To War or Not To War
A Triptych Worthy of Hamlet
 

  

Harry T. Cook
By Harry T. Cook
9/26/14

 

 

Reading It Wrong?

 

The United States seems always to be misreading the Middle East. President George W. Bush, prodded by the neo-cons led by Dick Cheney, invaded Iraq in 2003 with empty certainty (to say the least), outrageous assumptions and almost no foresight.

 

Now there is pressure to go to war with ISIL. What is true, according to scholars whose work I follow, is that any U.S. military intervention would amount to a tremendous propaganda value for the Islamic State, serving only to recruit jihadists of all sorts and conditions.

 

To the extent that ISIL may be a threat to the American homeland, it would only grow exponentially were the United States to expand its military role in the Middle East. These are people with knives in their teeth. They relish death for the cause.

 

President Obama's much-criticized reluctance to commit ground troops -- thus far -- has seemed to keep ISIL's attention on the region in which it is now ascendant -- though the recent beheadings of U.S. and British citizens constitute a clear warning that the jihadists may have higher hopes.

 

Perhaps, though, President Obama sees parallels to the political cautiousness of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 and 1940 when the country was not with him politically even in view of what was quite accurately supposed about Nazi atrocities. The imprisonment, torture and killing of Jews are in the same terrible category with beheading journalists, raping women, persecuting religious minorities, etc. etc.

 

Withal, these are complicated matters. Americans by and large do not want to send more of our citizens into combat, especially in the Middle East where anything goes. Is that an end to it, then?

 

* * * * * 

 

Perspective

When, ages and ages hence, our current global cultures are being excavated and studied -- perhaps for clues as to how and why we annihilated so very many of our own species, not to mention parts of the planet itself -- archaeologists among the survivors may ponder the images of headgear that had been worn by men who appear to have been religious leaders of one kind and another.

While such adornment may suggest to us -- as we view them now in the 21st century -- important differences in the allegiance of those who wore them, the specimens could seem to those who would view them in 4514 to represent religious leadership in general. It is possible, though, that the better scholars among them may be able to identify the various styles of head covering as having belonged severally to those who were called "ayatollahs," "imams," or "rabbis," or "bishops" -- the high muckamucks in the business of representing god to humankind and vice versa.

Further excavation may turn up evidence that the various constituencies of the guys with the hats, inspired by their fervent benedictions, had murdered each other unmercifully -- all in the name of god.

In such a case, doubtless there would be much headshaking around the digs. "What were they thinking?" could be a question on their lips. Some wise one among them might say: "Thinking? No. When our human ancestors gave into blood lust because they were convinced the god they imagined demanded it, anything could have happened -- and, of course, did happen. Thinking had nothing to do with it. Poor bastards."

 

* * * * * 

 

Repeating History?

 

Without a doubt, I shall grievously disappoint such respected colleagues as Catholic Bishop Thomas Gumbleton by what I am about to write. Bishop Gumbleton is a one-man apostolate of peace known the world over. I count him as a dear friend.

 

I have been pondering the cauldron of the Middle East and find myself in the grip of a peculiar kind of fear I might have felt had I been a knowledgeable adult 75 years ago -- a fear that monsters were on the loose in the world and would stop at nothing to strike down anything in their way to global hegemony.

 

As I review the wanton rampages of the al-Shabaab in Somalia, the Boko Haram in Nigeria, the jihadists of ISIL and the zeal of the latter to create a true caliphate to be governed by the deeply misogynist and otherwise intolerant -- and intolerable -- Sharia law, I cannot avoid seeing the likeness of such movements -- if that's the right term -- to that of Adolf Hitler's Jew-hating mobs running roughshod across Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.

 

Of all the world's leaders at the time, the only one who saw the truth of Nazism and felt compelled to sound a call to arms against it was Winston S. Churchill. By the time he was named First Lord of the Admiralty in 1939 by the tired and much diminished Neville Chamberlain, Churchill was already on Franklin D. Roosevelt's case, trying to get aide to Britain as it bravely tried to repel -- and did eventually repel -- the German horde.

 

Hitler used those uncertain days before the onset of the world war to enslave the people of several theretofore free states and to escalate the lethal pogroms against Jews. Roosevelt's handwringing and the reluctance of many Americans to send ground troops into the European war only prolonged the agony and kept the ovens going round the clock in Auschwitz.

 

Maybe, then, it is time to declare all-out war on ISIL, on what's left of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Boko Haram and al-Shabaab, and in the name of humanity put them all down, render them incapable of doing further harm and re-educate them as to what a civilized world will permit and what it will not permit.

 

Said Edmund Burke: "Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it." We do know it. Will we suffer it to be repeated?

   


Copyright 2014 Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.
 


Readers Write
Re essay of 9/19/14 Vox Populi

 


Billie Ragland, Ferndale, Michigan:  
It is curious that some Americans have more free speech than others. I have to use my free speech for things like groceries and student loan payments. (This thought paid for by Americans for America.)

Paul Trammel, Ames, Iowa:

Tell that wisdom from the housetops. Our senatorial race here in my newly adopted state is entirely affected by outside money, and plenty of it. In such a situation as this, we could elect an ape. What happened to democracy?

