Let's Break Out a New Deck

For a good while I was at least tolerant of the sort of program that a lot of Democratic marquee names seemed to have signed up for and now are as reluctant to consider releasing as a life-ring. That is: since we're there it would be cowardly and irresponsible to withdraw precipitously.

Like the guy says (you know, that Zimmerman character), "Ah but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." These days I find myself of a different mind, partly thanks to a groundswell of welcome rejectors of received knowledge and the party line and tyranny-defiers in general and the implied permission to reconsider and admit to prior flabby thinking.

There is one assumption behind the idea that we cannot simply up and leave Iraq that seems to me to be absolutely central and way overdue for frank discussion. No doubt this has been addressed at least tangentially elsewhere, and certainly the issue is tiptoed around frequently in progressive on-line discussions and tacet in much of this universe. However, I cannot recall any overt dialogue on this score in the media-ganda directed at the average folks still struggling to remember which club that Rove guy accused of something plays for

That is where we need to push some reconsideration of what I believe is an extremely naive and over-simplistic assumption that the routine level of turmoil, discontent and outright chaos at present in Iraq would be multiplied many-fold if our military were to largely disappear. I think it is almost a certainty that this assumption is unconscious among most people horrified at the idea of setting schedules. I'm equally certain that the vast majority of the "stay the course" crowd have not actually allowed any consideration of reality to intrude on this assumption (ok, some find that reality stuff loathsome on the face of it, I admit). I have come recently to a belief that there is a strong likelihood that the removal of the US military presence from center stage would change the rules so dramatically that this extrapolating assumption is basically a crock.

I'm not going to go all rumsfeld on you and suggest we would be observing folks with flowers in their hair, Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis embracing in the streets. But given what the reality-philic should have been routinely picking up on over the past couple years, it is our presence there that is directly and indirectly triggering the vast majority of the violence. Doubtless civil strife would continue, some a holdover from the Hussein days, more quite likely and regrettably a consequence of our unplanned, ill-considered, racist, antidemocratic, and ever-so-obviously hegemonistic, empiristic, and oil- and loot-plundering motives.

But the idea that bringing our troops home would naturally and inevitably lead to a Mid-East holocaust cannot be allowed to hang over our heads any longer without some thoughtful evaluation. What can we do to get some dialogue going on that score?

If you've made it this far (huzzah!!), here are a couple excerpts that I found inspiring and compelling in the last couple days on the score of "studying war no more." Mea culpa for the clip lengths - these posts were too good to over-shorten.

Rosa or Jane?

Is Cindy Sheehan the Rosa Parks or the Jane Fonda of the War in Iraq? Is she the lonely sentinel, standing righteously against injustice? Or a self-centered publicity seeker, endangering American soldiers in the War?

The question is something of a political Rorschach test, telling us more about ourselves and our appraisal of America's wars than about Sheehan. But asking it and understanding the issues behind the question might help us find a solution to the illegitimate and failed War.

Rosa Parks is an iconic figure of twentieth century America because she so tidily embodies one of its greatest ideals: the courageous stand against injustice. When she refused to give up her seat on the bus, she let loose a fire that had simmered since the end of the Civil War. Despite its ideals of equality, American society in the early 1960s was manifestly unequal. Blacks were undeniably second-class citizens, their subjugation systematically abetted by the government itself.

The cultural esteem for Parks' heroism originates with the founding fathers. They, too, had been made second-class citizens by their own government. They were denied representation, protection against unreasonable searches, and trials by jury, rights guaranteed to all Englishmen. They demanded those rights of King George but were rebuffed. Mending those injustices became the inspiration for the American Revolution.

Jane Fonda is a similarly iconic figure but for different and more complex reasons. Her conflicted celebrity, almost 40 years after her act, reflects not one but two models that collide with each other in the American psyche and that make the protest of war so problematic for Americans.

In the hostile rendering, Fonda endangered American soldiers in Vietnam by providing succor to the enemy. "Hanoi Jane" is no more than a latter-day Tokyo Rose, and, in fact, a modern day Benedict Arnold. There is no exculpation for her acts. They were traitorous. And the garden variety war protesters were merely state-side acolytes in the treason, inescapably stained with the same existential guilt.

But the fact that Fonda still enjoys celebrity status with much of the American citizenry suggests, at the very least, another deeply held understanding of her acts. Just as Parks had done, Fonda defied the tyranny of her own government, a government that had abandoned its own ideals and was perpetrating a massive injustice.

Ho Chi Mihn had asked President Truman in 1946 if the U.S. would help the Vietnamese throw off the yoke of French colonial occupation. Sadly, Truman sided with the French, betraying his country's founding ideals of self-determination and freedom from colonial domination. In that act, he irretrievably undermined the U.S. moral position with the Vietnamese people, ultimately dooming the course of the War. Truman's betrayal of American ideals is the origin of our enduring angst about the Vietnam War. But it is not the only source.

While Americans ritualistically mourn the 58,000 U.S. soldiers killed in Vietnam, we are oblivious, or worse, indifferent, to the fact that more than three million Vietnamese were killed. That is 50 Vietnamese killed for every American. And this, against a country that had never attacked or even threatened to attack the United States but, rather, had asked it for help.

It is a profound moral blindness to deny the immorality of such a war. Fonda's protests of the War, of the betrayal inherent in its origins and the brutal injustice that saturated its execution, are what sustains the positive side of her reputation today.

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What if the Vietnam protests had not occurred? It was the impending civil war in the U.S. that convinced Johnson's "Wise Men" that the War must be ended. What if the protesters had been silenced, as the right wing thugs want to silence Cindy Sheehan today? What if the War had gone on for another ten years and another 58,000 American and another three million Vietnamese lives had been lost?

