Iraqi Finis

In Main Currents of Sociological Thought, French Sociologist Raymond Aron devotes a significant portion of Volume 1 to the observations Alexis de Tocqueville made during his visit to the United States around the center of the 19^th Century. His interpretation was incorporated into the book Democracy in America.

It was generally understood that the United States was a country of enormous resources and had adopted a form of government that was equally unique and promising. This form of government would always be in a conflict between two dependent forces: equality and freedom. Changes in one of these variables would induce changes in the other.

I’m not going to attempt to justify this conclusion historically but would instead comment on what one possible future the United States faces in 2010.

According to Paul Krugman:

Jane Mayer’s new article in The New Yorker about the superrich Koch brothers and their war against Mr. Obama has generated much-justified attention, but as Ms. Mayer herself points out, only the scale of their effort is new: billionaires like Richard Mellon Scaife waged a similar war against Bill Clinton. Meanwhile, the right-wing media are replaying their greatest hits. In the 1990s, Mr. Limbaugh used innuendo to feed anti-Clinton mythology, notably the insinuation that Hillary Clinton was complicit in the death of Vince Foster. Now, as we’ve just seen, he’s doing his best to insinuate that Mr. Obama is a Muslim. Again, though, there’s an extra level of craziness this time around: Mr. Limbaugh is the same as he always was, but now seems tame compared with Glenn Beck.

Limbaugh and Beck?  Take a guess. They are less than anecdotes of history; their insignificance and historical consequence are such that someone reading this in the future would understandably wonder just who were they.

The unrelenting discord in the current U.S. political scene is not between freedom and equality however; rather it has freedom and equality on the same side, both being endangered by reactionary forces whose intentions appear to be bordering on treason and establishing a perverted imitation negating both. How else could what we now see possibly be described? From Main Currents of Sociological Thought:

Curiously, an individualistic society of this kind reveals certain common traits with the isolation characteristic of despotic societies. Despotism, Tocqueville said, tends to isolate individuals from one another.

Whatever these forces represent, they have always been lurking in the shadows and it was the Democratic Party that rose to oppose them.

Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League as a Republican ally eager to “squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.” When John Kennedy’s patriotism was assailed by Birchers calling for impeachment, he gave a major speech denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”

There are those on the left that claim the Democratic President Obama and the Democratic majorities in the U.S. House and Senate have so far not made similar inroads into the lunatic fringe that endangers their congressional majority and the existence of a Democratic Administration in the White House. This is not a given and the second possibility is much less likely than the first.

However the Democrats first need to comprehend what they are facing. It is easy to dismiss the deeds and actions of the insane collection that has for all practical purposes captured the Republican opposition as trivial. Certainly in the long term they are inconsequential, however there are so many problems now facing the country, the Obama Administration’s agenda must not be interrupted by the acts we are now witnessing. Indeed there is much more that needs to be done. I have discussed this elsewhere on this blog. See for example Neo-Right - Neo-Nazi.

Here is an example. One of the chief nut cases out there is Sharon Angle. She is running for the U.S. Senate in Nevada and has been described thusly:

Sharron Angle has no business being in the Senate, at least according to many of her fellow Nevada Republicans. The GOP mayor of Reno called Angle "wild" when he publicly endorsed her opponent in the November election, the embattled majority leader Harry Reid. Attempts by Angle's advisers to soften her image amount to a game of media whack-a-mole — there's no keeping down the real Angle, whose head pops up roughly once a week to unfurl something bizarre. She has said she'd like to "phase out" Social Security and Medicare and eliminate the Energy and Education Departments and the EPA. She called BP's handing more than $20 billion to the victims of its negligence a "slush fund." She referred to the separation of church and state as an "unconstitutional doctrine." She's mused about "Second Amendment remedies" if the ballot box doesn't deliver redemption. She agreed with a talk-radio host that there are "domestic enemies" currently sitting in Congress. And on and on.

Get the picture?

Returning to the major theme, one also must recall the seminal issues of the 2008 election. Health Insurance reform and Wall Street regulation were two of major importance. The previous 5 years though had been consumed by a single issue actually, the U.S. invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. One could argue that the invasion actually wasn’t successful and what happened after the American military deposed the governing authority should correctly be entitled the War in Iraq. It is difficult to dispute this. I explore this in detail in Wars That Are Chosen and elsewhere on this blog. So soon it seems to be forgotten. One issue that should be approaching a level of consciousness is that the U.S. combat role in it is over.

