Zimbabwe and Mugabe

My summer travels involved a brief stint in Zimbabwe, during which I made an historian’s pilgrimage of sorts to two very different historic sites in the country. The first involved a five hour bus ride over bumpy, dusty roads and through police checkpoints, past busy towns serving as arteries of local trade, and past family smallholdings and large farms. The destination was Great Zimbabwe, the ruins of a magnificent

capital that sat at the heart of an African kingdom between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. Once home to royal enclosures, granaries, and the prized stock from vast cattle herds, and a conduit for a trade that ran between rich African goldfields and the far side of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, the still only partially-understood complexity of the city and the society it governed confounded nineteenth century sensibilities about the Africa they were poised to conquer.

Undaunted, British conquerors and South African settlers determined that the city must have been built by non-Africans. The Queen of Sheba and the Phoenecians were two possibilities bandied about by professional archaeologists, who like their anthropologist counterparts, often served the interests of the colonial state, and whose quackery was only slowly dismantled over the next century.

The city served as the namesake for the African country which gained its independence in 1980. Great Zimbabwe also provided some of the new country’s important symbols. At the other historic site I visited, reproductions of the famous Great Zimbabwe stone birds sat atop the tall friezes which narrated the African territory’s emergence from subjugation to independence. The friezes are part of the monumental architecture of Heroes Acre, a memorial to the independence struggle, its martyrs, and the country’s founding fathers and mothers. Heroes Acre sites on the outskirts of Harare, high on a hill, overlooking the capital which can by turns seem like any other well appointed southern African city, and like a shell of a country on its knees, unable to rise to its feet.

It is at Heroes Acre that most assumed Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s first president, and the bane of many of its people, was likely to be buried. Mugabe, who died Friday, lived a life in parallel with the emergence of modern Zimbabwe, and for Americans might be best imagined as a combination of George Washington and Jefferson Davis. Mugabe was--and remains for many Zimbabweans--the hero most associated with his country’s liberation from colonial rule and its emergence as the original southern African “rainbow nation,” a title now usually bestowed on the South Africa of the Mandela era. But also became responsible for repeatedly and brutally dividing the country along ethnic lines, for empowering a military which confuses its own prosperity and wellbeing with the public good, and for setting in motion events which have led to the collapse of Zimbabwe’s economy.

The territories that became Zimbabwe were conquered by European settlers and chartered companies during the late-nineteenth century as a part of the broader “scramble” for Africa. In this case, it was the British South African Company, British and Afrikaner settlers, and finally the British government, which presided over the conquest of what became known as Southern Rhodesia. Africans were transformed from the peoples of a variety of pre-colonial kingdoms, states, and communities, into colonial subjects, restricted to “tribal” reserves which often comprised and even more often became marginal agricultural land, divided along ethnic lines that were artificially strengthened by the colonial state, and subjected to a cruel and humiliating colour bar.

More than most other British colonies outside of South Africa, Southern Rhodesia became a settler state, and those settlers resisted every effort by the British government to force Rhodesia to conform to what became the envisioned timeline and mode of decolonization in the 1960s. Instead of according to British and African nationalist demands for “no independence before majority African rule,” Rhodesia’s settlers issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence from an impotent British Empire, allied themselves with apartheid South Africa and the colonies of Portugal’s dictatorship, and fought a twelve-year war against African nationalists who, when civil disobedience and political organizing proved insufficient, retreated to the bush to wage a guerrilla war.

After working as a teacher, one of few professions open to Africans under colonial rule, Robert Mugabe became involved with the nationalist parties fighting the rogue Rhodesian state, and spent time in prison for his anti-colonial activities. His imprisonment coincided with the death of a child, and to add a further indignity to the violence and humiliation imposed on detainees, Rhodesian authorities did not allow Mugabe to leave prison to attend the funeral. Mugabe later rose to the top of ZANU-PF, one or the two primary parties that provided the organizing framework for political and military resistance.

At the end of the 1970s, the Rhodesians having been worn down by a drawn out civil war, Britain briefly reassumed control of the colony (the last governor was a son-in-law of Winston Churchill and the father of Nicholas Soames, a member of the British parliament recently evicted from the Conservative Party for his defiance of Boris Johnson). The Commonwealth oversaw elections in 1980 which saw ZANU-PF win an overwhelming victory in spite of multiple attempts--like by the Rhodesian security services--to murder Mugabe himself.

