Open Letter to Robert Gates
Dear Secretary Gates,
I will not judge you now for what you’ve done in the past. Vietnam and Iran-Contra happened when I was working for the government, too. One thing we all have to hold out for is the possibility of change, including personal change. Without both forgiveness and redemption, what’s the point, after all?
This letter is with regard to the future.
You have been put in the unenviable position of cleaning up a mess. At least, that is the perspective of your cohorts, most of the Republican Party, and the majority of the Democratic Party. They see the US invasion and occupation of Iraq as a mess, a dilemma, a political hot potato. That’s because most politicians have tendencies of personality that DSM IV devotees might call narcissistic personality disorder.
I won’t digress to argue here that these “personality” traits are actually job descriptions. The behavioral descriptions stand, in any case.
A pattern of grandiosity, excessive need for admiration, entitlement, and lack of empathy are the chief components in the diagnosis of NPD.
They lack empathy. They see the destruction of a modern society, and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands, and the inevitable toxic aftermath, and the unanswered pain and grief of this war as their problem, as if each of them had an abcessed tooth. They feign empathy, when the spotlights are on, but this war is threatening to their own careers, not the content of their nocturnal dreams.
The Republicans appointed you to make Donald Rumsfeld their sacrifice after the election; and most of the Democrats will welcome you in order to manipulate their constituents into believing that the war can be managed until the defeat can be dropped in someone else’s lap.
That’s the point of my open letter, sir. Donald Rumsfeld didn’t lose the war. It was never winnable. Not only that, the United States never had any legal or moral right to impose an armed occupation in Iraq. And the fundamental fact that the vast majority of Iraqis do not accept the occupation, and are willing to fight to resist it, cannot be changed by better management.
Killing time until politicians can figure out how to save face is killing people — Iraqi and American. Every day that goes by with this US occupation distorting the political landscape of Iraq is forcing Iraqi groups to deal with one another in light of who is and who is not with the Americans, instead of dealing with one another as Iraqis… as the residents of Iraq. In other words, sir, the American occupation of Iraq is the primary source of inter-Iraqi bloodshed; and painting this as ethnic rivalry might be a great public relations palliative for people in the US, but it is a deadly deception.
There are a lot of pressures, that the American public doesn’t generally understand, to stay in Iraq.
We are generally ignorant of the Washington Consensus which seeks to subordinate the whole globe to the interests of the US State as the guarantor of profit for transnational corporations and a tidy return-on-investment for Wall Street speculators. A very few of us know, yet, that this bipartisan consensus is a consensus on the primacy of American imperialism.
The American public, not from any lack of intelligence, but from incessant indoctrination, does not know that defense contracts serve as a surrogate for disappeared export markets, and we haven’t put it together yet that without an infinite “war on terror” to justify these contracts, the American economy’s basic weaknesses would be exposed: unsustainable growth, accumulation through dispossession, mountain ranges of household debt, and dollar hegemony. When we do put it together, it will expose the manipulative perfidy and hypocrisy of the two ruling-class-run parties who seldom bicker about the Washington Consenus itself, only about how it is managed.
Most of us don’t know, sir, but you probably do know. All these economic and political wagons have been hitched to the war; and the war will not be “won.” The war will simply further grind down the people who live there and those who occupy Iraq — while politicians figure out how to save their political hides — killing people, maiming people, pouring grief on the survivors, and driving people mad… all the while giving more momentum into the catastrophic cascade that this invasion has triggered.
Here is what we might petition you to do, sir. Take this portfolio as Minister of War and publicly offer to resign it if the order is not given immediately to end the war… begin the prompt and unilateral repatriation of US troops back to the United States.
Tell the world you have erred, sinned even, and that you are seeking your own redemption by redeeming the lives of others. Secure your place in the history of this species as the voice of sense and morality that rallied a nation to end its aggression.
The “problem” will not go away with a gradual reduction of US troops trength. The “problem” will not be solved by sending more troops. That this war will be lost by the US — as the US government deserves — is not a decision that will be made by the US State. It is a decision that has already been made, by Iraqis. It should not have taken us more than four years to figure this out.
