[A-List] Roger Morris: War for the Future

[Erik Freye <efreye@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.egp360.net/midnightride/morris_2005_08_29.shtml

The War for the Future


Publication/Source: eGP360 Midnight Ride
By: Roger Morris
Senior Fellow, Green Institute


Over the dying summer. I have known
No truce with Time nor Time's accomplice, Death.
--Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

What a surreal momentâ??this faded end-of-summer 2005.

We are locked in an evil lost war of staggering costs.
Some flail at the atrocity in a cause that seems
equally lost. Most play on in the ebbing season's sun,
oblivious to reckonings.

In Washington rules the worst regime in memory. Yet it
falls to a fiercely bereaved 48-year-old mother,
camping beside a dusty ditch in Texas, to embody the
conscience of the culture, at least until the media
move on.

The regime in its outrage struts essentially unopposed
in our supposed democracy. Protest rises powerless.
The oblivious go uninformed, unled. Ignorant of the
issues, cravenly afraid of risking privilege for
principle, hostage to corrupt advisors and a corrupted
calculus of national interest, Democrats not only
mistake the public mood and fail the minimal duty of
opposition, but join the folly. From Hillary Clinton
to Barack Obama, Capitol Hill barons to camp-following
bloggers, they stand bravely for more fodder more
efficiently fed to the calamity, huddling earnestly to
the right of the most egregious right-wing aggression
in our history. Add to the Iraqi disaster the defining
debacle of our second intellectually and morally
derelict party.

Even if Democrats poll to find courage convenient, as
some surely will, it will do us little good. Like the
odd rebel Republicans (Senator Hagel & Co., who
exhibit, ironically, what conservatives always said
about enlisting more integrity than the other side of
the aisle), they will find this Presidency peculiarly,
frighteningly immune to advice and consent.

There is quixotic talk about George W. Bush reprising
Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, variously undone by
intra-party revolt, demonstrations, defection of the
Establishment, scandal. I was in the White House when
the "Wise Men" of postwar American foreign policy told
LBJ that Wall Street as well as Main Street had
deserted the Vietnam War. I was there later as Nixon
sullenly, anxiously watched a million protesters
engulf Pennsylvania Avenue. I saw those politicians,
however grudgingly, however slowly, respond to
reality.

We must be clear. Bush is no Johnson or Nixon. This
president is not simply the least competent ever
thrown up. He is also the most pathological. Every
shred of evidence of the man and his rule, every
witness, leak, and gesture reek of it. Freshman
psychology students and amateur therapists smell it
instantly.

To quote a distinguished analyst who'll remain
anonymous for the sake of his Republican patients:

George W. is a narcissistic personality. He is self
referent. He sees things only from his point of
view--and by extension sees and represents the America
that reflects it. He is able to create a seamless ball
into which nothing else can penetrate. As with other
narcissistic personalities, he lives his entitlement
and grandiosity--in his case even seeing himself as
fulfilling God's wishes on earth. He does not need to
check any other reality. He knows that what feels
right to him is right for everyone. The rules do not
apply to him (college, the reserves, etc)--only to
those who need rules to do what is right. Unlike
Senator Frist, I tend not to diagnose in absentia, but
with George W., all of us could go on and on.

On and on is how the pathology will be manifest in the
torment of Iraq. It hardly matters how vested Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Rice, the Generals, corporations, media
claque, complicit Democrats. Bush is enough. The
cowardice and blindness, craftiness and stupidity of
the war policy, and of the whole myth-encrusted and
corrupt mentality around it, will persist so long as
Bush and all who used and accepted him remain in
office.

Despite the seeming death of politics, we have never
known a crisis and opportunity more political. The
moment cries out for politics fought as never before.

Not for more wailing at how venally awful it all is,
marveling at how the reactionaries did it, as if
Churchill's British spent the autumn of 1940 shaking
their heads and endlessly writing one another about
how it happened Nazis were at the gate. There is no
time for that. The poet is right. For this generation
of progressives, time's accomplice is
deathâ??senseless, generations-haunting death in Iraq,
and all the other deaths of body and spirit inflicted
by America's misrule at home and abroad. What to do is
plain.

Fight now. Fight everywhere. Take the battle first and
foremost to where power lives.

Progressives must contest all 435 House seats and all
33 Senate seats up in 2006, along with every governor,
legislator and local official not unequivocally
against the war and more, everywhere a Republican or a
compromised Democrat presumes to govern. Never mind
Beltway braying that it's not practical and a waste,
the myth of non-competitive races reinforcing the
one-party system. The point is to stop playing by the
old rules. Like the RAF in 1940, we must take on even
the impossible. In the underlying volatility of the
American electorate, every challenge is a threat,
every spark a potential burn clear. Politicians know
this. No Democrat will face a primary challenge on the
war, no Republican will face it in the general,
without risk. No progressive will run without gain. No
lesson will be lost.

The campaign everywhere is simple. Stop the dying.
Stop the lying. In Iraq and beyond. About foreign
policy, energy, jobs, and so much, much more.

To carry that message progressives have never been
stronger, never so mobilized, conscious, savvy. If
they are serious about spending their money to save
the century, the new progressive donors will add to
the strength by funding genuinely new policy thinking
and answers for candidates to carry. From dealing at
last with the scandal of our health care system to
conducting at last a civilized foreign policy. From
finding the tipping point in lifting the root
oppression of campaign money to adopting non lethal
alternatives to guzzling away as if there's no energy
or environmental crisis, as if a global
warming-unleashed hurricane were not now pounding away
to ravage 25% of the nation's oil supply off
Louisiana, with more like it to follow.

None of this will happen in old ways and institutions
under yesterday's men. We will never have a chance to
stop the dying and lying until we stop the irrelevant
and self-indulgent, the jockeying and empty debating.
Winning means unity, and unifying means ready
sacrifice of credit, precedence, postage-stamp domains
of power and prestige we substitute for serious
politics. It is an ancient adage. We cannot lead
without humility, govern a nation without governing
ourselves.

Most important, our fatal attraction, we must go
unseduced by the Democrats, who have made seduction
and abandonment of progressives a lucrative career.

We can, of course, stand by wringing as the Democrats
nominate Hillary Clinton and the Republicans Giuliani,
McCain or some more transparent throw-back. We can
easily go on blogging and bandaging in this half-mad
twilight.

Or we can act as the free people our soldiers in the
deadly sun of Mesopotamia, however deluded, misused or
misled, think they are defending. We can take up the
fight for them and more, street to street, door to
door, with $20 bills or $20 million. We can turn
weakness into strength, retreat into advance, defeat
into victory.

We lost the invasion of Iraq and the election of 2004,
not our souls. We lost battles. The war for the
futureâ??America's and the world'sâ??is only
beginning. But there can be no more waiting to fight.
No truce with time nor its accomplice.

# # # #

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