[Mb-civic] Descent into anger and despair

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

  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/2006/04/1
7/descent_into_anger_and_despair/


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"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

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