The other night at dinner my female guest, wife of my male guest, grandmother of my granddaughter guest, spoke quietly most of the evening until, perforce, the conversations delicately wended its way toward national security, 9/11, the Iraq War, and the Ayatollahs of Iran, and al Qaeda, whose radical minions are probably among us, it was quietly said, waiting for the right moment to strike terror into the hearts and minds. We were talking about targets and the site of YK1 was mentioned, not Chicago where YK2 is winding up. The male guest thought that Vegas was a good spot because it has an incompetent police force when it comes to terror ... allowing for a certain amount of responsiveness if Hoover Dam is attacked. The femme guest finally broke into the male dominated commiserating about vulnerability and the theoretical pervasiveness of the threat and said, "well, I think we should just bomb the hell out of them until they stop all of this."
We have heard this often enough that there should be a smart, snappy, and completely disabling response from those of us who know that "bombing the hell out of them" cannot possibly work, unless we actually kill all of them and everyone they talk to, and everyone who reads newspapers and watches television broadcasts of news like that. The question is: Is there a snappy response, and if not why not?
Granddaughter chimed in ... bless her nearly 16 year old heart ... at this point and said something like this: "We really need to know why we are over there. What are we doing?" Remember, this is a war that has been going since this young woman was only 12 and just putting her Barbies into storage shoeboxes. The war has been going so long that the anger and frustration that led a majority of Americans to say, "Hell Yes!," to the idea of killing off Saddam Hussein ... (removing the evidence, by the way, of our complicity in mid-eastern turmoil and our complicity in the deaths of hundreds of thousands Iraqis and Iranians) ... is now so old and frayed that we barely understand the fervor that got us there in the first place. Certainly the younger generation doesn't.
The key to the question is the logic of the "bomb them to hell" statement. The statement reveals the near total frustration with conventional means of persuasion, lumps the whole country into the group of people who we call "enemy," and says you have betrayed our belief that individuals will act for the good when the chips are down. Accordingly, my female guest has in effect given up even while she complains that others who want to draw down our troops and get out of the war slant occupation have treasonously "given up."
It is almost a movie storyboard frame: they (the Iraqis) do not understand conventional attempts using troops to civilize them, so we will show them that behind the troops, (actually above them), is a force that can utterly decimate, perhaps obliterate their country ... if they don't wise up. So, the statement assumes that individuals in Iraq are less important than the apparent "group think" in Iraq that produces IEDs and kills our troops. After all, how can Iraqi insurgents, including those who say they owe allegiance to al Qaeda, operate if it is not with the complicity of the general public? My femme guest fails to recognize that the good citizens of Chicago in the 20's and 30's were not complicit with Al Capone, but they were wary of sticking their heads up too high. My female guest has no experience being terrorized from within, except 9/11 and that was done from the sky, surgically as it were, so why not respond in kind.
The error is in all the assumptions that what 10% of Iraqis do is representative of all Iraqis. Those who want to respond to the "bomb them to hell" statement should start from that premise and demolish it. The best way to do this is to think of a scene in Iraq containing individuals. You begin with mothers and fathers and children. You begin with a specific mother, invented for the purpose, but iconic of any individual mother in Iraq (or Iran ... when we get around to bombing them back into the 10th century). Begin with a child who goes to school to learn history and arithmetic and Arabic and English. Begin with individuals, for then the "bomb them to hell" strategy has a human face, an innocent human face.
I leave it to your judgment how best to enter the conversation with this riposte, but enter you must, because the "bomb them to hell" statement is the clear evidence that the speaker has given up. They are anxious about losing face, of course. They are worried about the consequences of drawing down the troops and leaving Iraqis to shoot it out in their own OK corral. All they need to know at the response point to their statement is that bombing kills thousands and tens and hundreds of thousands more innocent individuals. Watch the speakers face, watch their shoulders, listen for the last ditch statement that says: okay, so be it, we will have to kill them all.
This is the point where not only have they given up trying to understand them (the Iraqis), but are now showing signs of having given up understand ourselves. Remember the old Vietnam statement: "We had to destroy the country to save it from Communism." Remember how well this idea was derided by all political stripes. To believe that we have the right to utterly destroy a civilization is to accept the idea of genocide, to accept the idea that it is not a questions of ends or means, but a question of some hideous principle that says we are not only right but we are powerful and we can do what we want.
