I Cogitate

The jig is up
We'll remember November, when our hopes were dashed - and rekindled

Hal Crowthers
Illinois Times
December 14, 2006

November 2006 was a month that historians will study in minute detail, day by day and headline by headline, when they attempt to reconstruct the iron chain of misery the United States has been forging for itself since September 2001 ­ though some will maintain that November 2000, with its still-disputed presidential election, was the actual beginning of our decline and fall. If these are historians of a distant future and the nation has survived, even regained some of the power and prestige it squandered in this most humiliating of all its military misadventures, their conclusions will be of great but essentially academic interest. If the colossus of the 20th century has self-destructed and vanished from the playing field of history, their chronicles may take on the tragic grandeur of Homer, Herodotus, and Gibbon. But the truest thing about the lessons of history is that they are never learned.

Either way, this November just behind us was the first month since 2001 in which a careful observer could glimpse any excuse for optimism, not so much for the midterm elections of Nov. 7, when President George W. Bush lost his enabling majorities in Congress, but for the month’s last day ­ historic November 30 ­ when the congenitally self-assured Mr. Bush stood before us buck naked, stripped of his last pretenses and his last hope that he could salvage much of anything from the smoldering ruins of “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” The hateful smirk remained, but with a rueful little twist to it, and the swagger was gone. Gone with the president’s majorities was Donald Rumsfeld, his warlord and role model, whose martial body language had sustained the White House in its last comforting spasms of make-believe (but who had issued, on the eve of the election and his own forced resignation, a classified memo conceding that he and Bush had failed in Iraq). Gone, too ­ shattered by the oft-maligned Howard Dean ­ was the sinister prestige of the presidential hand-holder and vote-counter, the cutthroat Karl Rove, whose universal prescriptions for misdirection, intimidation, subterfuge, and denial had always served to keep the truth at bay...

...The charade was over, even if the bleeding has just begun. This invasion of Iraq was a huge lie conceived in lies, launched and defended by lies, and mismanaged hopelessly by deceivers and deceived alike. It dislodged a nasty dictator that many of these same Republican hypocrites had helped to establish, supply, and maintain; its result is an apocalyptic destruction of life, property, infrastructure, and social order that leaves one of the world’s most ancient civilizations reeling back toward the Stone Age. Under the pressure of our occupation, certain modern inhabitants of Mesopotamia revealed themselves as the most bloodthirsty maniacs who ever set out to please their god with buckets of their neighbors’ blood. (“That was the only thing that surprised me,” said a Special Forces captain I met in a bar in Maine, one who also served in Vietnam. “They hate each other even more than they hate us.”) The government of the United States revealed itself as the most arrogant, naïve and incompetent gang of imperialists who ever botched an occupation and unleashed a genocide...

...Honest historians will record that a failed government of oil pirates, corporate shills, chickenhawks, and neocon fantasists was the worst this country ever endured. But never tell me that Bush and his accomplices, however history makes hash of them, are getting just what they deserve. What they deserve was suffered instead by tens of thousands of young men and women who are dead, maimed, disfigured, and psychologically crippled, victims of the wretched judgment of politicians whose lame schemes and pipe dreams (oil pipes, mostly) they struggled to implement and comprehend. “All we really do,” one young soldier told a reporter from the Boston Globe, “is drive around here until someone shoots us or blows us up...” 

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