Sliding Toward the Abyss

My stepson called me last night to discuss Eric Cantor’s surprising loss in the Virginia Republican primary and that occupied our attention for a good while – it shows the establishment GOP that they have to deal with the Tea Party honestly or go down in flames – but the conversation turned when I told him that the city of Mosul had been taken by al-Qaeda, that 500,000 people were fleeing the city and that the Iraqi security forces, trained and equipped and supported at such a high cost in blood and treasure these past eleven years, had also fled the city, abandoning their vehicles, weapons, equipment and even their uniforms in their haste.  He was very sad at this news since he worked in Mosul as a contractor for Kellogg, Brown and Root for two years (he worked in Iraq from 2003-2007 during the worst of the insurgency) and knew military and civilian personnel who had been killed trying to secure the city, and the realization that all the sacrifices made toward that goal had been wasted struck him hard: The black flag of al-Qaeda now flew over his former compound.

America is repeating one of its worst traits in the loss of Mosul, that of abandoning a major strategic objective before the objective is met and leaving the affected people to their fate.  John Kennedy authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 and at a critical moment, withheld naval and air support that doomed the operation.  In 1975, despite firm and repeated assurances to the contrary, Gerald Ford denied military assistance to South Vietnam as it was invaded by the North, guaranteeing a Communist victory and the worst strategic defeat in our history. Jimmy Carter refused to support Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as he faced a fundamentalist Muslim revolution in Iran because Carter disapproved of the human rights abuses committed by the Shah’s security forces, though the U.S. had overthrown the previous government in favor of Pahlavi and the Shah had been a major ally against Soviet expansionism in the Persian Gulf for twenty years. This ensured the rise of the most radical Islamic regime in the world, the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism and the greatest threat to Middle East peace ever. George H.W. Bush encouraged the Shiite tribes in southern Iraq to rebel against Saddam Hussein in 1991, as well as the Kurds in the north, then stood aside and watched as they were slaughtered in the thousands by Saddam’s tanks and gunships.  Over and over, America fights and bleeds and dies for an objective and then goes home before the objective is achieved, with dangerous consequences for us and deadly consequences for the people we leave behind.

Maybe establishing an Arab democracy in Iraq was simply impossible, maybe overcoming the kleptocracy was simply too hard, but after 9/11, it was worth the attempt and was certainly worth a better effort than arbitrary retreat.  Thirteen years of combat and massive investment have failed to change the corruption inherent in Afghan tribal culture and having declared unilaterally that the war is over, America leaves that benighted country in the hands of a resurgent Taliban to complete its misery.  In both of these cases, we chose to walk away, we could have stayed and fought the enemy on his own territory and kept the worst of Islamic extremism from our shores and we could have done so indefinitely, but our President lacks the stomach for that.  He is interested, rather, in disengaging from conflicts, in disengaging from the hard and flinty work of defending our interests, in assuaging hurt feelings in the Muslim world, in exchanging five hardened Taliban commanders for one American deserter, in emptying the cages at Guantanamo to please his friends at Berkeley, in giving up.  Projecting American power into the teeth of our enemies nauseates him (as his commencement speech at West Point last month attests), and beyond disdain for the military – cutting their budget by $1 trillion by 2022, closing the National World War II Memorial during the government shutdown – he just doesn’t think that America and her commitments are worth fighting for.  Those Iraqis who welcomed the Americans in 2003, who trusted us and helped us and believed that a democratic Iraq was possible, who now are running for their lives, are simply gullible and eminently disposable fools.  Those Afghans who suffered under the Taliban’s savage rule, who cooperated with us against them, who wanted a brighter future for their daughters than mutilation, slavery, ignorance and an early death, who now face the return of those pitiless sociopaths to the seat of power, live in a country very far away, whose customs we don’t understand and who are so ungovernable that even Alexander the Great gave up and returned to Babylon. Those Syrians who believed the President of the United States when he said that use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would constitute a “red line” that would invite swift retribution, whose children have been massacred by Assad’s poison gas and who lie in their graves unavenged, cannot be distinguished from the Hizbollah, Iranian and al-Qaeda thugs now overrunning the country and aren’t worth a confrontation with Vladimir Putin; ditto Ukraine.  Priest-King finds these people boring and tedious, their circumstances too complicated for his lofty intellect, annoying distractions from the important work of dismantling the world’s lone superpower and shaping his legacy.  So he looks away, maybe for political reasons but maybe because he knows the job is too big for him, maybe because florid speeches and empty threats are no replacement for guts, maybe because he is the wrong President for our time.  America deserves better, certainly Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine deserve better, but as we contemplate what could have been, Mosul burns.

