Who do ya think you're foolin'?

Who do ya think you’re foolin’?

When President Obama announced recently the end of the combat mission for US soldiers in Iraq and presented it as a triumph for both the US and Iraq, I thought back to when I began painting the portraits. It was January 2002, 15 months before the invasion, when the decibel level of fear and propaganda, righteous war-mongering, was already deafening. Weapons of mass destruction! al-Qaeda in Iraq! Saddam Hussein’s complicity with 9/11! Iraqi nuclear weapons! Mushroom clouds! Lies ricocheting around America’s hollow, Halliburton supported media skull with a tooth-rattling roar. Lies unchallenged by our “free” press because the press was obsessed with tactics for defeating an enemy whose strength had to be inflated like a balloon to make it seem like the world’s biggest war machine had to pop something. All those ex-generals, all heavily invested in corporations that profit from war, trotting from station to station like trained dogs to promote the coming violence. Hard to tell what scent they were on --- blood or profit? Voices challenging the lies were banned from the major media. Anyone who tried to talk about oil, empire, and control of the Mid-East as reasons for war was ignored, marginalized, called a traitor.

I began painting truth tellers as a personal act of resistance and defiance and a means of maintaining some measure of self-esteem. How hypocritical and duplicitous was our country! How sad to have one’s perception of one’s worth bound up with national identity. But this war was being promoted to protect me and you, thousands of people were going to be murdered (most of them civilians) to protect me and you, young patriotic American men and women would die and be grievously wounded to protect me and you. What a profound betrayal of the notion of democracy and the rule of law was being carried out in your name and mine. And if you can imagine a country’s wealth as a great forest of possibility, ours was being clear-cut for a war revelers’, blood soaked bonfire …. not for housing, healthcare, education, alternative energy, and alleviating poverty. A net of fear was thrown over this country and the majority of people were swept up like a panicked school of minnows. Gleefully. Free fish were criticized for failing to conform to the culture of fear.

The proposition that the US is now leaving Iraq is preposterous. As preposterous as the absurd reasons given for the war. But the first is the necessary condition of the second. The war was not to protect America and not to free Iraqis from an evil dictator. Our government, that is, our taxes, have built there the largest embassy in the world and many “enduring” bases to protect the real reasons for the war. The shameful and ludicrous demand that it’s time for Iraqis to finally take responsibility for their own security is obscene. Iraqis didn’t ask for this war, didn’t beg for America to destroy all their infrastructure, power stations, water treatment plants, kill 1 million plus civilians, create more than 4 million refugees, poison the country with Depleted Uranium, foster ethnic and religious animosity, further malnourish their children, leave the entire country in a state of traumatic stress and give control of their oil to foreign countries.

It seems Iraqis can’t police themselves and don’t understand how to be grateful! Or, how to be thankful for indefinite colonization.

It’s like the teenage drug addict who storms into his little brother’s room, rips it to shreds looking for a little loose change, and then says, “Now I’m going to sit right here and wait till you clean up this mess you just caused by hiding your money.”

Andrew Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University and a former colonel in the US Army who has been very critical of both the Iraq (his son was killed in Iraq) and Afghan wars, recently said:

"The question demands to be asked: Who is more deserving of contempt? The commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause, however misguided, in which he sincerely believes? Or the commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause in which he manifestly does not believe and yet refuses to forsake?"

The first commander he refers to is Bush, the second Obama. I have a problem with the characterization of George Bush as a true believer, a president who was convinced he was morally right to engage in pre-emptive war. If Bush’s zeal for war --- part born again “Christian” crusader, part neo-con ideologue, part oil imperialist, part Dick Cheney puppet --- makes him a misguided, true believer, then what are we to make of his understanding of his position as leader of a democratic republic? What are we to make of his oath to defend the Constitution?
He was a president ( appointed, not elected, by the way) guilty of lying to creat war, guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, guilty of ordering torture and a host of subversions of the Constitution. I have the greatest respect for Mr. Bacevich, but Bush was not a true-believer. He was a true disbeliever in our democracy and law. And he was on purpose. Contempt is too good for a president who lies to create war. Give me prosecution. Our contempt is righteous, but puny and ineffectual. Bush’s contempt for democracy, life, and law was enormous and changed the history of the world, sinking us further into brutality, ethnic and religious hatred, inequality, corporatization, and avoidance of humanity’s great crises.

And because President Obama has refused to acknowledge those intentional crimes and not disavow the true reasons for the Iraq invasion, not just the wars but the crimes become his, too.