Commentary:

How did we get here?

They're playing a song on one of the French music television stations called "Marilyn and John", referring to Marilyn Monroe and John Kennedy I presume. My presumption is because they were using images and film clips from that time in history to illustrate the video (I'm not good enough at French yet to understand a lot of songs). Seeing the images from that era reminded me of the Cold War, which almost turned very, very hot shortly before I was born over the missiles that the Soviet Union had placed in Cuba. It made me think back to my teenage years, when I was deathly afraid that there would be a nuclear war and the world would be destroyed. Although it is a bit dated, the movie War Games illustrates some of the feelings that pervaded the atmosphere of the era without being overly political, although Red Dawn may illustrate better the right-wing vision of the world as told by left-wingers.

Both movies are of a piece of the tenor of the times. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed under the weight of its own internal contradictions (yes, the Reagan military buildup helped accelerate the decline and fall, but the fall was indeed inevitable regardless of who was in power in the United States), that seemed an unalloyed good at the time. No more huge, world annihilating arsenals set on a hair trigger. No more wars by proxy where overtly or covertly lives of our youth were spent defending our philosophy of government and what we regarded as our way of life. No more spies or "fifth columnists" lurking in the shadows, subverting our democracy by using its very openness against it. No more bipolar world. The Wall surrounding West Berlin that symbolized that bipolarity was demolished and rock concerts were held on the rubble. Celebration of the end of a long nightmare and hope epitomized by the phrase of the day "the end of history" filled the air. A brief, albeit shocking and deadly, war in the Persian Gulf prompted by naked aggression did not completely derail the optimism that arose from the apparent dawn that broke the 50 year long night that had started with the deadliest war in human history; a war that culminated in the use of the first weapon that could truly be called a "doomsday device".

Explosive economic growth followed, growth fueled by resources no longer being consumed by a war that was not fought by soldiers but by technologists and bankers and farmers. Technology that had previously been reserved for military use became the province of both businesses and individuals, so much so that now there is more sophisticated technology in the average cell phone than there is in a cruise missile. The computing power in an average surround sound stereo system used to watch the latest James Bond movie on DVD is orders of magnitude more than that used to navigate the Apollo spacecraft to the moon, and the number of transistors in a low-end PalmPilot that college students use to keep track of class schedules is 10,000 times greater than the number of vacuum tube "transistor equivalents" in the computers used to design the first atomic bombs.

There were brief disturbances in the exuberance, which some said was "irrational exuberance" at least in economic terms. Bombs were set off in the basement parking garages of the World Trade Center in New York City. The Keystone Kops-like errors made by the terrorists attempting to topple the towers from below gave an illusory sense of security that ultimately proved to be fatal. Even after the massive explosions in front of two of the United States' embassies in Africa the threat of terrorism was not regarded as "real", and none of these attempts to strike at the United States derailed the sense of invulnerability to the troubles plaguing the rest of the world. The lessons of the Red Brigades and other terrorist groups in Europe in the last 20 years of the Cold War were forgotten, and the threats of terrorism from the "outside world" were merely inconveniences in airport departures and arrivals to be complained about because we could not be met at the gate instead of baggage claim.

Fat, happy, complacent, and self-assured we sat on 10 September 2001.

Fat, terrified, troubled, and insecure we squirmed on the afternoon of 11 September 2001.

The dangerous but certain and bipolar world of the Cold War seemed like a distant but fond memory.

The decade of the nineties was like a happy dream that briefly interrupted the Darwinian real world which rudely asserted itself on that horrific day early in the autumn or 2001.

Our seemingly miraculous, amazingly quick, and astonishingly low cost victory in Afghanistan that winter seemed to put the world back on its axis again, although there was now the loss of certainty that crept into every debate, every plan, every action.

Then...

We were told it was IMPERATIVE to resolve the situation with Iraq. The spin at that time was over Weapons of Mass Destruction rather than the more than a decade long violation of the cease fire accords that ended the Gulf War in the 1990s.

An appeal was made to the United Nations based upon the alleged presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction rather, than the blatant violations of both the cease fire accords and numerous UN resolutions. The "with us or against us" bluntness gave the Europeans an out, because they thrive in shades of grey. The United Kingdom stood with the United States solely because of the leadership of a single man, Tony Blair.

The invasion of Iraq was commenced without the benefit of an additional UN resolution, although it could be argued (and has been, even within this weblog) that no additional resolution was required due to the blatant violations by the regime of Saddam Hussein of both the cease fire accords and previous UN resolutions. The invasion, though harrowing during the initial stages as all battles are, was an amazing success that seemed inevitable after the fact, as all outcomes of battles are. The tactics used combined the best of both adversaries of the American Civil War, the audacity of Robert E. Lee with the overwhelming concentration of firepower of Ulysses S. Grant. The Civil War left a legacy that we do not fully appreciate. We in the United States murdered each other with an intensity that has rarely been matched elsewhere in the world, yet we managed to pull the nation back together afterwards. In every war we have fought since, we have to differing degrees combined the best of both sides of that deadly conflict to destroy our enemies. The conflict in Vietnam was not lost on the battlefield. It could be argued that it was not "lost" at all, because the current regime is embracing capitalism; however, the pull out was due to political concerns, not due to any real losses on the battlefield, especially when compared to prior wars such as Korea or World War II.

