Chaos theory
The tiny, tight-knit group of men who are running this country, largely out of the Pentagon, have rolled the dice in a way unprecedented in American memory. For them, the world turns out to be Las Vegas. Give them credit for nerve. Their dreams are global and distinctly imperial. To be against this war is to be against their militarized dreams of empire, so clearly etched in their initial plans for a coalition-of-one occupation of Iraq. Below are four provocative essays on those warrior dreams (even if the warriors are not to be them) which individually and together suggest the breadth of the dangers we now face, thanks to the neocon revolution in Washington and its imperial utopianism.
In the Washington Monthly, Joshua Marshall, who runs the weblog www.talkingpointsmemo.com, offers an exceedingly smart version of neocon chaos theory (with an emphasis on the "con" or deception in that neocon). He suggests that Wolfowitz et. al. are set on provoking a series of crises in the Middle East on the thought that every small catastrophe, every seemingly wrong turn, will lead us ever closer to their long-dreamt of goal -- a remapped, reorganized, Americanized Middle East, somehow both democratic and pliant. For them, Marshall concludes, the wronger they are, the righter things will be. It's an audacious thought from audacious men, but, as he comments, their "vision rests on a willing suspension of disbelief, in particular, on the premise that every close call will break in our favor: The guard will fall asleep next to the cell so our heroes can pluck the keys from his belt. The hail of enemy bullets will plink-plink-plink over our heroes' heads. And the getaway car in the driveway will have the keys waiting in the ignition. Sure, the hawks' vision could come to pass. But there are at least half a dozen equally plausible alternative scenarios that would be disastrous for us."
The most recent Nation magazine had two pieces not to be missed, the first by George McGovern, the man who got my presidential vote in 1972. If you want to be truly utopian (and ahistorical) imagine where this country might have gone if he -- and not Richard Nixon -- had been president. At 80, he is bluntness itself, as he links the assault on Iraq to an assault on us. "This President and his advisers know well how to get us involved in imperial crusades abroad while pillaging the ordinary American at home." In the same issue, Jonathan Schell points to the "Vesuvius of violence [that] has erupted from the dead center of American life" and makes similar linkages suggesting that what makes the present war in Iraq "revolutionary" is likely to lead to an imperial constitutional crises here at home, one delayed since Dick Nixon, having stomped McGovern in a campaign of widespread "dirty tricks," managed to sink beneath the waters of Watergate..
Finally, from the exceedingly establishment Foreign Policy magazine (though found at www.warincontext.org), a piece "The American Mongols" by Husain Haqqani which lays out, from a Middle Eastern point of view, the dangers in the great dance of clashing fundamentalisms -- ours and theirs -- now ongoing.
(By the way, I suggest that you might also look at the transcript of a recent Bill Moyers interview with Susan Sontag. It's smart and quite moving. She discusses, among other things, the "noise" of war from her experiences in Sarajevo, of what, in short, can't be imagined from an afternoon in front of CNN and MSNBC; and also considers the ways in which even horrific war photos can turn us into spectators and sometimes counter-intuitively increase our sense of safety and of "innocence.")
nationinstitute.org |
