AMERICA'S
FAILED AMERICA'S
FAILED
DEMOCRACY AS
A MODEL FOR
WORLD-WIDE
EMULATION
As the end of this leap-month (Feb 2004) nears, much more information has surfaced about the events of the past year in Southwest Asia. The George Bush administration’s already shaky credibility has recently taken some fairly severe hits, as several noteworthy members of the government have come forward with testimony and evidence, repudiating the administration’s highly dubious determination to invade Iraq, that cannot simply be dismissed and or casually discredited (as the White House’s public relations spokes-people are so reflexively accustomed to doing).
Starting with ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s commentary in his recently released book, continuing with CIA Director George Tenet’s declarations to Congress on CIA and DIA intelligence, and most recently culminating with Weapons Inspector David Kay’s summarization of his investigations into Iraqi WoMD, it would appear to all but the most stupidly partisan, right-wing conservatives, that George Bush and his closest advisors are guilty of far more than simple ignorance or oversight. The evidence revealed thus far by these three above named individuals alone constitutes a slamming indictment against the honesty and ethics of the present Republican administration.
No reasonable person could draw any conclusion other than the fact that President Bush came into office with a hidden agenda of finishing the fight his dad had lost with Saddam, and that the Bush Administration without little credible doubt whatsoever put pressure upon the entire range of US intelligence gathering services to support his pre-determined decision to commit American forces to an action to depose Iraq’s dictator.
Very recently, close presidential advisor and arch-warhawk Richard Perle (doubtless feeling considerable heat from all of the damning aspersions being cast at the White House’s neoconservative brain trusts in the past months) publicly declared that the directors of both the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA should be called upon to resign for having drawn incorrect conclusions about Iraq; conclusions that mislead the White House in its assessment of the nature of Saddam’s erstwhile threat to US security prior to the US invasion of Iraq this year. I for one (and I am sure many others) just about swallowed my tongue when I read this egregious distortion of truth in the printed media.
In other closely related revelations, although heaping criticism was directed (quite fairly, I feel) at US intelligence agencies for the insubstantial intel gathering techniques and methods presently used, this does not change the highly probable fact that Bush, Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, Rice, and the others clustered around George Bush selectively ‘cherry-picked’ documentation to support the Iraq War action. Not only this, but evidence suggests that they ignored clear cautionary intel caveats and warnings that the overall evidence was inconclusive and not at all supportive of the central Bush contention that Saddam had 1) substantial stockpiles of WoMD that posed a ‘severe and immediate threat’ to American security; and 2) that Saddam had an ongoing nuclear weapons development program that posed a similar dire threat.
Both allegations, upon which the brunt of the Bush campaign to send American
forces off to invade Iraq was based, have now been shown to not only have been
untrue, but not even substantially documented to begin with (by US intel
agencies). Pressed now with these aspersions, the White House’s attitude has
been one of “Oops, we may have been wrong, but Saddam still posed a threat to
the USA and our actions taken to depose him were therefore justified.” NOT!
In the past week on a public television program a former intelligence field officer was interviewed, in which interview he was asked candidly if he thought that Bush had ‘pressured’ the intel agencies to provide intelligence that would be supportive of his views. This astute individual stated that while there was probably no identifiably ‘direct’ and ‘concrete’ pressure applied, although there was no question in his mind that there was in fact tremendous ‘indirect and discrete’ pressure brought to bear by the White House to force that conclusion. This agent’s experience revealed, furthermore, that due to the existing political influences that are a normal part of Washington DC affairs, there was no question in his mind that the intel agencies inevitably felt somewhat ‘overawed’ by White House requests for supportive information, and that there was consequently a definite and palpable desire (on the part of the agencies) to ‘please’ powerful figures such as Vice-President Richard Cheney. A modern analog of the forces at play in the classic Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale story of The Emperor’s New Clothes, no doubt.