Donald Rumsfeld made mistakes, to be sure, but time doesn’t offer take-backs. The main mistakes were confusing the tactical content of war with its political content and the belief that the Iraqis would accept foreign occupation. No decision you make will correct that. If Rumsfeld would have decided differently at any juncture, the resistance would have adapted itself to those decisions as readily as it adapted itself to the actual actions. It was not the conduct of the war that was the “mistake.” It was the war.
A vast, bureacratized, conventional, state military cannot defeat a decentralized, determined resistance with popular support on its own ground. The invader can only elect to leave or exterminate them all or delay the inevitable while the bodies continue to pile up. The world will not stand by while you exterminate them all; so now you can elect between one or the other… leave, or dither while others die.
Choose to leave, and enforce that choice with the immense but latent power you have to shock the world with the truth from your current position, and you will be reviled in the short term — as Dr. King was by both parties and the press in 1968, when he turned openly against the Vietnam War — and be remembered by history as a redeemed human being who bore witness and stopped human suffering.
Choose to issue more of the “bipartisan” pablum from both parties about a semi-puppet government “taking responsibility” first, and of “exit strategies,” and you’ll drink cocktails paid out of Georgetown catering budgets for the next couple of years — and you’ll be remembered, if at all, as just another functionary of a dying empire.
An exit is not a strategy. It is a command.
You are standing at the fork in the road, sir.
CSP:
“It was not the conduct of the war that was the “mistake.†It was the war.”
Might I add an “Amen Brother!” to that truth.
All of us need to keep repeating this line as loudly as possible until it rolls naturally off the tongue of each and every American.
13 November 2006, 2:43 pmMike in Kansas:
I can’t do it. Sorry Stan, despite my best intentions wanting a better country for the sake of our young ones, my brain tells me the Gates was sent by the Busheviks – like Baker and others around the “Iraq Study Group.” The “ultra – elite” both Democrap and Repugnut are on the move; redefining the conquest of the Middle East, distracting the world while it starts burning up, delaying the inevitable and necessary demands to pull America, kicking and screaming from the monster it has become.
Gates is not going to do that, the Iraq Study Group is not going to do that and the “ultra – elites” both Democratic and Republican are not going to do it.
This is a delaying strategy to buy time and continue to rape and pillage the world’s energy reserves. The “ultra – elites” will continue to advance their agenda of imperialism and this is the deadly candy all Americans are still eating.
I greatly admire all your writings, but Stan, these people are not going to do anything for us on the bottom – I suppose delaying the attacks on Iran is something, but not enough to change Americans away from the deadly mass genocidal consequences ahead for the planet.
13 November 2006, 3:57 pmAngelo:
Mr. Goff,
In your opinion, do you really think there is a chance that Defence Secretary Robert Gates will order the troops out of Iraq? Or is it too early..
Forgive me on my error, could this be the same as when MacNamera stepped down and instead of pulling out of vietnam, the war had been escalated? Could there be an escalation here? Please correct me for any mistakes in my questions or my historical insight.
Sorry my english is not that perfect..
thanks,
Regards.
13 November 2006, 4:27 pmRandy Morris:
I agree with you Mike, but it never hurts to try.
Randy
13 November 2006, 8:33 pmMarilyn Farhat:
I still think we will never leave Iraq (or Afghanistan). I am still surprised that there are those who still think that the Iraqi nation is somehow salvageable. The Iraqis are damned if we leave now and are damned if we don’t. What needs to be done is get nations who have ties to all the warring groups in the country to negotiate, and negotiate on behalf of the the different sects and parties inside and outside Iraq. The conflict shifted into a regional one the day the first American soldier set foot onto Iraqi soil. But, as I said, peace and justice were not the goal.
I am not optimistic about anything. I think that the current paradigm of ubiquitous and indefinite war on terror was a deliberate design to keep war going and to snow the Western world. Ongoing conflict accomplishes a few things: it keeps the arms, oil, and mercenary industries in business; it enables the different international powers to control their interests through the different warring groups they finance; and it ensures the hegemony of the colonial powers. Societies that are in constant turmoil do not have the energy to think beyond the immediate survival of their different groups.