The same set of assumptions that led Europeans to ascribe the construction of Great Zimbabwe to a more “civilized” people meant that many settlers assumed Mugabe’s triumph would be followed by their summary removal from the country or worse. But before most of the world’s people had ever heard of Nelson Mandela, Mugabe became a Mandela-like figure, encouraging European settlers to remain in the country provided that they accepted that they were now Zimbabweans. His stirring articulation of a civic form of nationalism--in stark contrast to the Rhodesians’ ethnic nationalism--made Mugabe a figure of local, regional, and global adulation, and antidote to fears of what African governance meant, and a powerful rejoinder to the South African apartheid government’s claims about the menace of African nationalism.

The new government went out of its way to indulge the white settlers, even reserving twenty parliamentary seats for the community, seats that were later converted into appointed seats, a ‘00s era weapon deployed by ZANU-PF against its opponents.

During the 1980s the country successfully extended access to education and healthcare to many of its citizens. The health and wellbeing of most Zimbabweans increased dramatically. The country also began halting efforts at land redistribution, designed to address the inequalities in access to wealth and land constructed over nearly a century of colonial and settler rule. However, the British and Zimbabwean governments interpreted the former’s commitment to funding this program, and when Ronald Reagan came to power in the U.S., he did not display the Carter administration’s interest in and commitment to supporting and funding elements of land reform. Land reform also placed most of the power in the hands of sellers, and focused on other forms of welfare--health and education in particular--the government did not have the resources to meet willing sellers’ prices.

Scholars, journalists, and onlookers continue to debate the combination of factors that led to the sinister events that unfolded in parts of Zimbabwe during the 1980s, some citing Mugabe’s psychological profile, others arguing that the descent into dictatorship was an inevitable feature of African politics. However, the partial division of the liberation movement along ethnic and geographic lines, the different international affiliations of the liberation parties, and restiveness with the allocation of post-independence power contributed to a climate of suspicion between ZANU-PF and ZAPU, its main rival for power once the Rhodesians were swept into marginal if still highly affluent obscurity.

These differences were deliberately exacerbated and in some cases manufactured by the highly-effective South African regime, which saw the front-line of colonial and settler states crumble before its eyes, and regarded an independent Zimbabwe willing to host South African liberation parties as an existential threat to its system of segregation. South Africans saw, in fanning the flames of dissent and difference in Zimbabwe, a way to bring to life their lie about the innate incompetence of Africans, and manufacture what they could no longer pretend was a natural state of affairs. South African plants in Zimbabwe’s military destroyed most of the country’s air force, and planted weapons caches that appeared to implicate Mugabe’s political rivals in fomenting dissent.

The result was a campaign of ethnic cleansing ordered by Mugabe, allegedly overseen in part by his successor, Emmerson Mnangagwa, and partly implemented by Rhodesians who still occupied high places in the security services, and who brought forms of violence honed under colonial rule into Zimbabwe’s military. The immediate force behind the Gukurahundi was the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade (North Koreans were also the architects of Heroes Acre). Mugabe traced his roots to the remnants of the Shona people and their predecessors who built Great Zimbabwe, and his campaign of violence targeted Ndebele people, descended from communities that entered the region from further south and east in the nineteenth century. The Matabeleland massacres, in addition to making more lethal and lasting the differences that had emerged during the liberation war, also illustrated the hypocrisy of European and American powers, which barely batted an eye over these massacres, in stark contrast to the storm they raised over the eviction of white farmers a decade and a half later.

While the world’s powerbrokers largely ignored Matabeleland, they took a less indulgent approach to the deficit spending that had lifted many Zimbabweans out of poverty, and in the early 1990s the IMF began to enforce austerity--with predictably dreadful consequences--on the Zimbabwean economy. Mugabe also found himself under pressure from an emboldened and organized community of war veterans and hangers-on, the former having never received the compensation they believed they deserved for the sacrifices endured during the liberation war. As party, state, and military grew increasingly intertwined under one-party rule, Mugabe sent his military into the Congo, in the time-honored tradition of southern African war-making during the late-20th century. Like the apartheid state before it, which intervened in civil wars both to shore up regional influence and to take advantage of the chaos to plunder its neighbors, ZANU-PF and the miltiary profited handsomly from the misfortunes of the Congolese.

