Mission Accomplished

From the moment President Bush strode across the flight deck of the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln to declare "Mission Accomplished", he and his War Cabinet have had to contend with, and spin, growing evidence that little is going as planned in Iraq. Not only was the "mission" based on spurious intelligence and largely baseless fear mongering but also, because pre-war planning was at best hopeful and at worst delusional, there is not much the administration can claim to have "accomplished".

During a recent episode of the HBO program Real Time with Bill Maher, host Maher compared Bush's recent assessments of the siutation in Iraq with those of "Baghdad Bob", the former Iraqi Minister of Information Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf, whose job it was to present to the world daily accounts of the invasion of his country that were drafted in some alternate reality. The comparison is apt and yet another example of Maher's knack for keen insight and sense of irony. But while it is tempting to dismiss Bush as simply delusional it is essential to bear in mind that in the overarching geostrategic scheme concocted by Hawkish administration members--including Douglas Feith, Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. The invasion, occupation, and ultimate control of Iraq are steps in a much broader geo-political role articulated by the think tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC). In their own words, a liberated Iraq would serve as a shining example to the rest of the troubled region, and regimes unfriendly to the aims of the United States were officially put on notice. In that light, the dissembly and obfuscation issuing daily from the White House and the Pentagon is little more than a rhetorical holding pattern.

The media in its role as governmental watchdog is dropping the ball with respect to the situation in Iraq. Too much reporting is merely puppeting administration talking points. Discussion of Iraq, and the espoused goals of this adminstration are occuring in a journalistic vacuum with lax investigation, a draught of fact checking and distracting side argments about the veracity of minutia. This vacuum keeps intact the carefully established cover for the catastrophe of the American invasion of Iraq. The Bush administration is running out of options but steadfastly refuses to alter course.

Even the term "occupation" is a misnomer. Occupation implies that hostilities have ended, that some semblance of law and order exists, that the continued presence of military forces is only necessary to secure and stabilize the country during its transition. The reality is that American and British forces are now engaged in the pacification of Iraq. This is clearly illustrated by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's recent comments about the prospects for Iraq's elections, scheduled to take place next January:

"Let's say you tried to have an election and you could have it in three-quarters or four-fifths of the country. But in some places you couldn't because the violence was too great," Rumsfeld said, hours after the leaders of the United States and Iraq met in Washington.

"Well, so be it. Nothing's perfect in life, so you have an election that's not quite perfect. Is it better than not having an election? You bet," he said.

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In other words, Iraq will be overhauled, piece by piece if necessary. The long term geostrategic aims are further occluded by deliberate misrepresentation of the Iraqi insurgency. Last Sunday General John Abizaid, U.S. Central Command, made the following claim on NBC's Meet The Press:

GEN. ABIZAID: I think the number of foreign fighters in Iraq is probably below 1,000, but it's kind of difficult to know because people infiltrated into Iraq to fight next to Saddam before the movement phase of the war began back in March of '03. It's also clear thatthere is foreign fighter infiltration. There is foreign terrorist activity such as Zarqawi. There is activity by al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations in Iraq. But it's not just in Iraq, and sometimes we tend to look at Iraq through a soda straw, and also Afghanistan through a soda straw, whereas we really have a problem of terrorism that is ideologically motivated throughout the entire Middle East and Central Asia that has to be faced, and it's got to be faced with the will and the perseverance of the American armed forces and the American people, but most importantly with the moderate peoples in the region that don't want to have this type of life be dictated to them by the extremists.

...I still think that the primary problem that we're dealing with is former regime elements of the ex-Ba'ath Party that are fighting against the government and trying to do anything possible to upend the election process.

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But what if the deteriorating situation in Iraq is not entirely the result of extremists, terrorist infiltration, or ex-Ba'athist provacateurs?

"Early one morning this week, when the police have yet to set up too many checkpoints, Abu Mujahed will strap a mortar underneath a car, drive to a friend's in central Baghdad and bury the weapon in his garden. In the evening he will return with the rest of his group, sleep for a few hours and then take the weapon from its hiding place. He will calculate the range using the American military's own maps and satellite pictures - bought in a bazaar - and fire a few rounds at a military base or the US Embassy or at the Iraqi Prime Minister's office. Then Abu Mujahed will shower, change and, by 10am, be at his desk in one of the major ministries."

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What if this crisis was the result of a profound misunderstanding of the historical forces at play?

"The United States military, unable to relate to a tribal society, finds itself the player in a nationwide blood feud. To understand the intensity of these feelings of honor and kinship, read "Othello" or watch "The Godfather." This is how many tribal Iraqis perceive the world. It is not necessarily a lack of sophistication but a mark of being outside the West. Tribal culture in Iraq goes back thousands of years. When an Iraqi man loses a family member to an American missile, he must take another American life to even the score. He may not subscribe to the notion that some Americans are noncombatants, viewing them instead as the members of a supertribe that has come to invade his land."

