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A Patriot's Answer to Rudy Giuliani
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
By Nelson Hultberg
In the recent South Carolina Republican Party debates, Rudy Giuliani demanded an apology from Congressman Ron Paul because he dared to declare that America's interventionist foreign policy had helped to bring the 9-11 terrorist attack upon New York City. Mr. Giuliani put forth his demand in the smear tactic style always employed by political bullies. His performance was insufferable to true American patriots.
In our minds, it is Mr. Giuliani and his neo-conservative comrades in Washington who need to apologize for plunging our country into a horrific guerrilla war in the Mideast that's cost in both spirit and material grows more ominous as each year passes.
It is Mr. Giuliani and his neo-con comrades who need to apologize for trying to ram our political system down the throats of nations that have a right to the same self-determination that we claim so vehemently for ourselves.
But most grievous of all, it is Mr. Giuliani and his neo-con comrades who need to apologize for killing thousands of American youth in a war that does not have to be fought in order to effectively combat terrorism.
Hard Questions for the Mayor
I would ask Mr. Giuliani the following questions: "What if Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia were one country called Persia, and it was a sophisticated world superpower? How would we like it if this superpower Persia was constantly intervening into our affairs to guarantee a steady supply of our wheat and corn by shoring up political dictatorships in several of our states with loans, weapons and advice? Is this not what America has done in the Mideast during the past 60 years by shoring up the Shah of Iran and his ruthless secret police, by shoring up the House of Saud which lives in Marie Antoinette style while dispensing crumbs to its people, and by shoring up several other smaller satrapies in the region? Is this not what we have done to guarantee a steady supply of Mideast oil?
How would Mr. Giuliani like it if this Islamic superpower, Persia, had pressured the United Nations into partitioning our east coast states into two sections -- one for blacks and one for whites -- giving New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut to Jesse Jackson to rule as he sees fit, and in the process, uprooting hundreds of thousands of families and their property? Is this not what America did in 1947 in Palestine with its major ethnic groups?
How would Mr. Giuliani like it if Persia was building military bases in and around America over several decades to maintain vigilance over our affairs and help protect Jesse Jackson and his newly partitioned country? Is this not what America has done for several decades in the Mideast to protect Israel?
How would Mr. Giuliani like it if Persia did not wish for Washington to build up its defense forces, and thus began an eight year bombing campaign upon our country that killed hundreds of thousands of American women and children? Is this not what America did to Iraq from 1992 to 2000?
How would Mr. Giuliani like it if Persia was using its privilege of possessing the world's reserve currency to export its domestic inflation into our country? How would he like it if Persia's Islamic corporations and bureaucrats continually patrolled Washington in their white turbans and robes attempting to sway our politicians into doing their bidding? Is this not what America has been doing in the Mideast over the past several decades?
No, I think it is Mr. Giuliani who needs to apologize to the American people because of his support for Washington's callous meddling into the Mideast that began back in 1947 with Harry Truman and has proceeded down to this day under the dictates of George Bush and the recently empowered neo-conservatives.
I think it is Mr. Giuliani who needs to apologize for his inability to grasp the most basic lesson of foreign policy. If you persist in sticking pins in rattlesnakes, you will eventually get bit in a very venomous manner.
Unless a better understanding of this hatred on the part of Mideast rattlesnakes is achieved in the political circles of Washington, Mr. Giuliani, atrocities committed against our country from Islamic terrorist groups will continue to escalate for decades into the future. Our allies in Britain have been painfully learning this basic lesson over many decades in their conflict with Ireland. Are you and the neo-cons going to force us to endure what the myopic Brits have endured?
The sources of the terrorist Islamic breeding ground are, of course, many faceted. I do not believe that American meddling in Mideast affairs is the sole reason for Islamic hostility toward the West, but it is the most important reason. Part of the problem is, of course, that Islam (in its fundamentalist version) is a primitive religion of hostility and irrationality. To the extent that Islamic fundamentalists have gained sway with the intelligentsia over the centuries, they have kept the Mideast in backward status. But our role in America cannot be to save the heathens of humanity from their primitiveness with the butt ends of our rifles. Our role should be one of benign neglect. Simply leave them alone, and if they want to wallow in cultural idiocy and economic stagnancy, then so be it. Our role should be to lead the world to rationality and prosperity through the shining light of example. Let us restore the vision of the Founders and demonstrate to the world (as we did from 1787 to 1913) what a truly free country is like.
Listen to the Generals
We correctly retaliated to 9-11, Mr. Giuliani, by going into Afghanistan and destroying the Taliban. But we made a huge mistake by pressing our bet and invading Iraq. General Schwarzkopf rightly warned Bush Sr. not to go into Iraq. It is a "tarpit" of insanity and virulence, and has been this way for over a thousand years. "Don't fight with these troglodytes," was the advice of the ablest military men. You'll just get bogged down in a grisly guerrilla war that will stultify America over the long haul. Such a war is not winnable. Bush Sr. wisely listened to Schwarzkopf. Unfortunately Little Boy George did not have his father's level of wisdom.