It was Mugabe’s decision to order the occupation of some of the country’s white-owned farms that finally mobilized international public opinion against the regime. Tony Blair declaimed the responsibilities Britain had incurred for aiding land reform in the 1980 settlement (the responsible minister saying that as an Irishwoman and fellow victim of colonialism she was not party to Britain’s colonial legacy), and instead mobilized public opinion in the Commonwealth and north Atlantic world against Mugabe. In this, Blair and Co were aided by a flourishing genre of memoirs that dominated the “Africa” section of British and American bookshops, packed with subtle and not-so-subtle nostalgia for the “good old days” before Mugabe. As the song says, “Rhodesians never die.”

As the Zimbabwean economy spiralled and an emboldened opposition brought serious electoral pressure to bear on the regime, Mugabe unleashed terror and violence on the leaders and members of the Movement for Democratic Change who drew on the power of outraged urbanites in Harare and Bulawayo, trade unions, and a civil society yearning to reassert itself. Even ZANU-PF’s most shameful intimidation and manipulation couldn’t earn the party victory in 2008 parliamentary elections. Morgan Tsvangirai, MDC leader, beat Mugabe in the presidential election, but likely thanks to manipulation, did not receive the outright majority needed to claim victory in the first round. To protect the limbs and lives of his supporters as Mugabe unleashed still more horrific violence before the second round of voting, Tsvangirai withdrew from the contest, but the MDC entered government.

Many expected Mugabe’s death to provoke brutal infighting between generals and party leaders. But in 2017, his attempt to pave the way for his wife to succeed him in office infuriated generals who had bloodied their hands during and after the liberation war, and who had grown accustomed to occupying a special place in the party. They deposed Mugabe in a coup and elevated Emmerson Mnangagwa to the presidency. True to his role in Zimbabwe’s security state, Mnangagwa has proved every bit as willing as Mugabe to use violence. Unlike Mugabe, he is making his way in a global environment more disposed toward authoritarianism and less concerned about human rights.

During my few days in Harare, an opposition stronghold as poorly disposed toward Mugabe as any, many Zimbabweans were acknowledging that Mnangagwa was challenging their certainty that things could only get better, and more than a few expressed something close to nostalgia for the Mugabe years as they face kilometers-long fuel lines, fluctuating prices, currency shortages, and devastating unemployment. And Mugabe is twisting the knife from beyond the grave, for his family claim that his wishes were to be buried in eastern Zimbabwe, and not at Heroes Acre where he would be used as a symbol by those who deposed him to save their own skins.

The resurgence of white nationalism in the United States, and the global networks that ethno-nationalists are building has resulted in renewed interest in a distorted narrative about the lived experiences of white South Africans and to a lesser degree, by extension, white Zimbabweans. But the vast, overwhelming majority of victims of Mugabe’s regime, and of Zimbabweans who have fled their country or suffered for seeking to reclaim their civil and political rights, are black Zimbabweans. It is they who endure xenophobia in South Africa or bide their time in North America or Europe. And it is these exiles and “inziles” alike--the likes of Tsitsi Dangarembga, Yvonne Vera, Noviolet Bulawayo, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, Panashe Chigumadzi--who have most compellingly documented Zimbabwe’s arc since UDI in 1965 and independence in 1980.