Now, despite all the mounting evidence supporting what I concluded was true earlier in the year, before the Iraqi War began (i.e. that George Bush came into office wanting to depose Saddam Hussein—not because of the ‘direct and immediate’ threat he posed to the USA, but stemming from his own personal motivations), and despite the clear evidence that the Bush Administration blatantly lied to both the common people of this nation and to its elected political representatives in laying out its justification for war, we are now being told that truth doesn’t matter anyway!
From my standpoint, such an attitude on the part of the leader of the greatest power ever seen on earth is beyond scandalous and inherently censurable, it is justification for impeachment. The idea itself that the President of the United States could expect to lie openly and glibly to nearly 300 million people and expect to not have those lies called to question--in the face of irrefutable evidence of deceitful disingenuity--is stunning evidence supportive of the fact that the great American socio-political-economic experiment that was (and I suppose still is) the American model of ‘Capitalistic Representative Democracy’ is a dysfunctional failure. (An interesting thought to consider here is that perhaps the last 'honest' American president was Dwight Eisenhower or Harry Truman; starting with Kennedy and leading through Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, etc., the precedent had been set for gross distortion of truth as a norm).
This example of monumental basic dishonesty, as manifest by the highest office of the land, is disturbing evidence that the vaunted socio-political experiment that has heretofore been American Democracy has tragically mutated to the point where it is no longer either a fair and just system operating in the best interests of common, individual Americans or a laudable model for world-wide emulation.
Early colonial America, as instituted by the signers of the constitution, was a complex synthesis of precepts and principles whose origins included elements from classic Greece, modern Europe, and even Native American tribal confederations. Surprisingly, many Americans even today do not understand the fact that many of the basic founding principles, practices, and customs incorporated into early American democracy were drawn directly, as historians have recently shown, from the protocols formulated by tribes of the Iroquois Confederation.
Lest anyone be fooled into thinking that the founding fathers were entirely selfless and altruistic in their approach to engineering an enlightened political system sufficient for governing a cluster of small colonies (whose population comprised less than several million people), it should be kept firmly in mind that colonial America consisted principally of a rising bourgeoisie comprised of highly ambitious individual capitalists, who practiced Yankee style capitalism on a modestly successful level. Thus, to their credit, while these framers of the American constitution were interested in the higher and nobler aesthetics of protecting and preserving individual freedoms, they were for more importantly concerned with protecting their own collective abilities to acquire wealth, power, and increased affluence, and to protect those concerns from being usurped or jeopardised by any ‘imperial power’ (i.e. King George of England).
This basic premise worked well enough in motivating a nation of that size, even under immediate pre-and-post industrial revolution conditions of the 1700s and late 1800s. The system also appears to have worked admirably in the days before the rise of modern science and technology, in an era of small, local communities with strong ethical traditions, and well before the rights of the individual citizen had been conferred upon (limited liability) commercial corporations. However, as the nation grew demographically, and as the effects of modern scientific technology began to make themselves increasingly useful to commercial interests as highly effective tools for acquiring profits, any concerns with high-mindedness or the classical ethics of humane egalitarianism were completely suborned, if not totally dispensed with, to sentiments favoring unlimited growth, wealth, and material power.
As America grew—most notably after the commercial fortunes made during First and Second World Wars had transformed America into a world power, unrivaled by any other nations—the immense power of large corporations began to impact upon and erode traditional American freedoms to the point where the basic premises of early colonial democracy were almost no longer operative. Perhaps a good illustration of this may be found in the institution of law and the establishment of the American justice system that developed as American grew. In the first hundred or so years of nationhood, most Americans were governed internally by strong ethical traditions and positive cultural influences (religion, etc.), patterns of behavior that were strongly supported by a law enforcement establishment and justice system that was moderately effective in both protecting and defending individual rights (as long as one was white!). Trials were usually not lengthy, justice was typically swift (although sometimes inappropriate, granted), and the cost of trying criminals was not particularly substantial. As time passed and rural agrarian America gave way to the social complexities of highly industrialized urban America, the status quo changed significantly to the point where today, as we are in our strait-jacket of political correctness, urban law-enforcement organisations are hamstrung and no longer capable of protecting individuals against the most basic crimes against person or property. To add further frustrations, the proliferation of well-meaning but stupidly conceived regulations concerning ownership and use of firearms in our society have resulted in a present quandary wherein the average citizen is little more than a lamb pastured in an open field and required to wait passively for the next passing predator to commit depredations at will. The open carrying of weapons has been discouraged to the extent that a potential victim has no recourse at all to a random or deliberate act of violence, since he will invariably be confronted by a criminal who is not just armed, but in sync with today’s crazed subculture norms more likely to use it than not—and more likely for the perverse thrill derived from the act of killing a human being.
