The United States of Cruelty

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

26 June 14

We are cheap. We are suspicious. We will shoot first. It does not have to be this way. Like Lincoln before us, it is time to do something about it.

while back, we noted the story of the toddler who was severely injured when, during a drug raid, a local SWAT team came busting in and someone threw a flash-bang grenade into his crib. Well, his mother has written a chilling first-hand account of what happened to her son, and to her, during their encounter with one of our insanely militarized police forces.

My husband's nephew, the one they were looking for, wasn't there. He doesn't even live in that house. After breaking down the door, throwing my husband to the ground, and screaming at my children, the officers - armed with M16s - filed through the house like they were playing war. They searched for drugs and never found any. I heard my baby wailing and asked one of the officers to let me hold him. He screamed at me to sit down and shut up and blocked my view, so I couldn't see my son. I could see a singed crib. And I could see a pool of blood. The officers yelled at me to calm down and told me my son was fine, that he'd just lost a tooth.

This didn't happen in Mosul. This didn't happen in Jalalabad. It happened in Atlanta. Keep this in mind.

In related news, up in Detroit, we discover that drinking water is considered to be a privilege, especially if you're poor. And, if you happen to be in arrears, it's time to pull yourself up by your thirsty bootstraps.

There are 323,900 DWSD accounts in Detroit. Of those, 150,806 are delinquent. Some of those delinquencies are low-income customers who are struggling to keep their utilities on, said some who work in providing assistance to those in need. "The need is huge," said Mia Cupp, director of development and communications for the Wayne Metropolitan Community Action Agency. "There are families that have gone months and months without water." The group is among a handful of local agencies that provide assistance to those who need help with their water bills. The Water Access Volunteer Effort, a Detroit-based nonprofit, is another. Going without water can be dangerous, Cupp said. "You can only imagine, how do go to the bathroom? How do you take showers? How do you clean yourself?" she said. "You can't conduct the normal daily things that you would do." The organization has very limited resources. Cupp said the group raised about $148,000 during a charity walk; that money could go to helping people pay water bills.

There is a new kind of systematized cruelty in our daily lives, in how we relate to each other, and in how we treat our fellow citizens, and, therefore, there is a new kind of systematized cruelty in our politics as well. It is not as though there haven't been times in the history of our country in which cruelty was practiced for political or pecuniary advantage. It is not as though there haven't been times in our history when the circumstances in people's lives did not conspire cruelly against them, or when the various systems that influenced those lives did not conspire in their collective cruelty against their seeking any succor or relief. There was slavery, and the cruel war that ended it. There was the organized cruelty that followed Reconstruction, and the modern, grinding cruelty of the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age that followed it. There were two World Wars, the first one featuring a new era in mechanized slaughter and the second featuring a new era in industrialized genocide. There was the Great Depression. There was McCarthyism, and the cruelty that was practiced in Southeast Asia that ended up partly dehumanizing the entire country. There always has been the cruelty of poverty and disease.

But there is something different abroad in the politics now, perhaps because we are in the middle of an era of scarcity and because we have invested ourselves in a timid culture of austerity and doubt. The system seems too full now of opportunities to grind and to bully. We have politicians, most of whom will never have to work another day in their lives, making the argument seriously that there is no role in self-government for the protection and welfare of the political commonwealth as that term applies to the poorest among us. We have politicians, most of whom have gilt-edged health care plans, making the argument seriously that an insurance-friendly system of health-care reform is in some way bad for the people whom it is helping the most, and we have politicians seriously arguing that those without health-care somehow are more free than the people who have turned to their government, their self-government, for help in this area. In the wake of a horrific outbreak of violence in a Connecticut elementary school, we have enacted gun laws now that make it easier to shoot our fellow citizens and not harder to do so. Our police forces equip themselves with weapons of war and then go out and look for wars to fight. We are cheap. We are suspicious. We will shoot first, and we will do it with hearts grown cold and, yes, cruel.

