In this piece I am casting a glance back to a mere month ago. How the world has changed since. The headline above is part of a statement President Bush made in a talk to the nation Tuesday evening, April 13th. It was featured in a large pullout quote on the front page of our local daily paper: "Now is the time and Iraq is the place in which the enemies of the civilized world are testing the will of the civilized world."
The assumption behind this statement is a curious one. It is the notion that abstractions have enemies and will power and can act purposively.
But of course the first thing you always have to do with a statement by President Bush is translate it out of the Orwellian he employs as a primary language. That's what LRC columnist Mike (in Tokyo) Rogers says he does: "Whenever I hear “Bush-speak” . . . I . . . take what he says for the opposite meaning."
On that basis, here is the translation: "Now is the time and Iraq is the place in which the civilized world [the U.S.?] is testing the will of its uncivilized opponents [Iraq's outraged people?]." Somehow it makes more sense to me that way. We are trying to find out if Iraq, fighting William Lind's Fourth-Generation war, is going to prove tough enough to withstand us. Bets, anyone?
Let us suppose for the moment that there is such a thing as a "civilized world." (I prefer for the moment not to get into the question of whether we are it.) Then there is also, one supposes, an "uncivilized world." And since those are the extremes, it would be reasonable to suppose there is also a less than fully civilized world, or if you prefer to put it the other way around, a less than fully uncivilized world.
Do any of these entities in fact exist as material things; do they have battalions and armaments, addresses and telephone numbers? Of course not; they are figments, ideas, at the very least more or less misleading stand-ins for what is really meant.
Bush obviously meant by the "civilized world" us, as I have suggested above: the U.S., plus its few and wobbling allies in this mess. He meant by the "uncivilized world" all the nations and peoples who oppose us, starting with the Iraqis but not stopping there. One could go on and name a huge roster of quite real, and I fear, quite "civilized" sovereignties (with addresses and telephone numbers) which would send up a roaring cheer if we were to come a complete cropper in our present world-conquering crusade. There would be intense rejoicing at every hand for Goliath defeated. I'm sure of it.
But leave that aside. It is exactly Bush's claim to represent the "civilized world" that is now looking mighty lame. As the Abu Ghraib story unwinds and exfoliates, it is going to be ever harder to put it back in the bottle and go forward with the argument that we are bringing democracy and other blessings of modernity to the backward folks in Iraq and Islam generally. There is now left only about six weeks in the run-up to the so-called transfer of real power. If we can convince the Iraqis and the Muslim word generally that that is what we will have accomplished, while keeping our bases and our essential veto over what they do with their new sovereignty, we may be able to extricate ourselves without a physical disaster. I have a feeling in my bones, however, that we are much more likely to have to get out under fire because the whole of Iraq will have risen up against us in a new intifada, again, as Lind has suggested it might. It is devilishly hard, as Lincoln said, to fool all of the people all of the time. That is what we are apparently attempting to do, and only a thoroughgoing desperado could possibly think it would work.
I can see why Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and their assorted neocon brain trust have perhaps by now adopted the full-fledged, Hollywood-thriller, desperado stance. Back to the wall, jobs and the future and above all future reputation at stake, they know that unless they can prevail and dictate the writing of the history of this epoch, they are apt to end up looking to posterity like pretty sorry chaps, not at all the enlightened conquerors they saw themselves as when they first issued the order to attack.
For my part I keep hoping we will, as a race (I mean homo sapiens), at some point – could this be it? – get over the idea that there can be any sort of heroism or any future in the history books for people who simply want to steal what someone else owns, using great clouds of squid ink to divert attention from what they are up to and suckering entire nations into doing their dirty work for them.
May 18, 2004
