[Mb-civic] MUST READ: Descent into anger and despair - James Carroll - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Descent into anger and despair

By James Carroll  |  April 17, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

LAST WEEK, the rattling of sabers filled the air. Various published 
reports, most notably one from Seymour M. Hersh in The New Yorker, 
indicated that Washington is removing swords from scabbards and 
heightening the threat aimed at Iran, which refuses to suspend its 
nuclear project. It may be that such reports, based on alarming insider 
accounts of planning and military exercises, are themselves part of 
Washington's strategy of coercive diplomacy. But who can trust the Bush 
administration to play games of feint and intimidation without 
unleashing forces it cannot control, stumbling again into disastrous 
confrontation?

An Iranian official dismissed the talk of imminent US military action as 
mere psychological warfare, but then he made a telling observation. 
Instead of attributing the escalations of threat to strategic impulses, 
the official labeled them a manifestation of ''Americans' anger and 
despair."

The phrase leapt out of the news report, demanding to be taken 
seriously. I hadn't considered it before, but anger and despair so 
precisely define the broad American mood that those emotions may be the 
only things that President Bush and his circle have in common with the 
surrounding legions of his antagonists. We are in anger and despair 
because every nightmare of which we were warned has come to pass. Bush's 
team is in anger and despair because their grand and -- to them -- 
selfless ambitions have been thwarted at every turn. Indeed, anger and 
despair can seem universally inevitable responses to what America has 
done and what it faces now.

While the anger and despair of those on the margins of power only 
increase the experience of marginal powerlessness, the anger and despair 
of those who continue to shape national policy can be truly dangerous if 
such policy owes more to these emotions than to reasoned realism. Is 
such affective disarray subliminally shaping the direction of US policy? 
That seems an impudent question. Yet all at once, like an out-of-focus 
lens snapping into clarity, it makes sense of what is happening. With 
the US military already stressed to an extreme in Iraq by challenges 
from a mainly Sunni insurgency, why in the world would Washington risk 
inflaming the Shi'ite population against us by wildly threatening Iran?

But such a thing happened before. It was the Bush administration's anger 
and despair at its inability to capture Osama bin Laden that fueled the 
patent irrationality of the move against Saddam Hussein. The attack on 
Iraq three years ago was, at bottom, a blind act of rage at the way Al 
Qaeda and its leaders had eluded us in Afghanistan; a blindness that 
showed itself at once in the inadequacy of US war planning. Now, with 
Iran, nuclear weapons are at issue. And yet look at the self-defeating 
irrationality of the Bush team's maneuvering. How do we hope to pressure 
Tehran into abandoning its nuclear project? Why, by making our threat 
explicitly nuclear.

Seymour Hersh, citing a ''former official," reported that US warplanes 
near Iran ''have been flying simulated nuclear-weapons delivery missions 
-- rapid ascending maneuvers known as 'over the shoulder' bombing -- 
since last summer." Such an exercise puts on display an American 
readiness to use tactical nuclear weapons against Iranian nuclear 
facilities. Whether the maneuvers have actually been carried out or not, 
even authoritative reports of them represent an extraordinarily 
irresponsible brandishing of the heretofore unthinkable weapon: To keep 
you from getting nukes, we will nuke you.

As if that were not irrational enough, the Bush administration chose 
this month, in the thick of its nuclear standoff with Tehran, to reveal 
plans for a new nuclear weapons manufacturing complex of its own -- a 
major escalation of US nuclear capacity. This represents a movement away 
from merely maintaining our thousands of warheads to replacing them. The 
promise of new bombs to come, including the so-called bunker-buster 
under development, may be the final nail in the coffin of the Nuclear 
Non-Proliferation Treaty, which binds Washington to work for the 
elimination of nukes, not their enhancement.

Set the cauldron of Iraq to boiling even hotter by daring Iran to join 
in against us. Justify Iran's impulse to obtain nuclear capacity by 
using our own nuclear capacity as a thermo-prod. How self-defeating can 
our actions get?

Surely, something besides intelligent strategic theory is at work here. 
Yes. These are the policies of deeply frustrated, angry, and 
psychologically wounded people. Those of us who oppose them will yield 
to our own versions of anger and despair at our peril, and the world's. 
Fierce but reasoned opposition is more to the point than ever.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/04/17/descent_into_anger_and_despair/
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