The Colonial Imperative of George W. Bush's War against Iraq.  (1/10/07)

Before I begin to outline the reasons I believe America's war against Iraq is primarily a colonial enterprise, as opposed to anything else it has been called, I should say what I have been doing to prepare for this excursion into uncharted territory.  Mostly I have been reading.  A list of books includes: Chain of Command by Seymour Hersh; The Assassins' Gate by George Packer; State of Denial by Bob Woodward; Against All Enemies by Richard Clarke; Cobra II by M. Gordon and B. Trainor; Fiasco by Thomas Ricks; The Greatest Story Ever Sold by Frank Rich; State of War by James Risen; The One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind; and, Imperial Life in the Emerald City by R. Chandrasekaran.  Not every book here is just about the war in Iraq.  Not every book written on the subject is listed.  One might be able to say that these books reflect opinions by people who are biased against neocons, Bush, conservative ideology, etc., and none represent positive evaluations of our involvement there, as Bush argues, but the truth is that few people who support the objectives of the war, as defined and redefined by Bush over the last four years, has written much about it.  

The colonial imperative that drives the Bush administration's war against Iraq is not an invention of anyone living today.  The impulse has guided American policy since before the policy was American.  The British, French, Dutch, and Spanish came to the New World as colonizers and stayed as colonial occupiers.  Strictly speaking anyone who holds a political office in any part of the Western Hemisphere today who traces his or her ancestry back to a European source, as opposed to a native American one, is a colonial occupier.  The impulse to colonization, however, while clearly articulated in Thomas More's Utopia, has its deepest roots in Biblical traditions.  The stories about the Promised Land in the first five books of the Old Testament are nothing more nor less than stories about God sanctioned colonization.  The point is that the land in question was occupied by an indigenous population that was considered by the Israelites to be morally unworthy of of possessing the land on which they lived.  Their supposed moral depravity gave the Israelites the right with God's permission and by His commandment to annihilate them and seize their property.  This same tradition became Christian when the early Church Father, Tertullian (260 AD), articulated the concept of seizing land from heathens and infidels by right of moral superiority.  Thomas More was probably more dependent on Tertullian for his sense of colonization than he was on the Old Testament since his discussion of it closely parallels the early Church Father.  (For a comparison of concept and language usage click Tertullian; Peckham; More.)

The one thing, more than any other, that signals Bush's intention to wage a colonial war against Iraq is the way he has characterized the presumed enemies of America since 9/11.  The people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Iran are always characterized as "tribal" people.  As everyone in America certainly knows, tribal people are always led by vicious, cruel, and savage warlords.  We know this, of course, because the original colonizers of the Americas characterized native Americans in precisely those same terms--with one word substituted for another--the leader of the tribe was a vicious, cruel, and savage war chief, as opposed to a warlord.  Geronimo, for instance, was an Apache medicine man, a spirit-walker, but was always referred to as a war chief.  Consistently true across the board was one further fact that mattered--the colonizers were always of a different religious faith than were the tribal people.  The Israelites waged war against the unworthiness of the pagans who occupied the Promised Land.  The English, French, Dutch, and Spanish waged war against native Americans because we were not Christian and generally refused to be converted to Christianity.  If, and when, we did convert, we still had to be attacked pre-emptively because we were either faking our belief or would inevitably backslide into heathen practice at the first beat of a drum.  All the above mentioned people are Muslim.  We are at war, therefore, against Islamo-fascist radicals of one stripe or another.  The point is that Bush's war against the terrorists will last as long as there is a single unconverted Muslim anywhere in the world.  Again, as everyone already knows--tribal people are evildoers who must be brought to justice.  Hence, we will wage our holy and just was against them forever and forever--if Bush has his way.

