Bush's March of Folly

In her book The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman identifies four types of bad government: tyranny or oppression; excessive ambition; incompetence or decadence; and folly or perversity.

The current regime in charge of the United States government can be accused of committing all four of the sins of bad government, with respect to their post 911 foreign and domestic policies.

What else can you call the opportunistic linking of the 911 terrorist attacks to Iraq, without any credible evidence to back it up, other than Excessive Ambition? That oh_so_clever linkage is now being used as transparent cover for an imperialistic aggression in the Middle East. It is not as if we aren't already there keeping Iraq under the thumb. Now we must "finish the job." The miseries of containment and economic sanctions are not enough for Iraq. It must be bombed, whupped, overrun and occupied _ in the name of the antiseptic moniker "regime change."

Fresh on the heels of the Afghanistan intervention, the rest of the world is waking up to the reality that Iraq will not be the terminus of the United States' excessive ambition. Bush told us, "you're either with us or you're against us," which sets up a rather arbitrary litmus test that could be used to justify invasions (or plain bombings) of "evildoer" states like Iran, Syria, and North Korea, and eventually such ungrateful "old Europe" allies as France and Germany. It will rationalize the scrapping of the United Nations and the refashioning of the world as the United States' own virtual police state _ Randy Newman's satire "Political Science" come to life. The excessive ambition also applies to domestic policy. Bush's Patriot Act, rammed through a rubber_stamp congress in the shaky weeks after 911, was an ambitious right_wing power grab that shat upon many civil liberties we Americans claim to hold dear, but are apparently willing to discard when the going gets tough. Folly does extend beyond the halls of government to the rank and file.

Incompetence or decadence enters the picture when one thinks of the fact that a small cadre of hijackers was able to kill three thousand people in a most spectacular fashion using box cutters, while the administration had failed to act upon warning after warning that something "big" was afoot in the months before, that George Bush finished reading a story about a goat to some children as the attacks unfolded and then hid like a scared puppy dog for the better part of the day, and in the ensuing days continuously put his foot in his mouth (appropriating the language of vigilante cowboys and Christian crusaders), before the spin doctors could stage manage his response into something more respectable.

This still did not stop he and his cronies Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, and Powell from periodically mouthing off with arrogant barbs aimed at anyone not wearing an American flag lapel pin. The incompetence and decadence of Bush's regime extends to his management of the national economy and federal budget. I might mention the rash of outted thieves: Enron, Worldcom, Xerox, Adelphi, Tyco; the nation's ballooning defecits, the crisis of investor confidence, and irresponsible tax cuts for the wealthy in the middle of a recession.

Folly or perversity is the heart of Tuchman's book. She defines it as "the pursuit of policy contrary to the self_interest of the constituency or state involved." She further posits three criteria that must be met for a policy to considered as folly: "it must have been perceived as counter_productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight"; "a feasible alternative course of action must have been available"; and "the policy.should be that of a group, not an individual ruler, and should persist beyond any one political lifetime." Do Bush's policy blunders meet the folly test? Is war against Iraq contrary to our self_interest?

Unless you live in Texas and own an oil company, war against Iraq has plenty of downsides that spring to mind. How about making millions of Islamic fanatics that much more feverish to kill us; how about destabilizing the most contentious region on earth; how about putting thousands of American soldiers in harm's way, possibly exposing them to the very weapons of mass destruction that we mean to rid Iraq of; how about destroying the Nato alliance, setting a united Europe against the United States, and making most every country in the third world suspicious of our "altruistic" motives, when the true aims of this war (oil and American hegemony) are so baldly obvious?

Is an alternative course of action available? Sure. We could continue with the containment policy that has boxed Saddam Hussein in, isolated him, and rendered his regime ineffective. We could tie the removal of Weapons of Mass Destruction to the lifting of sanctions and help rebuild Iraq, boost their economy and acquaint them with the gluttonous glories of American style consumerism (has a better pacifying agent ever been developed?).

Better yet, we could show the world how earnest we are about weapons of mass destruction by dismantling our own. We could continue the inspections inside Iraq. Yes, there are plenty of options short of war, and everyone knows it. Iraq is a threat? THE threat? Surely they must be joking.

Is the policy that of a group and not one ruler? Sure. War against Iraq isn't just Bush's folly _ it's the product of government vets from the Bush One administration, chickenhawk conservatives, the oilmen, the religious right, and zealous backers of reactionary Israeli policies. It's the same mindset that got us involved in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, El Salvador and Nicaragua, and the Persian Gulf. Bush may be a fool, but he has company.

Tuchman also cites "wooden_headedness" as an important component of the march of folly. It is "the source of self_deception.. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts." Wooden_headedness is tailor_fit to Bush and company, who have robotically committed themselves with pre_programmed religious zeal to a fantasy of world domination, despite the fact that most every country on earth is opposed to it, that millions have taken to the streets to protest it, that it is turning our friends into our enemies, that it is energizing the very terrorists we want to deter, that it has stalled the economic recovery.

The wooden_noggin syndrome is shared by the relatively small clique of oligarchs responsible for our government, business management, and agenda setters in the media. When you've monopolized power and information in the hands of so few, you may think you've gained the panoptic view, the gaze of the eye on the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill. Then a curious phenomenon occurs: the world's diverse range of opinion gets distorted, homogenized, packaged, filtered by hubris and the need to be proven right; the interpretations get more unreliable, you lose perspective, the blind side widens. There are gaps in the script. Something like this is happening now. The people in charge, the ones with the B52s and 24 hour stations, are so out of touch, so well off, so proud of themselves, that they lose grip on the situation.

As for tyranny, we in America still live in a democracy (so I'd like to think. Since 2000 I hesitate to say so.) And yet we who live and work under the current economic system of late capitalism sense a creeping tyranny of the soul. As John Berger puts it, [M]ight it not be better to see and declare that we are living through the most tyrannical _ because the most pervasive _ chaos that has ever existed?

It's not easy to grasp the nature of the tyranny, for its power structure (ranging from the 200 largest multinational corporations to the Pentagon) is interlocking yet diffuse, dictatorial yet anonymous, ubiquitous yet placeless. It tyrannizes offshore, not only in terms of Fiscal Law but in terms of any political control beyond its own. Its aim is to delocalize the entire world. Its ideological strategy, beside which Bin Laden's is a fairy tale, is to undermine the existent so that everything collapses into its special version of the virtual, from the realm of which _ and this is the tyranny's credo _ there will be a neverending source of profit. It sounds stupid. Tyrannies are stupid.

This one is destroying at every level the life of the planet on which it operates. Considering all the senses described above, the United States' bad government batting average is an astounding four for four, or 100%. Sobering when you think that the world's lone hyper_power is being run by abject fools.

Their march of folly towards a war of aggression in Iraq is wrong on every front I can imagine: moral, economic, diplomatic, military, domestic security, foreign relations. Any victory in Iraq will be Pyrrhic. I wish we had the power to stop it.

In tyrannical times, the wishes of the powerless tend not to come true.

Mort Allman, Turk's Head Review, edited by J. Esch, contact.