Star-Spangled Burden

There’s a peculiar slant to the budget debates taking place now on whether we should continue to pour a trillion dollars into wars of conquest and attempts to seize other people’s resources or instead see about creating a more humane polity in our own 10 million square miles. But the choices are never cast in those crude terms because the consensus at the top from one end of the liberal/conservative, Democratic/Republican spectrum to the other remains that what’s gone on in the last six years in Iraq has something to do with our security in the face of ‘terrorism’ rather than old-fashioned colonial conquest.

In fact, the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses in 2003 has much more in common with the seizure of the Congo in 1885 by King Leopold of Belgium for its rubber trees than with any Pearl Harbor-like repelling of the 9/11 attacks, which provided the convenient excuse. The leaders of the Democratic ‘opposition’ struggle to mount an effective counter-discourse on the ongoing war due in part to their complicity with the underlying phony rationale.

Capitol Hill critics talk about the ludicrous mismanagement of the war and its frightful outcomes, but they can’t bring themselves to expose and denounce the original motivations for it. Bush’s defenders can then hallucinate in public about the war’s achievements and insist that the defeatist Democrats just stick it out a little longer so ‘victory’ can be achieved. No one questions that this illusory victory, i.e. successful conquest, would be a good thing.

As a result, solid liberals like Tom Harkin of Iowa appear in the sad role of fighting for health, education and infrastructure spending at home by complaining that Bush is squandering a fortune ‘giving’ the Iraqis all those things. Sure, Bush is tossing a trillion bucks down a hole, but Harkin and his peers should know better than to pander to American selfishness and to use the horribly abused Iraqis as whipping boy.

That kind of whiny critique of foreign aid used to be the stock-in-trade of the UN-baiting reactionaries. It’s one of the many ironies of the current situation that now it’s the Republicans who insist on giving Bush billions to waste overseas and who turn a blind eye to the stealing, graft and screw-ups that the not-so-well-meaning projects engender. What will be next? A Republican movement to expand the UNDP?

Despite their weaknesses the Republican’s monotonous flogging of ‘winning’ in Iraq and accomplishing the mission and staying the course and the rest of the repetitive drivel is hard to combat if you’re a Democrat secretly hoping that American companies eventually do get their mitts on the Iraqi oilfields. I suppose it’s unrealistic to expect our two parties to produce even a single proponent of a foreign policy based on real respect for the sovereignty of other nations and their people’s rights to the usufruct of their own belongings, including the oil underneath their sands. So it’s up to mere citizens to fill in the yawning gap.