Empire and Privilege

Empire and Privilege

Everything depends on how you frame things and I am writing this note to Canadians, Americans and indeed citizens of the globe to warn about the false framing the upcoming conflict with Iran will generate not only among red blooded conservatives but even many ‘liberals’. This is a framing taken from the standpoint of empire and its privileges. For this framing there is an American occupation of Iraq which is not an occupation at all but really a benign ‘humanitarian mission’ undertaken at the behest of the Iraqi people. The American occupation of southern Iraq (which borders on Iran) is one of ‘right’ and ‘justice’ and if Iran opposes this occupation because it hates having hostile armies on its borders (something NO American could ever tolerate) this it is because it is blindly and perversely opposed to the good. It is then fatally easy to construct Iran as an existential threat to this benign ‘reconstruction’ project which must, as all existential threats, be neutralized. All this will be said in sanitized language that hides behind colorless words like ‘neutralizing threats’ destruction, misery and slaughter on a vast scale. All of which is necessary because the American occupation is sacrosanct and anyone who tries to subvert or threaten it must be ‘deterred’ and if deterrence fails (as it often does) savagely punished. This is a lie. It is a lie compounded from other lies. If America commits the grotesque crime of ‘destroying’ Iran this will be a crime that is, like so many other crimes, compounded of previous ones. There is NO legitimate American occupation of Iraq as anyone who remembers 2003 and the contorted justifications of the Bush regime can attest. The occupation was illegal then and illegal now. But as I said, one crime brings forth another crime. To defend its criminal colonization of Iraq America must attack Iran. This is something the right wing is entirely correct about. If the United States is committed to a middle Eastern Empire it is committed to another war as bad as, or worse than, the first one. ALL that has transpired over the last few days is the inevitable fruit of a poisoned tree.

The only way out of this morass is to question the premise of the entire thing which is the legitimacy of the 2003 occupation. Grant that and you will find yourself in a vicious (the POTUS has already promised a cultural genocide) war all the while bemoaning the tragedy of it all and congratulating yourself on your patriotism or your liberal values. All of this is founded on privilege. What gives America the right to occupy countries and ‘destroy’ other countries who oppose or subvert that occupation? If you are Mike Pompeo, of course, the answer is Jesus. America takes its marching orders directly from God not the petty laws of man which it is free to ignore. Actually, this position, insane as it is, is at least logically consistent. The ‘liberal’ position is to simply hum and haw and accept the ‘reality’ of perpetual war ignoring the amoral and cynical assertion of privilege behind it. America can colonize Iraq because it can. It can provoke war with nations who object (rightly in this case) to that colonization because, again, it can. It can wage any campaign it wants on Iraqi soil without asking Iraqis. It is an entitlement that is simply assumed as a right so that if ‘we’ go to war or not that is because it is entirely up to us. ‘We’ either bomb Iran to the stone age or magnanimously or prudently decide not to entirely on ‘our’ own prerogative. What would such people say if others applied the same principles to the United States or any other western country? Privilege is founded on never asking this question. The way to avoid the coming insanity is to question and challenge this ‘privilege’ at every turn. Neo-con hawks will tell you are not a realist though their ‘empire’ is built on fraud and delusion of the worst kind. Challenge their fantasy and they will hate and bully and cast themselves as the victims. Ignore them. Ignore those also who want you to ‘support the troops’. Do not support the troops or pray for the troops. When the troops are supported honoring the troops means more and more war to redeem the sacrifices our ‘heroes’ have made. Ignore this logic. I will NOT be honoring or praying for ANY troops of any nation. Canadians are lucky here because a few seats switched in the last election would have put a man beholden to Trump cultists in his party’s base into the prime minister’s office. Americans are not so lucky nor the citizens of any other nation conned or bullied or bribed into being ‘allies’.                     

