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--- Begin Message ----Caveat Lector- http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/051204H.shtmlStupidity in Power By Alain-Gerard Slama Le Figaro Monday 10 May 2004 During his appearance before the Congressional committee questioning him about the acts of torture committed by American soldiers in Iraq, Mr. Donald Rumsfeld invokes as his sole excuse regret at failing to anticipate the media fallout from the broadcast pictures. Certainly, the impact of the image is a distortion. In this case, the deeds being condemned are overwhelming. By daring to address such a mediocre response to the members of Congress, the Defense Secretary revealed to the world the face of the team managing Washington, the face of stupidity. One trembles at the thought that so much incompetence should be the work of leaders on whom the fate of the planet has depended for the last four years, leaders who nonetheless have a chance of being reelected by a people still wounded by the shock of September 11. That news is not good, either for peace, or for democracy. There's no Roosevelt, nor Churchill, nor even de Gaulle. Those who hold the reins of the American executive branch have revealed themselves in the test to be too small for the events they have to confront and contemptible in comparison to the nobility of the goals they invoke. That it should be necessary to respond to the war declared by hyper-terrorism with force is obvious. Even in the Arab world, there was no opposition to the American attack on Afghanistan. Given the elusive character of international terrorism, the political, economic, even military, in the form of localized strikes, pressures applied by the Bush Administration on countries disposed to welcome terrorist movements to oblige them to effect the necessary internal controls were necessary. On the other hand, the purely ideological extension of the conflict to all of Iraq displayed an inexcusable blindness. By taking such an initiative without having a credible casus belli available and without having prepared the conditions for a return to peace, the White House multiplied its mistakes. In the first place, it believed that it was extending the battles for freedom that it led against Germany and its allies in the first two world wars, then against Korea and Vietnam during the Cold War. Much ignorance was necessary to support such a delusion. However odious the regime suppressed, you do not liberate a people from itself. Unsolicited interference exacerbates nationalist fervors. In the absence of a real on the spot demand, Washington's aggression against Baghdad cannot claim any precedent. In every case when it has intervened in foreign theatres -apart from South America - the United States has found itself on the side of threatened nations or peoples. The international community would no doubt have accepted an intervention on behalf of the Kurds before September 11, as was the case in favor of the Albanians during the Kosovo conflict. Given the veritable genocide Saddam Hussein had engaged in against the Kurds, the pretext could have been successfully argued. However, given, among other considerations, the fear of upsetting the Turkish ally, that intervention didn't take place. Today, far from being beneficiaries of the despised regime's fall, the Kurds, the only US allies on Iraqi soil, find themselves isolated and dread a fate like that of the South Vietnamese. Washington's second mistake was to have refused to listen to France and Germany's warnings and to have invented the strategy of unilateralism to satisfy its frenzy to strike Baghdad. The absurdity of this supposed strategic innovation is total. Far from implying American power's isolation, no international threat has ever justified the unwavering solidarity of all democracies more than that of terrorism. Never has the historic observation that highlights the counterproductive character of using strategic means too heavy in relation to the desired ends been better demonstrated than by the failures that followed September 11. The struggle against a stateless and faceless adversary necessitates intelligence resources first of all. The dissemination of nuclear weapons has since overflowed the container of countries and states and now threatens all of them. The American hyper-power's first priority should have been to secure the collaboration of the largest number and to avoid the by-products of a new ideological confrontation, which this time would be a religious war. The third mistake inspired by the Iraqi obsession consisted of the claim to legitimate the notion of "Preventative war". Prevention is justified when the probability of damage is high or when the harm is known for certain. In most cases, it favors the deployment of real violence against overestimated, even imaginary, threats. What is true on the international level is also true domestically. How many freedoms have been derided, how many initiatives censured by this concern for prevention! How many experiments aborted, and enterprises ruined, in the name of the principle of precaution! How much punishment and violence have sheltered behind this pretext! In a period when the development of risk factors and technology has exacerbated anxieties, the idea of prevention has taken on the proportions of an ideology. Domestically, over-protecting individuals from themselves makes them more querulous and overcautious; instead of containing conflicts, it generalizes suspicion. Abroad, "preventative war" proceeds from the same causes and generates the same effects. It feeds off the ignorance and fear which are stupidity's accomplices. As a result of trying too hard to anticipate limited threats, prevention may have unlimited consequences. The Bush Administration's fourth mistake was to have sent white hot soldiers into Iraq. Under the impact of emotion immediately after September 11, the wave of cretinization that affected all the media, including even American intellectuals, was understandable. At that time, Robert Kagan wrote in the Washington Post that war must be declared immediately, "without knowing against whom". Steve Dunleavy exclaimed in the New York Post: "We must kill those bastards, train assassins, hire mercenaries, and, as for the cities and the countries where those vermin live, they must be bombarded, aiming even at basketball courts." (1). Since then, Sunni and Shi'ite terrorism on Iraqi soil have prolonged the climate of psychosis. Like the French soldiers in Algeria, the Abou Ghraib torturers invoke the double excuse of intelligence needs and righteous resentment to convince themselves of their impunity. Those who sent them there have no excuse. (1) Cited in Lewis Lapham's brilliant essay, "L'Amérique bâillonnée", published by Saint-Simon, 180 p., 15 euros. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> <FONT COLOR="#000099">Yahoo! 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