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if you read the project for a new american century site through, you can see what i think is a more coherent vision that underpinned war in iraq: it was the theater across which the american state, in its military expression, was to be inserted as lone hegemon, not answerable or bound to international law, represented by the un.
the motives for the second war link directly to the neocon understanding of the first.
i have thought from the outset that this adversarial relation to the un explained the shabbiness of the administration's case--it does not take much to see in it an expression of contempt for the institution itself--a contempt that the neocons might have thought vindicated if the war in iraq had gone as they fantasized it would.
i think the wolfowitz crowd had a vision, believed it, threw the dice on the basis of that vision, and lost--horribly, completely, entirely.
in a rational world, this gamble and loss should spell a parallel, ignominious defeat for the adminsitration as a whole in the next election---much of what i have been posting over the past week or so has been directed at trying to point out how the political culture being developed by the right is geared toward making it possible to explain away this fiasco.
a capacity for collective denial which is itself a kind of horrifying glimpse of what a future would look like should this political tendency become dominant for any period of time. if these people retain power long enough to enforce their view of the world, their version of history, and of politics onto children via the political instrument of education, then future historians will find themselves having to explain the early phases of a collective retreat into fantasy as the first phase of the collapse of the american empire, and the passage into a different arrangement. they will probably look to questions like lead in the wine to explain it.
what no-one wants to say, but what seems obvious, is that american troops have died in numbers now over 1000 and 12-15,000 iraqis have died---all for a hallucination of american global military hegemony--the primary function of which was to keep the world safe for the increasingly outmoded entity known as the nation-state, and that only--and i mean only--because the right in particular (traditional and neocon alike) cannot think of how it could possibly operate outside that framework.
lots of people are dead because the bush administration chose to indulge this absurd attempt at political self-preservation engineered by a particular rightwing faction.
there is a way to link the war to oil as well, but i think it explains less about the administration's actions than does the nationalist project.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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