The Iraq/Iran? War
“The Iraq War”
I’m presently watching “Meet the Press” with Tim Russert and presidential hopeful and ex-Senator, John Edwards. I like Edwards; I’m not sure I trust or like Russert. I find him to be an equivocator and a tool, and I mean a ‘tool’ of the Republic Party as well. They are discussing Edwards’ position on the Iraq war at the lead up and the early years of the war. Edwards has been forthright about his mistake about his early support for President Bush and the war. He continuously and fervently and honestly, I think, apologized for being dead wrong about his support for these abysmally prosecuted and pathetically weak excuses for starting the war in the first place.
As I’ve said before I am intrigued by American politics; I’m also thoroughly alarmed by them too. It would appear that our friend (yours and mine), President Bush, will be taking his Iraq war on the road to Iran. It is just not Bush, of course, who is pursuing this disquieting route to hegemony in the Middle East. He has lots of company, led by, the de facto, president of the United States, Dick Cheney and his disturbing band of neocon nutjobs. Bush, as usual, allows himself to be propelled along these disastrous courses but makes sure he does not miss one of his workout times; priorities, you know.
I really believe as these scary events unfold that we, the international community, are witnessing the demise of the American empire. George Bush has almost single-handedly brought American power and prestige to its knees. Pretty impressive, you must admit, for something he has been able to accomplish in less than six years. This incurious, indolent man has supervised (I’m not sure if that is the right word) his country’s remarkable destruction right before his too-close-set eyes. For all intents and purposes, Japan, and especially, China own America. The Americans owe hundreds of billions of dollars to each of these creditor nations. Because Bush refuses to tax the rich and the super rich in America, he must pay for his Iraq war by borrowing from these two nations. The children and certainly the grandchildren of present day Americans will be left with this huge bill to pay. But Bush does not care, by that time he will be dead and universally acknowledged as the worst American president ever!
An interesting, and even more disturbing aside to all of this is the posture of the Republic party. They have circled the wagons on this war and are steadfast in their support of Bush, their leader. The Republicans, who have shown an interest in running for president in 2008, have to a man continued to mouth the GOP talking points; it’s as if the disaster that is Bush/Cheney never happened. It is clear, at least to me, that the Republic party will continue to bow to the most extreme and wingnuttery flanks within their party. They will attack mercilessly and without any sense of decency anyone and everyone who dare disagree with their policies and their divisive and purely partisan planks in their platform.
In this they will be ably supported by a compliant and lazy national press and FOX News, as well as certain high profile newspapers throughout America. Until these Americans realize how disastrous this cozy and inherently evil partnership continues to cripple American government at home and abroad. The key word here that explains too thoroughly, I’m afraid, is the greed that is the basis for the Republic party and too many people who share in this short-sighted and wrongheaded policy.
In other words, it will be the same old, same old. It is too clear that the Republic party has no intention of changing, nor has it shown any sense of learning from all their mistakes in government the past six years. That they will elect no one to office in two years is a clear and present possibility. Just remember what Brian Mulroney did to the Progressive Conservative party of Canada in the 1980s. Did they not have but two members for the entire country? They could have, and perhaps did, caucus in a phone booth.
posted by Paul at February 09, 2007
1 Comments:
Speaking of Iraq and Iran, I recently read some great books by Edward Said on cultutral representation and interests of power. Here's a short excerpt on his theories, from a larger work I did, that may seem somewhat self-evident now, were groundbreaking for his time, circa 1979:
In the introduction to Orientalism, Said lays out his methodology. While his studies are not ultimately confined to the Near East, Said did consider Orientalism primarily in the context of the relationships between the Near East and Franco-British and American theories of representation and cultural politics. He identified three interdependent designations for the term Orientalism. First, Orientalism is a designation for the field of teaching, writing about, or researching the Orient. Second, Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an epistemological distinction between the “Orient” and the “Occident.” Finally, Orientalism is a corporate institution for dealing with the Orient. As Said noted, one “deals with” the Orient by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, teaching it, settling it, and dominating it. The Orient, as an idea, has had a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that has given it presence for the West. In addition, the constructed ideas of both the East and the West support and, to an extent, reflect one another. The West speaks for the Orient, and this ability stands for a pattern of strength between the East and West and the discourse the ability itself enables. A scholar thinks about the Orient because he or she can think about it with little resistance on the Orient’s part (ibid., 7). The Orient is represented as a truth, yet this says much more about the West than it does about “an Orient.” Orientalism is a distribution of geopolitical awareness into texts and an elaboration not only of an East-West distinction, but also of the interests that this distinction creates and sustains (ibid., 12). The writer, for example, has a deliberate way of addressing the reader and speaking on the Orient’s behalf. At the same time, every author assumes an Oriental precedent affiliating itself to other works. Said asserts that “Orientalism is after all a system for citing works and authors” (ibid., 23).
