Clandestiny: Human Being

War in Iraq:
the Communist Road to Victory?

. . . Like many of us in the Clan, and across America, I have supported the war and reconstruction effort in Iraq with few reservations. I have never credited claims that we acted to secure our oil interests, for the simple fact that the short-term cost of securing them is likely to outweigh the long-term profit— however long that might be. Though the immediate rationale for military action proved to be faulty, Saddam Hussein was still in flagrant violation of UN Security Council resolutions, still capable of producing weapons of mass destruction (i.e. all the stuff we developed.) It seemed to me that ridding the people of Iraq of this inhumane dictator would lead to unprecedented freedoms for an appreciative populace— a feat generally regarded as a failure of Operation Desert Storm a decade before.
. . . Two viewpoints have forced me to reconsider my thinking. The first is found in this year's "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azar Nafisi. I won't describe Nafisi's memoir in depth, but I shall provide some background. Nafisi is an Iranian-born, American-educated teacher who returned to Iran as a teacher for seventeen years following the overthrow of the Shah. During that time, she saw all her peaceful leftist revolutionary dreams enacted, corrupted, and overtaken by Islamic fundamentalists enforcing sharia law. The result was less freedom, less well-being, less safety, less everything.
. . . A perhaps unintended point I got from the powerful book is that these are people not ready for freedom: they are not ready to fight for it. There are cyclic periods of relaxation in the enforcement of the brutal and misogynistic sharia laws, but the Iranian people are cowed from demanding more. Harsh crackdowns always follow: crackdowns that mean imprisonment, rape, death for thousands of young men and women for wearing make-up, listening to the wrong music, reading the wrong books, knowing the wrong people. The Iranians grumble and go on. The young men participate willingly in their self-righteous self-destruction, joining sharia police in droves.
. . . There are those in Iraq who greatly desire the freedom we offer, any freedom, but I no longer believe the majority of the populace will take advantage of the opportunity we offer them. The first reason I will give here: the second I believe will become apparent with reflection upon the quoted material to follow.
. . . The Iraqis are still fragmented, still fearful of and influenced by extremist reliqious leaders. Sectarian warfare will undoubtedly continue for some time there, with or without our withdrawal and free elections. Unless the average Iraqi develops the courage, the desire, to confront the terrorist groups he knows will murder him and his family if they claim individual freedoms, our hope to install even limited democracy in Iraq is— hopeless. I do not expect the average Iraqi— or Iranian —will quickly develop this trait of freedom, flying in the face of thousands of years of herd-like obedience, until they have been unbearably downtrodden. Remember, the Iranians had decent freedoms under the Shah: their revolution became not one of freedom, but of repression— hijacked much the same way the bolsheviks hijacked the Russian revolution. I'm sure Russia is funding the groups that seek power in Iraq (with or without their knowledge) just as they funded the groups that took power in Iran. The Russians do so not merely to thwart us: but because by doing so, they can (as President Putin is even now attempting, as I heard just after completing my first draft) convince not only the heads of all the Soviet Republics, but also the peoples of those republics, to relinquish the freedoms they have so recently gained. The continuing Chechen conflict is a strategic pawn in this global chess game, one Russia could have removed from the board long ago— if it so desired.

. . . ...But Mr. Nyazi is not convinced. "Is it just Gatsby who deserves to die?" he said with evident scorn. "No! The whole of American society deserves the same fate. What kind of a dream is it to steal a man's wife, to preach sex, to cheat and swindle and to...and then that guy, the narrator, Nick, he claims to be moral!"
. . . —Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

