Blog For Arizona

"Democracies don't make war, dictators do."

I laughed for a considerable time when Richard Perle said this to Charlie Rose. Charlie was polite enough not to laugh.

Charlie interviewed possibly the two most absolute knuckheads ever in a position to influence American policy; Dickie Perle and Davey Frum. The result of the interview was an admission that the reason we went to war in Iraq was really to make an example of Saddam. We had to take him down to establish our cred with locals and be seen to take down someone who represented a challenge to American power in the Middle East. It really had nothing to do with WMD, nothing to do with terrorism, nothing to do with democracy, except as window-dressing for the public, it had everything to do with striking terror in the hearts of those who might oppose us.

The crux of the philosophy they respresent is simply the imposition of the will of US elites upon the Middle East, by pressure to change policy, and failing that, to change regimes by force. The putative reasons for all this is to prevent terrorism and prevent WMD falling into the hands of terrorists from states. But the useful and neccessary by-product of this is the maintenance of hegemony of the US and Israel in the Middle East and elsewhere. The war on terror is nothing more than a shaggy-dog pretext for throwing US weight around more freely and more widely.

Charlie pointed out correctly that if you want to go after everyone militarily we simply don't have the ability, given that we are already overextended to the breaking point trying to maintain our current commitments. If you go to these countries with only the threat of force backing you, and your force is already spent, you are joke, not a threat. The attack puppies didn't really have a response to this beyond hoping that the US can afford ever greater levels of military expenditures.

They both talked tough, in a way that only a perfect ideologue with no experience of the real world can, saying that everyone who co-operates with terrorists IS a terrorist. That sort of cretinous behavior in the real world very quickly creates much more hostility and resistance than even a 'Superpower' can handle. But, drunk with power, these flakes can conceive of no limits on US power, at least until those limits cause tremendous damage back home; even then, they will just blame it on the Democrats, who have 'taken themselves out of the debate' as Frum put it. I would point out that a conversation with a madman avails you little, and just pisses off the madman.

They trotted out the empty canard about the UN wanting to dictate when America can protect itself. This whole idea is so specious, it is contemptable. The fact that the UN would not give use leave to attack Iraq is simply because they were not, in fact, any threat to us or any other nation. To claim otherwise is most inflated rhetoric. Given the abject defenselessness of Iraq, giving the US leave to attack it would be like giving license for the neighborhood bully to kick a collicky and malnourished baby.

These people are completely disconnected from reality, uninformed by any understanding of history, completely enamoured with military force with no concept of how hellish it truly is, blind to the value of the human life or the dignity of human beings, except as window dressing in their calculations, and absolutely lacking of any appreciation of thier own evil. They are the Arendt's grey men. Pedestrian in manner, perfectly rational, and personally inoffensive, whose operations set in motion a hell that they need never see. Though perfectly banal themselves, they are actively engaged in bringing evil into the world on an unimagineable scale. The world would be far better off if something very heavy were to fall on them both.

Prehaps their convictions are genuine, their motives patriotic, and their goals pure as driven snow, but it doesn't matter. The result of the rationalizations, fuzzy reasoning, and idealistic dreams, is to cause needless and untold suffering and death. Their belligerent stance, so robust and hard-nosed, will not stop terrorism, or even slow it down. Violence feeds on violence. Injustice stokes the fires of vegence. Their approach, and their wildly innaccurate applications of force as a horatory tool, will only instruct their victims in the efficacy of violence and demostrate the psuedo-ethical justification of its indiscriminate use.

Ten or twenty years from now, as terrorists from Iraq and elsewhere harry American interests with suicidal attacks, these men will fail to see the connection to their own casual use of deadly force to impose thier will and teach others fear. They are more likely to point to the carnage as the result of being insufficiently brutal, of not going far enough. The only reason they will be able to conceive of for the spiral of violence rising where they once worked their will shall be that we failed to impress upon the survivors the implacability of our will to dominate them.

What Perle and Frum cannot see, cannot even conceive of from their cushy offices at AEI, is that, to many thoughout the world, it is they who are the terrorists. They may not push the buttons, pull the triggers, or strap on a shirt of explosives, but they are responsible for the high altitude bombing, the random shooting, the torture of prisoners turned over to less squeamish nations, the quarantining of Iraqi families in their own villages, and the concentration camps in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Cuba. The deaths and suffering are their creations, as much as any Imam who issues a fatwah, as much as any angry man who blows himself up to smack the face of the enemy.

American foreign policy has been taken over by terrorists who have at their disposal the might of the US armed forces to spread their terror. Al Qaida has nothing on America. They may have bin Laden, but we have George W. Bush and his pack of useless idiots, the most successful terrorists in the world today.

posted by Michael Bryan @ 1/11/2004 05:18:00 AM