Power, Politics, and Pain
By Crispin Sartwell
Power, politics, and pain seem to work in collaboration to induce a kind of psychosis. One day you're creating a fiction, the next you think it's real as a boulder. One day you're mouthing words to the world's press, perfectly well aware that you haven't said anything. The next day you're staking your sacred honor before God on the same rhetorical flourish.
On June 30th, if all goes according to plan, the United States will, with great fanfare, transfer sovereignty to a newly constituted Iraqi state.
Now, I'm not sure what "sovereignty" might mean: perhaps we'll hand someone a palace and a piece of paper. But I'm pretty sure what "power" is, and we'll still have all of it, in virtue of the fact that we have the nation under military occupation, which we are increasing rather than withdrawing. Sovereignty in this case is the power of a puppet.
In a touching expression of our continuing dedication to self-determination for all peoples - in virtue of which we stand as a beacon of freedom to a benighted world - Colin Powell has announced with great fanfare that should the newly-constituted sovereign authority of Iraq ask the American occupiers to leave, we will.
Oddly, though, we will have handpicked this authority, and will have his palace surrounded by heavy arms at the moment he asks us to leave. He is liable to be a bit nervous as he asks us to go. And when, heedless of all but his sovereignty, we go, a whole bunch of unhappy Iraqis will grab the sovereign authority, push him up against a wall, and execute him as a traitor for his collaboration with the occupiers.
Then I guess we could return with a clear conscience.
Every event that takes place constitutes a moment for us to reinforce our self-delusion. What we believe about ourselves becomes more emphatic every time it is falsified by reality.
We've liberated Iraq by blitzkrieg, and kept it free from its own people by force of arms. The sexual torture of prisoners - which now more and more seems to have been a systematic practice of humiliation and blackmail - violates everything that we stand for as a people, everything that makes us the great, unique nation we are. I wonder what the Iraqis think we stand for. I wonder what you think we stand for.
New York Times columnists David Brooks and William Safire have recently, again, claimed that the invasion of Iraq is an "idealistic" crusade. Perhaps when they think of Dick Cheney or Richard Perle, they think of men that would sacrifice anything for the ideals of freedom, justice, and equality: martyrs to human generosity of spirit and universal love, Christ-like lovers even of their own enemies.
Brooks, like so many others, sees an American armed forces filled with heroes. He said so again after seeing photos of some of them grinning and smoking in front of piles of naked Iraqis. Why does he think so? Or what does he think a hero is? Perhaps after all it doesn't matter, and all that matters is the rhythm of the words, the billowing of the flag on a sunny Memorial Day, the Declaration of Independence in a glass case, protected by armed guards.
Perhaps truths, even the self-evident variety, mean whatever we tell you they mean, like freedom, like heroism, like sovereignty. Perhaps they mean nothing at all.
Crispin Sartwell's latest book is "Extreme Virtue; Leadership and Truth in Five Great American Lives."
