[Peace-discuss] Is Bush Unhinged?

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Here's some more of my campaign to suggest that the anti-war movement has
allies on the Right -- principled conservatives often bitterly opposed to
the neocon group dominating Bush administration policy.  Robert Higgs is a
principal in the libertarian Independent Institute and editor of The
Independent Review. Have you heard this point put so clearly on the
soi-disant Left?  --CGE]
  
	Is Bush Unhinged?
	by Robert Higgs

Before you conclude that I myself must be unhinged even to raise such a
question, ask yourself this: If a man talks as if he has lost contact with
reality, then might he actually have done so? Granted that this
possibility deserves evaluation, then consider President George W. Bush's
rhetoric in his March 19 speech to diplomats and others at the White
House.

The president begins by stating his interpretation of the recent bombings
in Madrid, reiterating one of his recurrent themes of the past two and a
half years: "[T]he civilized world is at war" in a "new kind of war." The
concept of war, of course, ranks high among evocative metaphors. Not by
accident have politicians declared wars on poverty, drugs, cancer,
illiteracy, and an assortment of other alleged enemies. A society at war,
as William James observed in 1906 in his call for the "moral equivalent of
war," finds a reason for unaccustomed solidarity and – here's where the
politicians come in – for unaccustomed submission to central government
authority. James himself, after all, was arguing that "the martial type of
character can be bred without war." Political leaders are always seeking
to establish such character, with themselves in command of the battalions
of "disciplined" subjects. Insofar as the so-called war on terrorism
merely represents the latest attempt to bend the war metaphor to an
obvious political purpose, we might well dismiss the president's
rhetorical flourish as nothing but the same old same old.

Bush, however, will allow no such dismissal. "The war on terror," he
insists, "is not a figure of speech." Well, I beg your pardon, Mr.
President, but that is precisely what it is. How can one go to war against
"terror," which is a state of mind? Even if the president were to take
more care with his language and to speak instead of a "war on terrorism,"
the phrase still could not be anything more than a metaphor, because
terrorism is a form of action available to virtually any determined adult
anywhere anytime. War on terrorism, too, can be only a figure of speech.

War, if it is anything, is the marshalling of armed forces against
somebody, not against a state of mind or a form of action. Wars are fought
between groups of persons. We might argue about whether the United States
can wage war only against another nation state, as opposed to an
indefinitely large number of individuals committed to fanatical Islamism
who in various workaday guises are living in scores of different
countries. The expression "war on certain criminals and conspirators of
criminal acts" would fit the present case better and would entail far more
sensible thinking about the proper way to deal with such persons. The idea
of war, obviously, calls to mind too readily the serviceability of the
armed forces. Hence the application of such forces to the conquest of Iraq
in the name of "bringing the terrorists to justice," although that
conquest was actually nothing but a hugely destructive, immensely
expensive diversion from genuine efforts to allay the threat posed by the
Islamist maniacs who compose al Qaeda and similar groups. "These killers
will be tracked down and found, they will face their day of justice," the
president declares, speaking as always as if only a fixed number of such
killers exist, rather than a vast reservoir of actual and potential
recruits that is only augmented and revitalized by actions such as the
U.S. invasion of Iraq. It would be a boon to humanity if the president
could be brought to understand the distinction between waging war and
establishing justice.

Whatever our understanding of the president's "war on terror" might be,
however, he definitely parts company with reality when he states, "There
is no neutral ground – no neutral ground – in the fight between
civilization and terror, because there is no neutral ground between good
and evil, freedom and slavery, and life and death." Of course, this
Manichean pronouncement echoes the administration's previous declaration
that everybody on earth is either with us or against us – and if they
know what's good for them, they'll fall into line with our wishes. Aside
from the undeniable fact that some nations simply prefer, as did the
Spanish people (as opposed to the Aznar government), to avoid the blowback
of U.S. interventions around the world, the president's insistence on
equating U.S. policy with good, freedom, and life and all alternative
policies with evil, slavery, and death represents the sort of childish
bifurcation one expects to find expressed by a member of a youth gang, not
by the leader of the world's most powerful government. To raise but a
single example, though a highly relevant one in this context, can any
dispassionate person argue that the U.S. position on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict is entirely good, whereas every alternative
position is entirely evil?

Observers endowed with humane moral sensibilities recognize that there is
plenty of evil to go around in Israel and elsewhere. In Iraq, for example,
the U.S. government bears clear responsibility for killing and injuring
thousands of noncombatants in the past year – not to mention the
horrendous mortality and suffering it brought about previously by
enforcement of the economic sanctions used to cripple that country for
more than a decade. Some people maintain that the price was worth paying,
that ultimately the good obtained will more than compensate for the harm
caused in the process, but even if one accepts that assessment for the
sake of argument, it remains true nevertheless that much harm was caused,
that the burden of responsibility for evils perpetrated must be borne by
the U.S. side as well as by the demonized enemy (Saddam Hussein having
been made out after 1990 as "another Hitler"). International conflicts in
the real world do not often divide neatly into nothing-but-good versus
nothing-but-evil. For the president of the United States to employ such a
juvenile characterization raises the possibility that his mind is so
immature that he ought to be removed from office before he propels the
world into even worse disasters.