Tainted

Throughout American history, there have been situations so urgent that extraordinary action by the President has been demanded.  George Washington took to the field personally to crush the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, the first major test of our young democracy; Thomas Jefferson bought Louisiana from Napoleon without Constitutional authority to do so, in order to double the size of our country; Abraham Lincoln faced the greatest threat of all by suspending the writ of habeas corpus – a power reserved to the Congress alone – and jailed Confederate sympathizers without trial, besides waging a continental war; Franklin Roosevelt led the nation through the greatest war in history, jailing 100,000 American citizens rather than risk one act of sabotage; Harry Truman tried to nationalize the country’s steel mills during the Korean War to avoid a potentially disastrous strike; Ronald Reagan forced the Soviet Union to collapse by accelerating the arms race and not maintaining the status quo as his critics demanded, and through his compassion for American hostages then held by Hizbollah in Lebanon, authorized the illegal sale of missiles to Iran that resulted in the Iran-Contra scandal that crippled his second term.  In all of these cases, the needs of the moment were so pressing that unusual and even illegal action by the President was required but such action was not part of a general pattern of the given administration.  (You will note I have purposely omitted the Bill Clinton years since those stand apart in a special class of criminality and would require more time to discuss than I have.) Yet now in 2014, we are governed by a man so intoxicated with his godlike stature that he acts as he chooses; he obeys laws, breaks laws, ignores laws, creates laws, condemns, kills and destroys at will, a man who despises the country he leads, its Constitution, the very office he holds, a man for whom the title of President is insufficient, a man for whom pontifex maximus is more appropriate, the greatest emperor in the New Rome, the feeble, stooped, emaciated and toothless America of his socialist fantasies.

He refuses to enforce immigration law and the Defense of Marriage Act. He fires the CEO of General Motors when he has no legal authority to do so. His Attorney General encourages the attorneys-general of the states to disregard laws with which they disagree, particularly those that forbid homosexual marriage, refuses to prosecute the Black Panthers for voting rights violations, authorizes the illegal sale of firearms to the Mexican drug cartels then hides behind Executive Privilege rather than disclose to Congress the full details of the sordid affair. Priest-King lies repeatedly to ensure passage of the Affordable Care Act, changes the law over twenty times without legal authority to do so, then claims that the millions of hapless citizens who’ve lost their health care as a result of his deceit “should have known” that they would lose it.  He appoints political cronies to the National Labor Relations Board without Senate approval although the Senate was in session.  He uses the Internal Revenue Service, the NSA and the Justice Department to flog his political enemies and unilaterally grants amnesty to 116,000 illegal immigrants who have been convicted of crimes and jailed, again without legal justification.  The depth and breadth of Priest-King’s lawlessness in unsurpassed in American history but have we seen everything yet? What else is he capable of doing?

Although he enjoyed a privileged upbringing (raised by doting grandparents in the tropical paradise of Hawaii, educated at Columbia and Harvard, no evidence that he was victimized because of his race), Priest-King harbors a deep hatred for America.  If America was founded by rich white European men for their own selfish purposes, if these men passed a Constitution and laws designed to maintain their hegemony while minorities suffered, if America got rich by defrauding and exploiting the weak and marginalized peoples of the earth, then Barack Hussein Obama – umm, umm, umm! – will take whatever measures are necessary to make things right and those include issuing bills of attainder and ex post facto laws.  (Now, before you sneer and scoff and blithely dismiss this as a preposterous notion, remember what we’ve already discussed.) Priest-King is a revolutionary in the deepest Saul Alinsky tradition, committed to radically and irreversibly transforming the United States of America into its rightful condition as a post-industrial, post-capitalist, let’s-share-the-love egalitarian commune, so any resistance to his vision is by nature counterrevolutionary.  Since the law can be used to protect counterrevolutionaries, the law must be changed or overridden to meet the situation. By a stroke of his pen, Priest-King could sign Executive Orders authorizing the arrest and imprisonment of persons he deems are “security threats,” without trial and for activities that were legal at the time but which, by the same pen, he declares illegal.  Would Congress and the American people object?  Certainly some Congressmen and Senators would, and a great many people, but these would be Priest-King’s political enemies whom he has never been able to win over.  The disturbing aspect of such reaction is that it would not be universal.  The same liberals who defended Bill Clinton’s perjury would leap into the fray.  His allies on Capitol Hill and in the media, on college and university campuses, in the unions and environmental groups, would rally to him, applauding his bold action, cheering him on, opining that the Constitution should not be a straitjacket for his enlightened leadership and that he should jail even more of the right-wing, stubborn, conservative relics who oppose him. The rule of law would be redefined to mean whatever he wanted it to be, Congress would shrivel like a useless appendage on the sidelines and who’s to say that the Supreme Court, which has already proven it can be intimidated regarding Obamacare, would overturn such blatant unconstitutional action?  Who would try to enforce the Supreme Court’s ruling if they did oppose the President?  The American people would then be living under the same tyrannical conditions that motivated their forebears to rebel against the British Empire and overthrow it, and everything they fought for would be brought to nothing.  Is this truly the nation we want to pass on to our grandchildren?  Is American oppression really so much more preferable to British?

Arrest and imprisonment without trial has been the hallmark of authoritarian regimes from Rome to North Korea, as is charging people with crimes that weren’t crimes when they were committed.  Priest-King has already demonstrated his contempt for the rule of law, that he’s willing to kill American citizens on his own authority and that he’ll use the Federal government to assail his political opponents, the Constitution be damned.  If you’re a liberal and this scenario works for you, then be encouraged to stay the course: You go, Barack!  But if you’re a conservative as I am and this scenario terrifies you, if this scenario represents the death of democracy and everything we’ve built since 1776, then you will continue to resist and criticize and frustrate the Priest-King with every means at your disposal until your dying breath…or until Eric Holder’s minions knock at your door.