Iraq changed who we are as a nation. A new moral tone was set. [View all]

[madfloridian]

We have never really gone back to what we were before. We humiliated Iraq's leader publicly, executed him openly, executed his sons and put their bodies on display....how does a country get back its old soul after that.

We became a country that openly invades another country based on lies, and we did it on TV. We called it Shock and Awe.

That day when the invasion started with all its shock and awe on TV to impress the world with how strong and tough we were, I just cried. There was nothing left to do but cry.

Even politicians who had grave doubts went along rather than buck popular opinion. George Bush used what he called plain talk. Tough talk. That kind of talk was comfortable to Americans after 9/11. One had nothing to do with the other, but that didn't matter.

I will never forget an article in the Guardian UK that absolutely had Bush analyzed perfectly. The reporter called him a Christian Cowboy.

It's a great read.

From Bush's perspective, the resistance of the international community to the war on Iraq is therefore to be expected - it's part of the script. So too, perhaps, is Bush's notorious inarticulacy. For the cowboy is essentially a man of action, not talk. "So self-contained is the later western hero that he seems to exist beyond the everyday commonplaces of talk and explanation, of persuasion, argument, indeed beyond conversation altogether," writes Princeton academic and western expert Lee Clark Mitchell.

The image of the lone gunfighter who is suspicious of fancy talk and who acts fearlessly to defeat the forces of evil is the defining mark of a certain sort of US national pride. Some have argued that this pattern exemplifies a sort of redeemer myth. The hero is saviour to the town - thus the cowboy's violence is justified. For in the absence of the rule of law, or in a town where the sheriff is seen as weak (here we see the part assigned to the UN), the cowboy must carry the responsibility for defeating evil.

Bush seems to believe that this cowboy justification for war is also a Christian rationale for war. It isn't. For the cowboy film represents the development of a distinctive ethical stance that is defined in the strongest possible contrast to that of Christianity. "The meek ain't goin' to inherit nothin' west of Chicago," said Conn Vallian in The Quick and the Dead. In this cowboy film, Christianity is depicted as weak and ineffectual, something commonly practised by women and wholly incapable of dealing with the challenges of the frontier. In High Noon Grace Kelly begs Gary Cooper not to take up his gun and face the Miller Gang, but he ignores her Quaker principles. In order to create a safer future for them both he must return to unfinished business and kill the enemy. For the cowboy any sort of Christian forgiveness is never an option. Redemption only comes through violence.

Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal Constitution had some now famous words to say about what it was really all about.

I can't find the original link now, but here are two pertinent paragraphs.

I believe this was 2002.

The official story on Iraq has never made sense. The connection that the Bush administration has tried to draw between Iraq and al-Qaida has always seemed contrived and artificial. In fact, it was hard to believe that smart people in the Bush administration would start a major war based on such flimsy evidence. The pieces just didn't fit. Something else had to be going on; something was missing. In recent days, those missing pieces have finally begun to fall into place. As it turns out, this is not really about Iraq. It is not about weapons of mass destruction, or terrorism, or Saddam, or U.N. resolutions.

This war, should it come, is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by those who believe the United States must seize the opportunity for global domination, even if it means becoming the "American imperialists" that our enemies always claimed we were.

Naomi Klein wrote in The Nation in 2003. Again I can't find the original link, but I kept notes to several articles about that time.

2003 Naomi Klein. Iraq will emerge to find "that their country has been sold out from under them"

Privatization in Disguise

Entirely absent from this debate are the Iraqi people, who might--who knows?--want to hold on to a few of their assets. Iraq will be owed massive reparations after the bombing stops, but without any real democratic process, what is being planned is not reparations, reconstruction or rehabilitation. It is robbery: mass theft disguised as charity; privatization without representation.

A people, starved and sickened by sanctions, then pulverized by war, is going to emerge from this trauma to find that their country has been sold out from under them. They will also discover that their newfound "freedom"--for which so many of their loved ones perished--comes pre-shackled with irreversible economic decisions that were made in boardrooms while the bombs were still falling.

They will then be told to vote for their new leaders, and welcomed to the wonderful world of democracy.

President Obama is unfortunately reaping what was sown by Cowboys Bush and Cheney and some Democrats who did not take a stand.