In any large and densely populated American city today, the relatively small number of peace officers available in any given municipal area are 1) incapable of effectively covering as much of the urban area as they have been given jurisdiction over (due to sheer proportion of officers to crimes committed), and 2) are immersed in such a violent and brutal occupational environment that the typical psychological forces endured by peace officers are severe enough to corrupt even the most honest and high-minded individuals amongst them. Really, the only thing that prevents absolute social chaos or urban anarchy in today’s modern American urban setting, given the rabidly immoral attitudes that are so pervasive in today’s drug-afflicted subcultures in America, is the inability of individual criminals to efficiently organise and act together to achieve illicit ends.
Further, redress for victims of violent crime today is only available well after the fact, usually available only after many years of costly and complex legal maneuvering, and in many cases rendered impossible by the complex requirements of our terribly costly and constipated justice system. Victims of non-violent crime may as well accept the fact that there is no realistic or timely redress possible at all, effectively speaking.
I should state here that while I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of gun advocacy organisations such as the American National Rifle Organisation, making it difficult for law-abiding citizens to obtain and maintain weapons is not the best way to keep weapons out of the hands of criminals. While keeping guns under tighter legal control (by requiring registration, etc.,) may spare a few victims from gun-violence, by and large it does nothing at all to keep criminals from obtaining and using them. Parallel to this, one of the recurring themes of groups like the NRA is the emotional admonishment that the government of the United States is trying to prevent individual Americans from having the means (i.e. “guns”) for resisting increasing control imposed over basic ‘freedoms’ by the Federal Government (i.e. Orwell, et al). While I regard this also as a bizarrely unrealistic contention, it does make one reflect that our nation was founded upon the principle of rebellion against unjust governance and tightening up controls over possession of weapons by the ordinary citizen certainly makes the possibility of a bunch of armed yahoos (armed with lever-cocked deer rifles?) taking on heavily armed Federal SWAT teams as a means of protest against oppressive government seem remote and ludicrous in the extreme.
Such a fantastic prospect seen within the focus of the present scenario wherein the President of the United States and a handful of immensely powerful advisors (who have substantial personal vested interests in the agendas of powerful commercial corporations) have given evidence of deliberately acting on their own prerogative and not (despite the usual indignant protests of innocence) in the best interests of all Americans, takes on a very much more interesting character. This is beyond my present speculation, and my hypothesis remains the same: that is that given the unlimited power and influence that corporations have today on both national political and socio-economic affairs, any vestige of former true democracy that may have previously existed is no longer possible in our society. Even with regard to our sacrosanct right to elect representatives, options are severely circumscribed by the excessive cost that running for public office imposes. In essence, we may only truly vote for a selection of millionaires. Given the reliance of candidates upon contributions, and the fact that those contributions again come predominantly from powerful, vested private interest group (not from a broad and balanced mix of individual non-partisan Americans), even the system of soliciting contributions is severely flawed and needful of an overhaul.
Thus, representative democracy as we experience it in America today is not only NOT representative of our collective best interests and highest aspirations, it works conveniently as a tool of powerful corporate capitalists to ensure that the average American has very little true freedom in determining the moral or ethical standard for the conduct of national affairs. A reprise of “What’s good for General Motors is good for the nation” obtains.