As I have said before, this war on terror is a fascade behind which this country and some of its allies are hiding to push their control of the world’s shrinking resources, including oil, water, and labor. It is creating job opportunities for the multi-national corporations from building contracts, to oil drilling, to Rambo-like thrill and money seekers (Blackwater is offering a “crash” courses in Arabic and Pashto/Dari to “professionals” and “intelligence” experts out there. Yes, folks, Blackwater now has a “language school.”
http://blackwaterusa.com/images/pdf/Blackwater%20Language%20School.pdf
The price: $1,500 for a five day course and to bunk with three other men (notice, there are no women). Get this. Breakfast is EXTRA, at $120. Those classes are touted to be essential for the poachers out there.
THAT is why we are in Iraq: for self-gratification and profit.
Too bad many people fail to realize that you cannot communicate “effectively” and “understand” a culture by just eating their food and reading their signs. You have to live their lives, eat with them, sleep with them, and cry with them. You have to study their history and speak their language on a regular basis. Every time I go back to Lebanon, it takes me a couple of days to get back into the pure Arabic mode although Arabic is my first language. I start mixing words and my cousins do get a kick out of it. The reason is that although I read the language constantly while I am in the US, I rarely converse in it for extended periods because most of the people I know are non-Arab.
Heck, I can teach you the same Arabic for twenty bucks. I’ll even do it for free if it will do some good.
I feel sorry for the poor sods in the Special Forces groups scattered around Afghanistan and Iraq right now. They are there to play in front of the cameras and to break down doors looking for weapons in mud huts. It is farcical watching them with their three thousand dollar gadgets and outfits, with their state of the art equipment and satellite support, chasing after desert and cave dwellers who travel on donkey backs (with the occasional cell phone). I am sorry, but there is something obscene and comical about it all. I like to watch the looks on the Afghan and Iraqi people who are being searched, and they tell a lot about how they feel and, those guys behind the guns have no clue. They cannot even speak the language much of the time. I have seen footage of raids conducted with the help of translators and I can tell you for a fact that sometimes, what is asked by the soldiers and what is interpreted to those who are bound and gagged within their homes, are not the same. It is just a game that is played in war.
The real stuff of war is conducted through espionage and sabotage. It can also be conducted through massive bombings. All those neighborhood and desert “missions” that are so touted in the news are nothing.
Wars are fought with collaborators, car bombs, bribery, assassinations, and secret intelligence. I am always curious what it is that is really in store for the world in the Middle East.
Most wars historically have been wars of attrition and they are rarely won in the true sense of the term. Most conflict around the world now is “chronic” in nature. It lasts decades and generations and it bleeds the people slowly. People get rich because of such wars and, that’s what it is all about.
So, no we probably will not leave Iraq. We will always find an excuse to stay. Many in the democratic party will cater to the whims of the Zionist state in the region and will be willing to send more troops to fight the proxy war on their behalf. Both Lebanon and Palestine are still in danger. After the last brutal assault on Lebanon, Israel and the US are studying the tactics of Hezbollah to figure our why they were not defeated. It is amazing that those two nations still live in a biblical Disneyland where they think that technology and brute force will break the will of people.
And they wonder why “they hate us.”
Refugees from the last invasion of Lebanon are still living in tents in the rain. Children have not gone to school yet because the schools are all gone. The money sent over by the different nations to assist the children is still sitting in some bank account. I guess George Bush’s “Cedar Revolution” is all but forgotten, until the next round of bombing.
Hold on to your kids.
13 November 2006, 11:32 pmLegume Sam:
If anything kicks the US out of Iraq, it will be the crash of the Dollar…
14 November 2006, 12:48 amSteven Blais:
Well Said sir.
I too believe, Mr. Gates will behave as feared, yet this letter serves the world, those having eyes and ears, that other choices could have been made. Like biblical prophets, this letter is a well worded, up front, I told you so.
