An Iraqi policeman stands guard at a checkpoint in central Baghdad [/caption]There was a bitter blend of irony and déjà vu about how the U.S. media reported the industrialized killings in Iraq this week and a single gunman’s murder of 12 filmgoers in America.
Coverage of the latter obscured the former, which is not surprising given how Iraq ceased to be of interest to most Americans after the bulk of U.S. troops withdrew from the country last year. The two incidents, however, are extraordinary in their normality and are doomed to repeat themselves thanks to Washington’s contempt for self-reflection.
It may be remembered that the U.S. waged war on Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to deny him of weapons of mass destruction that, as it turned out, lived only in the fevered minds of neoconservatives in Washington. The long-term consequences of the invasion and the ill-planned occupation that followed were graphically expressed in the Al Qaeda-inspired bombings Monday that killed at least 100 Iraqis. It was only the most intense in a series of such attacks, yet few if any American commentators have suggested that Washington is at least indirectly responsible for the slaughter.
Overlooked was America’s home-grown cache of WMDs, an online bizarre of ordnance, the lethality, portability, and affordability of which would have horrified the nation’s founding fathers. (The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” for the sake of “a well-regulated militia,” the kind that was rendered obsolete at least with the creation of a standing army in the twentieth century. That said, I believe it is perfectly acceptable for every American to keep and bear a flintlock rifle, just to be on the safe side.)
In Washington’s culture of excess, particularly as it is embraced on the political right, the tendency is to press one’s advantage as far as ideology and powerful interests will take it. Thus the Republican Party’s crusade against taxation, despite the fact that federal revenues as a percentage of gross domestic product are at their lowest rate in sixty years; thus the full-court press for ever-more deadly and accessible handguns even as the body count of innocents lost to demented gunmen escalates; thus explicit talk of war with Iran and implicit planning for sustained conflict with China that makes such expeditions all but inevitable, the cautionary lessons of the Philippines, Vietnam, and Iraq notwithstanding.
Americans are so used to foolhardy military enterprises and the random killings of bystanders by Kevlar-clad, loaded-for-bear gun fetishists that they are no longer outraged by them. That leaves nothing to stop their elected representatives from pandering to whatever lobby is bidding for their attention, be it corporations for the sake of lower taxes, the gun lobby for the repeal of sober-minded gun laws, or militarists for a defense budget and a mission worthy of a global hegemon.
Insanity, said Albert Einstein, is repeating the same act and expecting different results. By that measure, the U.S. government is not only mad, which is bad enough, but unaccountable, which is worse.