Seemingly aware of previous criticism, the president declares that "the
terrorists are offended not merely by our policies – they are offended
by our existence as free nations." I myself have seen no evidence to
confirm such a statement; certainly the president has adduced none. I have
seen, however, the translated testimony of one Osama bin Laden, who in a
famous October 2001 videotape objects to U.S. support for Israel in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to the presence of U.S. forces in Saudi
Arabia, and to U.S. economic sanctions and other hostile actions against
Iraq – that is, to various U.S. policies. "Millions of innocent children
are being killed in Iraq and in Palestine and we don't hear a word from
the infidels. We don't hear a raised voice," says bin Laden. In my ears,
this statement sounds like an objection to U.S. policies. I have seen no
evidence that bin Laden or any other known Islamic terrorist takes offence
at our very existence, provided that we mind our own business in our own
homeland.

In the president's mind, however, every deviation from adherence to his
promulgated national-security policy of U.S. world domination and
preventive warfare represents a dangerous form of appeasement: "Any sign
of weakness or retreat simply validates terrorist violence, and invites
more violence for all nations. The only certain way to protect our people
is by early, united, and decisive action" – that is, by global military
intervention by the United States, with all other nations serving as its
lackeys. In the neoconservative vision to which the president has been
converted, time stands still: It is always 1938, and if we fail to bring
all our military might to bear preventively against the Hitler du jour, we
shall certainly be plunged into global catastrophe.

Waxing positive, the president credits recent U.S. and allied military
actions with bringing about "a free Afghanistan" and the "long-awaited
liberation" of the Iraqi people. He maintains that

the fall of the Iraqi dictator has removed a source of violence,
aggression, and instability in the Middle East. . . . [Y]ears of illicit
weapons development by the dictator have come to the end. . . . [T]he
Iraqi people are now receiving aid, instead of suffering under the
sanctions. . . . [M]en and women across the Middle East, looking to Iraq,
are getting a glimpse of what life in a free country can be like. . . .
Who would begrudge the Iraqi people their long-awaited liberation?

This effusion evinces a tenuous grip on reality. Nobody begrudges the
Iraqi people their freedom, but many of us have serious doubts about just
how much freedom those long-suffering people really have. Their country is
occupied by a lethal foreign army whose soldiers roam freely, breaking
into homes and mosques at will, maintaining checkpoints that often become
the venues of unjustified killings, carrying out police activities by
employing such means as aerial bombardment and bursts of heavy machine-gun
fire. If this unfortunate scene is the "glimpse of what life in a free
country can be like" that others throughout the Middle East are getting,
then woe unto anyone who yearns to stimulate those Middle Easterners to
seek freedom. "With Afghanistan and Iraq showing the way, we are confident
that freedom will lift the sights and hopes of millions in the greater
Middle East," the president states. If he really harbors such confidence,
one can only note how ill-founded it is.

The president seems to have no idea of what a free society consists of.
Violent military occupation and the complete absence of the rule of law
totally invalidate any claim that either Iraq or Afghanistan is now a free
society. At present Iraq is awash with violence perpetrated by resistance
fighters and occupation forces and with criminality of all sorts unleashed
by the disruptions associated with the war and by the U.S. dissolution of
the old police apparatus. "We will not fail the Iraqi people, who have
placed their trust in us," Bush declares. But they never placed their
trust in us in the first place; they simply suffered our invasion and
occupation of their country. In any event, we have already gravely
disappointed the hopes that many Iraqis held for life after the overthrow
of Saddam Hussein's regime. The country is rife with resentment and
hostility, and the people are eager for U.S. forces to get out. Although
the president maintains that "[w]e've set out to break the cycle of
bitterness and radicalism that has brought stagnation to a vital region,"
one cannot help concluding from the facts on the ground that the upshot of
the U.S. invasion and occupation has been just the opposite, that U.S.
actions in Iraq have only poured fuel on the fires of terrorism there as
well as in the wider world.

It is disconcerting for me to listen to the president's speeches. I get
the unsettling feeling that the man inhabits another world in which things
are the exact opposite of how they seem to me. Of course, I may be the one
whose perspective is askew. Unlike Bush, I cannot claim that the Almighty
has licensed my position. Yet I fear that time will tell in favor of my
view of the matter – a view shared, of course, by most people on the
planet, indeed, by nearly everybody who has not been bribed, intimidated,
or blinded by partisan loyalty to the Bush administration. For now, this
difference of views might seem to be nothing more than that – just one
man's opinion jousting with another's – but reality has a way of passing
definite judgment, and I will not be surprised if Bush's pronouncements
ultimately come to be seen as having no more substance than a bad dream.

March 22, 2004

Robert Higgs is senior fellow in political economy at the Independent
Institute and editor of The Independent Review. His most recent book is
Against Leviathan.

Copyright © 2004 LewRockwell.com

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