A far more troubling figure than most other nationalist figures in southern Africa, Mugabe was nonetheless an enormous force shaping the region. A liberation hero who saw the transformation of his citizen’s wellbeing in the ‘80s, he ultimately mangled the country’s economy and maimed its democracy, allowing the ruling party and the military to confuse the prosperity of their leading members with the health and wellbeing of the nation. Like many other leaders of newly independent nations--and in common with political figures across the world today--Mugabe offered at various times various answers to the question of how citizenship and belonging were defined. In North America and Europe he is a byword for the ills of African politics, but his trajectory, and the window his life offers into Zimbabwe’s fortunes the past half century, is also a mirror for his critics. It is easy to dismiss Mugabe as a depraved dictator, but more uncomfortable to think about the regional and global factors underpinning his transformation, and how very ordinary some of his politics look wherever we cast our eye around the globe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

A noun, a verb, and Barack Obama (and don’t mention the war!): Joe Biden’s candidacy

In 2008, Joe Biden ran to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for the presidency. You could be forgiven for forgetting this, because his wildly unsuccessful bid was remarkable mostly for a devastating comment he made about Republican Rudy Giuliani’s candidacy. It was, Biden mocked, nothing more than “a noun, a verb, and 9/11.”

In 2019, Biden is waging another campaign for the Democratic nomination, and it is best summed up as “A noun, a verb, and Barack Obama.” Largely bereft of ideas proportionate to the political, economic, social, and ecological crises facing our world, and characterized by almost comical flip-flopping on a range of issues, Biden’s campaign is instead a plea for the status quo and good feelings of the Obama years.

To be fair, Biden’s campaign is marginally more complex than that, because of the inconsistency with which he invokes his role in the Obama years. When discussing a popular policy--turning the ship of state on civil rights issues, signing a climate accord, passing healthcare reform--Biden would have us believe he was the man in the room who held the president’s ear, pushed the executive envelope, and swayed the debate the right way. When discussing less popular policies--deporting “Dreamers,” blowing wedding parties to smithereens in Afghanistan, letting financial criminals go on their merry way--Biden would have us believe that he was nothing more than a helpless, rejected spectator to events, whose voice was whipped away by ill winds.

To be sure, Biden is not in solitary company as a politician of the “have his cake and eat it” school, nor is his inconsistency his only characteristic. Biden is also known for speaking as though he has a blender on low speed spinning in his head--as distinct from the high-speed model that mutilates Donald Trump’s “thoughts” as they emerge from his head.

Many Democrats view Biden’s “Noun/Verb/Barack Obama” campaign, and his tendency to commit what they call “gaffes” as evidence that he’s a harmless old duffer, who might not be the sharpest candidate on offer, but who has a solid working class shtick. Having my origins in the working class, it looks to me more like a fake, condescending, slimy “used car salesman” shtick, but that’s another story.

More dangerous than Biden’s hypocrisy over his role in the Obama administration, his general incoherence, and his 1950s-tinted views of the world, are other elements of his politics and his record.

Biden's style is is loudly and aggressively ignorant. He seems to hope that volume will be seen as a sign of strength. Like George W Bush and Donald Trump, Biden works hard to give the impression that he thinks with his alimentary canal rather than his grey cells. And like those two politicians, he practices a particular brand of machismo. In his case over the past few years, this includes repeated references to high school social dynamics and suggestions that he’d like to beat up Donald Trump.

While most Democrats share Biden’s outrage about Trump’s words and actions, no other candidate has had the crassness to suggest that this should be settled by some school-yard scrap. Biden’s words--repeated often enough that they suggest a strategy rather than a “gaffe”--are not just crude. They send the message that political differences should be settled by violence. And they play straight into the hands of the most fascist elements of the Trump campaign.

From the beginning, Trump has made clear with his words that his participation in electoral politics is conditional, and that reverses might well be met by violence. Spokespeople in 2016 said a Trump loss would have provoked a “bloodbath.” Trump suggested that his supporters might murder his opponent. He encouraged his supporters to beat up his critics at rallies. And he revelled in the notion that he could murder people on the streets without his supporters raising an eyebrow.

Trump’s politics are destructive, and the more chaotic our political discourse and behavior becomes, the more his lawlessness and cruelty thrive. In the 1920s and ‘30s, fascist parties in central Europe drew their opponents into literal street battles. The left won some battles and the right won others. But only the right could win such a war, because their success--as does Trump’s today--depends on destroying faith in the politics, processes, and behaviors that have traditionally enabled people to claim more civil rights and make social and economic progress. Biden’s chest-thumping might make some people feel good about his “strong” leadership, but he cannot beat Trump at this game, and whichever of them would win a brawl behind the gym, the real loser from this kind of talk is American democracy.

