Captain Future's Log

Howl Again---The Fifties Reduxed


“Bush begs for support to fight ‘evil radicals’ waging war on humanity,” was the headline in the Times of London report online.

Tim Reid in Washington wrote, IN AN impassioned plea to America to hold its nerve, President Bush said yesterday that Islamic radicals were trying to take control of Iraq as part of a plan to “enslave whole nations and intimidate the world”.

Facing dwindling support for the Iraq war and growing calls for a troop withdrawal, Mr Bush said that terrorists had made Iraq the central front “in their war on humanity”, and that defeat for the US would be a catastrophic setback in the broader war on terror.

"Facing dwindling support" is for sure. CBS reports that its poll shows Bush's approval dropping again to 37%, with 69% saying that America is seriously on the wrong track. The numbers on Iraq are no better, and support for Bush's version of the war on terror is below 50%.

Bush continued in this bleeding vein of extreme rhetoric in his speech on Thursday. Though he characterized the intentions of certain Middle Eastern terrorist groups in the starkest, most extreme terms, this wasn’t the major flaw of his analysis. We’ve heard rhetoric to support the assertion that “The militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region and establish a radical Islamic empire that expands from Spain to Indonesia.” (Though the “ expands from Spain to Indonesia" part sounds more like a carried-away speechwriter than a carried-away political visionary, possessed by “evil ideology.” )

No, it’s not the intentions or at least the rhetoric as we hear it translated that’s at issue, but the realities. Could these militants even come close to these objectives? Is the American military occupation of Iraq the way to stop them?

Bush offers only parallel inflated rhetoric to support his policy of “staying the course” in Iraq. He combines language that conjures the Domino Theory of southeast Asia ( and since the US lost in Vietnam, that is of course why all of Asia is now enslaved by Communism) with the threats of Communism in the Cold War and fascism in World War II. Perhaps the American Civil War is apropos as well, but he didn’t bring that up, yet. The war between the red states and the blue states lacks something in the morality claims.

This is scare rhetoric at its worst and most desperate. Bush is using the military occupation that caused Iraq to become a haven for terrorists as the solution for holding back terrorists from taking over the rest of the region. The analysis is perversely correct: a radical Islamic state, or a vicious civil war, are now the most likely fates for Iraq, and they both threaten what passes for stability in the region.

But the military occupation is not working and will never work. The truth of the situation is summed up in nothing more complicated than a bumper sticker, a tragic traffic koan: “We are creating enemies faster than we can kill them.”

According to a Booman Tribune post, Robert Pape in his book Dying To Win performs a statistical analysis of suicide bombings in the modern world, and concludes that what they have in common is they are perpetrated by natives of a country against a foreign power occupying that country---especially when the occupier does not share the same religions or culture.

In other words, it doesn't have much to do with ideology, let alone evil ideology. Which is what a lot of experts having been saying all along, and it certainly suggests that the solution is not going to be found with bombs, guns and torture.

It’s hard to tell what Bush really believes the U.S. is doing (see following story.) But the intention of his speech is clear, and that is to create the spectre of a scary enemy that threatens the world. It may be his mission from God, but it conveniently worked for him politically in 2004, just as it conveniently supports his corporate friends on the war dole.

The template is straight out of the Cold War. After World War II, America built a huge military apparatus, including a cancerous nuclear arsenal. But how could they do that without a war in progress? "In order to make the country bear the burden," said President Dwight Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, referring to the Cold War arms race, "we have to create an emotional atmosphere akin to a wartime psychology. We must create the idea of a threat from without."

The threat must be disproportionate to reality, to justify the military machinery. Now we know where Cold War rhetoric goes to die. Into the mouth of G.W. Bush.