[Marxism] Re: Bush's Speech [A response to Zell Miller's speech]

["M. Junaid Alam" <junaidalam@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I don't have any commentary on Bush's speech but I wrote an article
about Zell Miller's. He just pissed me off more.

/Taking on Dangerous Lies: A Response to Zel Miller’s Speech /

On September 1^st Democratic Senator Zell Miller delivered a speech to
the Republican National Convention gushing with praise for the president
and venom for his own party’s nominee. He exalted the Republican Party
as the only force that can best protect and preserve the future of his
“most precious possession” - his family - because of its aggressive
stance in the international “war on terror,” and derided the Democrats
for making the country “weaker” with their “manic obsession” to unseat
Bush. What strikes the conscious American as most disgraceful about the
senator is not his betrayal of the party to which he belongs, but his
allegiance to the most dishonest set of positions to which justice and
reason have never belonged. The promulgation of poisonous myths about
the war abroad, like the eagerness of a nervous public to eat up those
myths, is the greatest danger confronting America today.

The senator from Georgia opened his defense of Bush’s outlook on the
“war on terror” by reminding the audience of World War II and the
urgency of fighting Nazi Germany’s “crazy man across the ocean who would
kill us if [he] could.” It is a sad comment on the state of public
discourse in American society that no great issue can be discussed, no
pressing topic considered, without someone somewhere immediately
conjuring up the frightening image of Hitler’s hordes sweeping across
Europe and exclaiming that what we face in the present is a
reincarnation of that event.

Senator Miller insists on the comparison. He opines that “the party I’ve
spent my life working in” no longer considers it “the duty of America to
fight for freedom over tyranny” and is lacking “bipartisanship” at a
time when, like World War II, “this country needs it most” and “face[s]
great danger.” Has the senator, like a certain one of his sworn enemies,
been languishing in isolated caves for the past year? Has he not noticed
that the “great danger” of weapons of mass destruction was a figment of
the warped minds of right-wing ideologues in the Pentagon and White
House? Has he not seen that the “great danger” of the supposed Saddam –
al-Qaeda link is another fabrication for which not one intelligence
agency in the world has found a shred of evidence? And where are the
large armies, the huge tank battalions, the goose-stepping soldiers, who
are marching their way to invade America and snatch away our freedoms
from us?

So wrapped up in making facile analogies about expansionist dictators,
the senator has apparently forgotten one other pressing fact. In the
“war on terror”, there is only one major standing army deploying itself
across the globe, one force of high-tech terror and fearsome armor, one
massive killing machine sent half-way across the world to invade other
countries – that of the United States. The targets of invasion have been
small, weak nations suffering from decades of war, strife, and
sanctions; barely capable of raising their bowed heads, they presented
no threat to neighbors, let alone the world’s most powerful country.

But Senator Miller is hardly perturbed. With a magic wave of the hand he
declares that US soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq are not occupiers, but
liberators. “[N]othing” he informs us in the third person, “makes this
Marine madder than someone calling American troops occupiers rather than
liberators.” Authoritatively, he further intones, “Never in the history
of the world has any soldier sacrificed more for the liberty of total
strangers than the American soldier.” The good senator is quite a clever
orator: he states what is true – soldiers have made great sacrifices –
and links it with what is patently false – Muslims have been liberated –
such that anyone who attacks the second assertion by implication appears
to be attacking the first.

Let us defuse this ruse promptly. The men and women shipped off to
Afghanistan and more recently Iraq have indeed made great sacrifices.
They are far away from their friends, families, and homes, operating in
combat situations at great risk to themselves, living under difficult
conditions. In the case of Iraq, where most troops are now stationed,
soldiers made these sacrifices precisely because the president told them
and every other American that we faced a serious growing danger in the
form of Saddam Hussein, that we needed to take swift pre-emptive action
to stop the threat, and that it was our moral duty to free the Iraqi
people who would happily greet us as liberators.

