Ten Years And Counting: To See The Elephant

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

“To hate and to fear is to be psychologically ill. It is, in fact, the consuming illness of our time.” — H.A. Overstreet

Politics has always been personal, here at Planet Waves. I found it so as a reader at the turn of the 21st century, having discovered the Francis website as a daily visitor. Eric and I had quested along similar spiritual paths, shared a psychological understanding of human frailty and aspiration and a realistic mistrust of institutional manipulations and corporate power-mongering. We also shared a kind of flabbergasted outrage at Bush’s hijack of the 2000 election.

We began a conversation over the 9/11 cover-up, as the nation was directed not to believe their eyes when megalithic buildings collapsed upon themselves as neatly as a Christmas box, or question the bin Laden family escape in otherwise restricted airspace on 9/12, or assess the tidy hole in the side of the Pentagon, sans wreckage, debris or other clear signs of plane crash. Right about then, Planet Waves began to expose the fraud, the manufacture of fear and hatred, that served as introduction to the long-planned BushWar II.

It may seem a no-brainer that those who study the cycles of planetary bodies and their correlation to human experience would be at home tracking political currents, but being aware of truth doesn’t necessarily make you fearless. At the time, very few astrologers were willing to touch on any of the three topics my mother warned me not to bring up at a cocktail party lest I provoke a brawl: sex, religion, politics. It was refreshing to find that Eric didn’t dodge those hard topics, loaded as they were and ready to explode — and he still doesn’t, bringing his readers not only his skill and intuition as an astrologer, but his ethical commitment as a reporter to discover and expose what is being withheld from the public and shaping our personal lives without our approval or knowledge.

In both personal and political terms, Eric’s commitment to bringing us the information we most need to maximize our potential, side-step hazard, and tackle 21st century challenges, remains one of the few things I consider relevant in our less-than-dependable information stream. Planet Waves got the war right, in all its ugliness, hubris and grievous inhumanity, and that was not by chance. We most often get things right here, because we’re ahead of the curve, seeking to shape the future with our informed choices and create possibilities with a pro-active attitude. The Friday and Tuesday editions are gems, leaving readers feeling prepared for what’s ahead, and while you are always welcome to enjoy our free content, for the whole of that larger conversation, please consider taking advantage of our premium service, finding an option that best fits your budget. Trumps Prozac any day!

In those early years of the new century, Eric and I, in our respective corners — and probably many of you — continued to chart the ambitions of the Bush White House. Dubby’s ‘no-apology’ approach to eliminating the last of the public and environmental protections left standing after Reagan’s 30-year junta on government made my head spin like Linda Blair’s. By 2002 and the build-up to an ill-conceived, opportunistic and wholly fraudulent war, I was shooting news links to Eric’s in-box, fast and furious, along with howls of protest. The topics of the day couldn’t ignore politics gone mad, but not all of Eric’s mail showed support. Truth-telling had its price in a time of nationalism, mandatory flag pins, and tribal alliances built on hate and fear-mongering.

In the third century B.C., Macedonia’s Alexander the Great took his warriors into ancient India, where they defeated an army riding great beasts called elephants. That was perhaps the first time returning veterans discussed “seeing the elephant,” spinning a yarn both fantastic and frightening. It became a euphemism for military adventurism, particularly during our Civil War, and it’s come to represent mindless, duty-bound nationalism and geopolitical misadventure. Everyone knows that George W. Bush wanted to see that elephant, wanted to make his mark as a war president, and wanted to kick Saddam Hussein’s ass. He spoke of it as Governor of Texas. We talked about it, blogged about it, reported on it prior to 2003. In short, we all saw it coming.

By the time March of 2003 rolled around, we’d seen a concerted effort to convince the public that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attack and had links to al Qaeda as well as nuclear ambitions. Not only was Iraq the biggest, baddest danger to our freedom that we could conceive, but ex-CIA operative and ally Saddam Hussein was sitting on a shit-load of weapons of mass destruction, not just willing but eager to use them. For reasons both complex and obscure, most of us lapped that fantasy up like honey, but a few of us called bullshit on the propaganda machine, naming it Orwellian smoke and mirrors, and got attacked for it. Eric was one of those.

By the summer of that year, the heinous, televised reality show called Shock and Awe was behind us and much of Baghdad had been reduced to rubble without a trace of WMD. Saddam’s government looked less like one ruled by Karl Marx than by Groucho, we found ourselves stuck in Brer Rabbit’s briar patch (even to this day). And while the internal religious factions of Iraq were set free from Saddam’s iron grip to commit war upon one another (when they weren’t warring with the infidels who occupied their country,) the Bushie justifications began in earnest. The American press was as compliant as an elderly, castrated family dog.