“It was not the conduct of the war that was the “mistake.†It was the war.â€
Not a mistake, a crime. So too was the adventure in the Afghanistan nation. But knowing such truths, doesn’t change them – It just hurts more. A mistake is daydreaming on the freeways, it may lead to unfortunate results; a crime is the unfortunate results of planning – however poorly done.
The American adventure is the result of planning where likely results were known then ignored; or, more correctly, deemed acceptable. “People” like Bush and Friends, a not bothered by bloodshed, because rarely is it their blood that’s is going to get spilled.
sincerely
14 November 2006, 2:19 amStan:
The link to “dollar hegemony” in the post says more about currency (referencing Legume Sam). But this system has been in place for more than 35 years, and all the while some have been warning that the chickens are coming home to roost. The problem is complicated by the fact that China is both competitor and collaborator in this system.
If China fails to disconnect, it will go down with the US. Right now, China is in no position to do that. Nor are Japan and Western Europe. Oddly enough, the most dangerous challenge to dollar hegemony may be a convertible ruble in combination with a Russian oil bourse.
There is no doubt that the system has no long-term prospects, except more war… and the Iraq adventure has already shredded the myth of US invincibility on that account.
The link to “American imperialism” is an interview with Michael Hudson, author of Super Imperialism, which read in combination with Liu’s theses on dollar hegemony, and with Gowan’s work on the Dollar-Wall Street Regime, fleshes out the key macro-economic stress points that threaten to break. Where and how one point or another will give way is not pre-determined, but as they say, “Anything that cannot go on forever, won’t.”
14 November 2006, 8:54 amMark Strozenberg:
Apart from his being on the Baker Commission, and having advance notice of what their report is likely to say, why, people are wondering, appoint a CIA type, a former spook master, as the WOT enters a new phase? Personally, I think the question almost answers itself. But for reporters for whom everything is political, that may be a puzzler, I guess.
14 November 2006, 10:46 amhttp://www.bobgates.net/index.php/2006/11/10/gates-views-have-differed-from-bush/
Julio:
At each point in our lives, even under the most brutal constraints, we people have a fundamental ability to make choices and create ripples beyond us. In fact, without that, social change would be impossible. But if that is valid to each of us, regular folks, it must also be valid to individuals in the “high” political spheres.
This is not to downplay the importance of the pressures and constraints that condition our choices and push us to replicate our behavior. But the choices are *ours*. And the same applies to them. In their cases, most often, the constraints appear not as a sticks about to bang their heads, but as dangling carrots in front of them. But constraints they are, since renouncing to ill rewards and checking one’s appetites for the sake of community can be as tough as absorbing pain.
I don’t know whether somebody like Gates has any chance to change, but Stan’s approach — dealing with one of our adversaries as a human being, however corrupted he may be by the previous choices he’s made in the face of his personal circumstances, and leaving him with an “exit” if he dares to take charge and do the right thing — is impeccable.
On a related matter, Ms. Cindy Sheehan just publish this open letter to Pelosi and Conyers, where she lays it out for them — also under the assumption they are individuals pretty much “like us”:
http://sacramentofordemocracy.org/?q=node/view/4707
14 November 2006, 10:55 amneilcaff:
A well written letter, I hope it gets read by Mr. Gates.
14 November 2006, 2:33 pmThis is a little of post but is the following statement really correct?
“In other words, sir, the American occupation of Iraq is the primary source of inter-Iraqi bloodshed; and painting this as ethnic rivalry might be a great public relations palliative for people in the US, but it is a deadly deception.”
At the start of the insurgency I think this would have been an entirely correct statement, lets not forget that leaked policy document on an “El Salvador option” in combating the Iraqi insurgency. Nevertheless I think 2 solid years of attacks on Shias by Sunnis and Shia death squads stalking Sunni neighburhoods have now taken their toll. Every sectarian atrocity whether its for or against the occupation leaves a legacy of bitterness and hatred and is a perfect feeding ground for the factionalism. In the absense of any unifying political force in Iraq the elites in the Sunni and Shia and Kurd community will continue to jockey for power whether the US is there or not. You’ll also have interference from Syria, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia as well as sundry Western powers and Russia and China probably all with their own pet millitias when the US withdraws.
