IMPERIALISM IS HARD WORK

This will be my last column before the recall election, so before I get into my usual rant I have to remind all my fellow Californians to vote NO on the recall. I hate to sound too much like the Democratic Party Line, but I do think that this election was put together just to undo last year's election and grab the governorship. I can't believe it's out of any real desire to correct the state's fiscal problems. People complain about income taxes a lot; Republicans are taking advantage of that, but California's aren't all that high really. They also shout about increasing the license fee for cars; people seem to forget the fees were cut dramatically a few years ago. Besides, it's a tiny charge in comparison to what you pay for gas, and the highest cost for driving, INSURANCE, but I digress. I'll probably vote for Arianna Huffington in spite of how little she's paid in taxes, but only if we're in no danger of a Schwarzenegger or a McClintock winning. My vote for replacement governor may go to Bustamante if it seems close, just to thumb my nose at the Republicans who started this 150 ring circus. My personal prediction? Governor Davis will get 40 to 45% saying no to the recall, so he'll lose. His replacement will have far fewer votes, getting maybe 25%. Democracy in action! I don't think this is what the authors of the recall provision had in mind. The one thing we are assured of is that the recall law will change; politically it's the equivalent of a nuclear bomb and no one will want to use it again.

I'm glad that's out of the way; what the heck else is going on in the world? At least it's finally football season again, whoo-hoo! Unfortunately LA still has no pro team so I am forced to root for my old hometown's team, the Bengals. How pathetic is that? About as pathetic as LA's efforts to attract a new team! What is it about our city that we can't have pro football here?

I don't know if the NFL will finally achieve parity this season but the Bush Administration certainly has. Sorry, I meant to say "parody." Didn't it make you proud to hear about the success of the combined US and Afghani operation recently to rid us of the, um, wait a second, the Taliban!? Weren't the Taliban supposed to have been flushed away down the crapper of history already?

The Bush Administration sold us the idea that making war is an easy, even glamorous solution to our terrorism problem. They are finally awakening to the reality that, unlike traditional wars between nations, you can't simply declare victory and expect the fighting to stop, as if the clock has run out in a football game. Moreover, you are obligated to remake the government in the area you conquer and try to return things to a semblance of normal life. Rebuilding the damage caused by all those photogenic smart bombs is tough, sweaty work.

The Bushies are finally admitting they need help and are now backpedaling furiously on their UN-is-irrelevant-We-know-better rhetoric of last winter, but they are still loathe to say that establishing cannon law is not enough to bring peace in Iraq. As I write this, the current commander in Iraq, Ricardo Sanchez, said that a battalion of US soldiers and Marines was more than enough to address any threat to peace in Iraq. Yeah, right. We can kill Saddam Loyalists and assorted flavors of Islamic terrorists, but can that battalion kill the ideas that drive them? The Israeli Defense Forces have been pursuing that kind of killing for decades; are they any closer to peace?

It's said that those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them, so maybe we should have known that this effort would be difficult. Hell, there's no MAYBE about it. Take the experience of the British in Iraq, about 85 years ago after World War I. Most history books don't even mention this chapter in the history of Brit imperialism, but it was pretty similar to the present situation, that of a Western army trying to occupy a large portion of the Mid-East after the fall of a regime.

The end of World War I saw the collapse of the Ottoman Empire which had ruled all the Mid-East for 500 years. The French has a small hand in this but it was mostly the British and the efforts of men like T. E. Lawrence who hastened its end. Another major figure in this effort was Sir Arnold Wilson who landed at Basra and took an army north to Baghdad. This action literally put Iraq on the map, along with Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Trans-Jordan.

Like today it was no bed of roses. There was a big Iraqi revolt in 1920 and the Brits got out after a few years, setting up a local Iraqi government that basically could do what it wanted as long as it was friendly to British oil companies. So much for Western Imperialism in the Mid-East.

Even before that time there were people warning us about the costs of Empire. Rudyard Kipling, who was born in British India, wrote The White Man's Burden in 1899. In spite of a title that sounds patronizing in the 21st century, it is very anti-imperialist. Perhaps it bears repeating today.

Take up George Bush's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

Take up George Bush's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain,
To seek another's profit
And work another's gain.

Take up George Bush's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
(The end for others sought)
Watch sloth and heathen folly
Bring all your hope to nought.

Take up George Bush's burden--
No iron rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go, make them with your living
And mark them with your dead.

Take up George Bush's burden,
And reap his old reward--
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up George Bush's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness.
By all ye will or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent sullen peoples
Shall weigh your God and you.

Take up George Bush's burden!
Have done with childish days--
The lightly-proffered laurel,
The easy ungrudged praise:
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers.

My apologies to Mr. Kipling for a small liberty I took with the text, but it serves to point out the striking similarities between their experience and ours.