Another part of Biden’s strategy is the embrace of a kind of empty-headed nostalgia for the good ol’ days, when Democrats and Republicans worked together in harness. The problem with this nostalgia is that it ignores two factors.

Firstly, the Republican Party as an institution has moved far enough from the days when its top figures could be expected to lead the way on environmental and healthcare related issues that Biden’s teary-eyed reminisces serve no discernible purpose. Today, Republican white supremacists occupy the White House, corporate power appears to have an invulnerable grip on the jugular of the GOP and the American political system, and the politicians that populate the Republican Party could not assemble a spinal column between them on behalf of the public interest. What does cooperation with these kinds of interests mean? What’s the middle ground between white supremacy and a multiracial democracy? What’s the moderate version of a corporate death grip on our institutions and economy? What’s the bipartisan method for ransacking our democratic institutions?

Biden’s bleary-eyed, simplistic reading of the past also demonstrates the lack of self-awareness that is his other trademark. In the glory days of yore, his role in this happy bipartisan world was to serve as cover for segregationists, the kind of man who decades later will still chirpily say that he wasn’t exactly opposed to de-segregation. He just didn’t think the federal government should do it; it should be left to the states run by segregationists to look into their hearts and miraculously find it in themselves to do the right thing. I’m not sure whether I’d rather believe that Biden is really this naive or that he’s actually this malicious. But I’m quite sure that someone who expresses these views in these ways should not be president.

Biden is also of the “When I was a kid I walked uphill to school in a blinding snowstorm, both ways!” school. Such utterances, like some of the above, are often interpreted as “gaffes” or part of his folksy charm. But when combined with his history of attacking “whiny” millennials, it tells us something else about his politics and prospective presidency. Biden has deployed these attacks on young people in particular over debates about the cost of higher education, mounting levels of indebtedness, and intergenerational inequality.

His suggestion that young people should quit “whining” (by which he presumably means “accurately describing their social and economic worlds”), get to work, pay their way through school, and get a good job--just like he did!--represents a particular lack of awareness from a member of a generation that grew up at a time when the American government was at its most generous and redistributive, and who attended public universities when they were tuition-free. In Biden’s case it was the University of Delaware, which today charges around $13,000 per year. Biden’s attempts to make bankruptcy processes more punitive--attempts that found him challenged by the likes of Elizabeth Warren--also speak to a callous side, and to profound ignorance of or indifference to the changes that unfolded during his golden age of bipartisanship.

If civil rights--see here, here, here, for example--and political economy (also here) are sticky ground for Biden, he would have us believe that foreign policy is his preferred turf. Joe Biden is often described--most often by himself--as having robust foreign policy credentials. But there, he is mostly robustly wrong and dangerous.

For Biden was among the supporters of George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. The supposedly brilliant foreign policy mind claimed that he didn’t have enough information to determine that the war was illegal, immoral, and ill-judged. (Never mind that an 11th grader with a newspaper subscription and a bad dial-up internet connection could figure this out readily enough.)

This invasion was a clear war of aggression--a crime in international law--launched on the basis of transparently fabricated evidence. The war was launched in the absence of evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, never mind any immediate threat to the U.S., and in the face of a great deal of evidence suggesting otherwise. The war was launched in defiance of the United Nations and the efforts of its weapons inspectors to arrive at clear conclusions about the existence or absence of Iraq’s weapons. And the war was launched as a part of an open effort by the Bush administration to use 9/11 as an excuse to create their twenty-first century version of a violent American imperium that served no discernible public interest.

As predicted by those onlookers who applied even a modicum of critical thought to the exercise, the Iraq war destroyed Iraqi civic and physical infrastructure, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans, and led to the proliferation of international terrorism, including the rise of ISIS, with dramatic spill-over effects into neighboring countries and terror attacks in the west.

Along with 9/11, the war was used by the American security state to expand its power at the expense of Americans’ civil liberties. The war was used by the CIA as an excuse to deploy torture against its prisoners and create a parallel “legal” system outside the reach of U.S. law, something that has cascaded into the realm of horrific drone strikes. The war and its aftermath eroded Americans’ faith in their government, indirectly contributing to the rise of Donald Trump.