You could smell the fear and guilt in the air, which was a clear sign to truth-tellers everywhere: beware! To keep on top of the information, Eric had established a reprint service for his readers, Political Waves, sending out news alerts and articles from around the web. The selection of reads proved too unpatriotic for some, too liberal for others. Eric found himself attacked by those who felt criticism of the war and its war-President — old Mission Accomplished, himself — unAmerican. He needed cover so he could focus on the larger picture. He recruited me.

In the years that followed, I put out over 10,000 posts; in the early days, when the Bushies were intent on changing the nature of our reality and unafraid to take ownership of it, as many as five or six a day. This was the maiden voyage of the Bush Doctrine: pre-emptive war, unilateral if necessary, to further American interests. What could go wrong there, huh?

The war stories churned out as war stories do, but this war — connected as it was to the Internet — began to form a picture Americans weren’t familiar with: history in the making, political maneuvering raw and unvarnished. From the very first moments of our new century, the key word seems to have been “overreach.” Even now, as we seek to dial back the damage done the nation, we still struggle to overcome the effects of the Bush/Cheney insanity.

We also had other news to report at the time. Global warming was still global warming, not politically-correct ‘climate change.’ There seemed little attempt to cover up corruption and influence peddling inside the the halls of government, where Karl Rove’s delusion of a ‘permanent Republican presence’ made all that moot. We were suddenly thrust into a religious dialogue that did not sit easy on our shoulders in this, a traditionally secular nation. And what happened in our name far across the planet seemed some kind of sick joke.

The jubilant picture of Iraqis gathered around one of the many national statues of Saddam, hitting it with their shoes, seemed proof of Cheney’s assessment that we would be welcomed as liberators — for a few weeks, that is, until someone published the uncropped version, showing only a handful of locals gathered in the public square, encouraged by onlooking press “embedded” with American soldiers.

A few months in, we found Saddam hiding in a hole in the ground, filthy, hair matted, mind befuddled. No doubt those who still believed him in league with al Qaeda crowed with glee, but others of us saw a man broken — his palaces occupied, his sadistic sons slaughtered, his fortune squandered — and thought his pitiful condition representative of the very country he’d held together by sheer will. To my mind, the iconic picture of him being led out of his spider-hole, blinking against the sunlight, brands the entirety of that war as fraudulent at its core: if this was the best our “enemy” could do, what the hell were we there for?

That question was answered before the first shell exploded, of course. It was the oil, it was always the oil. Long before the build-up to war, Cheney had long conversations with Iraq-national, Ahmed Chalabi* about the benefits a democratized Iraq, with access to it’s oil fields, might offer the Western world. General John Abizaid, former commander of CENTCOM, said, “Of course it’s about oil, it’s very much about oil, and we can’t really deny that.” Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, wrote in his 2007 book, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” And Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, who passed through congressional scrutiny by the skin of his teeth, caught hell for saying this in 2007: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are. They talk about America’s national interest. What the hell do you think they’re talking about? We’re not there for figs.”

But before those voices spoke candidly, and all after the fact, there were less well-known voices warning against such hubris. The Knight-Ridder newspapers championed a pair of reporters, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, who got it right every time. Former CIA operative Ray McGovern warned about forgery, hyperbole, and half-truths then, as now. Those we depended on then — Moyers, Kucinich, Krugman — are still with us, trying to let in light. Others are gone now: Ted Kennedy, Bobby Byrd, Molly Ivins. Many of the news and opinion sites that I drew from back then have gone dark now, exhausted by the effort — not the effort to get access to the facts, but to process them in our communal national soul that thought better of itself than was being revealed of it.

There were questions we should have asked; some few of us did, loudly, only to be ignored. When four contractors were killed, their burned bodies hung from a bridge in Fallujah, we might have questioned the growing presence of military contractors, otherwise known as mercenaries. When Halliburton routinely got the plum contracts, flush with government money we can only WISH we still had, why didn’t more people point to Cheney and question the cronyism?

When Saddam’s two sons — Uday and Qusay, bad boys both — were routinely slaughtered with cheers from Americans everywhere, intoxicated with the glory of war while pointing out stories about their history of rape and torture, we might have questioned our OWN history of rape and torture. Those answers subsequently played out over the long months that followed with headlines of torture, sexual humiliation and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, and the mindless slaughter of innocents in the vendetta at Hidatha.