General MacArthur repeatedly warned Kennedy and LBJ not to get into a land war on the Indo-China peninsula. It was not winnable. What did they do? They got us involved in the hideous Vietnam effort. Guerrilla wars with backward people cannot be won unless we want to stay and occupy their countries with dictatorial force, which violates one of the most important principles of international justice -- national self-determination.
We need to listen to our generals, Mr. Giuliani, and quit letting "chickenhawks" like Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Kristol, and Paul Wolfowitz (who have never put boots on the ground) manipulate political dilettantes like George Bush into sending our boys into harm's way for political causes.
If the Iraqi War is dragged out over the upcoming decades (as you and the neo-cons are warning us it must be), it will tear our country apart. Such a dragging out will quite possibly destroy the last vestiges of freedom, financial solvency, and political sanity we have left. Your pseudo-conservative philosophy is driving us into the role of a dying empire. Your colleagues, Kristol and Wolfowitz, advocate what they call "benevolent global hegemony." This is what imperialists advocate; and it is what brings on their death throes. It happened to Rome. It happened to the Ottoman Turks. It happened to Napoleon. It happened to Britain. Is this what you wish for America?
There are very few wars that should be fought, Mr. Giuliani; and Iraq is definitely not one of them. The wisest statesmen throughout history always realize this. Thus they pay close attention to the experience of their ablest generals.
It should be obvious to everyone by now that George Bush Jr. is what Lenin termed a "useful idiot." You do yourself no favors, Mr. Giuliani, by blindly aping this ersatz leader. His neo-con handlers in Washington have no erudite sense of history, only the hubris that history's hegemons have. But since they also have Bush Jr.'s ear, America is going to pay a severe price in the long run unless we as a people can regain our sanity regarding the so called "threat of Islam."
The Root Causes and How to Confront Them
None of this, of course, is meant to condone the grotesquerie of terrorism. We need to vigorously retaliate when we are attacked by its perpetrators. But what is equally important, we must come to grips with the root causes of Arab hatred that manifest in terrorist atrocities. No problem can be solved unless its fundamental origin is understood.
The neo-con explanation for Arab hatred ("They hate America because of our freedom.") that you and Bush are perpetuating is crude sophistry designed to ratchet up government power. Muslims don't hate Americans, Mr. Giuilani. They hate our Federal Government for its egregious intervention in their lives. Muslims in general don't hate us for our freedom; only fundamentalist Muslims do. But it is America's 60 years of obnoxious bullying of Mideast countries that has caused the fundamentalist mindset to swell and metastasize throughout the Islamic world. Without our pushy presence in their land, the fundamentalist wing would never have gained its present prominence.
Neo-cons are guilty of gross simplification in attributing Islamic terrorism solely to Islamic fundamentalism's rise in Mideast culture. It is the combine of our interventionism with Islamic fundamentalism that has brought terrorism about. This is a two-part problem. Without American intervention, Islamic fundamentalism would never have swollen to become the curse that it is. And America is not the only culprit here; European nations have been pushing Mideast countries around far longer than we have. But shallow neo-con intellectuals don't wish to dwell on this more complex assessment. It doesn't fit with their agenda.
Muslims are people who are dirt poor, Mr. Giuliani. They possess no weapons of any substance to compete with the superior might of an America that they rightly perceive as trying to dominate their countries and shore up the oppressive tyrants who run them. These people are indoctrinated from youth with the twisted preachments of Islamic sectarian firebrands who have risen to an unjustified cultural prominence because of our intervention over the past 60 years (and Europe's intervention for more than 200 years). This is what allows such firebrands to preach that the Great Satans of America and Europe are the financial power behind the rulers who tyrannize them. Add in the fact that American military power ritualistically bombed Iraq's women and children throughout the nineties, and you have the makings for a surefire sermon tailor-made to galvanize hatred against the West. Many Mideast youth thus became by the 1990s (and continue to become today) eager minions for the "glorious sacrifice" of suicide bombing against America and Europe.
To come to grips with this, Mr. Giuliani, will entail opening up our minds and seeing both sides of the Islamic-Western clash. People who cannot see both sides of human conflict are doomed to being blindsided throughout their lives. Such short-range mentalities always bring disaster when they assume the leadership of great countries.
Islamic terrorism is a much deeper and far more complex problem than what you and the neo-cons view it as. Therefore, it is going to require a much more sophisticated approach than just military retaliation against its perpetrators. It is going to require a dramatic ideological metamorphosis in our implementation of foreign policy. A new paradigm must capture the minds of our statesmen. As Patrick Buchanan so eloquently reminds us, we are "A Republic, Not an Empire." Foreign people have rights to self-determination. The Islamic nations have the right to work out their own destiny even if they choose backward theocracies over enlightened democracy.