Despots and demagogues around the world, recognizing the blindness that bloodlust induced in American decision-makers, declared their own fealty to the war on terror, winning moral and material support for their tyranny. Previously disparate, local conflicts, were welded together by the irresponsible words and actions of the Bush administration and those who voted for its dangerous war.

A vote for this war does not count as a “gaffe.” It was a vote to suspend international norms, critical thought, and the American public interest in pursuit of a conflict that violated international law, unleashed unspeakable horrors on Iraqis, and endangered Americans. No elected official who voted for such a war and the catastrophic consequences with which should be rewarded by voters.

Biden is among the high-ranking Democrats who have offered tortured justifications for their vote. Such mangled explanations for an inexplicable and unforgivable vote cost John Kerry the presidency in 2004, Hillary Clinton the Democratic nomination in 2008, and likely contributed--along with a range of other factors--toward Clinton’s loss of the presidency in 2016 (Trump taunted her mercilessly about the war, and his own abysmal views were subjected to little scrutiny).

Only two of Biden’s rivals for the Democratic nomination today were in a position to cast a vote on the decision to go to war. But both--Jay Inslee and Bernie Sanders--had the sense to vote against the war.

Lest his initial poor judgment not be sufficient to condemn him--and it ought to be--Biden’s attempts to wind down the Iraq war were equally contemptible. Biden routinely suggested that, having eviscerated Iraqi institutions and killed thousands of the country’s inhabitants, the U.S. should repeat the original sin of European colonialism in the Middle East, and forcibly break Iraq into multiple states. That level of imperial hubris alone should be a disqualification.

One of the jobs of a president is to be able to see a a few presidencies, and a few generations into the future; to consider the long-term consequences of actions, including those that might offer the most enticing of short-term gains--in the case of Iraq, the opportunity to “get” a dictator and for Democrats to look “tough” on foreign policy. At the very least, a president should be capable of posing the kinds of questions that invite experts to offer their informed prognostications about the likely long-term consequences of actions. When it came to Iraq, the most consequential foreign policy decision by the U.S. government for generations, Joe Biden demonstrated none of these qualities.

Joe Biden spent his career as a mediocre senator from Delaware. Absent Barack Obama’s strategic act of charity toward Biden in 2008, he would never have been plucked from well-deserved senatorial obscurity to ill-deserved executive stardom, and would not be seen as a significant contender for the presidency today.

The final line of defense offered by Biden’s supporters, is that his views have evolved and that today he holds reasonably progressive views, even if they seldom rise to the standard of the transformative politics offered by the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, or offer laser-like focus on particular issues of significance like Jay Inslee and Andrew Yang. But such a defense is hardly a ringing endorsement, there is a lesson there, as well. It is incontestable that Joe Biden has decent views about a respectable number of issues. But it is equally incontestable that Joe Biden was initially wrong--loudly, mulishly, intractably--about most of these issues, sometimes for years, sometimes for decades. I appreciate evolution as much as the next science-loving person. But I prefer my national leaders to be people who get things right the first time and can be expected to act accordingly in office.

A Joe Biden campaign might consist of a noun, a verb, and Barack Obama. But a Joe Biden presidency, on the basis of an even cursory examination of his record, would consist of three and a half years of getting it wrong on every important issue, a lame-duck Damascene conversion, and the loss of the subsequent election. We can't afford to waste our time waiting for Biden to evolve.

Because in addition to all of the serious flaws in Biden’s record noted above, it is his determination to run on a “moderate” or “centrist” platform--which accepts capitalism's cruelty, the market's preeminence, and a stunted role for the democratic state--that means that even if voters prove more forgiving and forgetful than Biden (or the country, for that matter) deserves, there is significant historical precedent suggesting that Biden’s tepid liberalism and fiddling on the margins of policy is a recipe for disaster and defeat.

The racism, corruption, and plundering of the Trump administration must be answered not only by a basic level of decency and condemnation. Trump’s central logic--that nationhood and belonging in the United States should be based on race--needs answering. And the best answer is the form of civic nationalism that results from the creation of a durable, universal, generous, and broad-based welfare state, in which civil and political rights come accompanied by social and economic rights. The best of the Democratic candidates recognize this, and are proposing a range of imaginative, compelling, generous policies that would refashion the American economy for the benefit of the public interest. Biden offers nothing like this.

