They done him wrong

It was the deep thinkers who did George in. Obviously, heavy ponderers have been telling men of action what’s wrong since the newcomers moved into the cave next door and ruined the neighborhood. Plato had a fascist solution and Marx a commie one. None of these catchall means to enlightenment and progress was too terrible until doers decided that the thinkers were right and moved to implement programs for mutual betterment.

Most utopian solutions aren’t very dangerous and go away without having harmed too many folks in the process. The small ones such as Brook Farm and the Amana Community just withered away, but occasionally, as in the case of the Bolsheviks, the efforts to save the rest of us from ourselves can get downright frightening and vast nations and their neighbors can be devastated in the name of good, or at least their version of it.

So it was with our friends the neoconservatives. Like Marx, the neocons read history carefully and, like Karl, saw an inevitability in their reading of the past that would lead to a new nirvana. Much like one of their heroes, Ronald Reagan, they saw before them a city on a hill and the certain spread of democracy, capitalism, and globalism to the unwashed of the world. But aside from flag waving and sloganeering, their view of history wasn’t very important and certainly not harmful until their man in the White House – George - had a real problem.

Obviously, September 11, 2001, was one of the defining days in our history. The attacks on New York and Washington and the downed plane in Pennsylvania galvanized the American people like nothing since Pearl Harbor. Retribution was demanded, and George Bush was open to suggestion on how to act decisively.

The first steps for the U.S. were very simple: follow the trail to those who had conspired with the perpetrators of the attack, kill or capture them, topple governments that were aiding and abetting those who had attacked us, and call upon all of our contacts in the world to otherwise undermine this group of killers. Virtually all Americans were on board with these and any other reasonable actions.

But there were men and women about with bigger and better ideas on how to deal with this world wide conspiracy of Islamic fundamentalist killers and at the same time advance the interests of the United States by spreading the neocon world view. While the military and security forces of America went about their tasks of justice and retribution, the neocons saw an opportunity to spread democracy and prosperity to the heart of Islam from whence the attacks had sprung.

This is not to say that the neocon view of history is invalid but just because they might have been right in their analysis that doesn’t mean that by applying outside pressure the tipping point could be achieved and the inevitable creation of free, independent, and prosperous nations across the great swath of Islam would be the fruits of America’s labor.

While I won’t argue that things don’t look good for capitalism and democracy, it’s my view that by buying into this neocon dream, George Bush created a hornets’ nest of problems for us. Instead of encouraging the acceleration of history with carrots, he was happy to apply the birch switch and therein lay his doom as a successful president.

From all that I have read and the little I’ve seen, Mr. Bush has a messianic personality and it took little prodding for him to buy into this solution to many of the problems he faced. In retrospect, the invasion of Iraq is seen clearly as a blunder without peer in American history, but the confluence of so many needs and opportunities for so many sectors of society was almost irresistible to a person of Bush’s type and tens of millions of his followers.

It’s Bush’s war and Bush’s blunder, but he was tempted by so many interests: military efficiency, energy independence, Middle East pressures, the pleas of Iraqi expatriates, the need for national vengeance, and many more. But he needed a rationale for the attack on Iraq that answered a higher calling, especially after the WMD and the Iraq/al Qaeda conspiracy fell through, and the neocons with their offer of a chance to tip history in favor of the president’s messianic view provided it.

So, while George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld will get the most of the ink when the histories of this failed presidency are written, the neocons will get very few column inches on their fateful role in this blunder. Too bad, they deserved far more.

One week to go. Turn out the enablers of this fiasco. Be sure to vote; the enablers will be out in force.

Blog on!

Wild Bill