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March 19, 2006

Angst-ing the anniversary of Iraq

Today's three year anniversary of the Iraq invasion brings its detractors and defendors. But its also exposing the bubbling up of angst and fear of the American citizenry. The nation is worried and upset about the state of things in Iraq and the handling of the war by the Administration.

The President has consistently operated from a position of denial and apparent fantasy, today pledging complete victory. His failure to really awknowledge the problems and make any fundamental tactical changes are really eating away at the public.

In the back of my mind I keep thinking about how we got here. What brought us to this time and place..and why. From my observation it always comes back to oil. We didn't go into Iraq to tackle terrorism or keep Americans safe. We went to Iraq to control a huge oil reserve.

Its interesting to know that folks a lot smarter than myself (and a lot more in the know) have reached that same conclusion:

The American press in the first days of the Iraq war reported extensively on the Pentagon's failure to post American troops in front of the National Museum in Baghdad, which, as a result, was looted of many of its great archaeological treasures. Less widely reported, but to Phillips far more meaningful, was the immediate posting of troops around the Iraqi Oil Ministry, which held the maps and charts that were the key to effective oil production. Phillips fully supports an explanation of the Iraq war that the Bush administration dismisses as conspiracy theory — that its principal purpose was to secure vast oil reserves that would enable the United States to control production and to lower prices. ("Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve underneath," an oil analyst said a couple of years ago. "You can't ask for better than that.") Terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, tyranny, democracy and other public rationales were, Phillips says, simply ruses to disguise the real motivation for the invasion.

The "Phillips" referred to in this piece is Kevin Phillips, former Republican political strategist and author of The Emerging Republican Majority (1969).

Phillips' new book entitled American Theocracy expresses his alarm at his former party. Specifically with Iraq and oil policy, deficit/spending policy and something we tackle a lot here at PK: the rise of influence of the extremely conservative Christian right:

He points in particular to the Southern Baptist Convention, once a scorned seceding minority of the American Baptist Church but now so large that it dominates not just Baptism itself but American Protestantism generally. The Southern Baptist Convention does not speak with one voice, but almost all of its voices, Phillips argues, are to one degree or another highly conservative. On the far right is a still obscure but, Phillips says, rapidly growing group of "Christian Reconstructionists" who believe in a "Taliban-like" reversal of women's rights, who describe the separation of church and state as a "myth" and who call openly for a theocratic government shaped by Christian doctrine. A much larger group of Protestants, perhaps as many as a third of the population, claims to believe in the supposed biblical prophecies of an imminent "rapture" — the return of Jesus to the world and the elevation of believers to heaven.

Prophetic Christians, Phillips writes, often shape their view of politics and the world around signs that charlatan biblical scholars have identified as predictors of the apocalypse — among them a war in Iraq, the Jewish settlement of the whole of biblical Israel, even the rise of terrorism. He convincingly demonstrates that the Bush administration has calculatedly reached out to such believers and encouraged them to see the president's policies as a response to premillennialist thought. He also suggests that the president and other members of his administration may actually believe these things themselves, that religious belief is the basis of policy, not just a tactic for selling it to the public.

I've personally wondered if the President was really a "true believer" in this sense. His stint as Governor of Texas never indicated this that I can tell. But its become evident that Bush has a very single minded focus when it comes to his policy decisions..and it appears heavily influenced by his hard right Christian beliefs.

Democrats and liberals have spent more time discussing values and the nurturing of the Christian left. But honestly, I'm not sure that's the sum total of the needed fix. There are certainly some whose political response germinates from a values discussion. But unless its heavily laced with factual data and information, many on the left will reject it out of hand. There has to be a way to meld these two approaches that will appeal to the spectrum of moderate to left Americans who wholly reject the hard right conservatism of the Republican Party.

There's also a fundamental cultural change that needs to take place. Liberals need to work harder to push their elected leaders to advocate for progressive ideas. Democrats must decide to hold to account the leaders of the Republican Party who've broken both the ethical and legal standards we've set as a nation. The shaky support given to Russ Feingold's censure proposal is one such example of the problems the Democrats face--putting perceived political issues over the right thing to do. It's unacceptable.

The electorate can't move to support a party or a group that isn't willing to stand up for its beliefs.

Posted by Carla at March 19, 2006 08:27 AM