"A Claymore is essentially a shaped plastic case packed with explosives and steel balls. The explosion, blocked at the rear and sides, hurls shrapnel in the direction of the enemy. Politicians and even media and business figures who express racist hostility to domestic minorities in public now often pay a very heavy price, even though everyone is well aware that, in private, such attitudes continue to stream through much of White American society.
"But as with a Claymore mine, the suppression of feelings at home may have only increased the force with which they are directed against foreigners, who remain a legitimate and publicly accepted target of hatred." [Ibid, p. 46] It's called bellicose nationalism.
And it's easy to tap into such moral rot. Take the candid 1989 admission by first generation neoconservative, Irving Kristol, the all-too-deserving father of the despicable "thug," William Kristol. It was the father who boasted: "If the president goes to the American people and wraps himself in the American flag and lets Congress wrap itself in the white flag of surrender, the president will win…The American people had never heard of Grenada. There is no reason they should have. The reason we gave for intervention - the risk to American medical students there - was phony but the reaction of the American people was absolutely and overwhelmingly favorable. They had no idea what was going on but they backed the president. They always will." [Ibid, p. 166]
Such moral rot explains why, when presidential candidate George W. Bush smugly asserted, "I may not know where Kosovo is, but I know what I believe," he was not judged to be a dimwit, but a man of character. Such moral rot also explains the ease with which an evil president and vice president -- with the cynical aid of America's neocons -- could manipulate the ignorant fears and blind rage of Americans into support for an illegal, immoral unprovoked war against Iraq.
Moreover, such moral rot explains why, even in the disastrous wake of the evil invasion he inspired, Darth Cheney could send out Christmas cards containing Benjamin Franklin's words: "And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?" And, alas, such moral rot explains why President Bush - who, until two months before ordering his evil invasion of Iraq didn't even know that the country was populated by Sunnis and Shiites - could feel sufficiently confident about the collective stupidity of Americans to erroneously compare Iraq to Vietnam (a war that the moral coward supported, but worked so mightily to dodge).
Moral rot also explains American's current inability to see through Bush's "surge" propaganda. Simply consider two incontestable truths: (1) "As of late-August, no progress had been made in achieving the key objective of the "surge" - to provide safe space for political progress at the national level." [Anthony Cordesman, "Iraq's Insurgency and Civil Violence: Developments through Late August 2007," p. ii] and (2) such political progress, in the form of national reconciliation, cannot occur because the Shiites now in power consider their permanent political ascendancy to be predicated upon their ability to outlast the American occupation.
As the New York Times correctly noted: Mr. Maliki's government "is the logical product of the system the United States created, one that deliberately empowered the long-persecuted Shiite majority and deliberately marginalized the long-dominant Sunni Arab minority. It was all but sure to produce someone very like Mr. Maliki, a sectarian Shiite far more interested in settling scores than in reconciling all Iraqis to share power in a unified and peaceful democracy." ["The Problem Isn't Mr. Maliki," New York Times, August 24, 2007] Of course, it's difficult to foresee such problems, if you're a president who did not even know that the country he was preparing to invade contained such Shiites and Sunnis. Moral rot!
Finally, moral rot now explains what appears to be the inevitable march to war against Iran, or at least the bombing of its nuclear energy facilities. Having supported an illegal, immoral invasion of Iraq, which has inflicted untold suffering upon its people, most Americans - including Americans currently sitting in congress and running for president - find themselves incapable of thinking through just how to deal peacefully with Iran, the sole regional power to emerge preeminent from the debacle we initiated.
And, yet, we still consider ourselves an exceptional people!
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