Monday, January 10, 2005
(10:39 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Death Squads
I think that the best possible way to spread the cause of freedom, democracy, and human rights is to repeat the most horrible crimes committed in Central America under the Raegan administration.If one believes the old saying that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce -- and I've found that it at least comes in handy -- then what we get here is a policy that was inarguably a horrible crime but was at least submitted to the higher goal of defeating communism. I don't personally think that goal was worth the price paid by the people of Central America, but according to Kierkegaard's analysis of tragey, it is at least formally tragic -- one must sacrifice "clean hands" in order to avert the greater evil. But now, it's simply farcical. That doesn't mean that it's funny. It means that we invaded a country for a million reasons that all turned out to be lies, and now we're on the verge of openly discarding the reason that the most thoughtful proponents of the war basically hallucinated and that the administration only picked up after all else had failed (i.e., "to spread the cause of..." above) -- to achieve no apparent goal.
But we can't pull out. No, by no means. Because then we'd be admitting that the whole thing was utter shit. No, a lot more people have to die -- because if more people don't die, then the deaths of those who have died already will have been meaningless. Or, more accurately, we'll have to admit that the deaths of those who have already died have been meaningless. I know that many people enter into the armed forces with noble goals, and I know that they show a level of bravery and physical risk I have never even come close to encountering, and I know that those the dead soldiers have left behind have enough grief to deal with -- but every soldier's death was ultimately meaningless. Even if the soldier died saving his buddy or painting a school, his death rested on a foundation of absolutely nothing. No moral authority, no cause of freedom, no nothing. It was all bullshit.
The solution to that problem is to keep pumping bodies into Iraq and to get angry at anyone who points out that we're wasting young lives for absolutely nothing, that we're sacrificing our "best and brightest" -- along with thousands of faceless people about whom our death squad-contemplating government obviously does not give a shit -- for what is finally a personality cult for a man with no discernable personality.
But by God, no one says we should just pull out of Iraq now! Who knows what would happen? Maybe the insurgents would start running death squads! And we know that since they wouldn't be run by Americans, those death squads would be the bad kind!
Fuck this. Fuck this all. Fuck the hard-nosed realist who decided it was time to break out the death squads. Fuck the leaders who are blackmailing people with their grief. Fuck you, George W. Bush, and fuck you, Dick Cheney, and a big fat extra-special fuck you to Donald Rumsfeld. If there is a God, you and all your cronies will go to Hell when you die.
UPDATE: A Tiny Revolution argues that the Bush administration is now a terrorist group and that, according to the logic of the National Security Strategy, the Iraqi insurgency is justified in preemptively attacking the agents of the Bush adminstration. I assume that people who were thinking that preemption would bite us in the ass thought that it would take more than just a couple years.