The vulnerability of people who say "bomb them to hell" is precarious. They may retreat slowly through various stages that got them to that ridiculous statement, or they may collapse in complete frustration and bewilderment. I suspect that most basically non-political people will collapse and having just been through the embarrassment of being revealed as essentially a genocide, a mass murderer, they will be emotionally vulnerable and tractible to a reasonable argument about what is obvious to all of us: the Iraqi War is a civil war and we, as an occupation force, are not part of the solution, moreover, we are attracting all the dissident elements from all over the world to train in the open laboratory of that civil war as terrorist insurgents. The time to get them to understand that is in this window of emotional vulnerability.
The other thing to remember is that the ability to make the "bomb them to hell" statement is in us all, and moreover, we may have said it ourselves at one time or another. It is not a sign of moral decay; it is a sign of emotional frustration and fear of the unknown consequences of our actions over the past four or forty years. Remember that the killing of Saddam was not just the removal of a terrible dictator, but it was also to shut him up.
JB
http://americanliberalism.org
James R. Brett, Ph.D. taught Russian History in several universities before becoming an academic administrator in curriculum and faculty research administration. His academic interests have been in the history of science and the history of ideas, particularly Marxism and classical liberalism, but also psychology and consciousness studies. He is a frequent contributor to liberal and progressive blogs and is the founder and publisher of The American Liberalism Project.
I'm sure that Hitler and the Nazi's had this same attitude about how to procede in their attempt to take over the world. This is of course declaring war on all civilians. In WW1 10% of the casualities were civilians. By now 90% of casualties are civilians. This is not advancing a civilized world, but the REpublicans and Bush are implementing a soviet-fascist type government for the USA.
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Swami Bogananda (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 38 comments)
on Sunday, August 5, 2007 at 2:10:03 PM
I was thinking about that the other day. Look from a period like the Civil War to now. The smarter our weapons get, the more civilian deaths there are.
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Willard Russell (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 41 comments)
on Monday, August 6, 2007 at 8:10:35 AM
The press is not covering the air war because it cannot embed with them. We do know, however, that the scale of the bombing is increasing dramatically and the toll of innocent Iraqis is climbing. It is the same frustration at the top, a tipping point in the direction of irrationalism and American terror. Kinda makes you proud to be an American. NOT!
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James Brett (82 articles, 95 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 86 comments)
on Sunday, August 5, 2007 at 4:57:02 PM
Yes, I can understand that hideous statement as a kind of frustration, an expression of being at one's wits' end. But I also see it as fairly typical of American provincialism -- an unfortunate consequence of American "exceptionalism." Americans do not seem very curious about the rest of the world in peace time, and therefore they tend not to be very creative thinkers when the chips are down. The author's 16-year-old guest seems to hold out promise for an end to this unfortunate state of affairs.
America has made a big mess of things in Iraq, and there's not much BushCo can do to make it better. But he could stop it from getting much worse by withdrawing ASAP. But, of course, everyone who reads this site knows that already. But I do think that in order to avoid more Vietnam- and Iraq-style catastrophes in future, something might be done to fix that problem of provincialism. Since the author of this article is an academic administrator with expertise in curricular issues, he might try writing another article in which he outlines how provincialism might be overcome through education.
As for Iraq, I am pretty much in agreement with my fellow countryman Gwynne Dyer, who has recently written that the Middle East "is now coming to an end. It is ending because defeat and humiliation in Iraq mean that soon there will no longer be the will in the United States to go on with the task of maintaining the status quo, and because the forces unleashed by the destruction of Iraq are going to overwhelm the status quo. Everything is now up for grabs: regimes, ethnic pecking orders within states, even the 1918 borders themselves might change. Five years from now there could be an Islamic Republic of Arabia, an independent Kurdistan, almost anything you care to imagine.
"So what should the rest of the world do about this? Nothing. Just stand back and let it happen. Outsiders to the region have no solutions left to peddle any more (nor any credibility even if they did have solutions), and they no longer have the power or the will to impose their ideas. For the first time in a century, the region is going to choose its future for itself—and it may, of course, make a dreadful mess of it. Even then outsiders should not intervene, because foreign intervention generally makes things worse—but also because it's none of their business."