In light of his findings, Said argues that “the object of knowledge is inherently vulnerable to scrutiny; this object is a ‘fact’ which, if it develops, changes, or otherwise transforms itself . . . nevertheless is fundamentally, even ontologically, stable” (ibid., 32). Orientals were, for all practical purposes, a Platonic essence that “in everything opposed the clarity, directness, and nobility of the Anglo-Saxon race” (ibid., 38). Knowledge of the Orient, because it was created out of a relationship of power and domination, in a sense created the Orient and the Oriental. The Oriental is contained and represented by dominating frameworks, derived from an attitude of cultural superiority, or a kind of intellectual power relation that enables the Orientalist to generate a discourse on “the East” without relinquishing his or her superiority to it. Like any set of socially constructed truths, “Orientalist notions influenced the peoples who were called Orientals as well as those called Occidental, European, or Western” (ibid., 42). For Said, truth becomes a function of learned judgment, “not of the material itself, which in time seems to owe even its existence to the Orientalist” (ibid., 67). This didactic process becomes a self-containing and self-reinforcing system in which “objects are what they are because they are what they are, for once, for all time, for ontological reasons that no empirical material can either dislodge or alter” (ibid., 70). Far from being a static thing, however, Said sees the “identity of self or of ‘other’ as a much worked-over historical, social, intellectual, and political process that takes place as a contest involving individuals and institutions in all societies . . . [a construction] bound up with the disposition of power and powerlessness” (ibid., 332).
In Covering Islam, Said sharpened his theory to include a more refined discussion of the way in which the media apparatus, as a tool of cultural hegemony, is used to define and control representations of Islam. The reporter, instead of trying to learn more about the country, takes hold of what is nearest at hand, “usually a cliché or some bit of journalistic wisdom that readers at home are unlikely to challenge” (Said 1981, xi). Said claimed that the way in which knowledge of the Arab world is compartmentalized and shaped eliminates particularities and that, in the interest of maintaining a static and controlled idea of the Arab world, “cultural and psychological qualities [or particularities] underlying the ‘Persian psyche’” are essentialized and transmitted as truth (ibid., xxvii). In addition, the study of Islam is motivated by political interests, for whenever “political tension has been felt between the Occident and the Orient . . . there has been a tendency in the West to resort not to direct violence but first to the cool, relatively detached instruments of scientific, quasi-objective representation” (ibid., 24). The powerful concentration of mass media can be said to constitute a core of interpretations, presenting a certain picture of Islam that is motivated by interests of power.
Said used the Iranian revolution to demonstrate how the media’s representation of Islam and the Arab world functions within a framework governed by certain rules and conventions, ones that dictate how the media can get ideas across intelligibly. Furthermore, since the “media strive to reach the same audience which they believe is ruled by a uniform set of assumptions about reality, the picture of Islam . . . is likely to be quite uniform, in some ways reductive, and monochromatic” (ibid., 45). If the Iranian revolution is represented on television by scenes of chanting mobs citing anti-American slogans, for example, the threatening quality of the spectacle limits “Islam” to those very characteristics, which in turn engenders the feeling that something negative is confronting “us,” the viewers (ibid., 44). If this representation is accepted as an essentialized truth, it is unsurprising that a confrontational response will be adopted and perpetuated. Said claimed that the circularity of covering Islam relies on the fact that neither of the two conditions for knowing another culture are present, these being “an uncoercive contact with another culture through real exchange, and a self-consciousness about the interpretive process itself” (ibid., 142). Thus, he said, the press’s coverage of Islam is not a genuine interpretation at all but rather an assumption of power whereby the media says what it will of the Arab world because it can.
- Pogue Mahone
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