We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "The Over Soul"
Upon reading various histories of Persia, I am always struck by the fact that Persian poetry had a profound influence upon such writers as Emerson, Goethe, Kant, Nietzsche, et al. The dominant religion of ancient Persia, before its many upheavals throughout the centuries, was Zoroastrianism, which has strong similarities before its reformation to the Hinduism of Northern India and is claimed to be the first monotheistic religion, despite its inherent duality of "equally opposing powers" (see above Zoroastrianism link). Emerson's "personal revelation, the conviction of that truth that `God is within us,' is the irreducible source of democratic ideals." Although Emerson was born more than a quarter century after the birth of the American Republic, he was its first writer to express fully this idea, which is at the heart of the ideal of America. I highly recommend this lecture, by Dr. James R. Russell, Mesrob Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University, on Emerson and the Persians.
The chilling rhetoric being used by the Bush Administration and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, cloaked in apocalyptic threats, has caused me to try to understand this ancient and beautiful culture, these beautiful people whom America and Britain threaten to incinerate. As The Guardian puts it, there is no "Plan B" if the very poor extant version of diplomacy fails. Ahmadinejad, for his fascist part, is playing into the hands of the hegemonic Bush cabal, who have already shown that they can promote a war with very little evidence and zero Congressional oversight.
How apocalyptically evil are this Administration's designs on global hegemony? I guess the question by its implications answers itself. (Read Robert W. Merry's, Sands of Empire), The Physicians for Social Responsibility thought about this issue and offered this policy brief on 10/22/02, and excerpt of which reads,
The adoption of the dangerous venture of preemption as a pervasive security strategy is an unprecedented move by the United States, distancing the Bush administration's national security policy from all before it. President Bush cites the need for such a strategy due to the nature of the threats facing the United States in a strategic environment wrought with terrorism. This new strategy, however, is at least partly motivated by the administration's aim to maintain U.S. military dominance in the future, and both elements of this strategy carry more inherent dangers than do the threats cited by the Bush administration.
(Another parenthetical; when William Kristol refers to this global hegemony wet-dream, he calls it Benevolent Global Hegemony.)
Death and disfiguration of the body and spirit, however, are the only lasting effects of this "continuation of political intercourse", as politics become corrupted and change like fashion and empires rise and fall; death is final and eternal. Bush's invasion of and consequent war in Iraq, forged out of a policy of hegemony and propagated with prevarication, did not meet the definition of jus ad bellum and is thusly an illegal act. In the language of the Nuremberg prosecutors, aggressive leaders who launch unjust wars commit "crimes against peace." Bush's neo-con advisors have set a policy, justified by the still uninvestigated crimes of 9/11, that is intent on perpetuating a state of global war exemplified by Clausewitz's statement,
If war is part of policy, policy will determine its character. As policy becomes more ambitious and vigorous, so will war, and this may reach the point where war attains its absolute form. . . . Policy is the guiding intelligence and war only the instrument, not vice versa.
At the beginning of this war, the ultra-hyped "shock and awe" part, the American population was again, as in the Gulf War, whipped into a frenzy of blood lust, even though the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said portentously at the time,
"We need to condition people that this is war. People get the idea this is going to be antiseptic. Well, it's not going to be. People are going to die."
Not everyone saw the war as a jus ad bellum. War protesters staged events and rallies while intellectuals and writers spoke against the purported justifications for invading Iraq. The author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges said at the time,
I think the {Iraq} war is illegitimate not because civilians will die. Civilians die in every conflict. It's illegitimate because the administration has not, to my mind, provided any evidence of any credible threat. And we can't go to war just because we think somebody might do something eventually. There has to be hard intelligence. There has to be a real threat if we're going to ask our young men and women to die. Because once you unleash the "dogs of war" and I know this from every war I've ever covered, war has a force of its own. It's not surgical. We talk about taking out Saddam Hussein. Once you use the blunt instrument of war, it has all sorts of consequences when you use violence on that scale that you can't anticipate. I'm not opposed to the use of force. But force is always has to be a last resort because those who wield force become tainted or contaminated by it. And one of the things that most frightens me about the moment our nation is in now, is that we've lost touch with the notion of what war is.
Along these lines, the poet W.S. Merwin wrote:
It would not have been possible for me ever to trust someone who acquired office by the shameful means Mr. Bush and his abettors resorted to in the last presidential election. His nonentity was rapidly becoming more apparent than ever when the catastrophe of Sept. 11, 2001, provided him and his handlers with a role for him, that of "wartime leader", which they, and he in turn, were quick to exploit. This role was used at once to silence all criticism of the man and his words as unpatriotic, and to provide the auspices for a sustained assault upon civil liberties, environmental protections, and general welfare. The perpetuation of this role of "wartime leader" is the primary reason-- more important even than the greed for oil fields and the wish to blot out his father's failure-- for the present determination to visit war upon Iraq, kill and maim countless people, and antagonize much of the world of which Mr. Bush had not heard until recently. The real iniquities of Saddam Hussein should be recognized, in this context, as the pretexts they are. His earlier atrocities went unmentioned as long as he was an ally of former Republican administrations, which were happy, in their time, to supply him with weapons. I think that someone who was maneuvered into office against the will of the electorate, as Mr. Bush was, should be allowed to make no governmental decisions (including judicial appointments) that might outlast his questionable term, and if the reasons for war were many times greater than they have been said to be I would oppose any thing of the kind under such "leadership". To arrange a war in order to be re-elected outdoes even the means employed in the last presidential election. Mr. Bush and his plans are a greater danger to the United States than Saddam Hussein.
And yet, the Bush administration pounded the drums of war incessantly, before the country and before the world at the United Nations (as they are doing now toward Iran). Nevertheless, the case was made, as we now know (and knew), with flawed and manipulated intelligence that was "being fixed around the policy". There would be no stopping this initiative, and we were left with the result that, as Hedges put it,
Our whole civil society is being torn apart. Once again, as is true in every war, the media parrots back the clichés and jingoes of the state. Imbibes and promotes the myth. In wartime, the press is always part of the problem. And that we are about to engage in that ecstatic, exciting, narcotic that is war. And that if we don't get a grasp on the poison that war is, then that poison can ultimately kill us just as surely as the disease.
Politically, Iraq is so disjunctive that it is like a hyper-world full of sworn enemies that has been set into an inescapable dynamic of evil, and every individual has to look at those around him/her as that soul's potential murderer. To read the daily news reports of death and destruction is to immerse oneself in incomprehensible pathos. There is no sense, no hope, no logic; only war profiteering, whatever delusions of grandeur the Bush cabal suffer from, and the immutable loss of life. Whatever hatred fuels the insurgency in Iraq, it is matched by the hubris, greed, and imperial ambitions of our own corrupt leaders. They are cowards who send children off to die for their delusional designs. Bush and Rumsfeld, et al, have even failed to protect the troops who risk their lives daily in this dystopian hell. They have blundered into a war of which they have lost control, of which is already lost.
For a unique and trenchant perspective of what has gone on in Iraq, and where this may lead, I highly recommend, The Blood of My Brother, a film that reveals the pathos and tragedy of this (and all) war.
In War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges argues that war is both a deadly addiction--a drug that offers an unmatchable intoxication, the thrill of being released from the moral strictures of everyday life--and a unifying force that provides a sense of meaning, purpose, and self-sacrifice that can wash away life's trivial concerns. But the meaningfulness of combat, Hedges suggests, depends upon the myth of war. In reality, no matter what grand cause it is supposed to support, war is simply the basest form of aggression: "organized murder." Once war begins, the moral universe collapses and every manner of atrocity can be justified in the eyes of those who wage it, because the cause is just, the enemy is inhuman, and only war can restore balance to the world. Hedges reveals the hollowness of such thinking and makes an impassioned plea for humility, love, and compassion as the human race's only hope for survival. Only when a nation can accept its share of blame and see its enemy with compassion rather than hatred can war be averted and true peace prevail.
War is defined by death. It is a descent into madness, into the "heart of darkness". And as Neruda pleads in the last stanza of his poem "I'm Explaining a Few Things",
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!
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