The Open Matt Project

Dark Dissent into Madness

As the Abu Ghraib Iraqi prison scandal blossoms, I can only grip my reality handbar even tighter and try to stomach what is happening to my world. This is a long, meandering post - you've been warned.

I watched a fairly long, and disappointingly mediocre, amature political video by ProtestWarrior.com yesterday. Like the far better Brain Terminal videos, it has right-wing activists confronting the left-wing activists in an effort to expose their real beliefs through, well, exposure. It's a little like shooting fish in a small pond, since the activists organizing these protests are hard core ideologues, which is why they are organizing protests in the first place. They already know the answers (The name of one of the biggest is actually International A.N.S.W.E.R - Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), and so their goal is to make sure everyone else knows them too - so we can all stop being so rascist, unfair, greedy, violent and so on. In these protests, you'll always find the following: Free Mumia, Not in Our Name, Free Palestine, No Blood for Oil, Bush Lied People Died, End the Occupation, and possibly Bush is Not My President. I don't know why Mumia is in there, but it is.

These people are the left's lunatic fringe. They are no more credible than the 700 club or the health and environment-related press releases from your typical Fortune 500 corporation, yet they are far more representative and influential. We see them in the news, usually saying things that are heartfelt and noble, like, "We should not kill innocent civilians just to fill our SUVs!" and really, who can argue with that logic? Who wouldn't want to side with people who want to not kill innocent people (or in Mumia's case, even guilty people)?

Of course we see them in the news, since the ones reporting it are merely one or more steps to the right of them. Still left, but not crazy. Naturally, they are more interested in covering similar-minded material. Don't worry, I'm not going to dive into the media bias thing, I was just dipping a toe in it, just to show the connections. So they have a tendency to vote Democrat and cover Democratic-minded things, like the American soldiers killed in Iraq, or the latest Israeli attack and coresponding Palestinian bombing, or the lack of funding for education, or the occasional accidental firearm death, or any pro-choice/anti-war/ethnic(not white) protest or rally.

Democratic. The Democratic Party. The Democratic National Committee, or the DNC. They are the other party of the two political parties that vie for power over our country. They are offering the alternative, if you don't like how things are being run now. Kerry is their man, and he is certain to change things if he's elected.

Back to Abu Ghraib. A handful of our people, soldiers or otherwise, torture and abuse the prisoners under their supervision. They take pictures and videos of it. They pass them around like baseball cards. Naturally, these 'trophies' find their way to people who don't find them amusing. People like, say, the people who we are trying to help and their fascist leaders. You do not need to be a pundit, or an activist, or a politician to understand these photos - it is sufficient to be human to feel the revulsion and anger. I can only imagine what the people who have been listening to their leaders lie about American behaviour 24-7 for their whole lives must think when seeing these pictures.

It's all true.

Now I read the response to this ongoing horror, and it's the blame game 2004 - with the prize being Bush. Watch the news, read the paper, google it if you like, the story is no longer on Fallujah, now that it's cooled down there, but is completely focused on Abu Ghraib. Names will be gathered, hearings will be had, and justice will inexorably grind its way through this scandal. For me, that is not where the real story is.

This year we watched the Democratic Primaries and barring the spectacular ascension and implosion of Howard Dean, it was a me-too convention of robotic Anti-Bush's that inspired no one. We watched clips of the 9-11 commission, we saw it lampooned on SNL and talked about in the news. Conclusion? Who knows. The two sides went into it thinking what they thought and having found no smoking guns worthy of a newsbite, they both went home. We bit our nails when Iraq exploded back into war, and lost interest before we noticed we won. Now we have the Abu Ghraib scandal to watch, and when that's left behind we'll still be heading for November 2004 - where the real story is. Half a year from now, we'll be able to pick a new leader for our country, and if we do it will be a radical change indeed.

But a change to what? What is the alternative I can vote for? Kerry's plan is to hand over control of Iraq to the UN, backed up by NATO forces. His posted number of returning troops is 20,000, which still leaves over 110,000 troops in Iraq under whose control? Are the anti-war people going to stop protesting if we pull 20,000 troops out? Are International ANSWER, Not In Our Name, and MoveOn.org going to back these plans? No. They have no goal other than thwarting George W. Bush.

If Kerry wins and we go with his plan, we're still in Iraq with slightly less troops and a different command structure. Keep in mind the draft talk that's made its rounds on the news was started by Democrats. Also keep in mind that just about everyone agrees on there being a need for more troops if we are to maintain security there - including security at places like Abu Ghraib. So, if you're anti-war, you're anti-Kerry, because he ain't pulling out; or so he says.

If Kerry doesn't win, we're still in Iraq with Bush at the helm. The plan, shifting like the sands as it may seem, is to attempt to bring a liberal democracy to the Middle East while at the same time giving the region a warning shot. The goal is to salt the ideological earth of Islamic facism so it cannot grow large enough to be of any danger to us. This is an old diplomatic message that's clear to everyone in the region, "clean up your back yard, or I'll have to do it for you." So if you're anti-war, you're anti-Bush, because he ain't pulling out; we know because he said so.

If Kerry wins, and he doesn't do what he plans but rather pulls out relatively quickly and hands over administration to the UN, I fear Iraq and Afghanistan will become the latest UN failures, to go along with Bosnia, Rwanda, and Saddam's Iraq. Their failure will be second only to our failure, however, if we free them from their shackles and then leave them in the slave market undefended. I assume that the signs that read "US out of IRAQ" really mean what they say, and I wonder if those people holding them will be disturbed by the bloodbath that would likely occur in the power vacuum created by our abscence. The civil war in Iraq would make Somalia look like a backyard wrestling video in comparison. Will ANSWER and NION and MoveOn protest the war when we're not involved? I doubt it.

So why does something as relatively small as Abu Ghraib scare the shit out of me? Because it's the first time that I felt that we might lose not because the enemy was strong, but because we were weak. The enemy is counting on our lack of resolve, having learned from Vietnam and Somalia. They know we have no stomach for war and do their best to win the war the easiest way possible - in the voting booths. I expect the enemy to behave like the enemy, by torturing and killing and destroying with wanton abandon whoever and whatever he must to win. But I do not expect that from us. I expect the opposite. To see our own people behaving as the enemy does is a special kind of failure.

Worst of all, it makes the friends of our enemies even stronger. You will see those photos enlarged to obscene sizes at the next anti-war protest. You will see them on Indymedia and all over the web in a collective sigh of despair and vindication. It makes it even harder for right-of-center folks like myself to defend our positions, and even worse it makes me look to George W. Bush even more for resolve and strength. I may doubt what countries all over the world might do, or doubt whether or not Kerry can lead effectively, but I have no doubt at all about Bush. He said he's staying - and he does exactly what he says.

So these are my choices? Folks on the left that have no plan to avoid 9/11 Part 2, and one man on the right whom I only partially agree with and only because ironically he's seems to be the only one who gets what's going on. Yes, that's what I said.

Posted by Matt at May 10, 2004 02:05 PM