Thats not to say the US should stay, there’s no question their presense is aggravating the situation but there IS an ethnic/sectarian conflict going on in Iraq as well as an anti US insurgency. We on the left need to be honest with people and say that a US withdrawl will not mean the Iraqi’s will live in peace and amity. Left to their own devices they probably would, but given its geo-political importantce domestic elite rivalries civil war seems a more likely course.
US imperialism cannot build a better future for Iraqi’s (the very idea is derisive) but neither can the right wing sectarian Islamists or other millitia leaders either.
sarkozi:
Bonjour à tous ,
14 November 2006, 4:51 pmrefuser à quelqu’un son humanité , en faire un animal , mène rapidement à la bêtise et à la haine .
Mais nos parlons ici de tels salopards , qui ont vu , fait et fait faire de telles abominations , des calculs si cyniques , que je suis certain qu’il n’y a que de l’ordure à attendre d’eux .
Ces gens ont sans doute une vision très pessimiste , très méprisante , de l’humanité .Il faut dire que nous voir gober le 11 septembre doit les faire se taper sur les cuisses .
Lisez l’excellent article de Larry Chin dans Global Research aujourd’hui .
Legume Sam:
The second contradiction of capitalism should do a number on the continuing functioning of the system as well, as it is predicated upon extending the “American Way of Life” to the point of global ecological collapse… this will come sooner than we think, as the scientists who are predicting “eventual” climate disaster are required by career considerations to be overcautious…
14 November 2006, 7:31 pmLegume Sam:
one of the reasons I think it’s so important to study the scope of the ecological crisis is that it (courtesy of the abovementioned second contradition) places a physical limitation upon the ability of the world to absorb capitalist discipline — there becomes less and less wiggle-room for re-enactments of the populist Keynesian compromises of social democracy as ecosystems wilt, and so the revolution becomes a matter of saving what’s left of the planet…
14 November 2006, 11:28 pmpeggy:
Cher Sarkozi,
I have undertaken to translate this post of yours. Hope I have not mangled it too badly. I love French, although I hardly know it.
**********************************
Greetings to all
To refuse someone their humanity makes one an animal and leads quickly to stupidity and hate. But we are speaking here of such bastards, who have seen, committed or caused the commission of such abominations, such cynical calculations, that I am certain they have nothing but filth to serve them.
These people doubtless have a pessimistic, scornful vision of humanity. We must see that the swallowing of September 11 causes them to choke on the meat.
See the excellent article by Larry Chin in today’s Global Research.
*********************************
The article Sarkozi refers to is here:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHI20061114&articleId=3860
14 November 2006, 11:35 pmJimi 45:
Good job of cutting to the chase, Stan. I wish more people understood the subtle and not-so-subtle underpinnings of U.S. foreign policy. In the mean time I will continue to direct people your way.
15 November 2006, 12:39 ampeggy:
Stan, I think your analysis is brilliant and I will continue to learn from you, to teach my students what you teach me, and to support your efforts however I can. But you know very well that Robert Gates will never see what you write, and even if he did, he would not understand. Perhaps this is what Sarkozi was trying to say: the creature to which you are writing has lost its humanity. Sarkozi just calls it and its kind bastards. You say they have narcissistic personality disorder. I say that whatever they have become is outside any human descriptors in any human language. It is questionable whether they have either consciousness or sentience. They are that far gone. They are not human. We cannot know what they are. We can only know what they do.
15 November 2006, 6:31 amd:
An Apt comment from Robert Bowman, a retired USAF Lt. Colonel who holds a Ph.D. in physics, was director of Advanced Space Program Development for the USAF in the Ford and Carter administrations. Here’s a part of what he had to say as a speaker at the DC Emergency Truth Convergence organized by the 9/11 Truth Movement in Washington, DC in July, 2005:
15 November 2006, 7:13 pmYou know, our freedoms are not under attack from the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist party. They’re under attack by the likes of John Ashcroft, they’re trampled by Donald Rumsfeld, they’re disdained by Dick Cheney, and they’re not even understood by George W. Bush. The battle to preserve our freedoms is not taking place in Baghdad and Tikrit and Fallujah. It’s taking place in peace marches and demonstrations in Girardelli Park in San Francisco, in Memorial Park in Oklahoma City, and in Lafayette Park in Washington DC. [….] We, my sisters and brothers, are protecting this nation by speaking truth to power. [….]
