George W. Bush: Plausible Deniability.  (04/01/03)

 

The USS Cheyenne launches tomahawks in an attempt to decapitate (scalp) the regime of Saddam Hussein.  Hence the war began.  Apaches are beaten back in their first assault against the Republican Guard south of Baghdad.  One was shot down—its two pilots were captured.  Kiowa assault forces are expected to play a key role in the battle for the capital.  Commanches are everywhere and does anyone wonder how it came to be that the US military now depends almost exclusively on native Americans to fight its wars of preemption against the forces of evil Bush sees behind every tree in the forest of his foreign policy initiatives?  Reading even ordinary dispatches, or hearing and seeing them, from the embeds in Iraq one gets the impression that no white-men at all are involved in any aspect of the war against Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

 

Must be something like “plausible deniability” going on here.  After all, when Bush, et. al., get hauled before an international tribunal to face charges of war crimes committed against the people of the Middle East (who believes his crusade is going to end with Iraq) he can always claim it was a band of off-reservation, renegade Indians (Cheyenne, Apache, Kiowa, Commanche, Arapahoe, etc., using the weapon of first choice for primitive savages—the tomahawk) who are actually responsible for the war crimes that occurred in Basrah and Baghdad.  Who would be able to deny it?  It was the Cheyenne that launched the first strike, tomahawks, against Saddam’s bunker.

 

Plausible deniability is a slippery slope, of course: not that anyone is likely to be taken in by Bush’s transparent attempt to blame native Americans for his war against Saddam but one can also ask the other, more terrible, question too; that is, who exactly is it he is trying to delude?  This all comes back to the issue of preemption in the first place anyway; not to the naked concept of such aggression as such, but to the notion that the Cheney-Perle version of it (1992) was somehow the first time American war policy hinged (or unhinged) itself around an absolute right of white-men to do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted to do it to anyone whose skin was a darker shade than their own.

 

The first time preemption was employed by white-men against an enemy of color was shortly after 1492 when Columbus began enslaving the natives of Hispaniola to dig out the gold he thought was buried under the soil of their island home.  So now it’s oil, instead of gold and silver, under the sands of Iraq that the architects of preemption are so intent on preserving for the people of color who live above it.  To this day, of course, the English and Spanish descendants of those first crusaders against native evil in the Western hemisphere deny that any one of them, then or now, ever did anything worthy of blame or notice in their wars of preemptive annihilation against the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas.  Is it just a coincidence now that only England and Spain support the Bush-war against Iraq?

 

The idea that preemptive strikes against innocent people were invented by Bush’s national security team for use specifically against Saddam ignores the fact that Bush’s ancestors, if they were among the first Europeans to arrive on “American” soil, employed “shock and awe” tactics of their own, biological weapons like smallpox among them, to begin the process of separating native Americans from their lands, possessions, and lives just as ruthlessly as he is doing it now to any Iraqi citizen who stands in the way of his white-man’s foreign policy objectives.  While most Europeans living now on native American soil deny any complicity or responsibility for what happened in North American 500, or 300, or 50 years ago, the real point of “plausible deniability,” in naming military hardware after the people who were systematically annihilated by wave after wave of white faces, is that blaming the other, as Bush has done in the case of Saddam and the Iraqi people, for whatever terrible fate awaits them at the hands of white people, is a lesson he (Bush) learned from his cowboy days in west Texas.  Cowboys have always blamed Indians for the atrocities they (cowboys) have committed against the innocent (Indians, Iraqis, Kurds, Saudis, etc.).  The methods and techniques of justification prior to the actual assault are relatively unchanged over the centuries—all one needs to do is sufficiently demonize the other—Saddam pours acid on children—to raise adequate outrage and support from right-minded moral people to accomplish by whatever means are necessary the elimination of that potential threat to all the world’s children.  If several hundred or thousand actual Iraqi children die as a result of Bush’s attempt to save them from a worse fate at Saddam’s hands, then the greater good is served by protecting everyone else.  Native Americans scalped white women with tomahawks whenever possible and, a fate Saddam hopes to escape but probably won’t, is that he and his people will someday come to exist only in the names the US military uses to identify its most potent and deadly weapons of mass destruction.

 

In a chilling example of how demonization works, Jonathan V. Last, an editor for the right-wing Weekly Standard, recently (04/03/03) penned a column about an analysis of war crimes in Iraq compiled by Amnesty International, an organization long hated by fundamentalist ideologues.  He bemoans the fact that the report spends more time and space “attacking” the US military than it does Saddam Hussein’s evil regime, as if Bush needed any help outlining all the terrible atrocities Saddam has committed against the civilized world.  One reason for the perceived “bias” of Amnesty International’s coverage could be that the US, not unlike Hitler’s Germany in 1939, has invaded with preemptive and overwhelming force a relatively defenseless country whose only provocation may turn out to be that it is populated by people of color who do not speak English as well as Bush pretends he can.  If no weapons of mass destruction are found in Iraq, and none have been so far, the rationale for Bush’s war hardly rises to the level of Hitler’s claim that Poland was actually part of German territory prior to WWI.  This is what Last said:

 

“But a few sentences later, Amnesty International returns to form, attacking the United States for the March 31 incident in which seven Iraqi women and children were killed when their vehicle stormed a coalition checkpoint.”  Jonathan V. Last, “Calling It Like They See It,” The Weekly Standard (04/03/03).

 

Demonization often turns on a single word.  A vehicle filled only with Iraqi women and children, who were also unarmed, “stormed” a highway checkpoint manned by coalition soldiers.  While it might be true that the heat of battle and the terror it creates can be reasonably cited as a cause for the tragedy of US Marines killing women and children, to claim, as Last has done here, that the “vehicle stormed” the checkpoint is clearly a use of language that so distorts the truth, even as it blames the victims for their own deaths, that Last himself should be charged with the crime he defends others against.  As a noun, the word storm means “a violent, sudden attack on a fortified place” (as in “Desert Storm” for instance); as a verb—“to capture or try to capture by a violent, sudden attack.”  On the battlefield one can understand and forgive 19-year-old soldiers for mistaking the intentions of women and children fleeing a war-zone inflicted on them by the very people who were manning the checkpoint; but, how do you excuse the editor of the neo-conservative Weekly Standard, writing well after the fact, caught in the light of certain truth, and in the peace and serenity of his own ideological safe-haven, for perpetuating the very myth (Iraqi women and children are dangerous combatants “storming” the white-man’s checkpoint) that justifies Bush’s war against all people of color, not just the ones today who own one-sixth of the world’s known oil reserves.

 

This is at the very heart of demonization.  Preach the lie to the choir, to everyone who already believes that the monstrous women and children of Iraq are white America’s true enemy, and Americans everywhere will be prevented from ever questioning the validity of Bush’s first-strike, preemptive warfare against all people too weak to defend themselves against his overwhelming force.  Name the force itself after native Americans, call it Cheyenne, Apache, Kiowa, Commanche, Zuni, arm it with tomahawks, and no one will ever see the white-face behind the atrocity of Bush’s war against Iraq.

 

One word of warning, however: when a thoughtless man calls out to the spirits of a  civilization his ancestors murdered by naming his weapons of mass destruction after their living memory he runs the risk of inviting a visitation by the very spirits his thoughtlessness offends.  Bush and his followers (80% of white America) are not cautious enough, not wise enough, not intelligent enough, not adroit enough to escape the consequences of their cowboy ideology in the face of the spirit of their first victims.  The Cheyenne, the Arapahoe, the Zuni, have not forgotten and the spirits never sleep.