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February 9, 2003
There is a recent posting at public opinion entitled, 'Once the war is over, what then?' The post gently suggests that we to need to begin to think about what would happen to Iraq after the war is won by the US and its allies. If war is inevitable as many now say, what then the future of Iraq and the Middle East?
The post suggests that Afghanistan may be a model of post Iraq; a model that is a variation on Vietnam. The US wins the war quickly, installs a client regime and both are then subject to counterattacks from hostile forces dispersed in the mountains. Is that too pessimistic?
Is not that Afghanistan now?
What the above post on public opinion gestured to, in its attempt to write a history of the present, continues to trouble me. It is not the fear that may drive us some of stir crazy.
One aspect of my concern is the indifference of the Bush Administration to nation building after the regime change. The McGill Report says it very well:
"The early signs are discouraging. The U.S. military blew into Afghanistan, did its urgent business and vowed eternal support of the long-oppressed Afghan people, but now has basically flown the coop. Why should we believe that our government will do any more to support a stable democratic government in a post-Saddam Iraq? Where are the Bush government’s efforts right now to build a national consensus around the need to rebuild postwar Iraq into a democracy, just as we helped Germany and Japan to become democracies after World War II?"
My concerns go further than this though this. They circle around the unreason of the political reason of the national security state; but I have no words to express the dread that comes upon me. I fear the consequences of the unreason of reason (historical examples of the unreason of reason are Auschwitz or the destruction of aboriginal society).
Last night I re-read Walter Benjamin's, Theses on the Philosophy of History, and his insights once again struck me as dialectical signposts to the future.
Consider this:
"And all rulers are the heirs of those who have conquered before them ... Whoever has emerged victorious particpates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying protrate ...There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another."
These fragments of Benjamin's text capture my fears and anxieties about the future in the Middle East after the war with Iraq is finished. There is no straight, progressive course to history, ie., bringing democracy and freedom to a people oppressed by a totalitarian regime. Oh, I know, we are supposed to marching to Baghdad to liberate the people of Iraq; and to foster the emergence of liberal democracy in the Middle East. But I hear the satanic laughter echoing in the distance and realise that world history is indeed a slaughter bench of the innocents and the vulnerable.
This cuts against the liberal philosophy of many Americans who firmly accept, the words of The McGill Report, that progress is more than a hollowed-out catchphrase that has becoem a mythology.
"So are we making progress after all? Without a doubt. The United States is itself the greatest example of that progress, because here all people are owed government protection of their basic human rights regardless of race, religion, color, sex, age, caste, or station of birth. Persecuted refugees from the world over have flocked to the United States for decades because of this. "
In such a situation Benjamin suggests that a critical philosophy in public life brushes history against the grain; it strips the future of its magic by uncoupling progress and humanity. We need to blast open that continuum of history; to blast our specific era out of that homogenous, liberal course of history that is ultimately structured on redemption from evil---a movement towards a blessed state.
How can we brush history against the grain? Benjamin says that if we turn our faces to the past we can see the wreckage upon wreckage that is being hurled at our feet from the storm blowing from Paradise. This storm blows us irresistbly into the future to which our backs are turned, while the pile of debris before us grows every skyward. The storm is what we call progress.
A storm is going to blow through the Middle East, and it will a big one, if the past history of modernity is any guide. To put in George Bush's language, evil has continued undiminshed and redemption has failed to appear. All we have is the aura of redemption of a progressing humanity as we lurch towards an abyss of an unredeemed world wracked by violence and terror.
Sorry, I just cannot picture George Bush delivering on redemption in a world besieged by the evil of pure terror. I see the long shadows cast by a newly-forming empire, remember the historical setbacks of the past and cannot shake off the sense of shock at seeing once again the mutilated, twisted carcasses in the desert.
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