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delia (0 articles, 1 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 112 comments)
on Sunday, August 5, 2007 at 5:57:30 PM
I think that what goes for Provincialism in America comes straight out of that American Exceptionalism you mention. In addition, it comes from the homogenization component of the Melting Pot. We tend to disdain any and all elements of the "old world." Notice how CheneyBush and the NeoCons referred to tired, old Europe at the beginning of the Iraq War.
I am not sanguine about outcomes, though. The middle east is clearly an area of vital interest to petroleum-based America, and our interest is to secure the petro-assets for ourselves and our friends ... using corporations to extract the asset and the U.S. military to protect them. This is the imperial phase of the M-I complex. For more on this, you should visit U-Tube and watch "Why We Fight" or go to The American Liberalism Project where I have just (Sunday afternoon) posted all four of the videos with a little commentary.
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James Brett (82 articles, 95 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 86 comments)
on Sunday, August 5, 2007 at 6:16:52 PM
I would ask, especially if the listener were a woman, how many Iraqi babies we would have to kill with bombs in order to get them to stop? How many Iraqi women and children would have to die to make our point?
I wrote about this odd, disconnected American mindset over a year ago in my article “free them with bombs”. It is not just your guests at dinner, it is a huge swath of the American public who still thinks that war is a football game and our team needs to win.
Most of my friends and acquaintances seem to be playing the three monkey bit with hands over eyes, ears and mouth. They don't even like talking about the Iraqi war or what is going on and would rather just watch TV. Something's got to change. How do you wake America out of its entertainment induced slumber?
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John R Moffett (80 articles, 14 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 610 comments)
on Monday, August 6, 2007 at 5:29:04 AM
I doubt that this woman's coments were motivated by frustration more ignorance (a belief that everyone should see the world as she does) and fear (fear of what she doesn't understand).
My whithering comment would be "oh you mean Try and stomp them out of existance like every one has tried with the Jews or that long fogotten religion Christianity"
While 9/11 apart from being a spectacular media event it was an indeed an abomination. What slips every one's attention is that about 3000 were killed. A tragic loss of life, yet 3 times that men woman and children die on your roads each year and many time more injured. War on GM, Ford et sec ? Hundreds of thousands die as a consequence of tobaco, war on Pall Mall, BT et sec ....hardly. Victims of your 'joke' of a health well!! Breast Cancer, Prostate Cancerall have more than 3000 deaths pa. The point is perspective. Are they drawing anywhere near the attention and funds as your retribution? Dare I quote the Mikado from G&S "make the punishment fit the crime" So what was the unforgivable crime? InjuredNational Pride! a reality check that no matter how powerful the US believes its self to be its citizens are vulnerable. So for the sake of injured national pride the US is prepared to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives in "collateral damage"! (That means non combatant, innocents) To think we condemn the Nazis (and rightly so) for their policy of 10 civilians for evry soldier!What is isthe ratio in Iraq? and we wonder why the US is hated? Never let it be said America under reacts. Remember it is leaders who declare war and the citizens who bury and remember. There in lies the prima facae case of " the Ugly Americans".
9/11 was the act of a group so why put a whole region in chaos to punish a group. Sure a response was necessary because of the Taliban invasion could be argued for. But to try and enforce our style of Government on a tribal/clan based population is silly look at Papua and New Guinea. more thought was needed for the after. To then declare "War on Terrorism" is idiotic by definition terrorism is asymetrical. Bush has effectively done the eqivelent to declaring war on Germany because of the Badher Minehoff group(appologise for the spelling). Bombing Iraquis into submission is an obscene view and betrays the USA's biggest flaw a system that allows this to happen. It is argued in the middle east that the USA sows the seeds of its own problems. The middle east didn't happen in an instant it took years of exploitation, inappropriate interferance to forment the current rancid relations. There is no magic bullit it will take generation to heal if ever.
If she was half way intelligent she would see the point (you can't defeat an idea with force it need a better idea) if not infuture buy antacids and drink a lot.
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Andris (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 531 comments)
on Monday, August 6, 2007 at 10:23:29 PM
Yeh....there is certainly the problem, with millions of US citizens. Most of us are not, indeed the very concept of 'Average Intellegence' pretty much requires that half of us are dumber than dirt! (grin)
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Roger (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 359 comments)
on Monday, August 6, 2007 at 10:29:43 PM
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