The media
blitz is fully engaged around the latest Washington scandals, and with
it come nascent cheers from some anti-war sectors over the public
unravelling of the top brass who have helped to orchestrate the longest
war in US history.
Yet while it may be true that there’s a certain
element of ironic remuneration in all of this, it’s also the case that
such episodes can serve to draw our focus toward the wrong issues and
the wrong scandals.
It isn’t the sexual dalliances of
the power elite that merit our critical gaze, but rather the sadistic
destruction of their everyday actions as architects of
institutionalised, taxpayer-funded brutality. The real transgressions
here are not crimes of passion, but crimes of war: massive civilian
casualties, destruction of nations, bankrupting the domestic economy,
torture and rendition, drones raining extrajudicial death from above.
These are the reasons to bring down a demagogue; doing so under other
pretences threatens to cloud the issues, while a successor is hastily
named to continue the war effort. It would be a worse scandal if we
allow this to happen.
Only in the US could such rabid
sexual Puritanism combine with uncritical genocidal complicity. We seem
to have a unique capacity to condemn more mundane forms of human lust
even as we thoroughly exercise our collective bloodlust without much
reflection or remorse. Does it really matter much if a general has a
love affair or betrays his family, when the war policies he has helped
to design and implement have destroyed countless families and fractured
the bonds of love among people half a world away?
In this
light, we can surmise that politics surely plays a role in all of this.
Perhaps this signals an effort to slowly downsize the military and
hasten an end to the war without end. Maybe it’s part of a larger
foreign policy shakeup that will become evident in the near future.
Possibly there’s a strategic shift afoot to deemphasize hardware and
prioritize software in the next generation of conflict. It could also be
the case that such revelations are a way of reducing in rank those
whose policies have failed to produce the promised results.
Granted,
there’s a certain degree of delightful irony in all of this, as “war on
terror” stalwarts get bitten by the very same post-9/11 surveillance
apparatuses that were imposed on all of us under the pretext of catching
terrorists. The ease by which electronic communications of all sorts
are delivered to law enforcement by internet providers should give us
great pause in a free society. Progressives and civil libertarians have
long complained about the intrusiveness of such practices, and how they
broach the leading edge of punishing people for “thought crimes” right
out of authoritarian dystopias. In a perverse twist, we might even
consider whether we should be defending the defrocked generals’ right to
privacy.
By arguing against the Patriot Act and its
progeny, at least we would move the dialogue closer to the actual issues
at hand. The entire post-9/11 paradigm – pre-emptive action, perpetual
warfare, unilateralism, secrecy and surveillance, unbridled executive
authority, manipulation of fear – should be under close scrutiny more so
than the titillating details of anyone’s personal indiscretions.
I
don’t want to put a damper on the chortles of an anti-war contingent in
desperate need of even a small victory after more than a decade
(longer, really) under the dark clouds of escalating militarism. I get
why a story like this resonates and even appears as a form of rough
justice to many. Still, it seems to me that larger issues yet pervade,
and that we would do well not to lose sight of them – lest we find
ourselves winning the battle but losing the war
Courtesy: www.counterpunch.org