn]

In the midst of pale apologies, wanton scapegoating
parading as "taking responsibility," etc., I keep
wondering what acts of historical repentence would be
appropriate for us Americans.

Someone (I can't remember who--was it on this
listserve) 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.