. . . The remainder of this piece consists almost entirely of a lengthy but necessary passage from R. Buckminster Fuller's "Critical Path": it is important to note this book was published in 1981, when the Cold War was at its apparent height, but not so far from its apparent end, with no "hot war" in which America was involved.
. . . "At the present point of history, the uranium bomb has been displaced by the hydrogen bomb, and then it was discovered that if either side used that new greatest weapon, both sides and the rest of humanity would perish, so the biggest weapon could not be used. Nor could the equally large and mutually destructive biological or chemical gas warfaring. Both sides then discovered that killing of the enemy's people was not their objective.
. . . "Killing the enemy's ideology is the objective. Killing the enemy's people brings sympathy and support for the enemy from the rest of the world...one of the new world-warring's objectives.
. . . "At this point both sides have started to explore the waging of more war with lesser— more limited Ðkilling but more politically and economically devastating techniques. Just as ephemeralization employed ever-more-miniscule instruments and thus took technology out of the limited ranges of human senses into the vast and invisible ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum reality, so too has major warfaring almost disappeared from the visible contacts of human soldiery and entered into the realm of invisible psychology.
. . . "In the new invisible miniaturization phase of major world-warring both sides carry on an attention-focusing guerilla warfare (as was conducted in Vietnam) while making their most powerful attacks through subversion, vandalism, and skillful agitation of any and all possible areas of discontent within the formally assumed enemy's home economics.
. . . "In carrying on this new and unfamiliar world-warring they do not have to send ideological proselytizers to persuade the people of the other side to abandon their home country's political system and adopt that of their former enemies. Instead they can readily involve, induce, and persuade individuals of the other side to look for discontent wherever it manifests itself and thereafter to "amplify" that condition by whatever psychological means until the situation erupts in public confusion, demonstrations, terrorism, etc. The idea is to make a mess of the other's economy and systems and thus to discredit the other's political system in the eyes of the rest of the world and to destroy the enemy people's confidence in their own system.
. . . "Because the active operators are sometimes engaged on a basis of just gratifying their own personal discontent, they are often unaware that they are acting as agents. Because almost everyone has at least one discontent, a well-trained conscious agent can invoke the multiplyingly effective but unwitting agency of hundreds of other discontent promoters and joiners— in ever-larger, more amplified masses.
. . . "As a consequence of this new invisible phase of world-war trending, a most paradoxical condition exists. The highly idealistic youth of college age who are convinced that they are demonstrating against war are, despite the most humane and compassionate motives, often in fact the front-line soldiers operating as unwitting "shock troops." Meanwhile the conventionally recognized soldiers engaged in visible "warzone" warfare (either of ambush or open battle) are carrying on only a secondary— albeit often mortally fatal —decoy operation.
. . . "This invisible world-around warring to destroy the enemy's economy wherever it is operative, above all by demonstrating its homeland weaknesses and vulnerabilities to the rest of the world, and thus hoping to destroy the confidence of the enemy people in themselves, is for more devastating than could be a physical death ray, for it does everything with nothing. Furthermore it operates as "news," which moves around the Earth by electromagnetic waves operating at 700 million miles per hour.
. . . "At the moment the highly controled political states have a great defensive advantage over the "open, freedom-nurturing" states by virtue of the former's controlled "news." For it is the omniexcitable news in the "free" countries that is primarily exploited to publish and spread and all of their organized-discontent actions."

. . .You don't read Gatsby...to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil...
. . . —Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

. . . Given this standard, it is clear we are losing in Iraq: indeed, we are being badly beaten.
. . . I find it unlikely the Islamic fundamentalists have knowingly employed this strategy, though entirely possible. More likely, Russia or China has masterminded this offensive, which indeed began with the 9/11 catastrophe: a tactic which may very well have drawn us into a trap we can escape only by gnawing our leg off. Who was it that provided the Chechens in that school with explosives, one of which apparently had a faulty priming device: did they intend to kill all those children after calling for a specific negotiator? Who really stood to gain by those childrens' deaths? Not Chechnya. Should we withdraw? That might be disastrous. If we prevail, however, we may lose the real war, which aims at nothing less than the complete destruction of America. My sense is that we must stay the course, but get down to business: clean up the insurgents, no matter how inhumanely, and establish a high standard of living for the "good" Iraqis (and be prepared to defend them from their neighbors.) No matter our intent, we are the "bad guys" in Iraq. It seems to me our best strategy is to move through the bad-guy stage as quickly as possible, and move fully into the securing of reliable, dependable democracy stage, keeping in mind that the swiftness of our actions, regardless of brutality, may well make the difference between engaging Iran in the near future, or seeing its populace revolt.
. . . Nonetheless, I must admit that those calling for immediate withdrawal of our troops may be right for all the wrong reasons. Meanwhile, all of us, the world over, are spending more and more of our own money to protect ourselves not from each other, but from our leadersÐwhatever their credos. How long can it last?

. . . Raise not democracy nor any other name above the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.
. . . —Edgar Cayce, while in trance

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