Empire & Inequality

One year ago to the day, our dangerously stupid Christian Fundamentalist rich boy president George W. Bush celebrated May Day – originally launched to celebrate the struggle of the international working class – by landing on an aircraft carrier to proclaim America’s “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq. The president’s approval ratings were high and most of the United States population seemed to support his decision to invade and occupy that poor and impoverished nation in the name of the “war on terrorism.” It seemed possible to many that Bush was going to achieve the fast, cheap, and easy imperial victory that his audacious neo-conservative team of officers and advisers (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Condaleeza Rice and others) had promised him. The Great Iraq gambit was paying off and some thought that the potency of the National Security Strategy/Bush Doctrine – a grand imperial strategy based on America’s ability to rule the world through sheer military might – was being demonstrated for all to see.

One year ago to the day, our dangerously stupid Christian Fundamentalist rich boy president George W. Bush celebrated May Day – originally launched to celebrate the struggle of the international working class – by landing on an aircraft carrier to proclaim America’s “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq. The president’s approval ratings were high and most of the United States population seemed to support his decision to invade and occupy that poor and impoverished nation in the name of the “war on terrorism.” It seemed possible to many that Bush was going to achieve the fast, cheap, and easy imperial victory that his audacious neo-conservative team of officers and advisers (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Condaleeza Rice and others) had promised him. The Great Iraq gambit was paying off and some thought that the potency of the National Security Strategy/Bush Doctrine – a grand imperial strategy based on America’s ability to rule the world through sheer military might – was being demonstrated for all to see.

Things have changed. Hundreds of mostly working-class U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq during the last 12 months, including more casualties in April 2004 than in any month since the initial invasion. A large number of US military personnel have been crippled for life. Thousands more Iraqi soldiers, resistance fighters, and civilians - including large numbers of women and children have been murdered and maimed. Saddam Hussein may have been swiftly removed and subsequently captured, but the American occupation is a bloody, costly, and many-sided quagmire that has deeply alienated both the Arab world and the broader global community. The White House and Pentagon are mired in a monumental public relations nightmare in the Middle East and beyond, fueled by horrible film and photographic images of US forces attacking holy Muslim mosques, killing Iraqi children (“collateral damage”) and humiliating captured Iraqi prisoners. Islamic hatred of the American Empire is seething like no time in memory, fueled also by Bush’s open endorsement of Israel’s illegal West Bank settlements.

Iraq is a bloody shooting gallery in which stressed-out U.S. forces are moving-targets for both full-time terrorists and average resisters. The Bush administration has managed to alienate much of Iraq’s Shia majority, many of whom initially welcomed the US invasion. It has also united various warring religious, tribal and political factions in common hatred of the American Crusader-Imperialists. Extremist Islamic terror groups are widely active within and beyond the Middle East, their recruitment efforts fed by giant waves of anti-American hatred.

As the unnecessary “Clash of Civilizations” provoked by our “messianic-militarist” president (Ralph Nader’s excellent description of Bush II) deepens, bin-Laden is gleefully pinching himself. It seems unlikely that the US would receive much in the way of international sympathy if another, even worse 9/11 were to occur. A number of high-profile best-selling books have come out exposing the incestuous, stupid, and power-mad vision and behavior of the Bush administration, including one written by Bush’s own former counter-terrorism czar (Richard A. Clarke) and another by an elite journalist (Bob Woodward) who had just previously written a nearly sycophantic study of Bush after 9/11.

Meanwhile, the United States continues to be the most unequal and wealth-top-heavy nation in the industrialized world by far – a dubious distinction that is richly deepened by the president’s plutocratic and imperial policies. Happy May Day, American workers.

Thankfully, Bush’s approval rating for handling Iraq is now just 41 percent, “down from 49 percent last month and 59 percent in December.” His overall approval rating has fallen to 46 percent, the “lowest level in his presidency.” This is “down from 71 percent last March and a high of 89 percent just after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”

Especially interesting is the rising percentage of Americans who think that invading Iraq was “a mistake.” In March 2003, that percentage was only 24, compared to 70 percent who said it wasn’t a mistake. As of April 2004, 48 percent think it was a mistake, compared to 46 percent was say it was not a mistake and 5 percent who have no opinion (Richard W. Stevenson and Janet Elder, "Support for War is Down Sharply," New York Times, April 29, 2004, A19).

It’s too bad for Bush that he can’t be bothered to do some serious reading (Bill Clinton was a voracious reader, as Clarke has noted) or to listen to arguments made by persons outside his little royal circle, including Uncles Dick and Donny and Sister/Tutor Condi. As Ralph Nader has been pointing out on the campaign trail, a large number of groups and persons, including many in the policy and intellectual establishment – ie, not just leftists – told Bush not to invade Iraq. Bush refused to listen. The other side of the Iraq argument, even at the elite levels, did not exist for him. Very stupid.

On that note let me refer ZNet readers to a fascinating document, penned by a handful of well-pedigreed elite intellectuals at the thoroughly establishment American Academy of Arts and Sciences and published in December of 2002, by which time it was clear that Bush was preparing his disastrous war: War With Iraq: Costs, Consequences, and Alternatives, available http://www.amacad.org/publications/monographs/War_with_Iraq.pdf. After stretching far to accept the plausibility of the White House’s case for war, the authors proceed to demolish Bush’s argument piece by piece. The reasons they cite for not invading included much of what has actually transpired, including the alienation of world opinion, unpredictable chaos in post-invasion Iraqi politics, distraction from fighting actual terrorism, the likelihood that Iraq would become a magnet for anti-American terrorism, the likelihood that invasion would generate numerous images and stories to enflame Arab opinion, the distraction from and exacerbation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the provocation of anti-Western terror, the enormous diversion of tax dollars away from other needed expenditures, and more.

War With Iraq is not a left wing document (far from it) but it’s a reminder that there are significant differences of intelligence, sentiment, and statecraft within "the ruling-class's" policy structures – variations that seem small from a left perspective but which translate into significantly divergent outcomes for real people like American GIs and the people of Iraq.

John Kerry, who is not turning Bush’s falling opinion numbers into any appreciable gain for his campaign (see Stevenson and Elder, "Support for War"), is making a rather bad show as an opposition candidate so far. He is also saying some terrible things about Iraq, the broader Middle East, and what he saw and did in Vietnam.

My sense, however, is that documents like War With Iraq would be read and discussed in a Kerry White House, probably even at the executive level. It strikes me that we can’t afford to sneeze at that difference.

I’ll look for international proletarian power next May Day…this year I’ll be pleased if we can just get the current horrifying Bush regime out of national and global power.