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Our current policy in Iraq is the combination of at least two broken perceptions of the world. First, there is an underlying ideological framework which says the people of Iraq will offer themselves up to an American vision of democracy, regardless of their historical relationship to Western invaders. Second, an administration that is unwilling to accept nuance and modify their position in the face of obvious failure. In January of 2003, before the invasion of Iraq, the National Intelligence Committee delivered a report to the White House that warned of potential chaos following an American invasion of Iraq:

"Intelligence reports compiled in January 2003 predicted that an American invasion would result in a divided Iraq prone to internal violence, and increased sympathy in the Islamic world for some terrorist objectives, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.... Another government source dismissed the significance of prewar predictions of unrest in a postwar Iraq. ``Anybody who studied Iraq for a semester could say that was possible,'' the source said."

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These are the bad new days

REICH
You say Gurdjieff used the term "the horror of the situation"... What did he mean by that?

OUSPENSKY
Gurdjieff meant that as long as people think they are free, they will not work on the techniques to become free. He said it was hard work and that nobody would really try it until they became aware that none of us are free at present. The horror of the situation is that we think we are free and we therefore go on acting mechanically.

REICH
When did you become convinced Gurdjieff was correct about the horror of the situation?

OUSPENSKY
It was after the war started. I saw a lorry...

REICH
This was in Moscow?

OUSPENSKY
Yes.

REICH
You saw a lorry. What sort of lorry?

OUSPENSKY
It was a lorry full of artificial legs. Wooden legs, in those days. It was headed for the front lines.

- Robert Anton Wilson, Wilhelm Reich in Hell

Sunday, August 29, 2004: Some 200,000 individuals pour into the streets of New York City to protest the policies of the Bush administration. During the march, 1,000 coffins were carried past Madison Square Garden. These were not only the coffins of those who had lost their lives in the war on terror or during the invasion and continued occupation of Iraq. Some were reserved for those who have not yet died. This demonstration was more than symbolic. It represented not only future losses but also our nation's acceptance of those losses. This acceptance is one of conditioning, as mechanical as the system of economics so rapacious that it requires perpetual war to function.

President Bush recently admitted that his administration had "miscalculated" the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. But then added the war has been a "catastrophic success."

REICH
A lorry full of wooden legs. And this convinced you of the horror of the situation?

OUSPENSKY
The fighting had hardly started. Those wooden legs were for men whose real legs had not yet been blown off.

REICH
Men whose legs had not been blown off but would be blown off?

OUSPENSKY
Yes. As a mathematician, I had studied a great deal of statistical analysis. I knew the principles the War Office had used in calculating how many wooden legs they would need at the front in the next few weeks. Such mathematical predictions are exact, but only if people behave as they are expected to behave. Only if people are predictable.

REICH
Only if people are armored and mechanical...

OUSPENSKY
Precisely. In that moment, looking at that lorry, I understood the horror of the situation, I understood that two hundred real legs would be blown off, on schedule, and two hundred wooden legs would arrive to replace them, and it was all mathematically certain... Because there was no real consciousness in any of it, just robot reactions. And yet everybody involved had the illusion that they were free and they they were making rational choices. They literally could not see what they were doing or what was going on around them. They had literally taken leave of their senses.

- Robert Anton Wilson, Wilhelm Reich in Hell

When Bush says that he and his War Cabinet made a "miscalculation", he is saying that he believes the loss of American and Iraqi lives, while regretable, is little more than a variable in an equation. Higher than predicted but acceptable when engaged in the struggle for freedom.

Bush and his War Cabinet formulated a strategy, and American and Iraqi lives are sacrifices in the cause of an ideology.

On September 7 the number of Americans killed in action in Iraq reached the grim total of 1000. Enough to fill all of the coffins that were carried in the New York City demonstration on August 29.

Just a couple days after the mass demonstration, during the Republican National Convention, John McCain told CNN that American forces are likely to be in Iraq for "probably" 10 to 20 years. "That's not so bad. We've been in Korea 50 years."

Is this a revised forecast, based on what we know now? Another regretable miscalculation? Or has this been factored in all along? It depends on what you are willing to accept.

Bush and his War Cabinet rely on public acceptance in order to ensure a supply of enough young men and women to replace those lost. A sonambulant American public is essential so that war in the name of our "national ideology" can continue.

We now launch Ritual Reality with the conviction that our nation is on a very dangerous course. People not only need to be better informed--we need to interact with others who realize that changing this course is both necessary and possible. We need to change our collective mindset and demand more from ourselves and our institutions. In short, to evolve.

Our position is one that refuses to accept the machinations of a system that is willing to sacrifice lives to obtain "democracy" and "freedom." We must first understand that we are part of a system. That system warps our political and economic resources with a rapacious ideological vision of the world and the way it works. It does not have to be this way. Instead of spending billions of dollars to wage a war of freedom, why not spend billions of dollars exporting access to clean water, food and technology?

The problem is that our leaders are locked in fundamentally broken ideological frameworks. This dead-end thinking only serves to perpetuate a system which finds this sacrifice acceptible.