We cheer for cruelty and say that we are asking for personal responsibility among those people who are not us, because the people who are not us do not deserve the same benefits of the political commonwealth that we have. In our politics, we have become masters of camouflage. We practice fiscal cruelty and call it an economy. We practice legal cruelty and call it justice. We practice environmental cruelty and call it opportunity. We practice vicarious cruelty and call it entertainment. We practice rhetorical cruelty and call it debate. We set the best instincts of ourselves in conflict with each other until they tear each other to ribbons, and until they are no longer our best instincts but something dark and bitter and corroborate with itself. And then it fights all the institutions that our best instincts once supported, all the elements of the political commonwealth that we once thought permanent, all the arguments that we once thought settled -- until there is a terrible kind of moral self-destruction that touches those institutions and leaves them soft and fragile and, eventually, evanescent. We do all these things, cruelty running through them like hot blood, and we call it our politics.

Because of that, the daily gunplay no longer surprises us. The rising rates of poverty no longer surprise us. The chaos of our lunatic public discourse no longer surprises us. We make war based on lies and deceit because cruelty is seen to be enough, seen to be the immutable law of the modern world. We make policy based on being as tough as we can on the weakest among us, because cruelty is seen to be enough, seen to be the fundamental morality behind what ultimately is merely the law of the jungle. We do all these things, cruelty running through them like a cold river, and we call it our politics.

It does not have to be this way. After the greatest exercise of systematized cruelty in the country's history, Abraham Lincoln gave the greatest speech ever given by an American president, and in its greatest passage, he called hold, enough.

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

On one of the cruelest nights of 1968—which was a very cruel year; indeed, a year the cruelty of which eventually would claim his own life—Robert Kennedy stood in the dark in Indianapolis and offered a similar gathering hymn.

And let's dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

The time for camouflage is over. Cruelty is cruelty. It should be recognized as a fundamental heresy against the political commonwealth and wrung out of all its institutions. That is the only way out.

Iraq Yet Again

By Stephen Eric Bronner, Reader Supported News

26 June 14

lbert Einstein once famously described insanity as the belief that doing the same thing over and over will ultimately produce a different result. That definition seems to hold when considering American policy toward Iraq. President Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination in 2008 on the basis of his opposition to a misguided invasion that led to the fall of Saddam Hussein and the emergence of what was conceived as an illegitimate puppet regime of the United States. Obama had fulfilled a campaign promise in withdrawing American troops from Iraq, though even before their departure the conflict between Kurds, Shia, and Sunni had already taken shape. Paramilitary organizations were united only by their hatred of the United States and its attempts to prop up a parliamentary government unwilling to integrate the once hegemonic Sunnis into its Shia-dominated hierarchy and unable to deal with the dynamics of Kurdish separatism. The situation appears to have deteriorated. Saddam Hussein is gone, but civil war is on the agenda – as if this were not previously the case – and it (only?) now seems evident that the government of President Maliki cannot provide stability. With Iraq imploding and civilian death tolls rising, therefore, Obama seems to believe that a change of policy is in order. Thus, he has decided to send back 300 military advisors and provide small arms to prop up what has become a completely dysfunctional parliamentary regime and mitigate the growing chaos.

More than a half million Iraqis have become casualties of a genocidal policy that leads back to the doorstep of President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their coterie of neo-conservative advisors. But the list doesn’t end there. These unindicted war criminals (to put it bluntly) were enabled by supporters of the invasion in the Democratic Party like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and others stalwarts of the Obama administration. None of them have publicly dealt with (or, more importantly, publicly reconsidered) what was obviously a disastrous decision. That is because (for equally obvious reasons) both the liberal and conservative media has given them a free pass. This leaves them content to follow conventional ways of thinking about foreign policy, whether in the name of human rights or geo-political advantage, that somehow always culminate in the need for military intervention. They seemed to have learned little, because for all the talk of new circumstances, the old assumptions that originally landed the United States in the Iraqi quagmire are still in place.

No less than their Republican colleagues, they assume that the United States is the key player in the conflict and that its interests constitute the point of reference for judging all other interests. Their political world is based on the sovereign state with its fixed boundaries, its legitimized monopoly over the means of coercion, its hierarchically organized bureaucracies predicated on economic rationality, and its secular capitalist ethos. In Iraq as in so much of the Middle East, however, the state is not necessarily sovereign, and its emotional appeal is far less than that accorded family, tribe, and religion.

