It Is Either There or Here, and Better Them Than Us: A Pro-War Political Myth
Press Action
Tuesday, October 26, 2004
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/holmquist10262004/
By Micah Holmquist
Most intellectual supporters of the “war on terror” don’t care about “democracy,” “freedom,” “human rights” or even peace and security. In fact, they don’t even bother to do a decent job of pretending to care except when they need a justification for killing some people and improving U.S. domination of the world.
Evidence of this is not hard to come by.
Peace is proclaimed by hawks as a goal, but there’s no concern about Iraqi civilians being in the way of U.S. missiles or how the land of the free is increasingly working to militarize Latin America.
Pro-war forces tout the undefined notion of “democracy” as an all purpose good, but there’s no perceived problems with elections in Afghanistan that are said to be a “farce," women not being allowed to vote in Saudi Arabia or the Bush Administration planning to give campaign assistance to the candidates it favors in Iraq’s upcoming elections, including an effort to define the political parties of the country that has already begun.
The pugnacious proponents of Uncle Sam’s military power are even contradictory when it comes to the security of the U.S. Three years ago U.S. citizen Yaser Esam Hamdi was an “enemy combatant” who the U.S. could hold indefinitely because anything else would put the U.S. at risk in the “war on terror." Now, after a citizenship change and some other minor details, Hamdi is free in Saudi Arabia—a country the hawks say is rife with “terrorists”—and yet there is no outrage.
More significantly, the George W. Bush party line remains that the U.S. needed to invade Iraq because of the “growing threat” posed by even the possibility that Saddam Hussein could get weapons of mass destruction combined with his associations “with our enemies," and yet none of these uber-hawks seem bothered by the disappearance from Iraq of equipment and materials that could be used to build nuclear weapons and 380 tons of explosives. Are they just convinced that Uncle Sam must have taken care of these items in a manner similar to the detainees under the U.S. watch who have “disappeared“ (at least from the eyes of outsiders)? Do they now, out of the blue, selectively doubt that there are people who want to attack the United States and related targets?
Ah, but there won’t be an attack on America soil, the hawkish argument goes. “We are striking the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home,” Bush has said more than once.
This might have been the explicit plan. In a September 6, 2003 Sunday Times column, Andrew Sullivan approvingly writes that “someone close to the inner circles of the Bush administration” told him before the war that one hope was that “terrorists” would flock to fight the U.S. in “post-war” Iraq. “Think of it as a flytrap,” Sullivan quotes him as saying before going on to write that statements from leading officials and military officers, including Bush’s infamous “bring them on” comment, tend to support the idea that this is the plan.
If all of this is true, it is more evidence that the Bush Administration and most its supporters have no regard Iraqi lives and actually see them as acceptable losses in their pursuit of the “war on terror.” After all, if “terrorism” is bad for the people of the U.S. when it happens in the home of the brave, it would be bad for Iraqis when it happens in Iraq. The only exception would be if one subscribes to some racist notion that Iraqi lives do not matter or that they enjoy dying in bombings or due to diseases that a greatly depleted and overburdened Iraqi health care system is no longer able to handle.
To top it off, this strategy won’t work. Given how vague and flexibly asymmetrical “the terrorists" are as a group, it is impossible to measure them in totality, let alone defeat them to that extent. Short of a revolutionary paradigm change in the political/economic system of the world and/or utopia, it is a safe bet that there will always be at least a few people who want to attack the U.S. (i.e. “terrorists") and, with the right equipment or the necessary funds, will be able to. Furthermore, events in Egypt and Russia concretely show “the terrorists” are capable of simultaneously operating in Iraq and elsewhere.
These pro-war arguments don’t make sense if taken on a literal level—I doubt many ardent supporters of the war would disagree with this conclusion after they had thought through it—but they aren’t meant to be understood that way. Instead, notions of “defeating the terrorists” and “winning the war on terror” remain central to the pro-"war on terror” positions espoused by the Bush Administration and others, such as Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, because they make sense of the current world in a way that people want to believe. They are political myths for the contemporary period.
In the United States, after September 11, 2001, there is a widespread, and understandable, longing for a reason to believe “terrorism” will not be a “threat” in the future. The lack of outrage to the use of phrases like “winning the war on terror” suggests that most people in the U.S. are willing to put logic aside, if they ever considered using it, and make a leap in support of a given set of actions if these actions are said to lead to a future without “terrorism.”
Televangelists of the “war on terror” like Bush and Kerry are doing their best to exploit this condition.
Micah Holmquist, editor of Irregular Thoughts and Links, is a Cadillac, Mich.-based writer.