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Democracy in a bodybag: David Faber
Things
are in a bad way in Iraq.
The Americans are now holed up in Baghdad
much like Napoleon in Moscow,
waiting for the country they have invaded to fall into their lap in a fit
of gratitude. A cross section of Iraqi society is sniping at them, and the
death toll amongst the occupation forces is a routine item on the evening
news. The troops who were told they would win a quick victory and be welcomed
with flowers are now getting used to the bitter truth that they will not
be home by christmas. Some 700,000 troops, double the invasion force, are
now holding down a country which welcomes them about as much as we would
welcome Indonesian troops if they took it into their heads to `liberate’
us from John Howard. If the Americans withdrew from Afghanistan,
where they are hostages as much as the Russians ever were, their puppet
government would fall. The same would happen in Iraq, which is one reason
why planning is going forward for the building of US bases throughout the
country, concurrently with the discussion of constitutional arrangements
by a handpicked national assembly. If this is victory, defeat must be a
very unimpressive thing.
Meanwhile, back with the bottom line, the US Federal deficit has blown
out to about twice what it was in the last year of the Clinton
administration. Nevertheless the Coalition of the Wilful, the most monocultural
and isolated coalition in world history, asks us to hold our breath indefinitely
until weapons of mass destruction float to the surface of the Tigris
and Euphrates to save their credibility. And we ask:
Just who applied what pressure to Dr Kelly? As the saber rattling continues
against Pyongyang and Tehran,
we wonder: Who is more dangerous? The dubious regimes who might acquire
nuclear weapons? Or the dubious regimes which already have them? Can we
place our trust in the cowboy vigilantes who would impose regime change
at gun point, and are enthusiastic about getting their revenge in early?
Or are they not themselves the greatest threat to world peace?
Truth died very early in the War on Whatever. The regime of Saddam Hussein
was reprehensible, but it had been disarmed in 1991, was a secular tyranny
having no involvement with fundamentalist terrorism, and the main risk of
arms falling into the hands of terrorists derives as was predicted from
the chaos now reigning in Iraq.
But there is another bodybag on its way home from Mesopotamia,
and that is the corpse of responsible government. Hitherto in Australia
governments have been responsible through parliament to the people. This
is no longer so, as Richard Butler observed during the recent Adelaide Festival
of Ideas. Now we live under a regime of wise monkeys. As during the Truth
Overboard Affair, no one responsible knew anything inconvenient about anything,
so that they could believe and promote belief in anything they liked. It
is a beautiful system, antidemocratic but elegantly suited to its intended
purposes.
It is worth remarking on the delightful mechanics of this new oligarchical
regime. So far as weapons of mass destruction are concerned, the public
servants who are the chiefs of our security services knew it was more their
jobs were worth to advise government that there was intelligence questioning
Iraqi unconventional weapons capacity. Their uncritical recitation of hyped
American and British propaganda was then sifted by ministerial advisers to
remove unwanted indications and select promising rhetorical material. Subsequently
the Prime Minister ruled that the inaccuracy of this carefully manufactured
material supplied by the security services was `not a hanging offence’. It
is a latterday application of the old political maxim `You scrub my back
and I’ll scrub yours’
Nor should we be greatly surprised at the importation into Australia
of a system which has long worked so well in the United
States, and in support of the same bellicose
policies. As Gore Vidal has pointed out, the republic Lincoln
fought for died of exposure during the Cold War, giving place to a national
security state presiding over a permanent war economy. Lest we forget what
is in store for us if we do not seize power electorally and defeat the warmongering
party lead by the Prime Minister, allow me to cite the situation in the
United States
as described by Mr Vidal:
Representative government
of, by, and for the people is now a faded memory. Only corporate America
enjoys representation by the Congresses and presidents that it pays for in
an arrangement where no one is entirely accountable because those who have
bought the government also own the media…Although We the People of the United
States are the sole source of legitimate authority in this land, we are no
longer represented in the Congress Assembled. Our Congress has been hijacked
by corporate America
and its enforcer, the imperial military machine…We have allowed our institutions
to be taken over in the name of a globalized American empire that is totally
alien in concept to anything our founders had in mind.
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