There is no compromise possible on the moral ground of this struggle; there never has been.  The question is always of a different sort, is always based on a different, and always unspoken, truth and reality.  To a colonizer religious preference is essentially meaningless since it is only a justification for the course of action that produces the desired result.  The native, tribal people, whoever they are, whatever belief system they follow, always possess something that the colonizer wants for his own.  The Israelites wanted to possess the Promised Land.  They waged genocide against the indigenous people to get it.  The Europeans wanted the land and the wealth of the Americas.  They waged genocide against the indigenous people to get it.  We want Iraq's oil reserves, and if Bush has his way, we will wage a war bordering on genocide against the Iraqis to get it.  Is that too harsh a judgment to render?  Of course it is.  Too harsh because our war against Iraq has been sanctioned by God.  God does not support genocide; hence, our war against Iraq cannot be genocide.

Beginning on 9/11/01 a dangerous perception of how best to pursue American foreign policy emerged in the Bush White House.  Before the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, indeed before George W. Bush entered the Oval Office, American relations with the rest of the world were determined, more or less effectively, by a process of evaluating facts and evidence in a search for the best policy to pursue when addressing this or that international or global problem.  Certainly, at times, facts and evidence were "cooked" and distorted to justify a particular course of action that was preferred by the person in the Oval Office, without regard for whether or not the action served the best interests of the American people.  Again, at other times, inappropriate facts and evidence were held up as a reason to pursue a policy that might not have been the best choice to address a particular problem.  Human error, misjudgment, faulty cause and effect connections, and a wide range of other failures of clear-headed reasoning are conditions one can only expect when dealing with global issues that resist easy solutions.  One can only hope that the best decisions will be made, based on the best available evidence, but sadly that is not always the case.

Since 9/11, in fact, a different standard has been instituted in making foreign policy decisions--in a real sense, when Bush draws a distinction between pre- and post-9/11 thinking, it can be said that he is supporting one type of evaluation (his own) over everyone else's methods of reaching policy positions.  The difference is easy to express: in place of facts and evidence used in reaching a reasoned, and reasonable, conclusion, in reaching any policy position, Bush depends solely on whatever he happens to believe.  This is evident in his rhetoric.  He never says "I know"; he always says "I believe."  To know something implies that a process of fact-evaluation has taken place and that a conclusion has been reached that is consistent with those facts.  To believe something, on the other hand, does not require any fact-evaluation process, does not need any correlation between fact and conclusion to support its assertion, is not dependent upon any method of analysis whatsoever, and thrives best in situations where reasonable methodologies are systematically rejected.

Consider the question of God's existence, for instance.  Over time many different attempts have been made to prove the validity of the assertion that God most certainly exists.  Without mentioning any specifically, all have failed in one way or another to satisfy standards of philosophical verification.  All such assertions have failed to establish "proof" certain that God exists.  People of faith, George W. Bush among them, respond by pointing out that belief in God's existence does not, and should not, depend on facts and evidence but on "faith" alone to confirm the truth of His existence.  Belief is all that matters where this question is concerned and anyone who demands facts and evidence of God's existence is clearly a non-believer, is one of them not one of us.  As long as faith versus fact, and the methodologies they respectively engage, are limited to questions about the existence or non-existence of supernatural beings, the difference is completely benign, innocuous, and essentially, irrelevant.  Believing in God has no effect on His existence or non-existence.  Having faith in God's existence, no matter how many people embrace the notion, no matter how few might believe the opposite, does not change or affect the material reality of the Supernatural's being or non-being in any way whatsoever.  Belief has no effect, one way or the other, on reality.  Belief does not, and never has, determined what is true or not true. 