And when we speak, this is the truth that we proclaim. This war in Iraq has nothing to do with national security, or freedom or democracy or human rights or protecting our allies or weapons of mass destruction or defeating terrorism or disarming Iraq. It has to do with money, it has to do with oil, and it has to do with raw imperial power. And it’s based totally on lies. Those who forced this war on an unwilling world are guilty of violating the US Constitution, the UN Charter, the Nuremberg principles, and international law. What they have done is illegal, immoral, unconstitutional, and treason. [….]
This cabal of neoconservatives from PNAC who planned this war—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Jeb Bush—even before W. became president, they told us why they had to do it. They said we need to occupy Iraq permanently in order to dominate Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the southern Russian republics around the Caspian Sea. We need to control the entire Middle East and all its oil. […]
[T]hey knew the American people wouldn’t stand for it, and they said so in their documents—and they said, unless there’s that new Pearl Harbor. Well, 9/11 did supply that—and we’ve been lied to not only about the war, but about 9/11 itself. They ignored the warnings: more than that, we have mounting evidence that—at least—they made it impossible for those planes to be intercepted. If our government had merely [done] nothing, and I say that as an old interceptor pilot—I know the drill, I know what it takes, I know how long it takes, I know what the procedures are, I know what they were, and I know what they’ve changed them to—if our government had merely done nothing, and allowed normal procedures to happen on that morning of 9/11, the Twin Towers would still be standing and thousands of dead Americans would still be alive. My sisters and brothers, that is treason!
As a combat veteran, I will not stand idly by and watch our security destroyed by a president who went AWOL rather than serve in Vietnam. As one who’s devoted his life to the security of this country, I will not stand by and watch an appointed president send our sons and daughters around the world to kill Arabs for the oil companies. [….] I joined the air force a long time ago to protect our borders and our people, not the financial interests of Folgers, Chiquita Banana, Exxon, and Halliburton. We’ve had enough corporate wars! No more Iraqs, no more Kosovos, no more El Salvadors, no more Colombias! These are not isolated incidents of stupidity; they’re part of a long, bloody history of foreign policy being conducted for the financial interests of the wealthy few. [….]
As a pilot who flew a hundred and one combat missions in Vietnam, I swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic—and that includes a renegade president! It’s time for George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and the whole oil mafia to be removed from office and indited for treason.
Rhisiart Gwilym:
Well,Robert Bowman gets it. Some of it. Finally. But a long,long way behind commentators such as Chomsky and Herman (for example) in point of time. And, it seems, still less comprehensively than them. And only after doing his own stint as a standard, mass-procuced US global war-criminal, in Vietnam in his case,’defending his country’ by flying a war-plane to kill Vietnamese and devastate their country, which C and H and the rest of the principled dissidents always refused to do, whatever it cost them. Because any reasonably clear-seeing twelve-year-old can grasp that such actions are fundamentally wrong.
Still a little way to go, Bob. Keep at it.
19 November 2006, 9:22 pmMarilyn Farhat:
Stan,
That was a great letter. Unfortunately, with the nature of some people who seek power and domination over others across the globe and their ability to “indoctrinate” the population in the different “must haves” of our culture and view of the world, I see no alternative to this never-ending war except for total disarmament. Even that will not eradicate violence, but it will prevent the psychopaths from inflicting mass oppression on the rest of the world.
War just is, and has been since recorded human history. Territoriality and domination are part of who we are as human animals. However, our salvation may come from the pacifists among us. I am not an advocate of total pacifism, but their ideas and their activists seem to be more effective in influencing the cause of the oppressed and in saving lives far more that anything we have seen.
I think it is up to every family in the US (and elsewhere) to figure out the degree of acquiescence in this warlike paradigm they wish to engage in. We all have a hand in it in different degrees based on how we live our lives and how we treat others.
