[Peace-discuss] Train wreck of an election

[Lisa Chason]

Train wreck of an election
By James Carroll  |  February 1, 2005
(James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.) 

IN THINKING about the election in Iraq, my mind keeps jumping back to 
last
week's train wreck in California. A deranged man, intending suicide, 
drove his
Jeep Cherokee onto the railroad tracks, where it got stuck. The 
onrushing train
drew near. The man suddenly left his vehicle and leapt out of the way. 
He
watched as the train crashed into his SUV, derailed, jackknifed, and hit
another train. Railroad cars crumbled. Eleven people were killed and 
nearly 200
were injured, some gravely. The deranged man was arrested. Whatever 
troubles
had made him suicidal in the first place paled in comparison to the 
trouble he
had now.


Iraq is a train wreck. The man who caused it is not in trouble. 
Tomorrow night
he will give his State of the Union speech, and the Washington 
establishment
will applaud him. Tens of thousands of Iraqis are dead. More than 1,400
Americans are dead. An Arab nation is humiliated. Islamic hatred of the 
West is
ignited. The American military is emasculated. Lies define the foreign 
policy
of the United States. On all sides of Operation Iraqi Freedom, there is
wreckage. In the center, there are the dead, the maimed, the displaced 
-- those
who will be the ghosts of this war for the rest of their days. All for 
what?


Tomorrow night, like a boy in a bubble, George W. Bush will tell the 
world it
was for "freedom." He will claim the Iraqi election as a stamp of 
legitimacy
for his policy, and many people will affirm it as such. Even critics of 
the war
will mute their objections in response to the image of millions of 
Iraqis going
to polling places, as if that act undoes the Bush catastrophe.


There is only one way in which the grand claims made by Washington for 
the
weekend voting will be true -- and that is if the elections empower an 
Iraqi
government that moves quickly to repudiate Washington. The only meaning
"freedom" can have in Iraq right now is freedom from the US occupation, 
which
is the ground of disorder. But such an outcome of the elections is not 
likely.
The chaos of a destroyed society leaves every new instrument of 
governance
dependent on the American force, even as the American force shows itself
incapable of defending against, much less defeating, the suicide 
legions. The
irony is exquisite. The worse the violence gets, the longer the 
Americans will
claim the right to stay. In that way, the ever more emboldened -- and 
brutal --
"insurgents" do Bush's work for him by making it extremely difficult 
for an
authentic Iraqi source of order to emerge. Likewise the elections, 
which, as
universally predicted, have now ratified the country's deadly 
factionalism.


Full blown civil war, if it comes to that, will serve Bush's purpose, 
too. All
the better if Syria and Iran leap into the fray. In such extremity, 
America's
occupation of Iraq will be declared legitimate. America's city-smashing
tactics, already displayed in Fallujah, will seem necessary. Further 
"regime
change" will follow. America's ad hoc Middle East bases, meanwhile, 
will have
become permanent. Iraq will have become America's client state in the 
world's
great oil preserve. Bush's disastrous and immoral war policy will have
"succeeded," even though no war will have been won. The region's war 
will be
eternal, forever justifying America's presence. Bush's callow hubris 
will be
celebrated as genius. Congress will give the military machine 
everything it
needs to roll on to more "elections." These outcomes, of course, 
presume the
ongoing deaths of tens of thousands more men, women, and children. And 
American
soldiers.


Something else about that California train wreck strikes me. As news 
reports
suggested, so many passengers were killed and injured because the 
locomotive
was pushing the train from behind, which put the lightweight passenger 
coaches
vulnerably in front. If, instead, the heavy, track-clearing locomotive 
had been
leading and had hit the Jeep, it could have pushed the vehicle aside. 
The
jack-knifing and derailment would not have occurred. The American war 
machine
is like a train running in "push-mode," with the engineer safely back 
away from
danger. In the train wreck of Iraq, it is passengers who have borne the 
brunt.
The man with his hand on the throttle couldn't be more securely removed 
from
the terrible consequences of his locomotion. Thus, Bush is like the man 
who
caused the wreck, and like the man who was protected from it. Deranged.
Detached. Alive and well in the bubble he calls "freedom," receiving 
applause.