Whomever the Democrats choose to represent them in 2020 will face a would-be tyrant, a man prepared to promise and do anything to retain power. It is no exaggeration to say that this man and the ideas that he and his party advance pose a mortal threat to the future of our democracy and our planet. This man has aligned himself with a host of authoritarians around the world, some of whom will be actively assisting him in his re-election campaign.

It seems absurd that the best we think we could do against such a man, who arose himself partly from the void left by the paucity of imagination and courage of an earlier generation of Democratic leaders, is a mediocrity like Biden. We can and should continue to debate Barack Obama’s legacy, but in a campaign for the future of the republic and the planet, we need more than “a noun, a verb, and Barack Obama.”

War on Iraq, 16 Years On

It is common for people to reflect, in relation to significant historical events, on where they were when they “heard the news.” Pearl Harbor for older generations, and 9/11 in more recent times, are events that assume this significance for many Americans. The one that really sticks with me is the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States. The invasion was launched early in the morning on March 20th in Iraq, when it was still evening in California. But I grew up in a house without electricity and television, and so it was over the radio the next morning that news reached my small corner of northern California.

I was a high school student, and that Thursday Foothill High’s junior English classes were bound by bus for the small Oregon town of Ashland to see a Shakespeare play. I think it was Romeo and Juliet, but I can’t be sure. Normally the radio during the bus ride to school was turned to a country music station, but because I had to arrive early for the field trip that day I was in the car with my mother, who left earlier from our small community in the foothills to work in Redding, the big city. The radio offered sporadic news of the invasion in tones of barely-concealed triumph, and my mother stopped at the general store so we could buy a newspaper--the San Francisco Chronicle was the best available in Palo Cedro, the small town where my high school was located.

I got badly motion sick trying to read the paper on the bus north, and so spent the ride staring out the window as rural northern California flashed by. This was Bush country. There were signs in the landscape, some of them very literal. Our local then-state representative, now Congressman Doug LaMalfa, peppered the roads with notices proclaiming his on-the-nose motto, that he was “One of Us!” Though when they said “us” they certainly didn’t mean me.

But there were signs every day in classrooms as well. As a sophomore I was fortunate enough to end up in the only one of several biology classes at the high school where the teacher designed to teach evolution. That others were able to teach “intelligent design” at this public school, or else ignore the question of the earth’s origins altogether, was a marker of the brutal confidence of the brand of conservatism that comprehensively dominated and dominates northern California.

My junior year U.S. history class was even less subtle. The teacher kicked off the semester in scorching August with an aggressive rendition of the Star Spangled Banner, to which he stood, hand on heart, eyeing the few of us who didn’t rise. Most class periods began with a dose of FOX news, not as satire, but as God’s own word. We were not to debate Brit Hume’s words, but rather to savor them.

As it became clear that the Bush administration was angling for war in Iraq, the teacher decided that routine debates on the subject would be a good opportunity to foster patriotism. But a few of us gave back better than we got. (One of the few dissenters was a Hungarian student who looked as though he’d stumbled into a twilight zone; most exchange students had something else in mind when they found that they were California-bound. Giving better than we got wasn’t difficult given the transparent lies told and flippant illogic offered by the administration which unravelled effortlessly when an 11th grader picked up a newspaper. Yet these eluded the leading lights of the Democratic Party, who allowed themselves to be led along by a propaganda machine facilitated by the unholy alliance between the jingo-press led by FOX and the neoconservative administration.

I wrote an editorial on the subject in the school newspaper. I clumsily incorporated a line from the Shakespeare we were reading that year in English (‘Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war’). My English teacher might have been pleased. But my history teacher met me as I entered class waving a copy of the newspaper, red-faced, calling it “Treasonous!” and referring to me as a “Commie pinko!”
But by March the Bush regime--”administration” seems a more fitting term for a government that wins a national election without calling off a recount--made it clear that no amount of logic, evidence, international law, common sense, or bone-chilling warnings from the British security services was going to stop them from launching a war of choice, otherwise known as a war of aggression (U.S. lawyers got the Nazis for that crime at Nuremberg, it’s worth noting).