Of course there are many ‘liberals’ in America who want to find various ‘reasons’ prudential or other to NOT slaughter heaps of Persian children. However, they want to do this without questioning any of the underlying premises of American imperialism that make war inevitable. I fear this is a circle that cannot be squared.  Within a system of imperial privilege Iran is supposed to be fine with American troops and bases on its border but Americans get to freak out about Guatemalan children. All kinds of arbitrary violence can be spun as logical, necessary and inevitable however once one grants this sort of privilege. This is especially so when colonization and imperialism take the form of actual military occupation as it has in the past 20 years. Once boots are on the ground anything can be justified by the need to protect 'our troops' even, as one concerned American put it to me, "destroying Iran". Thus we have a criminal occupation PLUS its sad corollary, an unlimited right to vengeance to 'deter' attacks on 'our boys' who are now in effect hostages. This is precisely how one gets stuck in a cycle of escalation where ‘not taking action’ or ‘doing nothing’ becomes the height of sentimental folly. Once one is stuck in such a feedback loop it is almost impossible to see reason and get out and that is why one doesn’t invade and occupy countries on a whim.

Of course the last trick the liberal resorts to is to appeal to the virtues of resignation. Sure all this is bad but what can we do? We are there after all and since we are there this is just what we have to do. What is more, we have to be there because pulling out would be isolationist. We (the west) can’t simply leave the world to its fate and withdraw into a corner! We need to be engaged! Of course, once one asks why the form of this involvement has to be brutal and illegal occupations and reckless assassinations this false dichotomy quickly evaporates. It is not ‘isolationist’ to remove soldiers from a dangerous area of the world which does not desire their presence and in which they are simply a destabilizing force. Nor do such liberals want to critique or question the assumed ‘right’ of the United States and NATO to put soldiers anywhere they please which was not even a ‘right’ before George W. Bush simply made it one by fiat. They will accept war as a ‘grim necessity’ which ‘cannot be escaped’ because ‘we can’t just do nothing’ before they concede this right.       

There are advantages to being old and one of those is that you remember things from 30 years ago. There is no underlying necessity to the U.S. (along with other western powers) having an imperial presence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen that will draw US forces directly into conflict with regional powers that they might otherwise have avoided and I know this because 30 years ago the US was not involved in such a colonial project even after Desert Storm, which left Saddam Hussein  in power because occupying Iraq was considered a quagmire that would suck US and allied troops troops into more wars with powers like Iran. In fact, most agreed that that Bush Sr. had done the smart thing. He did of course make the mistake of leaving US bases in Saudi Arabia which led to the transformation of the plucky, heroic 'mujahedeen' freedom fighters into Al QAEDA. So remember when people tell you that it is ‘impossible’ NOT to occupy Iraq that this was the status quo under a REPUBLICAN president who was motivated by nothing more than slightly more enlightened self-interest. My radical proposal then is nothing more than the return to a previous status quo. End the occupation; plain and simple. Bring the troops home in whatever phased manner they are best brought home and remove ONE main source of instability and violence in the region.          

I used to think 'humanitarian interventions' and the like were morally justified but another advantage of living so long is seeing ideas decisively fail.  All of our great ‘interventions’ have more or less come to grief and have spread as much or more chaos and misery as they were supposed to rectify (even on the charitable assumption that they were anything but plunder expeditions). If you are being empirical you have to say 'what on earth will be different this time?" of any proposed intervention in Iran or anywhere else.  Remember, the brutal reality behind 'getting involved' is occupying and colonizing others and getting self-righteously murderous when the colonized 'attack' us on soil we, the west, have stolen. The next time around nothing will change. The same people will repeat the exact same mistakes and tell the exact same falsehoods and more blood and more treasure will be spent to achieve not very much of anything. And of course, as always, to redeem the noble sacrifices of our troops there will be more interventions against even bigger targets like China and Russia.  Who then is living in the real world and who is living in a constructed fantasy where the same mistakes can be made over and over with a magically different result expected each time?