Before the neofascist ascendancy that currently dominates America, people on both the left and the right used to criticize the imprecise use of language. If we don’t call things by their right names, the thinking went, we will mistake their nature, and we will perform the wrong actions, failing to achieve our goals and getting tangled up in unpleasant surprises of our own making. Conversely, people who seek to deceive, manipulate, and ensnare use the wrong names for things because it helps them to steer the unwary onto a path they would never choose by themselves.
Since Nine-Eleven, this advice is no longer heard. The entire country accepted the Orwellian violation of the English language, common sense, logic, and decency without demur. "A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves."
If an American republic is to survive, we need to begin peeling back the layers of deceit and returning to some common sense and wisdom. While the whole pack of destructive neologisms cannot be untangled at once, today I would like to make a start with just one: "the war in Iraq."
That there is a war in Iraq is totally unquestioned in the conventional wisdom. It is self-evident such a war exists and – so narrow is the scope of discussion tolerated in the MainStreamMedia – it is never questioned. To question it would be to put in doubt one’s loyalty or even one’s sanity.
Yet in this case (as in many others) it is the conventional wisdom that has taken leave of reality. In reality, there was a war in Iraq five years ago. It lasted less than a month. In a brilliant and brutal campaign, the U.S. military crushed Saddam Hussein’s army and seized control of Baghdad. At that point the Iraq War came to an end. What has been going on there ever since is not a war. It is an occupation.
Now see here where people can get into trouble through words. If they are carrying out an occupation but think they are fighting a war, they will do all sorts of things wrong. They will seek a conflict with two sides, an enemy to fight, men to shoot, bomb, interrogate, and imprison, positions to destroy, territory to capture. They will be looking everywhere for a front line, a rear, allies, enemies, and ... victory.
But none of this applies to an occupation. An occupation has different rules, different means, different ends. The indifference of Bush and his advisers to history, the conceit of the neoconservatives, ensured that the necessary measures would not even be guessed at. Each step along the way was missed, each brick in the construction was tossed carelessly into a heap, until in the end a hideous mess had been created that no genius could undo, into which they sent our soldiers to die and to kill.
The only other route out for the Iraqis, to have their internal power struggle and discover who was strongest and therefore able to establish a truly sovereign government, was closed to them, while self-serving politicians accuse them of acting like irresponsible children as they die by the thousands. The presence of the American military might not be able to establish a government, but it could prevent anyone else from doing so.
No, there is no Iraq war. Today there is hardly even an Iraq occupation. There is a botched occupation that has resulted in the last and worst of all plagues of the state, anarchy. It’s an old-fashioned word, deprived of its terror because we haven’t seen it in a long time. It means, for those living in it, that the security of your home will be violated, your daughter raped, your son kidnapped or worse, your livelihood destroyed, and all hope for the future placed on hold, for those who yet live.
There was a war in Iraq. It succeeded. There was an occupation of Iraq. It failed. There is now anarchy in Iraq. It will continue until we leave.
That is the truth.
The neofascists hope we will stay there forever – "a hundred years," said John McCain, well in tune with them, and, just to show he meant business, he followed it up with "maybe ten thousand years."
But anarchy is a form of disorder, and disorder begets more disorder. When enough disorder is begotten, it expands to encompass those who begat it. This is the profound rule of fascism and the fate of all societies that fall for it: Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany...
As our economy staggers under the hundreds of billions the government pours cheerfully into the black hole of anarchy in Iraq, Americans are losing their homes to banks so Iraqis can lose theirs to bombs. They are seeing the real value of their retirement accounts halved as the dollar falls against every major currency in the world, on its way to becoming the minor currency of a former great power.
In the end, it will profit no one: not the U.S., not Iraq, not Israel.
But there is still time to cut our losses and, perhaps, take back some measure of control over our destiny.