In virtually any other context, however, substituting belief structures and methodologies for ones based purely on fact and evidence, can generate incredibly dangerous and destructive consequences.  In his arguments for going to war in Iraq, as everyone knows, Bush claimed repeatedly that Saddam Hussein had large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction that he intended to use to attack the US.  He stated that claim over and over again.  Intelligence reports, from the CIA and other government agencies at the time, tended to dispute that claim by citing a lack of evidence to support it.  After Baghdad and Saddam fell to US forces in April, 2003, and after unrestricted and exhaustive searches of Iraq failed to produce the stockpiles of WMD's, Bush maintained his initial claim by saying that, before the war "everyone" in Europe and elsewhere believed that Saddam had those weapons.  He continues to assert his belief, against all fact and evidence to the contrary, that Saddam had those weapons and that Saddam's intention to use them against the US justified Bush's decision to invade Iraq.  Eventually a small number of 30-year-old chemically equipped artillery shells were discovered and Bush's supporters claim his beliefs were true all along.  These weapons were probably given or sold to Iraq by the US government during Saddam's war against Iran in the 1980's.

Tomorrow night Bush is going to deliver his first State of the Union address since the Republicans lost control of the US House and Senate.  Experts, perhaps based on White House leaks, predict that much of his speech will be centered on domestic issues.  One certainly cannot blame him for avoiding mention of Iraq since several influential members of his own party have condemned his "new way forward" in the war on terror.  His plan to send more troops into the Iraqi civil war has been met with nearly universal objection.  The "surge" in troop strength will actually raise the number of troops there to just below the level that were there during the Iraqi elections.  The increase will be reached by delaying the return of people already there while accelerating the deployment of others who were going anyway in a few months.  If nothing else is done to increase the troop levels, in a few more months the total will again decrease to where it is now as those ending their deployment return home.  The fact that Bush's new plan is nothing more than an accounting trick to fool people into believing that Iraq can be handled the way Enron was destroyed tends to obscure the blind stubbornness of the man who owns the war.  Everyone is so busy talking about what does not actually exist (a real escalation of the war) that they are not looking at the motivation that underlies Bush's determination to win a victory from a situation where none can be managed.

He believes, as a matter of faith, that victory in Iraq is possible.  Consider what that actually means.  The worst thing a person of deep religious faith can do is lose his or her faith.  To admit defeat in Iraq is the same as betraying God if you are George W. Bush.  God told him, apparently, that victory was achievable in Iraq.  Sure, God was going to test him, test the strength of his faith, by throwing up difficulties, like sectarian violence that spiraled out of control into full-blown civil war between Sunnis and Shiites, but no matter how badly plans went in the war the true believer would never lose his faith.  What people call determination, stubbornness, etc. is actually blind faith in the righteousness of his holy war against terrorists, against "tribal" people, who are led by warlords, and are cruel, vicious, savage evildoers.  There is no way, new or old, out of Iraq for the American people as long as George W. Bush is President.

In Bush's mind the opposition that has appeared in Congress and among the majority of the American people to his determination to pursue his "stay the course" strategy in Iraq is simply another aspect of the testing God has devised to shake his faith in the moral superiority of his plan for victory over the evildoers.  Bush dismisses opposition as the work of a godless secular humanism that has control of the worldwide media.  When he characterizes dissenters as traitors, appeasers, and agents of failure, he is saying that people are not righteous enough to hear the word of God as clearly as he does.  On top of Bush's faith-based perception and practice of foreign policy is the other aspect of his Middle Eastern debacle, which may be the only thing that justifies his invasion of Iraq from a practical point-of-view; that is, the ocean of oil on which he intends to build permanent US military bases to establish perpetual ownership of the region's energy resources.  This should not surprise anyone, since Sir George Peckham argued in his exhortation to Queen Elisabeth I that the British colonizers of the Western Hemisphere should build forts in the northeastern US in anticipation of the hostility of the indigenous population.  To make this proposal less odious to the Queen, who was leaning against the enterprise, Peckham invented tribes of inland cannibals who were waging war against the more docile and compliant natives in the regions already occupied along the coast.  The British military bases would help the colonizers protect their peaceful natives from the cruel and vicious warlords of the cannibals. Insurgents in Iraq threaten peace-loving Iraqis and only the American colonizers can protect them by building permanent military bases in their country. Makes one wonder why Bush/Cheney have failed so far to claim al Qaeda, et. al., are also cannibals.