Disjointed thoughts on Violent Liberation
I find myself still in favor of the wars in (it does not sit well with me to use the Hitchensian term 'liberation of') Iraq and Afghanistan. My thoughts on it have colored very much of my political thinking, as they've been fought for most of my politically aware life, and the threat of them has loomed over my entire conscious life. To defend them has become a frustrating and inglorious exercise, as the war crimes - for the deliberate rape, torture, mutilation and extradition can be called nothing else - have begun to mount and the leadership at home has teetered. Despite the cries of 'Never forget!' and the embarassingly trite pictures of crying bald eagles, it seems hard for many to recall the events of a decade ago (has it been so long?) and the great lurching sound as the fattened couch-potato named 'Middle America' put on its father's armor and rode off to war. With ten years' worth of hindsight and crime and mismanagement to guide us, I intend to look back through the lens of a privileged-and-yet-poor white man, to what got us this far and what there is left to say about it.
The events of September 11th, 2001, can be called the 'impetus' for the pair of wars we have today only by closing our eyes to the realities of the last hundred, even last few thousand years. To try and untangle the muddle of 'he-said-she-saids' and Hatfield/McCoy feudings would be the work of an Encyclopaedia Britannica-sized volume and would almost certainly leave out enough events to be insulting to one side or the other. The act of mass murder that took place at the Twin Towers was claimed by its perpetrators as a response to American imperialism and interference in the Middle East, in the form of support for the Israeli state against the Palestinians. American imperialism and interference, in turn, comes from the Middle East's stranglehold on the world's oil reserves and its willingness to cover for the crimes of extreme Islam in Israel and elsewhere. The back and forth could be traced all the way to the sacking of Jerusalem, or even the prophet Muhammad's conquering trail through the Arabian penninsula.
The point is that at some point, you have to take an event on its face. A political actor must accept that he is the perpetrator of his own actions, especially when what he undertakes is in the name of those who are long dead and far beyond having their actions 'redeemed.' The attacks on September 11th constitute, in my mind, such a point. It was a raise of the ante, a deliberate act of cruelty intended to change the nature of the game, and it did. It made clear that there were forces that were willing to reach around the globe, to carve 'You are not safe' upon the great American Experiment, and to involve deliberately an American population that, for the most part, long since relinquished control over its political and military machine.
Americans have a love of liberty. They're raised with it from cradle to grave, and only a few - immigrants, brave journalists, long-deployed soldiers, and refugees - know what it is not to have guaranteed basic rights like the ability to speak your mind in public, to demand redress of grievance from the government, to defend yourself against unwarranted government intrusion. There is a general feeling, poo-poohed by liberal intellectuals as 'cultural relativism', that American freedoms should be the way the entire world works. This manifests in a blunt way by people who vote for anyone who says they're for 'smaller government, smaller taxes, bigger freedoms,' but the more nuanced opinion tends to agree that the guarantees in the American Bill of Rights and the United States Constitution are somehow correct, that they strike some cornerstone of personal and political authenticity. To export these freedoms to others seems worth the price to many people, so long as the moral intentions are clear and open.
Humans all over the world possess a similar character; no human being, not even one of the leadership caste, can truly prosper in a totalitarian famine-state, for example. Similarly, a life spent constantly fleeing in terror, losing precious material objects or even family members along the way, all in the name of evading roving gangs or government sanctioned kill-squads, has little to recommend it next to a life of material wealth, intellectual and cultural indulgence, and personal freedom of movement, assembly, and expression. When I see other human beings in such situations, I am moved. I have almost no power to affect my country's decisions, aside from a single vote in elections that are increasingly meaningless. But when the country mobilizes for a war to root out a man whose stated goal is to rid the world of 'America' (and breathe deep of that particular statement: Here we have a man born of Saudi royalty, whose organization and it's sibling organizations have consciously increased the violence in their home territories, whose religious beliefs include the intellectual and social stunting of half the world's population, and whose law stems from a barbaric and Iron-age belief in mob rule and retaliation, calling for the destruction of the only state to guarantee freedom from precisely such things in it's foundational documentation) and expands it to include ousting a tyrant whose means of subjugation has included roving political death-squads, deliberate starvation, and crimes against humanity limited only by the lack of larger-scale technology, what's not to like? What human being, especially a morally interested American, would not be in favor of liberation?
Ten years later, the piles of civilian dead have begun to pile up high enough to block view of such a goal. The ethics of those who were entrusted with the leadership and prosecution of these two wars have shown their colors, and a clamor of white noise has deafened the greater part of the American people from hearing how bad it's gotten "over there." Those of us who've been in favor of the ideals of liberation, who despise the suppression of women and the enforcement of rulership at the point of a gun, have increasingly had to choke down indelible images like Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, and the idea of the 'Green Zone' where privileged Americans and their allies can be reasonably safe while the rest of Baghdad - a city five times older than America - burns around them. The hope that America might pull itself out of this ethical doldrum dwindles every day. The point of no-return was probably crossed (not with a bang, but a whimper) several years ago. By the time Barack Obama took office, he was handed a war between a half-dozen militant sectarian and regional forces in Iraq, and a war in Afghanistan that had been tried and failed dozens of times since the age of Alexander the Great.
I was recently asked by a friend whether or not, if I could look into the future and see this outcome, I would still have been in favor of the wars when the first was started in 2002. I would, of course, have to answer 'no.' I cannot say that the outcome has been worth the war crimes, the economic hardships, and the severity of propaganda inflicted on the American people over the last eight years. But the nature of human beings is that we are emphatically not prescient. We cannot say what the future will be, we can only hope that we have sufficient intellectual and moral rigor to do the right thing when the time comes, from the enlisted soldier who has to decide whether an unarmed man is an 'enemy combatant', to the President of the United States listening to his peers and advisors about whether there are weapons of mass destruction threatening his country.
I voted for Al Gore in 2000. I did not vote for the man who would eventually take us into these wars. I voted for John Kerry in 2004, faced with four more years of Bush's obvious cronyism or the possibility of a 'liberal' victory in-country. In 2008, I voted for Barack Obama, partially on the hope that he would find some dignity in the disgrace the years of warfare had brought upon us. Bogged down as he is by conservative lockstep, there isn't, in my mind, any hope of redeeming our adventures in the Middle East. Things have soured beyond my ability or willingness to apologize for. But looking back to 2002 and 2003, knowing not just that cruel people existed in those countries and that America possessed the strongest and most able military in the world, I am not sorry that I was in favor of liberation. If liberation-from-tyranny truly is the sole motive for a war, then the war is just. At the time, I thought that was what we were signed up for. Only now are we starting to see through the smoke.