That war had all the most predictable consequences that many people sought to warn about in 2002 and 2003, though those voices were drowned out by the Bush regime’s propaganda machine, the complicity of even supposedly “liberal” media, the shouts of “traitors!” from good patriots, and the lockstep march of most Democratic Party leadership (in the senate, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Dianne Feinstein, John Kerry, Harry Reid, and Chuck Schumer).

The war cost the lives of thousands of U.S. soldiers and trillions of dollars. The campaign to “shock and awe” destroyed civil society and state infrastructure in Iraq, leaving something to be desired as an exercise in “nation building” (“It’s a slam dunk”/“Mission Accomplished!”). The invasion, occupation, and aftermath claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands if not millions of Iraqis (“We don’t do body counts”--you could tell the story of the Bush years in a series of slogans).

If you haven’t visited Ashland, Oregon, I would recommend it. It is a beautiful college town in the Rogue Valley, home to several splendid theaters, quaint streets, and nice coffee shops. But wandering in Lithia Park after Romeo and Juliet seemed deeply incongruous as bombs crashed down on Baghdad and we turned a country we were trying to “liberate” into rubble and ruin.

It’s no wonder that some of the people who were supposed to greet us with open arms (“We will be greeted as liberators!”) shot back instead. All the more after we opened prison camps that were sites of horrendous torture and abuse (Dick Cheney had warned us we would go over to the “Dark side”).
The war led to the massive proliferation of Al Qaeda in particular--Cheney lied to the public on television when he said that Al Qaeda was shaping Iraqi politics before the invasion, but the war he engineered brought that monstrous lie to life--and transnational terrorism in general. It led to acts of terror across the Middle East and on the streets of Europe (MI5 warned of this in stark terms while MI6 spun tales of imperial glory for Tony Blair’s court).

The threat of international terrorism--of our own very deliberate making--deepened the spiral begun by 9/11 and our security state grew fat on the civil rights on which it feasted, along with the date it illegally hoovered up, protected by the complicity and indifference of leading Republicans and Democrats (here’s looking at you Barack Obama and Dianne Feinstein), and its willingness to resist those few legislators who sought to pry into its doings in the public interest.

The invasion created the conditions for a civil war, for the rise of ISIS, and by extension for much of the violence that has consumed the Middle East in the past sixteen years. On my bus up to Ashland, as I had on my bus to school across the Millville Plains two years earlier on September 11, I overheard conversations about teaching those “ragheads” a lesson, turning Palestine/Iraq/wherever into a “parking lot,” and other examples of what initially seemed like the crudeness of the ignorant but which, if you listened a little closer, were also approximations of what passed (and passes) for statecraft in Washington.

More locally, the war gave Bush a second term: even degrading the public good, plundering public lands, and funnelling wealth to the rich looks good in red, white, and blue. It also sunk the presidential ambitions of John Kerry (“I was for it before I was against it”) and Hillary Clinton, the latter twice over, and by extension helped to elevate Trump to the White House.

Last year on this anniversary I invoked the late historian, Tony Judt, who wrote in his magisterial survey of postwar European history about another war of imperial hubris. “Afghanistan, in short,” he wrote, “was a catastrophe for the Soviet Union. Its traumatic impact upon a generation of conscripted soldiers would emerge only later...It says something about the underlying fragility of the Soviet Union that it was so vulnerable to the impact of one--albeit spectacularly unsuccessful--colonial adventure” (Judt, Postwar, 594).

Wars of this sort can have these kinds of consequences because their effects are never limited to the places where they unleash violence on those they seek to “liberate.” Symbolic shrapnel sends metaphorical munitions ricocheting around the world, and the places where chunks of molten metal embed themselves into political systems, political cultures, and political economies inflict damage that is eminently visible from the moment the wound is inflicted, and damage that takes time to spread and manifest itself.

And I can only imagine what this deliberate forgetting looks like to Iraqis. But even we live with the wounds that the Iraq war and its aftermath inflicted on our society, our democracy, our media, and our political culture, but there has yet to be a reckoning.