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"Real men want to go to Tehran"

A project of the Nation Institute

As the rush to war quickens, so does the writing about the situation. Here was one paragraph that caught my eye today from a piece in the Boston Globe, Pentagon plans lightning-quick strike. It was the umpteenth time that some paper or other -- often many at once -- has laid out a revised version of the "war plan" to be followed in the coming days:

"A new war with Iraq would begin with a devastating series of cruise missile and precision-guided bomb strikes across the country that would, as one senior Pentagon official put it, leave Iraqi troops with ‘bleeding eardrums and mouthfuls of sand,' allowing US troops to move within days to surround Saddam Hussein's strongholds of Baghdad and Tikrit."

In these endless media scenarios of America's crushing war plans, of how we expect to carry out war in urban areas or the desert, of how we plan to rebuild the country, there is something almost pornographic – and this is before the war even starts and all those retired generals take up their seats in the war rooms of the various TV networks. Already tonight, catching the prime time news, I saw the first of those impressive maps with their swiftly moving arrows heading for Basra or Baghdad ("… a two-pronged attack…"); while the first reports already arriving in our newspapers from our journalists "embedded" in front line units read distinctly like straightforward propaganda.

I think all this is a reflection of the pornography of power which now radiates from Washington. In his fine New York Times column this morning (see below), Paul Krugman catches something of this spirit in quoting a Brit close to "the Bush team" on a phrase that sums up the administration's attitude of the moment: ""Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran."

The President, of course, spoke again of "disarmament" last night, using a phrase that would apply no less strikingly to our own country: "[T]he… regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." Disarmament is an odd term actually for what's about to happen in the Gulf. Perhaps there is, in fact, no term that appropriately describes what is to happen, but something like "rearmament" or just "reloading" might be more on the money. For when this war and the occupation are over, we will certainly have well embedded bases in Iraq from which we are not likely to depart any time soon and a massive military infrastructure armed to its techno-teeth. Post-Saddam Iraq could prove to be something like a vast gun, loaded and ready to be aimed at either Iran or Syria. The Iraqis are likely to be disarmed. We will be armed and ready.

As Robert Scheer comments in his LA Times column:

"This is a truly frightening moment in history. Acting as if divinely inspired, Washington is now setting out to violently remake the maps and lives of the people of the world. This is an idea that old colonial powers England and Spain should have long ago discarded, after learning the hard way that people need to make their own histories. Whether this war is short or long, extremely bloody or just bloody, the stark fact is that a barely elected president has made the United States the first colonizer of the 21st century, openly declaring that he plans to reorder the politics, economy and culture of the Muslim world."

Here's the remarkable thing: As we now know, Bush's people wrote out this agenda for remaking the world in great detail, again and again, over the last decade. It was in plain sight, for those willing to hunt and read -- and it makes the big lie of the 2000 election all that much bigger. They knew; they wrote it all down for the record; and then they ran a campaign to win the American people over to an agenda that bore no relation to the one they planned to carry out. In his most recent piece for Pacific New Service, Mike Klare makes clear what the shifting geopolitical realities of this moment in the Gulf actually add up to and why exactly we're so eager to conquer Iraq and reconstruct it on our own.

And what of those of us opposed to the war on this dreary day? About the only positive news came from England where three of Blair's cabinet members -- Home Office minister John Denham, junior health minister Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and Leader of the Commons Robin Cook – all resigned in protest. Cook wrote an eloquent explanation of his resignation which ended,

"What has come to trouble me most over past weeks is the suspicion that if the hanging chads in Florida had gone the other way and Al Gore had been elected, we would not now be about to commit British troops to action in Iraq.

 

"[T]he British public… want the inspections to be given a chance. And they are suspicious that they are being pushed hurriedly into conflict by a US administration with an agenda of its own. Above all, they are uneasy at Britain taking part in a military adventure without a broader international coalition and against the hostility of many of our traditional allies. It has been a favourite theme of commentators that the House of Commons has lost its central role in British politics. Nothing could better demonstrate that they are wrong than for parliament to stop the commitment of British troops to a war that has neither international authority nor domestic support."

But what should we here hope for? No high government officials in Washington are about to leave office, that's for sure. I assume that there's an urge among some opposed to this war, this administration, and its imperial plans, to see American troops falter militarily, meet fierce resistance, and stagger at the gates of Baghdad. (By the way, I recommend Robert Fisk's latest piece, Baghdad, sleepwalking into history, on the city the New York Times referred to yesterday as a defensive "hornet's nest." He thinks it looks relatively undefended and wonders whether it might become an "open city." Perhaps both are right. Who knows? )

I think we should hope instead for the quickest sort of military end. I would wish that Saddam's regime collapsed this evening without a shot being fired. Let's remember that Saddam could have saved Iraq endless further horror simply by leaving the country, though he undoubtedly knows that sooner or later he would then have been subjected to a war crimes trial or assassinated.

It's true that instant success in war may perhaps tamp down the antiwar movement for a while, and embolden America's hawks, but not for long. The problems with this sort of imperial madness will, I suspect, prove too great, as Krugman suggests, and the alternative, I fear, is a slaughter of an all too unimaginable sort (especially if there is any significant resistance). The modern battlefield is a horror in its own right and, as the first Gulf War showed us, for our own soldiers, mostly adolescents, just passing through that battlefield, however victoriously, may make many of them environmental "casualties of war," even if they don't come near battle. 

Tom

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