Addendum to the 10/7 essay on stopping the war
by the Dash Brothers

Before the folks at Washington Week in Review turned to their real business of the evening---helping guest star Tom Friedman sell his new book---one of them mentioned that although the Democrats in Congress caved, every single Latino in Congress and most of the black members voted against the Bushwar. Think about it.

The one person who can stop the war

There's now just one person in the United States who can stop the invasion of Iraq. He's probably the only person in the entire world who can stop it. Saddam Hussein couldn't stop it, even if he gave UN inspectors the keys to Iraq on his way to retirement in Argentina--- unless maybe he does it after the November elections.

The only person who can stop this war cold, is Colin Powell.

Right now it doesn't look like he's inclined to stop it. On October 1, after Iraq and the UN inspectors agreed on a procedure and the American stock market shot up like a skyrocket, Secretary of State Colin Powell went out of his way to say that the old inspection process isn't good enough, and that the U.S. would push ahead with a UN resolution demanding full access, with the penalty spelled out.

But this may be a tactical move to outflank the war-fevered politicos in the White House. Powell also said that the UN resolution would naturally reflect the process of negotiation with other nations---that is, it might be a compromise. This puts him in the position of possibly getting some kind of resolution he can use within the administration as an argument against invasion. If Iraq hasn't done anything really egregious by then, this might work. Right now the Bushies are so self-inflamed and inflated that they won't take yes for an answer from Iraq or anybody else. Only Powell can slow them down.

Whether he will or not is an open question, but it seems unlikely that the Bushes can go ahead without him. Powell is the only person in the administration who is known and respected internationally. More to the point, he is the general who ran what was militarily an invasion of Iraq in the Gulf War. The Bushies need his support and participation desperately.

Even a glance at the current situation suggests why. There is little international support, and some important international opposition to this invasion. While the Bushies are using television pretty skillfully to create the drumbeat for war (not that this is too difficult), it's hard for anyone who's paying attention to avoid realizing that nobody has made a good case for why this "regime change" must occur right this very minute. There's been no clear and present danger demonstrated, and as the stock market reflects and many forecasters agree, a war is not likely to be good for a precarious economy. The only reason to be talking about this right now is to increase Republican chances in the congressional elections.

It's all part of a coordinated strategy. Republicans throughout the country are draping their TV ads in the red, white and blue, trumpeting their patriotism and calling into question the patriotism of Democrats. It wasn't a slip or a mere sentence, when President Bush castigated Democrats in Congress for concentrating on petty special interests ( you know-- like prescription drugs, the economy), and said they weren't concerned with national security. It is a political strategy.

Does everyone understand the political motive? That's also an open question. Democrats are scared to death of appearing to be political on a matter of war and peace, even though they all know that politics is what all the war noise is about. Congressional mail is running heavily against the war, and Democrats see it at 20 to one against or more, but those campaign ads scare them.

Of course, politics may not be the main reason. Politics might even be a smokescreen. It may also be that the representatives of Big Oil in the White House (which includes nearly everybody of any importance) are using the political argument to advance their own interests with a takeover of Iraq and possibly other areas of the Gulf.

I'm still waiting for someone to tell me why this isn't delusional. The idea that the U.S. can run the Gulf region like an oil corporation is insane. They can't even run Afghanistan. An invasion of Iraq is at least equivalent to Vietnam in quagmire potential, but then this war isn't being led by the best and the brightest. They're looking more like the worst and the dumbest.

But it's the insanity of the situation that may offer the greatest hope, because Colin Powell, even though a Republican, does not appear to be crazy. He is going to look at what it takes in personnel and technology, in logistics and costs, to first of all successfully invade Iraq and take down Saddam. That might be relatively easy, but costly (not that we'll know the cost for years to come), or it may take a long time and be very obviously costly in every possible way.

But then he's going to look at what comes next. "Regime change" sounds so simple. But the last time America with a huge coalition behind it invaded Iraq---led by Colin Powell--- the march to Baghdad was stopped short. Why? Could it be that Powell knew that the cost of regime change was beyond what the coalition would commit to doing, in resources, attention and time?

This time is different. It's worse. There isn't even a coalition. Last time in the Gulf the American military did most of the warfare, and the coalition mostly paid for it. Guess who pays for the whole thing this time? Odd how the tax cuts for the wealthy will be kicking in right about then.

But if Powell and others manage to string out the preparations past the November elections (and maybe that's the plan anyway), a short hangover may be followed by more sober assessments. Still, there may come a time when Powell has to step up, lay out the facts, and even lay down the law.

If Powell is ultimately against an invasion, how could it possibly happen? The Cheney wing would probably like to see him resign, but not on the eve of the largest military operation of the twenty-first century so far. Not when he is the most prominent African American in a government leadership role, and a lot of the men and women who will actually have to do the fighting, killing and dying are African Americans. They have little in common with the rest of the Bushies, for their veins do not run with oil, and their parachutes are not made of gold.