Let me emphasize once again! Retaliation is necessary on our part against any who have attacked us. But in this case, it must be accompanied by rapprochement with those whom we have wronged over the decades. Military occupation of Arab lands and the attempt to sledgehammer Western culture and democratic political institutions into thousand year old theocracies is not a formula for rapprochement. It is the formula that Imperial Rome pursued in this very region, and it brought down upon them undying hatred and devastating costs in both money and human lives.
Our solution to the 9-11 WTC attack should have been very powerful and very simple. We started out correctly by wiping out the Taliban; but then we bogged down in a rash of political irrationality and incompetency when we failed to capture and kill Osama bin Laden. It is quite possible that our military purposely let bin Laden escape. This is because Washington's power elites wanted him alive to act as a perpetual threat that they could then use to scare Americans into submitting to the dictatorial government they dreamed of putting in place
What is crucial to grasp, however, is that we did not need to invade Iraq to fight terrorism. We should simply have wiped the Taliban off the face of the map and then announced to the Islamic nations that we would, over the next three years, pull our military troops out of their lands. They would have the same right to self-determination that we demanded for America. We would grant them no aid, no weapons, no advice whatsoever. We would leave them alone, and we fully expected them to leave us alone. If not, then in the immortal words of Arnold Schwarzenneger, "We'll be back, baby!"
Moreover we should have made an additional announcement to the Islamic nations privately through diplomatic channels. We should have sent prominent envoys from our State Department to every one of the Mideast nations to meet with their rulers. In these private meetings, we should have made it very clear to each ruler that if, in the future, we had to retaliate against their country for harboring terrorists involved in bombings of America, then we would not just attack their country and its infrastructure as we had done to the Taliban, we would rain a shower of smart bombs down upon the private residence and family of the ruler himself. We would do what Ronald Reagan did to the Libyan ruler Qadaffi and his family palace. And we wouldn't do it sporadically. We would do it relentlessly until the ruler himself was dead. If his wife and children were killed in the process, then their deaths would be his fault.
After Reagan slapped Qadaffi with a bit of Yankee retaliation for his barbarism and effrontery in the late eighties, good old Muammar developed a different attitude, did he not? Well, I think that most of the Mideast rulers would react in like manner. They would begin to police their own terrorists domestically to make sure they do not plan any more American attacks.
We do not need to be fighting in Iraq, Mr. Giuliani, to handle the terrorist problem. Such an approach is tragically self-defeating; but this is the level of historical acumen and strategic creativity possessed by neo-cons the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol and those politicians who choose to be guided by them. The world of politics always has its ignorant, unimaginative bullies who revel in the use of brute force because they possess no moral compass to guide them, and because they can generate no cerebration to fashion wiser, less destructive strategies to defend their countries. Unfortunately modern day Washington is now a hotbed for such crude and unimaginative "chickenhawks."
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace
If we as a country do not come to grips with the insanity of neo-conservatism and its pseudo-patriotism, our fate will be no different than that of Britain and the Soviet Union before us. As the British found out in the Sudan in the 19th century and then later in Palestine between 1918-1948, and as the Russians found out in Afghanistan in the 1980's, the Mideast is a grotesque swamp of ungovernable tribal factions, long standing ethnic hatreds, and barbaric religious squabbles. It has been this way for thousands of years. If we persist in attempting to establish hegemony over this region, we will have to become an oppressive occupying military force and incur relentless suicide attacks against our soldiers for as long as we insist in maintaining our presence there.
We will be thrust into Orwell's "perpetual war for perpetual peace" Mr. Giuliani, which can do nothing but hasten the bankruptcy of our nation. It will create virulent enmity among the rest of the Islamic world and solidify further the Muslim conception of us as vile Crusaders come to dominate them once again.
It is true that no great country should ever be concerned with whether it is loved by the rest of the world. But a great country must always be willing to objectively examine its policies, both past and present, to be sure it is not creating its enemies itself through ignorance and arrogance.
There is no more lethal combination of flaws for a man to possess than ignorance and arrogance, Mr. Giuliani. The man who most glaringly demonstrates this combination today sits in the White House. And unfortunately with your ugly smear-mongering during the South Carolina debate, you showed true American conservatives that you possess the same lethal combination of ignorance and arrogance that dominates George Bush.
This is all immensely depressing to those of us who possess a big picture view of the world, who grasp the hubristic tendencies of man throughout history, and who long for leaders desirous of leaving people alone to seek their own destiny. We of this ilk fear greatly the dreadful consequences of allowing an ignorant and arrogant man to inhabit the White House. We know that the tyrannical, bully mentalities of existence will always be with us in some capacity or another. But we also know that Jefferson and Madison wisely warned us to never let such crude amoralists into positions of political power over our lives. Your kind of ignorance and arrogance, Mr. Giuliani, must not be allowed to sit in the White House. If there is any sanity left in the Republican Party, I pray that it manifests itself quickly.
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