Divestment from the system/systems that promote such unhealthy ways of being remains the most effective, whether by becoming a conscientious objector, or by refusing to live beyond one’s means, or by being mindful of not financially supporting the institutions that profit from war. But, those things have to been accomplished on mass scales to be effective and I am not hopeful. Most people do not have the time and they really couldn’t care less or think it will not do any good. I do believe in the statement “You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink.”
Power attracts people with dysfunctional personalities or those with personalities that lack empathy for others (psychopaths). That does not mean all people in power are psychopaths. Those individuals come from amongst us. It is a catch 22. They seek positions of power and, when they get there, they do their best not to change the system through total control. That is why power struggles have remained the way there are throughout history.People such the the Neo Cons and their military and political counterparts are in those positions because of who they are and their need to run the world a certain way whether the world wants it or not, and if the world gets destroyed in the process, it was all for a good cause, theirs.
The average person holds a lot of power. Without us, the people, wars cannot be fought; goods cannot be made , sold, bought or used; munitions cannot be made, and people cannot be murdered.
What may work against us is the fact that most of us are selfish people who are only concerned with our and our families’ immediate needs. Most people in the world are not aware enough to realize the complexities and the moral questions posed by all the people, events and new technology and destructive capabilities. Our destructive capabilities are impacting infrastructure, human life and health, and the environment on large scale, but we are all busy working ourselves to death just to make ends meet or play.
There has to be a world mass resistance movement, really, initiated by the people of the Western world. The West bears the brunt of the burden of change because we are the cause of most of it now and our citizens have better freedoms that others in more oppressive countries. We have the flexibility and the means.
I have always believed in leadership and change by example, not by what is written in the rules. Rules are broken constantly, and when those making the rules or enforcing them start to break them, the rest of us will become cynical and learn to play the game because we know that power corrupts and those that are in power are not there to enforce laws for the benefit of everyone, but for their own ability to break them in different ways for personal agendas.
We have to face it. Iraq is gone, a sad and criminal episode in our modern history. It will join the ranks for the countless nations of past generations who suffered the same fate due to cultural annihilation through prolonged war, a sort of Dark Age. The Palestinian nation is also gone. Both nations are being bled to death culturally and physically by vengeful and selfish groups of people with cultural and economic agendas.
When I visited the Middle East almost two years ago, I was saddened to see that everything was becoming a carbon copy of the United States and its consumerist mindset. Gone are the old grimy markets with the architecture of 500 years ago where thousands of people met to buy groceries, fabric, and eat in the popular restaurants. Gone are all the tourist faces from around the world. Those shops were forced out of the hands of their owners (with the help of Rafik Hariri. That is why a large percentage of the Lebanese poor disliked him). Now, they belong to GAP and other high-priced establishments that cater almost exclusively to the rich of the Arab gulf regions and the rich of the West. Most people cannot afford to take their children for an ice cream cone in downtown Beirut. At the same time, the princes and princesses of the rest of the world do frequent such places for $700 shoes and $1,000 alligator skin handbags. Starbuck’s and McDonald’s are everywhere and they are guarded by the army and others in plain clothes (under cover) on the inside.
I see the future as one where poor people will comprise the majority of soldiers, militias, armed resisters, and consumers. The rest will be war professionals, politicians and corporate leaders. There will be another group of people that will do well for itself in the never-ending war. The bourgeoisie term for those people used to be “nouveaux riches.” Now they are your collaborators who usually work for anyone that will pay enough money and they will trade in arms, prostitution, drugs, espionage, and other lucrative wartime endeavors. Your contractors for hire may come from them. The lines that traditionally separated the military from profit will blur more as time goes on. We are going back to the very old system of warfare where most soldiers were hired or worked as mercenaries for a government or a group. What we will see is the “war lord” mentality on a global scale, where wars will be declared on small or large groups of people (not governments) because they did not tow the profit line.
Mass resistance and constitutional and human rights laws revisions need to be made to protect the future generations.
20 November 2006, 4:09 pm