But it is now undeniably clear that all of above is utterly false. The
man who Senator Miller fawningly praises has deceived all Americans,
including the soldiers, about the nature of the threat and the desires
of the Iraqi people. The man who Senator Miller trusts the future of his
children with heads a government which completely failed to plan for
post-war Iraq, indefinitely extending the stay and endangering the lives
of over 150,000 American troops who thought they were simply going to
win a quick battle, be showered with flowers from glowing natives, and
promptly return home. That Senator Miller clucks and crows about the
greatness of the soldiers while pimping for a president whose failed,
mistaken policies have imposed upon these same soldiers the pain of
hundreds of deaths and thousands of life-maiming injuries is a crucial
index of his character.

Now that the senator’s thin veneer of “support” for the troops has been
peeled away, we can see with equal clarity that Afghanistan and Iraq are
anything but “liberated.” In Afghanistan, outside the capital of Kabul
most territory is controlled by fundamentalist warlords, and the
population is subject to the same Taliban-like degradations, minus the
stability. US reconstruction and security efforts have been so pathetic
that numerous aid agencies have been forced to pull out completely and
others have criticized the paltry funding going into building
infrastructure. The main US contribution in Afghanistan has been bombing
wedding parties and homes from above, resulting in hundreds of dead
civilians.

As for Iraq, no person whose IQ can be measured above the range of
numbers on the Richter scale can deny that the US has absolutely failed
to provide any semblance of security or stability in any major city.
Among the poorest Shiite areas, unemployment is rampant, garbage and
sewage fills the streets, and reconstruction is nowhere to be seen; in
everywhere but the barricaded sections of Baghdad protecting the
frightened puppet government, general lawlessness or militia prevail;
only a small fraction of money budgeted for reconstruction has actually
been spent, and billions of dollars have “mysteriously” vanished.
Thousands of Iraqi civilians have been liberated from their limbs and
lives, their spirits jubilantly lifted into heaven by a hearty chorus of
tank, artillery, aerial bombardment, and machine gun fire.

This is all blasphemous to Senator Miller, who criticized the Democrats
for “see[ing] America as an occupier, not a liberator.” Let us put aside
the supposed viewpoint of the Democrats for the moment: does the good
senator know that an 80% majority of Iraqis /themselves/ “see” the
United States and the occupation government as untrustworthy – according
the now-defunct CPA’s own polls? Does he know that a majority of Iraqis
also want the US forces to withdraw from Iraq immediately – according to
Gallup polls? If the senator is so thoroughly convinced that the Iraqis
are liberated, one is justified in asking why he is conspicuously absent
from the festivities going on in Iraq to celebrate this great
achievement. Why doesn’t Senator Miller dress up as a local and visit
Najaf, Fallujah, and Abu Ghraib to enjoy firsthand the budding
liberation of Iraq? If he survives the bulldozing, bombing, shooting,
beating, and torturing, he will have quite a riveting account of the net
benefits of being on the receiving end of American liberation to tell
when he returns home.

Of course, Senator Miller never has and never will visit the people of
Iraq; he will never for one second experience what Iraqis under American
occupation do. In his heart of hearts, the former Marine doesn’t much
believe in his own mantra of liberation anyway, for in his speech he
quickly shifts gears to announce, “[O]ur soldiers don’t just give
freedom abroad, they preserve it for us here at home.” In a display of
unprecedented opportunism and demagoguery, he declares, “It is the
soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press;”
likewise it is the soldier, “not the poet, who has given us freedom of
speech;” it is the soldier, “not the agitator, who has given us the
freedom to protest.”

What an abused creature the American soldier is! These mostly young men
and women who signed up to escape poverty, to finance their education,
to gain skills for the job market, have already been flung into a war
with no clear goals, no timetable, no exit strategy, and face a
population that deeply resents their presence and doggedly attacks them
with devastating guerrilla tactics – all thanks to the myopia of the
president, senator Miller, and a few other politicians and ideologues.
But Senator Miller is not content with this abuse. Now he burdens with
the soldier with all kinds of ridiculous and absurd expectations and
pretenses - indeed in his view the soldier is the quintessence of
civilization of itself.