In this sense, the protests undoubtedly saved soldiers' lives, in fact, many times more lives than might have been lost as their consequence. They unquestionably helped end a calamitous injustice.

But beyond concerns for body counts lies a more perplexing irony of protest, one that is seemingly lost on those who would condemn Cindy Sheehan as the Hanoi Jane of Iraq. It is precisely through such acts of protest that America itself was born. Those who would muzzle Sheehan would destroy the very freedom to challenge government that they claim to be fighting for, that they claim to be wanting to install into Iraq.

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Finally, beyond body counts, beyond the sanctity of protest, beyond the imperative to confront and right injustice, beyond the need for accountability, lies the simple question of how the war can be ended. It was not Cindy Sheehan's but George Bush's Dogpatch demagoguery that declared, "Bring 'em on!"

But his war spawns insurgents far faster than Bush can kill them. It long ago breached the dikes of Iraq itself and has metastasized throughout the rest of the world. It has made America and the world less safe from terrorism, not more so. And there is no end in sight. When the president's latest aim for the War itself-to reduce terror-has been lost, "Stay the course" is not a plausible, not even a remotely sensible strategy.

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Recruiting Terror

Hussain Osman, one of the men alleged to have participated in London's failed bombings on July 21, recently told Italian investigators that they prepared for the attacks by watching "films on the war in Iraq," La Repubblica reported. "Especially those where women and children were being killed and exterminated by British and American soldiers ... of widows, mothers and daughters that cry."

It has become an article of faith that Britain was vulnerable to terror because of its politically correct antiracism. Yet Osman's comments suggest that what propelled at least some of the bombers was rage at what they saw as extreme racism. And what else can we call the belief -- so prevalent we barely notice it -- that American and European lives are worth more than the lives of Arabs and Muslims, so much more that their deaths in Iraq are not even counted?

It's not the first time that this kind of raw inequality has bred extremism. Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian writer generally viewed as the intellectual architect of radical political Islam, had his ideological epiphany while studying in the United States. The puritanical scholar was shocked by Colorado's licentious women, it's true, but more significant was Qutb's encounter with what he later described as America's "evil and fanatic racial discrimination." By coincidence, Qutb arrived in the United States in 1948, the year of the creation of the State of Israel. He witnessed an America blind to the thousands of Palestinians being made permanent refugees by the Zionist project. For Qutb, it wasn't politics, it was an assault on his identity: Clearly Americans believed that Arab lives were worth far less than those of European Jews. According to Yvonne Haddad, a professor of history at Georgetown University, this experience "left Qutb with a bitterness he was never able to shake."

When Qutb returned to Egypt he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, leading to his next life-changing event: He was arrested, severely tortured and convicted of antigovernment conspiracy in an absurd show trial. Qutb's political theory was profoundly shaped by torture. Not only did he regard his torturers as sub-human, he stretched that categorization to include the entire state that ordered this brutality, including the practicing Muslims who passively lent their support to Nasser's regime.

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Why is it worth digging up this history now? Because the twin sparks that ignited Qutb's world-changing rage are currently being doused with gasoline: Arabs and Muslims are being debased in torture chambers around the world and their deaths are being discounted in simultaneous colonial wars, at the same time that graphic digital evidence of these losses and humiliations is available to anyone with a computer. And once again, this lethal cocktail of racism and torture is burning through the veins of angry young men. As Qutb's past and Osman's present reveal, it's not our tolerance for multiculturalism that fuels terrorism; it's our tolerance for the barbarism committed in our name.

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Can You Tell Me More About Your Lying Compulsion?

Rumor has it that the dimestore cowboy implausibly citing the White House as his place of residence these days has designs on reprising his social security snake oil sales pitch once the Endless Vacation is over. To the extent that is accurate, Mr. Krugman's recap is especially timely:

Social Security Lessons

Social Security turned 70 yesterday. And to almost everyone's surprise, the nation's most successful government program is still intact.

Just a few months ago the conventional wisdom was that President Bush would get his way on Social Security. Instead, Mr. Bush's privatization drive flopped so badly that the topic has almost disappeared from national discussion.

But I'd like to revisit Social Security for a moment, because it's important to remember what Mr. Bush tried to get away with.

Many pundits and editorial boards still give Mr. Bush credit for trying to "reform" Social Security. In fact, Mr. Bush came to bury Social Security, not to save it. Over time, the Bush plan would have transformed Social Security from a social insurance program into a mutual fund, with nothing except a name in common with the system F.D.R. created.

In addition to misrepresenting his goals, Mr. Bush repeatedly lied about the current system. Oh, I'm sorry - was that a rude thing to say? Still, the fact is that Mr. Bush repeatedly said things that were demonstrably false and that his staff must have known were false. The falsehoods ranged from his claim that Social Security is unfair to African-Americans to his claim that "waiting just one year adds $600 billion to the cost of fixing Social Security."

Meanwhile, the administration politicized the Social Security Administration and used taxpayer money to promote a partisan agenda. Social Security officials participated in what were in effect taxpayer- financed political rallies, from which skeptical members of the public were excluded.

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But the campaign for privatization provided an object lesson in how the administration sells its policies: by misrepresenting its goals, lying about the facts and abusing its control of government agencies. These were the same tactics used to sell both tax cuts and the Iraq war.

And there are two reasons to study that lesson. One is to be prepared for whatever comes next on Mr. Bush's agenda. Despite the tough talk about Iran, I don't think he can propose another war - there aren't enough troops to fight the wars we already have. But there's still room for another big domestic initiative, probably tax reform.

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