Now, the United States is engaged in an occupation of Iraq after the seemingly inevitable but still stunning due to speed victory. An occupation it is; there is no denying that seemingly ugly word, occupation. No cohesive civil or military authority existed in the country after the fall of Baghdad other than in the region controlled by the Kurds, which for all intents and purposes before the war was an independent state. Sadly enough, they have lost the most in this war because they will be subsumed into the "new Iraq" in a way that will cost the autonomy they had under the old regime that was enforced by the "no fly zone".

After a month, April of 2004, that was more deadly than the actual invasion of the Iraq itself a year ago in March and April of 2003, there is an entirely rational examination of the costs of the occupation versus the reward. The invasion itself was harrowing enough, televised live in the middle of the night to middle America, with battles fought on the television screen courtesy of CNN. Now, a year later after the battles between organized armies are over and there are casualties due to an only quasi-organized resistance, many right-wingers are wrongly decrying this examination of costs versus rewards while many left-wingers are equally wrongly declaiming that their opposition was correct all along. This self-examination is not aided by the almost weekly presentation of yet another vulnerability, of yet another threat of a dirty bomb, of a biological weapon, or of the discovery of chemical weapons that are most likely leftovers and not the indicators of vast stores of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. All these reports accomplish is to combine and create a fear that is more personal and visceral than the abstract and seemingly bloodless prospect of a pyrrhic nuclear cremation that was embodied in Mutual Assured Destruction. The revelations that our troops have feet of clay just like every other human or organization created by humans only puts a harsh spotlight on the very high standards we rightly set for ourselves, and those horrid photographs combine with the 24 hour news cycle to add sound and fury that distract us from the very important tasks of examining the costs versus rewards of our actions and considered reflection that would allow us to ensure that our true motives are indeed what we say they are.

Fat, concerned, alert, and confused we stand on 19 May 2004.

Where do we go from here?

Radical right-wingers declaim that the Islamists have shown they are sub-human by their decapitation of a US citizen. Radical left-wingers use this same incident as evidence that we should not have invaded in the first place. Those in the middle who understand that the decapitation video was just as much an aberration of true Islam as the photos and video of US troops humiliating (sexual or otherwise) Iraqi detainees are an aberration of American values are not served by either extreme viewpoint.

So, where do we go from here?

My proposals:

We DO NOT withdraw from Iraq until there is a truly stable government of laws, not men, established.

We DO NOT hold to arbitrary deadlines, especially those that seemed peculiarly timed to the US election cycle.

We DO stay as an acknowledged OCCUPYING force in Iraq until a the stable government described above is in place.

We STOP the arrogant "with us or against us" rhetoric, regardless of WHO wins the election in November. While that simple statement may express a truth, you have to use the right tool for the job. Using a sledgehammer to put in a finishing nail may work, but it destroys what you are trying to create.

We DO explain in non-absolutist terms how terrorism and the Wahibist form of Islam are a danger to EVERY liberal democracy, including those in Europe.

We STOP indulging in ridiculous fantasies of "democratic domino theories" for the Middle East. It should be apparent to the most casual observer that even the most advanced cultures in that region are not ready for true republican democracy because the philosophical systems of the "man on the street" have not evolved to that level of sophistication yet.

We DO pressure Saudi Arabia to stop supporting, and indeed to suppress, Wahibism.

We DO acknowledge to ourselves that there are some political philosophies that are dangerous to ours (such as Whaibism) and we work to destroy those philosophies wherever they appear, covertly where possible, overtly where necessary.

We STOP the cult of secrecy that the Bush administration has encouraged within government. The silver lining of the Abu Ghraib abuses is that the Arab news networks are showing how the democratic system in the US works. The wrongdoing is exposed, acknowledged, and punished, and NOT swept under the rug or said to involve issues of "national security" requiring secrecy. What appears on the face of it to be our greatest weakness is our GREATEST strength. We should not negate it.

We CONTINUE to engage in the democratic process, WITHOUT labeling our opponents "evil". Just because someone has a different opinion than ours does not mean that those persons should be removed from the face of the Earth. We survived over 50 years of the Cold War without self-immolation, regardless of which party was in power, and that should prove that our system has strengths to overcome the most serious threats without engaging in the tactics of self destruction that many advocate and which are in the end completely inconsistent with the democratic principles to which they claim to adhere.