Over time we’ve heard additional confessions from returning soldiers, shattered in body and mind, but we pay them no mind. We’ve moved on, without holding anyone with the power to have changed the trajectory of this whole sordid affair responsible. We’re still stuck in the briar patch, still deep in muck even though the last American troops left in December of 2011. We continue to have an inordinate amount of diplomatic personnel in Iraq, along with some 14,000 private military contractors, including 5,500 security guards.

With as much as $12 million a day spent on the war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, there continues to be money piped into a ‘peaceful’ Iraq, including an estimated $3 billion over the next five years to protect our massive embassy complex in Baghdad. That might put into perspective today’s news that the FAA will close 149 air traffic towers due to the sequester. Somehow, I doubt that any of them are in Iraq.

There was a surge I should mention that was supposedly all Dubby’s idea, although Condi Rice has said that “much of the staff surrounding President Bush at the time of the Iraq War was ‘very, very hawkish’ and ‘determined to drive policy from the vice president’s office.'” We owe our thanks to Uncle Dick, then, who has never, will never apologize for anything he’s ever done. He, like our Dubby, simply can’t think of anything he did wrong. Along with the supposed success of the surge, which depended largely on money to pay off tribal entities, the rising star of one General Petraeus came and went in the ensuing years, amid rumors of his eventual presidency.

There are other names we shouldn’t forget: Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Bremer, Feith. There are numbers to consider, squandered treasure: the trillions of dollars spent on the ‘liberation’ of Iraq pales next to the trillions that will be required to shore up the broken lives and bodies of our returning military force for the rest of their days. That’s a karmic debt we owe our own. We also owe the people in Fallujah, suffering an unspeakable increase in birth defects and immune collapse attributed to depleted uranium from American ordnance. And what do we owe the millions of Iraqis displaced, the hundreds of thousands dead?

We could go on for days, recounting ten years of sorrows in Iraq, but it’s all of one piece now, looking back. It was horror from start to finish. It’s also worth noting that NOBODY has access to Iraq’s oil so far, although the Kurds are selling it to Exxon and Chevron without a formalized right to. The government in Baghdad is still at odds with who gets what or even which religious sect will take eventual prominence in the future. Back in the day, there was one voice that argued for the region to be split into thirds, equal weight given to the Kurds, the Shiia and the Sunni, alike. That was Joe Biden, trying to conjure a way out of Bush’s mess, and that may eventually be what happens as Iraq is left to its own devices, but not without continued sectarian bloodshed.

We could say what’s past is past, if we weren’t still waiting for accountability. If Nixon had gotten pinned to the mat for his actions, I think politicians everywhere would be taking their jobs a bit more seriously today. Still, with Afghanistan a continuing problem in search of a solution and Obama even now playing in the dark undercurrents of both Israel and Iran, I’d like to think we’ve outgrown the need to see the elephant, that we’ve learned the hard way to value peace.

Studies tell us that we live in more peaceful times than ever before, which is hard to accept when we have such visceral examples of humanity’s violent nature. Yet it’s also true that we have more people studying peace and reconciliation, urging collaboration and demanding accountability now than at any time in the past. As a species, we no longer consider killing our first choice, warring our only option. That is truly a step forward on the evolutionary path, a rejection of the nihilism supported by tribal considerations. We must come to such a pass, sooner or later, if we are to survive into this new century.

Ten years later, our lessons are still fresh. Those are the elephant stories we should tell our children: not what we did in the war, but how we finally got a look at ourselves in the mirror and felt ashamed not just of our politicians, but of ourselves. Until we can tell one another the truth without flinching, face the hatred and the fear just below the surface, we will continue to be driven by the “consuming illness of our time.” That’s all the elephant’s ever been: humankind’s flirtation with the darkness, its preoccupation with death. The elephant will continue as a wound within our psyche until we collectively insist on respect, on reverence, for life.

* Chalabi, favored by the Neocons and PNAC, was go-to man for the WMD and al Qaeda propaganda; he was appointed interim oil minister in Iraq and then deputy prime minister. He was never elected to government by his own people, who have held together a bare outline of democracy, both corrupt and tentative. Civil war looms, as it did ten years ago, and those of us who are surprised the government is still holding together don’t expect it to last much longer. Recent violence, like the bombing deaths of 65 citizens on the ten-year anniversary of Bush’s Folly, speaks for that probable eventuality. And the question of moment? What might all this have looked like if we’d minded our own business?