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.
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.