One hopes for the best outcome for U.S. interests in the future. Now Republicans are attempting to justify the cost. Actually that the Americans are now leaving can be credited to the actions of the Iraqi Sunni faction. See The Endgame in Iraq elsewhere on this blog. Moreover one would be well advised to remember the timing of events leading to the current stage. Basically in sequence:

Bush claimed Iraq was a threat to its neighbors and a strategic threat to the U.S. and serviced as a base for Al Qaeda operations. This was false. Because of U.S. presence Al Qaeda did arrive in large numbers.

Intelligence provided to justify an invasion of a country that was not a direct threat to the U.S. was “cooked”, falsified, perverted by the Republican president and his cabinet.

The planning of the invasion and its aftermath was incredibly misguided by those who had no clue regarding what resources were needed for a successful and orderly occupation and rebuilding of the country.

Political leadership in Iraq and in Washington was totally inept leading to years of incredible levels of violence and destruction of a country and its civilization and death and injury to hundreds of thousands of innocents.

Had the Democrats not gained control of Congress in 2006, the direction of the American presence would not have changed.

Had the Republican candidate won the presidential election in 2008, in all likelihood the scope of the military action would have broadened and we certainly wouldn’t be leaving at this time.

Coupled with the stealing of the presidential election of 2000, all of this amounts to the most serious crime of the 21st Century so far. And I haven’t forgotten the events that occurred on September 11, 2001 but it is not credible to validate any other conclusion.

The American people began turning away from the Bush administration's prosecution of its policies in Iraq in 2006. The Iraq war policies and the course of action of the Bush administration in general were repudiated in the presidential election of 2008. Those who now believe in a version of reality where these years are glorified are simply performing duties for entities of wealth and power whose existence in the U.S. are understood only by a few.

It involves a family known as the Koch’s, mentioned above, and their surrogates are known as the deniers of reality. Here is more about this group.

The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to “educate,” fund, and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and a historian, who once worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas-based think tank that the Kochs fund, said, “The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it’s been all chiefs and no Indians. There haven’t been any actual people, like voters, who give a crap about it. So the problem for the Kochs has been trying to create a movement.” With the emergence of the Tea Party, he said, “everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there—people who can provide real ideological power.” The Kochs, he said, are “trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.”

They have always been there and their class consciousness is quite obvious. Alexis de Tocqueville and Aron certainly understood the presence of their opposing undercurrents to the unique qualities of the United States. Again from Main Currents of Sociological Thought:

One of the least doubtful characteristics of American society is precisely this conviction that all the professions are honorable or, more accurately, are essentially of the same nature.

Obviously in 2010 this is not so.

There are those who argue that the Obama Administration and the Democratic Party have neglected this task or failed to recognize and deal with it as urgently as they should. While there may be some truth in that, there is still time to take the offensive and influence the November 2010 election.

To accomplish this, the following needs to be pounded in again and again:

Remind people what a disaster the Iraq War was to both the United States and the people of Iraq and the illegal complicity of neo-cons and the Bush administration in its conduct. As mentioned, one can only hope for the best regarding their future and ours.

Remind people of the economic debacle of de-regulation.

Continue to counter the Bush era redistribution of wealth from the middle class and working class to the extremely rich.

Continue to address the problem of climate change.

Continue to press the need for additional economic stimulus to promote job creation and job growth to deal with the still disastrous levels of unemployment in a recovering economy.

Ending U.S. involvement in the conflict in Afghanistan as scheduled.

Continue to reform Health Insurance and the Health Care monopoly.

Simply explain how the Republican party has behaved in the U.S. Congress in the past two years and what will happen to working class and middle class Americans if they regain any seats there.

End the dependence on oil and develop clean energy technologies and a clean (non-fossil fuel) economy that creates clean energy jobs. Because of the influence of Big Oil, the U.S. is failing to become a player in this market which will be a dominant one in the future.

Continue to advocate and support progressive/anti-nazi initiatives.

If this is done, right wing extremism and its minions have no appeal and will be forgotten in the same manner they were in the past. It would be helpful if this task can be accomplished quickly as the world is far too complex to dwell on self serving ideologies whose words are hollow and devoid of substance, appealing only to motives based essentially on fear and deception.