In setting the present appalling example of duplicity, while serving as its highest ‘elected representative’, George Bush has regrettably demonstrated for any reflective individual around the world to clearly see that the principles of genuinely enlightened democracy in America are now as extinct as the fabled Dodo. What formerly was (at least in theory) a democracy of the people is now firmly in fact an oligarchy of corporate self-interests.
For this reason, it is my conviction that America now believes that freedom of the human spirit is equitable to freedom of selfish commercial interests (to rape and plunder the world at will for profit), crusading under the banner of fostering the spirit of freedom and brotherly good will. And for this reason chiefly, it is my contention that the nightmarish monster that many of us salute as the United States of America we cherish and swear to defend, has become as great a threat to the world as that same ‘great evil’ that Bush publicly denounces with great vigor at every White House press conference.
As such, America's present system of government hardly serves as a shining example of what the rest of the world should aspire to, least of all a nation like Iraq, which in our proselytizing zeal we have torn apart and now hope to reconstruct in our image (shudder!).
[Walt Kelly’s famed cartoon character of the 50s summed it up perfectly, I think, when Pogo Possum famously declared to his friend Churchy LaFemme: “We have met the enemy and HE is US!”]
Cheers, C2--Feb 2004
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“Don’t you love your country?”
(commentary
by Christopher T. Carey originally written in February 2003)
“Don’t you love your country?”
I was asked this question by someone last week, after laying down arguments against the USA going to war with Iraq for about the thousandth time. Since this seems to be a common perception by many who question my loyalty to the nation I was born in, and who wonder how I can be so critical of the country I live in, perhaps it is time to set the facts straight. When I was a small child of 5, I loved my country. When I was a Boy Scout, aged 16, I loved my country. When I was a college student, aged 20, and was told to take up an automatic weapon and be sent to a small impoverished nation on the other side of the world, I began to doubt that unquestioned love of country. Today, as the Bush administration gathers its military might together for a war against Saddam Hussein, I find that I no longer have any love for what the United States of America has recently become.
As I restate these facts, I am of course reminded of that famous short story by Edward Everett Hale, “The Man Without a Country” ( first published in The Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1863), but bear with me as I explain further. When the United States was founded, several hundred years ago, the principles that were enshrined in its constitution, its Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence were universally admired as examples of the human spirit’s timeless desire for freedom from oppression. The newly founded nation of several million people, clustered together in thirteen colonies on the edge of a vast new and unexplored continent, was a noble experiment in political economics that had great promise.
Today, 227 years later, that original ‘noble experiment’ has been transmogrified into an oppressive imperialistic oligarchy of heavily entrenched economic interests, operated and administered not for the benefit of ordinary citizens, but for the benefit of massive corporate business that wield immense and disproportionate power in perpetuating greed-driven profit generating activities. This status quo has been largely facilitated through the vehicle of science and technology, which has enabled these very powerful interests to increasingly covert more and more of the world’s remaining natural resources into disposable, wasteful and often redundant material goods, to be consumed by a nation of people who have been trained from cradle to grave to act as unquestioning consumers of those goods. Furthering this ‘devolution’ of the original founding ideals of the American experiment, Americans today have been deluded into believing that an economic philosophy founded on the premise of unending, perpetual growth, and expansion is a realistic, sustainable, and perfectly proper course for the nation to take. This is, of course, the sheerest ecological nonsense to entertain in a world that is not only shrinking, but being rapidly devoured by the American economic machine.
Today we Americans live in a nation in which, due to the costs involved in political campaigning, only the very wealthy, most powerful, and economically successful individuals can serve as our erstwhile “elected” representatives, since they alone are able to afford the millions of dollars it costs to run for public office in today’s American economy. As a result, American political representatives no longer effectively represent the ordinary people (despite all the public relations horse-exhaust to the contrary, that we are constantly exposed to), but rather the corporate interests whose lavishly funded lobbies and legal minions see to it that only agendas favorable to the corporations are supported in Congress. Despite these sad facts, and despite the fact that spin-doctored public relations hype seeks constantly to fool the ordinary American into thinking that his best interests are being served, despite the so-called “political correctness” that would have us all imagine that human dignity is being carefully protected and husbanded in this country, and despite the unending effort to deceive the average American into mistaking material superfluity and excess for spiritual and moral fulfillment, America of today is simply NOT a loveable nation.