According to the senator’s proto-fascist rhetoric, the glorified soldier
is the epicenter and defender of all that is good in society;
journalists, artists, rebels, thinkers, fighters for social justice –
they may as well have never existed. All that is really required in
America is the government-trained professionally armed man.

Has the senator ever taken it upon himself to read the history of his
own country? When American workers were first fighting for their right
to organize and exert control over their own destinies, was it the
soldier who won them this struggle? It was the soldier and guardsman who
were sent to shoot down and beat up these men. When millions of
disenfranchised blacks were fighting for their basic right to be
recognized as human beings, was it the soldier who won them their
freedom? It was the domestic soldier - the policeman - who was sent to
maul them with dogs and smash their skulls with sticks. When millions of
Americans – including thousands of war veterans – “agitated” to save
hundreds of thousands of Americans from the mindless machine of death
that was the Vietnam War and bring them home, could it not be said that
it was the agitator who risked much to save the life of the soldier?
Senator Miller would do well to consider these basic facts of our
country’s history.

When the senator does bother to refer to the facts, his choice is most
peculiar. Citing a long list of weapons that Kerry apparently “tried to
shut down,” he lambastes him for opposing “the very weapons system[s]
that…are now winning the war on terror,” declaring it tantamount to
“selling off our national security.” It is not at all clear how Senator
Miller reconciles his pronouncements about America “liberating”
Afghanistan and Iraq with his fanatical support for the various bombers,
fighter jets, and helicopter gunships employed to deliver a reign of
explosive terror that has killed and injured tens of thousands of
civilians in those countries. But putting that aside, it is even less
clear how he has deluded himself into believing we are “winning” the war
on terror, or that victory can be achieved with billions more spent on
expensive toys. America spends more on “defense” than the next
twenty-one countries /combined/. Can the senator say with a straight
face that this absurdly wasteful expenditure deterred, in even the
smallest way, September 11^th ’s nineteen hijackers armed with mere
box-cutters?

Our champion of mindless war spending takes rhetorical excess to
breathtaking new heights when he delivers his punch line against Kerry:
“This is the man who wants to be the commander in chief of our U.S.
Armed Forces? U.S. forces armed with what? Spit balls?” The blustering
congressman cannot constrain his contempt for anyone who fails to jump
up and down with glee at the theft of billions of public dollars, who
fails to kneel with proper awe and reverence before weapons designed to
kill innocents abroad en masse. Yet this is not the fatal flaw of his
argument.

For how have American bullets and bombs, used to deliver death to tens
of thousands of Arabs and Muslims and fear to millions more under
occupation in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine, benefited us? If
children playing on the street and families driving on roads were not
gunned down at checkpoints, but only hit with spitballs; if homes and
hospitals were not shattered by bombs, but only hit with spitballs; if
entire streets were not bloodied and smashed to pieces by artillery, but
only hit with spitballs; if random men and boys were not piled on top of
one another, beaten to a pulp and sodomized, but only hit with
spitballs, would we not have less enemies? Would there not be less
grieving mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers seething in hurt and
anger against our country for the massive havoc we have wrought? It is
sufficient to pose the question to receive our answer.

Senator Miller’s speech is dangerous not only because it is packed with
lies and myths, but also because those lies and myths today exercise a
powerful hold on a significant sections of the American public. This is
due in no small part to the fact that the Democrats do not even actually
hold any of the positions Senator Miller spent the bulk of his speech
attacking them for, as they strive futilely to appear as tough and cruel
as the Republicans. This leaves just and sensible ideas vulnerable, open
to widespread ridicule and contempt in the absence of any defenders.
Honest Americans concerned by the rightward descent of America must take
it upon themselves to man the undefended barricades of justice and
rationality before they are overrun by vicious and hateful men like
Senator Miller.

M. Junaid Alam, 21, Boston, co-editor of radical youth journal, /Left
Hook/ (http://www.lefthook.org <http://www.lefthook.org/>), feedback:
alam@xxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:alam@xxxxxxxxxxxx>



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