© 2009, UrbisMedia
Over 25 years of guiding and escorting tours of Americans to foreign countries on four continents I occasionally heard my fellow countrymen expression sentiments about the places we visited that amounted to “why can’t these people be like us?” Sometimes this was just missing the way we Americans have become accustomed to things, but there were enough times in which such utterances were clearly expressions of cultural superiority. I often wondered why these people were traveling in the first place if they wanted everywhere to be like home. Sometimes I think that America would prefer that the world be like an American city, a city with ethnic neighborhoods where they can get a good pizza, deli sandwich or burrito, but where they are always in control and outnumber “them,” and where the residents of such places are like quaint “guests.”
Naïve chauvinism is somewhat tolerable among American tourists; but as foreign policy it is serious, deadly and wrongheaded. Regrettably, it is also what characterizes much of American foreign policy.
I’m writing this for Barack Obama. He’s a smart guy and I won’t likely be saying anything that has not crossed his mind already. But I hope, now that he is in power, that he will consider such points again. (By the way, Mr. President, I am completely paid up in my taxes.)
So here goes. My understanding is that you intend to take the troops released from Iraq after you shut down that Bush blunder and send them over to Afghanistan, where things are not going all that well. Before you do that, I would like you to consider this. We have already killed a lot of Al Qaeda and Taliban—enough Al Qaeda to be able to say that we have avenged (at least numerically) the Americans who were killed on 911. We have probably killed a lot more of them. We could, on that score (apt word), call it a day in Afghanistan, and pick up and go home, victorious. But, if our objective is to exterminate AQ, we are going to be there forever. And we are not going to be victorious.
Now this is not rocket science; just a little history/anthropology (which means it was well over the head of Bush and Condi Rice.) Many peoples have tried to conquer Afghanistan (the only reason I can think of is the heroin). Most recently, the British didn’t win (and couldn’t add it to their empire), the Soviets didn’t win (and lost their empire). And we won’t win. It’s not that complicated really; a lesson it seems we failed to learn with our experience in Vietnam. These people are there for the duration, and for them that is forever. They have no other place to go; they are already home. They are fighting for everything they have. We are there as long as the politics at home allows it. The Afghans, like the Vietnamese, will outlast us. The only way we can beat them is to completely annihilate them, and that probably means nuking the country (then, in a few thousand years after the radiation subsides, we can grow our own heroin). Maybe we think we can pull this off anywhere because we did such a good job of wiping out Native Americans. But look, even they are getting some revenge with their casinos scalping all those grayhaired seniors out of our ineritance.
As sort of a sidebar, this is also the problem of the so-called “Holyland.” The Israelis are regarded, an with good historical reason, as “invaders” in the homeland of the Palestinians, a people whose ancestors, the Cananites, probably have an older residency there than the Hebrews (Abraham, the father of the Hebrew nation, hailed from Ur, in Mesopotamia—today he would be an Iraqi.)* However one feels about Zionism, and the Jews meriting the “right of return” after the Roman induced diaspora and the pogroms and the holocaust, the Palestinians feel they got screwed out of their homeland and will not likely ever give the Israelis true peace.** America is mixed up in this one, too; nothing like having foreign policy incompetents, influenced by American Jewish Defense bond buyers and whackjob American Christian Zionists hoping to convert Jews at the “End Times.” Ya just can’t make this crap up.
So this is the lesson that countries that want to ram their religions and/or political systems and cultures down the throats of other peoples by invading and occupying their homelands. They will find a way to beat you down. They will weaponize themselves as martyrs to their faith and cause and do everything they can to take you with them. Eventually they will make things so miserable and expensive for you that you will want to go home. Your pride will goeth before your fall.
The recent, peaceful, elections in Iraq will be touted by the American right-wing as a vindication of the Bush years of spending a trillion dollars and killing five thousand Americans and a hundred thousand Iraqi. To them it will be a public relations coup. But it will have been purchased with enormously expensive baksheesh, buying off sheiks, warlords and politicians. My money is on a reversion to sectional and sectarian hostilities—probably nudged and supported by Iran—that will eventually make its way to a sharia system. There is the oil to fight over; it’s not about democracy.
The Iraqis will at least be a relatively learned people. The Taliban is already busy blowing up schools for girls, and the boys will not need to know much to grow into old men who use young girls as virtual sex slaves and shoot them in the head at soccer games as half-time entertainment. There is no question that the continuance of this sort of culture is an odious blot on human rights. But America (and the First world in general) does not have an antidote for such cultural dilemmas and references to protecting human rights ring of hypocrisy when circumstances such as Darfur, Zimbabwe and the Congo are all but ignored.
The world had a lot of respect for us (not so much admiration), and we have lost a lot of that. Some of it was going to go away anyway. We still have a lot of money and power, but we promote a governmental system and then operate it like a bunch of jerks, “electing” the likes of George Bush. Think about it: Bush wants to turn many countries into democracies. Then they see Bush, head of the word’s most famous democracy. It’s a freakin’ contradiction—Bush/Democracy.
But America’s easy, halcyon days are over. It’s all going to be harder in the future. China and Russia are not so much the big, fearsome enemies as they are cases of “be careful what you wish for. We wished they would stop being communist. Neither didn’t, but they changed enough to become big problems for us; one controls huge amounts of energy and the other makes all our crap and finance our stupid wars. The easy 25 years after WWII are done; Argentina, India, the EU, along with the old East Block and China are for real. To be cliché about it—the global playing field has leveled out. Just at the time we needed to be smarter—after the turn of the century—we put one of the most stupid men on the planet in the most powerful position.
Moreover, during the Bush years, the very countries he has declared as enemies—North Korea and Iran (both of the “axis of evil”)—have become stronger, and nuclear weapons have proliferated, not diminished. The potential for a detonation by a terrorist organization has increased, not lessened along with the possibility setting off a full-scale confrontation between major powers.
With Obama we might be able to get back our respect and fend off economic disaster and nuclear risk brought on by those eight years. But we will never get all the way back t some mythical “morning in America.” It never could be sustained, even without Bush, because some of it is historical, structural, in the cards.
That feculent whiff coming from your shoes up to your knees—that’s deep doo-doo, dude. Get used to it. Part III is coming.
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© 2009, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 2.12.2009)
*The question of an appropriate homeland for the Israelis was considered in these pages sometime ago in DCJ Archives No. 4. 7: “. . . and they shall be let to the land of corn” The Cornhusker Solution.
**Every once in a while, since the Holy Land is holy to three major religions, the Christians like to get into the act. They like to come into the Holyland and kill off some Muslim infidels, so they can be free to persecute those “Christ-Killers” themselves.