If it comes to a war he believes is a mistake, will Powell go along with his Commander in Chief, or will Bush blink first? It's possible Powell would publicly support an invasion he privately opposes, just because it's patriotic. But somehow I doubt it. He's the best known American military figure, and he won't be able to hide from the media or international leaders. He has his own credibility and his effectiveness as a leader to worry about, if he's trying to defend what he doesn't believe in. That might work if he was more of a politician or less prominent. His choice would be between waffling and hiding, and either choice would tend to undermine the administration.

He could also focus all his power on providing American troops with what they need for an overwhelming military victory, discharging his duty to them. But can he then turn his back on the chaos that would ensue in the region, or the fate of the occupying force over time, when the slow accumulation of death is no longer fodder for the 24/7 media frenzy of the month? If asked about any other Bushie, the question would be rhetorical. But Powell might be able to translate his sense of duty from just the military he once commanded to the country he now serves.

America suffered a great trauma last September 11. Only a sober assessment of both threats and actions to neutralize the threats will make anyone safer from terrorism. The most terrifying aspect of the current leadership is its appearance of being both cynically manipulative and seriously out of control. For more than a year now, Osama bin Laden has been the devil incarnate, but he never gave the Bushies the satisfaction of becoming a visible bloody body. So they have to go after the ever reliable Saddam. At least they know where he lives.

America needs somebody to bring some sobriety to this White House. Maybe time will do the job, and the tide of opinion and protest. But just because this invasion is crazy in so many ways doesn't mean it won't happen. World War I was insane, and lots of people at the time knew it. This is how some wars start. So I expect that Colin Powell is going to be at the center of one of the more fateful backstage dramas of the next few months in Washington, DC.

Iraq and Roll

So far no one is saying it out loud, in the newspapers I read or the TV I've seen. But I imagine it's on the minds of many people, especially Americans, in this suspended moment before the war promoted by the President of the United States takes center stage: namely, we didn't really elect this guy.

Especially after the immense media concentration on the September 11 anniversary-much of it sincere, some clearly exploitive, but also some which seemed to be forced-we seem to have forgotten this other event that now looms so large in what is to come: the election of 2000.

We are being led, forced, on a course that defies historical standards and national ethics in modern times-- essentially a very radical course-by an administration that took power after losing the popular vote across the nation, and assumed office only by virtue of an extraordinary intervention by the Supreme Court, in a decision tainted by the evident conflict of interests of several Justices.

Its claim on being a democratically elected government is fragile at best. Yet this government is behaving with an arrogance that seems to lend credence to the proposition that it has contempt not only for the rest of the world but for the will of the American people. At the very least one would expect a certain political modesty from a government that came into power not quite by election, and not quite by a coup. (Though their arrogance tells me that in their minds, it was a coup.) But perhaps September 11 changed the equation of power-or perhaps it's just that they can count on the peculiar instant amnesia of this age.

Though no one now is connecting those dots, I'm sure future historians (if any) will do so in a matter of a few paragraphs. The first paragraph on George W. Bush will refer to his dubious claim to the presidency---that it came down to how to count or not count votes in a single state, where as result of error and designed suppression of votes, he carried the state and hence the election by a handful of actual votes---but only as validated by a split Supreme Court decision, defying both logic and law.

The second paragraph of this history will note that the G.W. Bush administration was dominated by the political cronies of the president's father, who spent their time out of government using their contacts to enrich themselves and large corporations, and blatantly represented those same interests when in government. It will note that the Bush administration was floundering until terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Then Bush made an off-the-cuff remark while standing in the rubble of the World Trade Center and saw immediately the makings of a political identity in the cheers of rescue workers that obviously surprised him. He could be the symbol of fighting back, even though he wasn't going to be doing any of the fighting, just as he could cry "Let's roll!" into Iraq, and then go take a nap. He could parlay that figurehead/talking head leadership into time-tested political manipulation based on patriotism and the fear of seeming not patriotic.

The third paragraph, I imagine, will be about the invasion of Iraq, and its tragic consequences. This history will perhaps note the puzzling lack of emotion and debate opposing this war until it was too late to stop it. It will note however that most of what then happened was foreseen at least in outline (columnists like Molly Ivins, Robert Scheer, and locally in San Francisco, Jon Carroll and Rob Morse, have been remarkably clear.)

These historians will fill in the details of the ensuing chaos and violent death in the Gulf region and the Middle East, the chaos and strife spreading to various political and economic alliances. This history will note the damage to the world economy, weakening it at a time when it needed to be strong to cope with the changes slowly but surely taking hold as consequences of the climate crisis. It will note the costs on life in the United States of more economic hardship and a greater siege mentality against real and imagined threats-with one of the real threats being an increasingly intrusive, powerful and arrogant police state government.

