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It’s war again, and winning isn’t everything
There is nothing to stop the US from rolling its war machine onto Iran, not even good sense
By Kevin Potvin
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Iran. What can be said that hasn’t already been said? Despondency is at an all-time high. In the lead-up to the unprovoked American war of aggression on Afghanistan, good and sensible people the world over were shocked and confused. In the lead-up to the unprovoked American war of aggression on Iraq seventeen months later, good and sensible people were frightened and alarmed. In the lead-up to the American war on Iran—and current events sure bear all the markings of a lead-up to war—people are just stunned and mostly quiet.
Where once people asked “How could they? Are they that stupid?” they now just assume that, yes they are that stupid. They will do this thing, and they will do it despite abject failures of the same war-making policy in Afghanistan and in Iraq, not to mention in Vietnam and in Korea and in a host of other places over the last half-century. They will send in the high-altitude bombers and fire off rounds and rounds of cruise missiles from the sea—two arms of the US military where they actually have spare capacity to burn while the army and the marines are totally pinned down in Iraq—and rip all hell out of Iran, crash every system from water to electricity to gasoline, destroy food production and distribution, directly kill hundreds of thousands of totally innocent bystanders, and then, faced with total failure of their aims, begin long debates about how to fix what they broke and how to get out of what will be yet another so-called God forsaken place that they themselves made so God forsaken.
In their eye-popping 2002 book, Why do people hate America? by Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, the authors probe deeply into the core American psyche to try to explain this unique American predilection to violence by reflecting on how the American nation was founded on the principle of redemptive justice through the application of violence.
In the American ouvre of the Western novel and Western films—themes totally unique to America and the defining bedrock of most of American cultural production—the authors point out how the narrative is repeated over and over again: a town of good people pioneering on the frontier bringing order, law and civilization to the wilds, are besieged by evil-doers, until the lone gunman comes to town, whether it be Shane or Clint Eastwood’s nameless pale rider, or Charles Bronson in calm, cool vigilante stance, or the Taxi Driver, or Neo in The Matrix, who unsheathes the bigger gun and mows down the evil along with the evil doers, thereby delivering the town from fear and returning them to the normalcy of justice and rightness.
What the world hates—or more accurately, fears—about America is not its freedom, its wealth, or its way of life. It’s America’s response of first resort to violence in confronting all disagreements. It’s America’s core belief, mythologized throughout the range of all its cultural products, that violence is the only tool by which justice can ever truly be restored.
It goes deeper than that. Lacking an enemy, America will invent one in order to create for itself scenarios in which it can stage endless retellings of its founding myth of violence as deliverer of redemptive justice. Acts of violence played out on the world stage purify the American soul, it cleanses the American psyche of the sloth and degeneration of too much peace. And winning isn’t the object; as they remind themselves in every sporting event, it’s not about winning or losing, it’s all about how you play. Showing up for the duel in the dusty street to face your adversary square on is the honourable act, and getting shot dead or shooting your opponent dead is beside the point. That’s why reminding America of the prospect of losing in Iran, as they are losing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as they lost in Vietnam and Korea, carries no weight on American decision making. Losing is fine, so long as blood is spilled in copious amounts. In fact, in the myth of the Western, winning would nullify the glory of war. It would deny America the opportunity to pose as the besieged town of good people victimized by an endless parade of evil doers surrounding it. Winning would mean no role for the savior set to ride into town to deliver justice through his gun.
In his speech to the United Nations this week, US President Bush intoned, “America will lead toward this vision where all are created equal and free to pursue their dreams. This is the founding conviction of my country.” A conviction it may be, but it certainly is not the founding one, and it certainly isn’t that nation’s practice.
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