The latest example of this status quo confronts our credibility head-on as President George W. Bush arrogantly continues to single-handedly commit the world’s greatest military power to a war that is neither necessary or in the best interests of any nation—least of all America’s! In defiance of a preponderance of intelligence reports that clearly show that Iraq has no tangible links to the Islamic ‘Al Queda’ terrorist organisation, and contrary to the compelling logic that there will be no peace in the world at all until the Israeli-Palestinian question is resolved, our President increasingly acts as if he has an absolutely consensual mandate from the entire American nation to carry out this plan. His stated conviction, that it is a leader’s job to ‘protect’ the nation he has been elected to serve, is reasonable; the flaw in this philosophy is, of course, that he chooses to interpret that ‘duty to protect’ as taking the form of an attack on Iraq. It doesn’t take half the intelligence President Bush appears to have to readily understand that the other many problems America is faced with at present are FAR greater and MUCH more serious than any threat Saddam Hussein might pose. These include the Al Queda terrorist threat, pressing internal and economic difficulties, and Kim Il Jung’s worrisome nuclear temper tantrums in North Korea. So why are “we” so determined to plunge head-long into this dangerous and extremely ill-advised adventure? Make no mistake about the fact that George W. Bush and his governmental cronies are acting in the interest of the same powerful corporate powers alluded to above, who need the Middle East’s vast supplies of oil to maintain the gluttonous American economy; this is, of course, the same corporate cartel that regards the entire natural world as simply one colossal consumable resource, on its present course of perpetual, sustained, and continually expanding economic growth.
The dangers of this extremely short-sighted and unfathomably ignorant national policy are ‘clear and present’. Aside from further reinforcing America’s already worrisome tendency towards becoming the world’s greatest imperialist power, any war as presently envisioned by the Bush Administration, will have grave consequences for both America and the world. In the short term, if we continue to concentrate all of our military force in the Middle Eastern region for an attack on Iraq, this will provide an unequaled opportunity for the Islamic terrorists to conduct an operation in the American homeland. What better time to perpetrate a major terrorist attack than while the entire nation’s military forces (along with a good percentage of our military reserves and national guard troops) are engaged elsewhere, some 8000 miles away? Another immediate effect will be further intense reinforcement of existing anti-US sentiment and radical enhancement of present severe polarization between western nations and Islamic radical groups. Still a further consideration is that North Korea, with its proven capability to produce and field long-range missiles and nuclear weapons, poses a far more dangerous and unstable threat to world peace than a contained and thoroughly scrutinized Iraq ever could; and yet the Bush Administration carefully chooses to ignore this fact in its relentless obsession with attacking Iraq, instead. In the long term, a war of the sort currently being prepared for will place a grotesque financial burden on the nation that will make even the Reagan years of profligate deficit spending look positively thrifty.
Of course, the present US budget proposed by President Bush already threatens to create an immediate new era of disproportionate deficit spending, but the added cost of a war in Iraq is not calculated into it. Not only that, and disregarding for a moment the 30 to 100 or so billion dollars in immediate costs the war will impose on the nation, it is estimated that the post-war cost required for policing and supporting the Iraqi nation after Saddam is overthrown will figure in the 280 billion dollar range. The overall effect of all of this expense will result in a future Federal budget deficit estimated to be in the vicinity of nearly 200 or more trillion dollars! Meanwhile, President Bush wants to create tax cuts that will benefit corporate business and the wealthy top 5% of the nation’s population, and have little genuine impact on the ‘average’ American citizen of modest means (that’s you and I and the other 95% of the nation, folks!). All of this and absolutely no increase in taxes?! If Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Ashcroft, and the other members of this gang of patrician elitists truly believe that, then there can be no clearer indication that the entire present American Administration is suffering from rampant, wide-spread mental illness! The next step, in this event, would logically be to run Mickey Mouse for President on the Republican ticket next term, so believable is this amazing state of affairs in Washington DC.