We owe all of this partly to the blindness of Americans who fell for the simplistic idea that it did not matter if Bush or Gore won the 2000 election. That Bush and Gore are part of the same corrupt political system is true, and has consequences. But that doesn't deny their differences, and one or the other was going to be president.

We reap the whirlwind of this failure to understand the differences between these two men, and the people they bring into power. Millions of Americans voted on small differences. If you can believe the media conventional wisdom, many voted for Bush because he seemed like a nice guy, not as stiff as Gore. This extraordinarily stupid test for presidential fitness was granted legitimacy by media's failure to even question it-but then how could many TV "news" personalities challenge the wisdom of judging on nice guy appearances when they owe their jobs to the same standards.

The Bush presidency is leading America and the world to a disastrous twenty-first century in three interlocking ways: internationally, by arrogance and war; domestically, by bankrupting the federal government on tax breaks for the wealthy; and globally, by ignoring global heating and other environmental threats.

The agenda behind all of this is pretty clear: favor entrenched corporate interests, keep the oppressed people of the world in control through force, and keep the American people scared: scared for their safety and their country, so they will support Bush and the Republican establishment from now until doomsday, and scared for their own livelihoods so they won't rock the boat, so they will keep fighting each other for crumbs, with their nose to the grindstone and nothing in their heads but dreams of sudden wealth and celebrity.

We can see the consequences of those apparently small differences between Bush and Gore and between these two parties pretty clearly now. Though most Democrats are too scared of appearing unpatriotic to do more than stutter, at least Al Gore has spoken forthrightly about the folly and arrogance of the Bush administration's march towards war, and its foreign policy pretensions that would make the Roman Empire jealous, especially as it was falling.

We can hear echoes of Gore's campaign call to fight for middle class Americans who are being lacerated now, and who will have their futures mortgaged by Bush war and tax policies. That call was ridiculed by the wealthy and wannabe-wealthy minions of the media, and disbelieved by the Naderites. It's not hard to justify the Naderite skepticism or even cynicism, but it's also not hard to see where the important lines of difference are. Some are large, like the tax cut that Gore never would have proposed or allowed to become law.

Other differences may seem smaller, but loom as large. Clearly, Gore would talk differently on global heating and other environmental matters, though even if he had become president, environmentalists would have had to keep the pressure on to get real change. But at least they wouldn't have to spend such an immense amount and proportion of energy and resources to even get the climate crisis on the table.

And here's an apparently small but very real difference. It isn't just that Gore is a lot smarter than Bush (though incredibly this was held against him much of the time) but that he respects the process and conclusion of science and thought. Intellectual integrity is something Gore actually understands. So we would not be seeing the folly now being perpetrated in Washington of replacing scientists with political and corporate hacks at EPA and on the federal scientific advisory boards to the CDC, the FDA and other agencies charged with health and safety. It's a virtual certainty that at some point people will get sick and die because of these decisions. With the challenges inevitably ahead-the health impact of global heating alone is going to be monstrous---this small act may turn out to be among the most consequential, just as important as that handful of votes in Florida.

At this moment it may seem pointless to revisit the 2000 election, but even beyond the need to understand history or be condemned to idiotically repeat it, there is in this moment, at least for me, the feeling that something truly terrible was set in motion, not just in September 2001 but in November 2000.

The fall of western civilization, the beginning of the end of humanity's hegemony on the planet---if you've been paying attention for the past few years, these things are not only being discussed as real possibilities, in some quarters they are virtual clichés. That western civilization is about to collapse is something like an assumption. The premise that humanity and perhaps all life on earth is in real peril in this century is also a kind of starting point for discussions among respectable scientists and knowledgeable observers.

A feature of collapse in its early stages, and perhaps even when it is well underway, is likely to be that not many people notice. They continue to judge problems in the same narrow frameworks; they fail to "connect the dots" in today's favorite cliché.

There was an article in The New Yorker a few years back that caught my eye, called "The Tipping Point." The author expanded it into a book I found disappointing, because I believe he missed the obvious ramifications of the theory on important issues. The Tipping Point theory sounds like systems theory I heard discussed some years ago. It says that there is a particular point in change-the tipping point-when the change can no longer be reversed until it plays itself out. The behavior of epidemics is an example.

The tipping point of the twenty-first century may very well turn out to be the moment American forces invade Iraq. If so, and it tips over this extraordinarily complex and fragile house of cards until it all falls down, there may not be future historians to record any of this. But if there are, my guess is that of all the dates they rank in significance from the first years of this century, September 11---for all its horror and importance--will turn out to be no greater than a close third.