Election Day in Iraq

Monday is the day we've all been waiting for. It is the day that President Bush, throughout his re-election campaign last year, convinced us would vindicate and reward our trust in his leadership. It is the day that democracy comes to Iraq, when all the lives lost (estimated at over 100,000 if Iraqi civilians are included) and all the U.S. casualties, serious injuries and billions of dollars will be proven worth it.

Does anybody believe it? On the eve of the big Iraqi election, no one has the slightest illusion that the domestic insurgency is anywhere near being brought under control. Bush administration officials are asking for another $75 billion for the occupation and conceding that there will be no draw down of U.S. forces there for at least two years.

Emboldened and armed insurgents are now estimated to number in the 10s of thousands, assembling greater numbers daily around the main population centers of the Iraq. There is barely a civilian in Iraq today whose life has not been made worse by the U.S. invasion, either materially through a collapsed infrastructure or through the loss of a loved one to disease, aerial bombings or gunfire.

The U.S. never had a good reason go in there. Bad reasons but no good ones. The U.S. cannot win there. It has no on the ground intelligence and no way to protect its own soldiers from being picked off almost at will by insurgents. It’s a quagmire, a terrible mess.

The U.S. military leadership knows this, but it cannot speak out. In the period since the November election, the Bush administration has consolidated its power in a breathtaking fashion. Only “true believers” are now being allowed into the inner circles of power and all in government who exercise independent, critical faculties of judgment about the consequences of U.S. policy are kept entirely out of the loop.

Those who want in are desperate to demonstrate their willingness to jettison their integrity and join the “freedom” chorus. Twenty seven times Bush used the “freedom” word in his inaugural address, turning the word into an empty mantra without substance, except for the suggestion of global dominion that so many elsewhere in the world have detected.

Intelligence insiders are calling the newly retooled Bush administration a cult, a cult of fear where those who know better are paralyzed by both imagined and real consequences of telling it like it really is.

One has to go beyond the Vietnam War to find the progenitor to this administration. One has to go behind the McCarthy Era, too. This crowd is the child of Herbert Hoover, the last Republican president to enjoy as much bald power in Washington as Bush does now. One has to go to the machinations of the unbridled captains of industry and finance of that era who sought to turn that power into a new global order.

Those were the days before Social Security and the social safety nets that grew out of the New Deal. Those were the days before collective bargaining and child labor laws. Those were the days when a social caste system was enforced by engendering violent prejudice and intolerance. Those were the days when the more aggressive social engineers dabbled in eugenics and the rise of fascism.

Much is said about the “neo-conservative” grip that the Bush administration now holds over Washington. But the roots of “neo-conservativism” are nothing recent, even if the movement was fueled by the energies of fresh cadres recruited from among the anarchist, libertarian and most hedonistically-inclined burned out hippies and counterculture dregs of the 1970s.

In them, old Nazi ideologues and their fellow travelers found fresh meat, casting among them often unsubtle rewrites of their old ideological pamphlets to incite the crude anti-establishment impulses of this new proto-movement. These people were indoctrinated, then scrubbed and shaven, given a new set of clothes, many “born again,” and launched into the neo-con swarm that insinuated itself into Washington during the Reagan years, climbing over deemed-irrelevant older generations of fiscal and social conservatives, and then into power with the Republican revolution of 1994. They've teamed with the new generation of industrial and financial elites in an unholy alliance to replay what failed after 1929.

These neo-cons and their allies are not isolationists and they're not afraid of federal deficits. They are driven by a cultish empty messianic passion that is not interested in facts. Their lust for power, emboldened by the acquisition of so much of it now, will not abate, and the whole world will suffer the consequences.

Nicholas Benton may be emailed at nfbenton@fcnp.com