If we look at our own record of imperialist activities -- What you thought America didn't have one? Well, to be sure the textbooks never use that term; if they mention it at all they give it the name Manifest Destiny -- code that God Himself wanted America to rule over all of the Western Hemisphere and much of the Pacific to boot. The purchase of large portions of our territory from European powers (regardless of the many Indian nations in them) is well covered in American History 101, but our more violent adventures are ignored. By force of arms we took the best parts of Mexico in 1848. (Gee, you think we could sell a part of California back to them to cover our deficit? How about Bakersfield?) Most people don't know we briefly flirted with conquering Japan after Commodore Perry forced open their ports with cannon in 1854. The Spanish-American War of 1898 brought us many imperial territories we still rule today, such as Puerto Rico, The Virgin Islands, Guam. The Philippines were also won then and thousands of American servicemen died fighting rebels there in the early years of the 20th century. We staged a rebellion in Columbia to make Panama independent so we could build a canal. Long before the Ollie North era, we sent Marines to Nicaragua. We sent them to Haiti and the Dominican Republic several times. In the waning years of the 20th century we also sponsored civil war in El Salvador and again in Nicaragua, a coup in Guatemala and outright invaded Grenada and Panama when the local administration seemed troublesome.

One sovereign nation we conquered became a state -- Hawaii. In 1893 Americans simply overthrew the indigenous royalty, whose government had been recognized in many European capitals. It's another shameful chapter of our history that never gets mentioned in our schools. I could go on about all these and other imperialist adventures, but perhaps it's time to return to the subject of Iraq.

Maybe it's not really imperialism that got us into Iraq this time. Americans don't really want to conquer and rule anymore, we only want economic dominion over the rest of the world. Give us cheap beef for our hamburgers grown in Brazil and Costa Rica on land that used to be rain forest, give us cheap footwear glued together in Indonesia, give us cheap computers made in Malaysia and give us a river of throwaway plastic Happy Meal toys from China. In the face of that kind of dominion, the economics of conquering Iraq don't make much sense. Sure there's oil there but it's available from so many other sources. Fighting terrorism and weapons of mass destruction never made good reasons to start the war either. Instead I get the sense that Dubya's crew, all veterans of his dad's regime, simply wanted to take care of business they left unfinished in 1991. We are simply stuck with their actions of vengeance.

Now the Bush Administration is asking for another $87 Billion for the rebuilding effort. Fine, what's that after the last $450 Billion he overspent? But we need more troops over there to restore order before we can even think about rebuilding. As I said in March, 250,000 troops is not enough to hold a country of 22 million. In their wisdom the Bushies reduced that to only 150,000. Now after four months of low level conflict at last they are admitting they need help. Maybe they're even regretting the decision to attack without the help of the UN. Maybe they think the other countries will have pity on our troops, hip deep in the dry quicksand of the desert. Maybe the other countries will give us troops because it's simply more dangerous not to. You see, now that this deed has been done we need to calm down the place simply because if we don't, it WILL become that much dreaded hotbed of terrorism the Bushies had made it out to be. Maybe it already has to some degree.

From Iraq we are hearing about American deaths constantly. To blunt criticism The Bush Administration has played some numbers games with the casualty figures, but everyone now agrees that more have died during the peace than during the shooting war. In the column before last I said that the occupation had taken 63 American lives. I researched that figure, but soon after the media started reporting numbers in the 30s. Whoops, did I make a mistake? No, the administration changed the rules on how it was counting deaths. Vehicle related deaths would no longer count, only deaths related to enemy fire. Of course some of these Humvees crashed after they ran over bombs in the roadway. We won't count any suicides either, they said. Hmm, suicides among our troops, what could be causing that? Maybe it's the fact that our troops are attacked 15 to 25 times a day across Iraq.

Ultimately these numbers are still small. I remember when we used to hear of a 100, sometimes as many as 150 Americans getting killed in Vietnam each week. The casualties we took in the Philippines 100 years ago also dwarf what we are taking in Iraq. But in the 21st Century, in spite of corporate control of the media, we are much more aware that this is happening. One number we are never given -- how many civilians are hit when Americans fire back at their attackers? I'm sure that's in the hundreds.

So after all this, if Al Qaeda is still in business, what good has the Iraq war done? Is George Bush's Burden worth it?

At least I think most people's eyes are opening to the reality of Bush's misadventure and "Onward Christian Soldiers" must finally be off the Armed Forces Radio hit parade in Iraq.

Sorry about the lack of spiffy one-liners this month. In fact I don't even think I'm going back into the Closet, instead I'm going to play the Imperialism game like Dubya does. First though I need to call up my Gurkha reserves to keep all these Bengals at bay. Thanks for reading and until next month the Closet is closed.

(C) 2003 - Rusty Pipes

Official Disclaimer: The opinions of Mr. Pipes are his and his alon... Hey, where the hell's Rusty? He's not in his closet? Oh, shit, last time he didn't go back in the closet he spent a whole month shooting his mouth off where we weren't around to write disclaimers. We got sued half to death!! This is just great! Fine! Whatever he says, we're denying it. That's a given. Okay? Deal with it! Thank you.