 

Danny Belose, Independence, Missouri:

If we had but 1% of our passion to defeat terrorism (ISIS in its present form with new incarnations waiting in the wings) directed toward the defeat of oligarchy there might be a flutter of hope for this new nation of mine. We delude ourselves that the rise and fall of myriad kingdoms and mighty civilizations throughout various epochs will not in the future list the U.S. One can't help wondering how near is our tipping point?

 

Blayney Colmore, Jacksonville, Vermont: 
Is your frustration at the point at which something akin to a Bolshevik uprising is the way to undo the mess oligarchy and corporate personhood have made of things in our country (and the world)? Given the history since the Bolshevik revolution, an unhappy resolution. I can't say how much being over seventy, and having encountered the same political and ecclesiastical frustrations you have, has to do with my pessimism, with the possibility of political salvation, and the hope of improving human nature. I tend to read things in ascending, or maybe descending, cycles in which the excesses of the moment eventually result in enough frustration to cause people to risk the familiarity of their lives to agitate for change. Perhaps the carnage of our civil war is why we haven't experienced an uprising against the gross unfairness our politics are creating today. Or that life hasn't yet become so intolerable for those who are being squeezed out, that risking everything to change it doesn't seem worth it. Or has TV and the Internet provided bread and circus enough to distract us from all that? Something someday may finally persuade us   that when the economic incentive becomes our central motivation, countless other deep longings are left bankrupt. Eventually that will become intolerable.

Tracey Martin, Southfield, Michigan:
"... laboratory of democracy?" Unfortunately, the Supreme Court left unlocked the doors to that edifice. And masked Kochs sneaked in late at night, smashed the equipment needed for testing its reality and spilled the serum of vitality all over the floor.Fortunately, they left footprints behind. But, so far, the cops have decided that no trace-back is good trace-back. Hopefully, your flashlight beam will help expose the vandalism.

 

Dorothy Simonson, Brookline, Massachusetts:

Here in what some of us think is the cradle of American democracy it is, as you say, the big bucks that generally prevail in elections. Normal, middle-class Americans have not very much say at all in who represents them. 'Tis a pity, as my grandmother would say.

 

Tom Hall, Foster, Rhode Island:

Right again. As Ken Burns' current documentary on the Roosevelts shows time and again, our way of life and governance is crucially dependent on such enlightened reforms as TR's trust busting and FDR's social security law. Indeed, the film's many parallels to the modern scene are alternately enlightening and scary. Until the kleptocrats are required to share enough of their pelf to allow everyone a decent living, we will remain on a path that can end only in some form of turmoil and thus worsen the lot of all.

 

Laura Anderson, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania:

I keep getting e-mail about a constitutional amendment that would ban all that big money. I would drop dead of wonder if the Republican House of Representatives would ever vote for that. Someone said, "Money is power." Somebody else said, "Knowledge is power." I think money carries the day -- sadly. Thank you for writing so forcefully about this.

 

Fred Fenton, Concord, California:

Our problem at present is the vast difference between the vox populi in red and blue states. Congress, the Supreme Court, and the country at large are clearly divided. Instead of moving forward as a nation we are lost in partisan warfare fueled by big corporations and their lobbyists. The great lesson from the Ken Burns series on the Roosevelts is the dedication of Teddy, FDR, and Eleanor to the welfare of all the people, not just the moneyed class to which they belonged.  We must somehow recover a dedication to the common good and stand up to the special interests or we will continue to flounder as a nation.

 

Richard Olson, Herington, Kansas:

The Reagan presidential campaign brain-trust recognized it could not succeed in 1980 solely supported by traditional GOP voters, so it brokered a deal with the nascent Evangelical horde that emerged in the 1970's. David Koch was the VP candidate that election cycle of the Libertarian Party, which received near-universal media dismissal and ~1% of the vote. The mainstream GOP voters who edged over to make room for Christian Conservatives in order to defeat Carter are now cowed by an alliance between two groups of True Believers: those Evangelicals they rather reluctantly merged with, and a booming (hopefully temporarily) Libertarian Tea Party segment which materialized immediately upon the election of a Black president -- and may simmer down and dissipate when he departs, unless a female Democratic presidential candidate also addles their judgement, prompting them to continue to vote against their own interests. What's this about a second group of True Believers, besides right wing Christians? Libertarian/Austrian Economics adherents possess a belief in human nature and how Free Markets -- a quite fuzzy concept which makes claims only adherents believe it is capable of delivering upon, not unlike every existing or previous theological doctrine dreamt up by dogmatic humans -- will deliver purity and perfection. When you hear GOP politico's mention "natural order", they are talking about negligible government that permits Free Market just reward, just desserts outcomes. This is perhaps the biggest Big Money contingent most empowered by Citizens United, definitely the most ideologically cohesive, and they will deliver a neo-feudal society on steroids and crack unless they return civilization to its Strong Man Rule pre-historic Free Market roots instead. A good primer on Austrian economics and Libertarianism, if one is starting from near zero, is the recent "Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty" by Daniel Schulman.     

 

What do you think?
I'd like to hear from you. E-mail your comments to me at revharrytcook@aol.com.