roachboy

even if the kucinich articles do not get anywhere, i think that the fact they exist is important. that the war was launched under what---at the very best---were dubious premises is a problem. A Problem. that ideological conditions were created such that congress approved the war without, apparently, an adequate interrogation of the evidence is a problem. A Problem. that these facts are self-evident at this point is itself another Problem. and that there appears still to be a political context that would allow for this kind of action to unfold WITHOUT SIGNIFICANT CONSEQUENCES IS ITSELF PERHAPS THE MOST TROUBLING OF PROBLEMS.

why? because it calls into question the ability of the american political apparatus to self-correct. beyond this, it calls into question the meaning of american pseudo-democracy---and this at a fundamental level---that of its functional legitimacy. i say functional legitimacy rather than legitimacy tout court because at this point i think that is the issue. aquiscence in the face of a debacle of the magnitude of the war in iraq is a problem for the whole of the american political system--it reveals something of a slide into a relation to political power characteristic of authoritarian regimes---the state is in itself the principle of cohesion and legitimacy, not the processes behind the state, whcih the state is to represent. the state is posited as one with "the nation" and so is fobbed off as the principle of unity in itself for a given political context. that would mean then that sovereignty resides in the state and not in the people. that would mean that division within the state apparatus--e.g. processes of holding the bush administration to account for its actions in iraq---represent divisions within the otherwise unified nation, and so in itself represents the fragmentation of the nation. all of this runs in a direction that is absolutely the opposite of any semblance of democratic notions of popular sovereignty--within which it is the people--divided, committed to contestation, debate, critical reflection--who are the source of state power--and in a democratic polity it is axiomatic that the people ARE NOT ONE---from this follows representations of the political such that division is not in itself something to be feared--and with that the political conditions of possibility for holding an administration to account are generated at the level of conceptions of the political in general.

the bush people CHOSE to go down this authoritarian route at the level of ideology within hours of 9/11/2001. they have framed every last thing they have done in these terms since: in the case of iraq, they have pushed this to its cynical limits by arguing that any internal debate over the legitimacy of the war amounts to the theater of dividedness of the Will--well if the united states were anything like an actual democracy, the Will would ALWAYS be divided at one level or another and this would be an indication of the HEALTH of the polity, not a threat to it. the discourse of the nation, of national will is in itself authoritarian, a rhetoric that loops directly through these nutty ideas that the state in itself IS the unity of the people, that the people who occupy power now ARE the nation, blah blah blah.

so when you attempt to dissolve the issue of false premises for the war in iraq, ace, i wonder if you know what it is that you are really defending. it goes beyond partisan affection for the bush squad. and it is not pretty.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite