President Bush’s concept of “democracy” smacks of Rudyard Kipling, but the solution for this tragic farce he started in Iraq could have been suggested by the Greek satirist Aristophanes.
The jingoistic, xenophobic Bush seems to have appropriated that 19th-century imperialistic creed known as the “White Man’s Burden,” so called by the British author Kipling, who specialized in writing about Anglo-Indian relations. This creed, employed by nineteenth-century imperialists, stressed the need for the “civilized” Western man to “civilize” non-Western peoples. Through this allegedly “noble” concept, Westerners imposed themselves on Africans and Asians, ostensibly to impart the more “civilized” way of life on these supposedly “backward” people in the hopes that, through the exposure to the “democratic” people, these “backward” peoples would be better prepared for self-government.
The arrogant “civilized” Bush frequently says his efforts in Iraq are meant to serve the Iraqi people and to better prepare them for democracy and self-government, but Iraq is the bedrock of ancient Mesopotamian civilization, and Bush’s war led to the near-obliteration of the Iraqi museum, which was full of antiquities testifying to a rich culture. But what do you expect of a Hee-Haw president with poor verbal skills, the hapless target of “Saturday Night Live” comedians, who had trouble maintaining a “gentleman’s c-average” in the Ivy League? Furthermore, the U.S. was never a proper example of democracy, or rule by the majority: In fact, the U.S. has always been controlled by the rich elite; it has always been an aristocracy and an oligarchy.
A former American soldier, who was eventually classified as a deserter because he would not rejoin his troop and fled to Canada, stated that during basic training in the Army, he and others were forced to recite a ditty that ran, “What makes the green grass grow? Red, red blood!” Inciting bloodthirstiness is “civilized”?
This supposedly “civilized” nation has the audacity to patronize another nation by saying that it is backward and needs an uncivilized and bloodthirsty, authoritarian state like the U.S. to tell it how to live via shoving an M-16 down its throat.
This so-called “deserter” was the truly “civilized” one for abhorring the uncivilized American military who believes that the killing of innocent civilians during war is simply a natural phenomenon; such tragedies happen because war is war and that is the “nature of the beast.”
Now the military no longer actually targets innocent civilians anymore, as they did during WWII, but the attitude of the arrogant military toward the killing of innocents during war is still callous and appallingly casual.
When the two monstrous sons of Saddam Hussein were taken down by the military, a little girl was shot in the head during the exchange of gunfire, and no explanation and no apology were offered by the American military. The atrocities by the military will continue unless somebody “reins in” this lunatic cowboy president masquerading as a sane representative of democracy. The whole fiasco of the war has the flavor of Nietzschean “eternal reemergence”; the same atrocity-ridden scenario happens over and over again: the U.S. military kills, the insurgents kill, innocents are killed. It never stops.
To effectively end this war quickly, maybe the smug wives of the four-star generals should do what Aristophanes’ characters in his play “Lysistrada” did: they should refuse to have sex until their husbands stop the war.