Little wonder then that the Iraqi parliamentary elections of 2014 were denounced by virtually all candidates other than President Nouri Kamal al-Maliki. Each candidate represented only particular regional or religious interests – Shia, Sunni, etc. – and lacked a national constituency, if not necessarily a mass base or paramilitary organization. Even President al-Maliki is well known for favoring the Shia and repressing Sunnis in the policies he has pursued. The United States consequently lacks a reliable domestic partner in Iraq. Amid vote fixing and corruption, therefore, its policy wavers between a half-hearted attempt to stabilize an inherently and structurally unstable situation and old fashioned nation-building by support for a corrupt regime.

Liberal champions of human rights still refuse to recognize that in Iraq the state is a Western import, arbitrarily and artificially created by and for imperialist powers, and thus always viewed with suspicion and sometimes with loathing. The borders of Iraq also bear no relation to the organic development of tribes, religious affiliations, and other pre-modern institutions. The idea that conflict will “spread” misses the point; it never was contained. Sunni militias spawned in the slums of Baghdad and headed by Moktada al-Sadr, disaffected Shia, and the existing state are all engaged in an escalating civil war. Its bloody evolution, which began with the fall of the coercive sovereign Saddam Hussein, was quickened by religious zealots from supposedly foreign organizations like Hezbollah and neighboring nations like Iran who transgressed Iraq’s borders and chose sides. Iran well remembers its border war with Iraq, which resulted in more than 1 million casualties, along with the support extended by the United States to Saddam Hussein. Their concern with the new initiative by President Obama, which puts US troops next door and reaffirms US desire for regional influence, only makes sense. The transnational civil society that marks the Middle East helps explain the appeal of a transnational terrorist vanguard like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which has already captured swaths of territory to the south and which is rapidly extending its influence in Iraq. Outlines appear of what should prove the strategic goal of American policy, namely, cooperation with Iran in opposing ISIS and a regional solution to the conflict in which not states but religious institutions and civic organizations take the lead.

Except in setting a precedent for further American intervention, President Obama’s decision to send 300 military advisers and small arms to prop up the al-Maliki regime lacks connection with any broader strategic purpose. His new policy sets the stage for a new form of “mission creep” that unsettles the political left while the small scale of the intervention angers the political right. No less than in Syria, the president had been experiencing enormous pressure from Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham as well as remnants of the Bush administration like former Vice President Dick Cheney who never encountered a crisis in which they did not wish to intervene. Worrying about the appearance of American “weakness,” unconcerned with the rank distrust of American ambitions by all parties to the conflict, their only strategy involves the intervention of more troops in a completely misguided attempt to reassert American hegemony over the region.

As for President Obama, however, he has already acknowledged that his mini-intervention will not impact the outcome of the conflict, even should the use of drone strikes increase. Once again, therefore, the United States finds itself in the position of intervening militarily in support of a corrupt regime that is losing control of its country and incapable of expressing the general will. Even more striking is that, once again, there is no clear articulation of the American national interest and no exit strategy. Costs will once again be born by the Iraqi citizenry, and once again the meddling of American troops will further undermine the prospects for a genuinely sovereign state amid the environmental and economic devastation, the chaos brought on by massive immigration, the destruction of the nation’s infrastructure, the collapse of civil society, rising infant mortality, and other legacies connected with the American invasion by a previous administration. A bit of political modesty is necessary to prevent the United States from becoming enmeshed in yet another proxy war. Belief that its policymakers have either the wisdom or the knowledge to intervene in every crisis reflects nothing more than the arrogance of power. There are other powers like Iran with a stake in the Iraqi civil war. Unless it involves extending humanitarian aid, calling upon the United States to “do something” (once again) rings hollow. The Bush boys and their fellow travelers have done enough. Sometimes it is better to do nothing – especially when there is so little clarity about what is to be done.

Stephen Eric Bronner is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University and Senior Editor of the online journal Logos. The second edition of his “Moments of Decision” has just appeared with Bloomsbury.