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Good vs. Evil or Spy vs. Spy? by Rick Gee The
United States government’s war on terrorism has been cast as a fight
pitting good versus evil. “We” are the good guys of course, and the
terrorists are evil. While the latter is agreed upon by virtually all
Americans, so, unfortunately, is the former. Consider
the malleable definitions of good and evil and ally and enemy as molded by
Washington. During the Iran-Iraq War, which took place during the Reagan
years, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was a friend of the US government,
which was publicly neutral but covertly supplying him with military aid.
Within three years, Saddam suddenly became The Evil One when he invaded
Kuwait after a wink from Washington. Our former friend had to be stopped! Voilà!
– The Gulf War. Despite
Saddam’s sheer evil, Washington stopped right at his doorstep and left
him in power. Conventional
wisdom held that Bush 41 didn’t have the mandate from “the
coalition” to push on to Baghdad to capture or kill the tyrant. The real
reason was so that they would still have him around to point to as a
mortal threat. This helped to justify enforcing “no-fly zones” within
a sovereign nation and punishing the Iraqi people (innocents) with
destructive sanctions that have no effect on Saddam and his grip on power. Osama
bin Laden’s trek from US-sponsored good guy to the latest Evil One
followed a similar path. During the last decade of the Cold War, the U.S.
fought its final proxy war with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. On the
political front, President Jimmy Carter fired the first salvo by
boycotting the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, a dreadful decision that
meant nothing to the Russians and Afghanis dying on the battlefield but
decimated the life-long dreams of thousands of athletes used as political
pawns. Predictably, the move backfired when the Soviets executed a
tit-for-tat boycott of the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles. Carter’s
asinine public response to the Soviet invasion aside, the U.S. government
secretly supported bin Laden in his fight against the Russians, supplying
him with money, weapons and training. He was a de facto employee of the
CIA. When that relationship was no longer expedient, Osama became the
enemy, especially after September 11. Just as Saddam was let off the hook
in 1991, bin Laden is nowhere to be found, and is not even talked about
anymore. But using the symbol of evil as a lightening rod for American
revenge gave the U.S. brain trust the cover to curtail individual
liberties and wage war wherever they choose, with a compliant nod from
Congress. Though
Osama has been lost in the fog of war, the confrontation in Afghanistan is
now the longest US war since Vietnam. Depending on which source is
accurate, 1,000 to 4,000 Afghan civilians have been killed by US bombs.
These deaths are euphemistically referred to as “collateral damage.”
But are those Afghan lives intrinsically worth less than the innocent
lives lost in New York? Are they somehow more deserving of a violent and
senseless demise? While
operations continue in Afghanistan, the list of targets grows to include
Yemen, the Philippines and the former Soviet republic Georgia. Forgotten
is the idea that most Americans favored: locating, apprehending and
bringing to justice those responsible for planning the 9/11 attacks. In
addition to these new targets, the U.S. is also making plans for a return
to Iraq--Desert Storm II, if you will. See, Saddam is amassing weapons of
mass destruction (WMD) and--déjà vu--he must be stopped. This time,
Washington will act alone if necessary until they effect a “regime
change.” Experts estimate that an occupation force of over 100,000
American troops will be required to “stabilize” the situation, an
occupation that promises to be endless. Some
would call it irony--others, hypocrisy--that the U.S. government opposes
WMD capabilities for Iraq despite its own status as the world’s leader
in the development and manufacture of biological, chemical and nuclear
weapons. In
fact, it is the U.S. government that is most likely to employ nuclear
weapons in battle (not to mention the only government ever to do so). In a
classified report called the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which was
delivered to Congress on January 8, the Bush administration ordered the
Pentagon to draft contingency plans for the use of nuclear weapons against
at least seven countries: Russia, China, Libya, Syria and the "axis
of evil”--North Korea, Iran and, of course, Iraq. Most
alarmingly, the Bush administration plan reverses a 20-year policy of
consigning nuclear weapons to the category of last resort. In fact, the
NPR states that planning nuclear-strike capabilities involves the
recognition of “immediate, potential or unexpected” contingencies. In
other words, the use of nuclear weapons is no longer a last resort but
could be a viable military option under a number of ambiguous scenarios. Despite
the simplistic explanation that the terrorists hate us for our freedom and
prosperity, their motivations are clearly more complex than that. One
compelling theory is “blowback,” a term coined by foreign policy
analyst Chalmers Johnson. Blowback is the often violent reaction to
America's officious foreign policy adventurism. If you thought 9/11 was
horrific, imagine the blowback Americans will suffer if their government
unleashes nuclear weapons on the world again. Would not such an appalling
act be considered evil? Most
Americans want to believe that their rulers are benevolent, if for no
other reason than the leaders are Americans, too. But what most Americans
don’t recognize--or perhaps shudder to acknowledge--is that it is the
worst among us who tend to rise to the positions of power. That power
wielded at the national level means the power to unleash weapons of mass
destruction, the very pretext the government will use to justify the
second full-scale war on Iraq in a dozen years. With
all this in mind, do you truly believe that the expanding war on terrorism
is a simple matter of good versus evil? Or is MAD
magazine’s “Spy Vs. Spy” a more accurate analogy? One spy wore
the white hat, the other the black, but each was equally insidious.
Remember the film Cape Fear? A deranged convict seeks revenge on
the attorney who improperly defended him. The original seems like it’s
directed by George W. Bush; Robert Mitchum is the evil convict stalking
the lily-white lawyer, Gregory Peck. The remake is more plausible. Martin
Scorsese elicits a performance from Robert DeNiro that exudes evil, but
casts the Nick Nolte lawyer as anything but a saint, a complex and flawed
man. Could
it be that the inevitable malfeasance of those in power manifests itself
in both despotic dictatorships and representative democracies? Is it not possible that even some
Americans are capable of evil acts, and that some of these evil actors
make their way into the highest positions in government? If
you’re still with me, dare to ask yourself one more question: who poses
the greater risk to your life and liberty, Saddam Hussein or George W.
Bush? * * * * * A version of this column originally appeared in the March 2002 issue of The Valley News.
Rick
Gee resides in
paradise, also known as Santa Fe, New Mexico. He writes about liberty, sports,
film and other topics for The Valley
News. In addition to being a Root
Striker, he is a columnist at anti-state.com
and a commentator at LewRockwell.com. |