So…..do I love my country? Perhaps a lot more than you might suspect, from all my criticisms of our present administration, but not if it means being a party to the present madness that is currently evident at the highest levels of American government. Not only do I not love what my country has become, I am grievously ashamed to see it sink to such despicable depths of deceitful, delusional, and morally deficit behavior. This is not the inspiring nation that fostered Edward Everett Hale’s memorable tale of a man who turned his back on his country. This is not the courageous, freedom loving nation that in 1774 inspired France’s Lafayette to join the American revolutionists in their fight against ‘imperialist’ oppression. This is instead a nation that has become increasingly foreign to me, that continues to insult the intelligence and dignity of those who all too readily see, through all the smoke and mirrors employed by our nation’s ‘leaders’, the ethically bankrupt and spiritually putrescent motives of economic imperialism that are today running ‘Amerika Incorporated’. In saying this, I wish to make clear, here: I have no prejudice against the ordinary men and women members of our nation’s armed forces. Even though their awareness of the real issues involved here is sadly lacking, they no doubt honestly think that they are doing the right thing. Furthermore, they are compelled to honor their commitment to serve.. They also honestly believe that the story being given them about America’s interests and consequent actions by the present Administration is the true story, and they are simply carrying out what they see as their ‘patriotic duty’ to enforce these (misbegotten) ideals with the military might they represent. Unfortunately many of them are still young and do not benefit from the greater overview that age and experience in the affairs of the world brings with it. I myself am a veteran, having served during the Vietnam era, but despite my youthfulness at that time, VERY I quickly realised what war is really all about (and it is not about glory, heroism, and honor).
War is and always has been first and foremost a political sanction that is imposed to enforce economic ends; it is therefore seen within that context not an honorable cause that is worth the possible laying down one’s life. Period. If the threat were palpable and the borders of the nation themselves were under attack (as Great Britain’s were in the Second World War), it would be quite a different story and one could make a reasonable argument for ‘defending and preserving’ one’s nation against such a danger. The argument for a war against Iraq, by contrast, is not even in the same league of plausibility. It is simply and purely an exercise in imperialistic, self-serving, and unwarranted aggression. For me, I have long since grown beyond the simplistic and cerebrally myopic concept of owing one’s unswerving, unquestioned allegiance to a nation. I regard myself instead as a citizen of the entire world, and it is to the planet and ALL of its widely varying peoples that I owe my principal patriotic allegiance. The world has grown too small in the present era to permit a continuation of the sort of short-sighted and small-minded partisanism that loyalty to a single nation presupposes. If we don’t start thinking of all humanity as members of the same extended family soon and take immediate steps to remedy the present disturbing arrogant imperialist behavior America is exhibiting, the relentless American economy will ultimately contaminate and destroy everything that is good and positive about humanity, by converting the entire planet into nothing more than so much wasteful consumer effluent.
Begs the question: “Do I love my country?” Not until it starts deserving love & respect by restoring wisdom and altruistic benevolence as the guiding principles of our nation. Not until it restores wisely conceived moderation in economic planning for the present blindly consumptive economic gluttony. Not until we stop our egotistical view of the rest of the world as being a mere raw resource to feed America’s insatiable consumption. Is this being ‘unpatriotic’? Perhaps, but what is patriotism but unquestioned support of political goals, social objectives, economic agendas, and (….just possibly) higher moral principles? At present, America has a plethora of the former qualities, but lacks entirely the last and single most important one. Until America starts to deserve intelligent respect for high-mindedness, ‘patriotism’ in my dictionary is lamentably an extinct concept. I remain a citizen of the world first and a political partisan second.
Got any more room in Sweden for disgruntled idealistic intellectuals? (And, yes, if all you red-blooded American knee-jerk “patriots” want to take up a collection to send me there, I wouldn’t mind it at all! Really!
Cheers, DocBoink---Feb 2003
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