Hubris and the End of
the Bush Era
Hubris.
One of my favorite words.
It's a Greek word actually.
We Americans usually first learn it when we study Greek tragedy in
university. In a Greek tragedy, we
are told, the protagonist will demonstrate "hubris"--a certain
overweening pride or arrogance, an insistence on going about things in his own
way. As the action of the play
progresses, we see the protagonist refusing to take advice from others, refusing
to recognize any sense of balance or moderation. Eventually, of course, this hubris leads directly to the
protagonist's destruction. Usually
a number of others fall along with him.
That's why it's a tragedy.
I think I
first learned the word "hubris" my freshman year. Some people, it's true, never learn the
word. I just did a Google search
on "Bush Administration" and "hubris" and found that the
search engine came up with 21,400 pages.
That's pretty grim. It
suggests to me that the Bush Administration might be a tragedy. I wonder if any of the Administration
insiders know this.
Recently I
read the following article, one that managed to sum up what I've felt for some
weeks now:
ROME (AP) - The scandal of prisoner abuses
by U.S. soldiers in Iraq has dealt a bigger blow to the United States than the
Sept. 11 attacks, the Vatican foreign minister told an Italian newspaper.
In an interview published Wednesday in the
Rome daily La Repubblica,
Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo described the abuses as "a tragic episode in
the relationship with Islam" and said the scandal would fuel hatred for
the West and for Christianity.
"The torture? A more serious blow to
the United States than Sept. 11. Except that the blow was not inflicted by
terrorists but by Americans against themselves," Lajolo was quoted as
saying in La Repubblica.
. . .
I won't quote the whole article. Just the main points.
I find the Vatican occasionally states perfectly my position on
things. I agree with them entirely
on genetic research, on cloning, on various other issues. And now again in the war on terror I
can see they take the long view of things: "The prisoner abuse is a more
serious blow to the United States than 9/11." That is stated correctly.
When the prison abuse issue broke, it was quickly spun
by the Bush Administration as a few bad eggs thinking outside the box according
to their own perverse and punishable inclinations. In fact it seems now that the issue is rather a few bad eggs
who won or barely won the White House: a few bad eggs who have seriously fucked
America's standing in the world, step by step making what was once one of the
shining lights of democracy and human rights into something getting dangerously
close to a pariah state.
Hubris. The good thing
about this word, as I studied it in university, is that it leads almost
ineluctably to disaster. The
protagonist is destroyed or destroys himself in the end. That is good news for us and for the world
too. It means that with each new
overly confident policy, each new bending or outright breaking of the rules,
this American Reich of neo-con nitwits is digging itself further into the
grave.
As the end nears, there will be earthquakes and tidal waves,
the moon will rise blood red on many a night, and monstrosities will be born
across the land. But then finally
November will come, and we will find them strewn there on the floor with their
dropped rapiers and spilled goblets tainted with poison. And then how good it will feel for us
who are left. How good it will
feel to sweep out the place.
E.M.
****
Following is the article that broke the story of the secret
program set up under Rumsfeld and how it was finally and recklessly activated
in Iraq. The article makes rather
long reading for Bush supporters, so I've excerpted a few paragraphs below (I
haven't, however, simplified the vocabulary: sorry). Non-Republicans can go and read the article directly:
"THE GRAY ZONE, How a secret Pentagon program came to
Abu Ghraib." Seymour M.
Hersh, 5/24/2004, New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040524fa_fact
1) The CIA had initially been part of the secret program, but
when they saw how the neophytes at the Pentagon were starting to use it they
backed out:
-----The C.I.A.'s complaints were echoed throughout the
intelligence community. There was fear that the situation at Abu Ghraib would
lead to the exposure of the secret sap [special-access program], and thereby
bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a valuable cover operation.
"This was stupidity," a government consultant told me. "You're
taking a program that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against Al
Qaeda, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional
war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral
procedures of a conventional war with an Army of a hundred and thirty-five
thousand soldiers."
The former senior intelligence official blamed hubris for
the Abu Ghraib disaster. "There's nothing more exhilarating for a pissant
Pentagon civilian than dealing with an important national security issue
without dealing with military planners, who are always worried about
risk," he told me. "What could be more boring than needing the
cooperation of logistical planners?" The only difficulty, the former
official added, is that, "as soon as you enlarge the secret program beyond
the oversight capability of experienced people, you lose control. We've never
had a case where a special-access program went sour--and this goes back to the
Cold War."-----
2) Sexual
torment was considered a particularly effective way to interrogate uptight Arab
men:
------Last week, statements made by one of the seven
accused M.P.s, Specialist Jeremy Sivits, who is expected to plead guilty, were
released. In them, he claimed that senior commanders in his unit would have
stopped the abuse had they witnessed it. One of the questions that will be
explored at any trial, however, is why a group of Army Reserve military
policemen, most of them from small towns, tormented their prisoners as they
did, in a manner that was especially humiliating for Iraqi men.
The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual
humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in
the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was
frequently cited was "The Arab Mind," a study of Arab culture and psychology,
first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught
at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The
book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a
taboo vested with shame and repression. "The segregation of the sexes, the
veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and
restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime
mental preoccupation in the Arab world," Patai wrote. Homosexual activity,
"or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions
of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and
remain in private." The Patai book, an academic told me, was "the bible
of the neocons on Arab behavior." In their discussions, he said, two
themes emerged--"one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the
biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation."
The government consultant said that there may have been a
serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed
photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything--including
spying on their associates--to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to
family and friends. The government consultant said, "I was told that the
purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you
could insert back in the population." The idea was that they would be
motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency
action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn't effective; the insurgency
continued to grow.-----
3) This so-called "conservative" Administration
breaks with long-standing legal tradition:
-----"This shit has been brewing for months," the
Pentagon consultant who has dealt with saps told me. "You don't keep
prisoners naked in their cell and then let them get bitten by dogs. This is
sick." The consultant explained that he and his colleagues, all of whom
had served for years on active duty in the military, had been appalled by the
misuse of Army guard dogs inside Abu Ghraib. "We don't raise kids to do
things like that. When you go after Mullah Omar, that's one thing. But when you
give the authority to kids who don't know the rules, that's another."
In 2003, Rumsfeld's apparent disregard for the requirements
of the Geneva Conventions while carrying out the war on terror had led a group
of senior military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General's (jag) Corps
to pay two surprise visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then
chairman of the New York City Bar Association's Committee on International
Human Rights. "They wanted us to challenge the Bush Administration about
its standards for detentions and interrogation," Horton told me. "They
were urging us to get involved and speak in a very loud voice. It came pretty
much out of the blue. The message was that conditions are ripe for abuse, and
it's going to occur." The military officials were most alarmed about the
growing use of civilian contractors in the interrogation process, Horton
recalled. "They said there was an atmosphere of legal ambiguity being
created as a result of a policy decision at the highest levels in the Pentagon.
The jag officers were being cut out of the policy formulation process."
They told him that, with the war on terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary
application of the Geneva Conventions had come to an end.-----
Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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