Iraq, Iran and the Moral Rot Infecting the Soul of Americaby Walter C. Uhler | Aug 27 2007 - 8:44am
The more I read history, the more I'm convinced that the United States, far from being God's appointed beacon for all mankind, was always a big talking, poor performing country in which the massive and willful stupidity of the majority engendered a moral rot incapable of withstanding manipulation and seduction by self-serving business/political interests. Thus, columnist Richard Cohen was merely acknowledging the latest example of such rot among the majority, when he asserted the Iraq War "was no mere failure of intelligence. This was a failure of character."
~snip~
Such moral rot explains why, when presidential candidate George W. Bush smugly asserted, "I may not know where Kosovo is, but I know what I believe," he was not judged to be a dimwit, but a man of character. Such moral rot also explains the ease with which an evil president and vice president -- with the cynical aid of America's neocons -- could manipulate the ignorant fears and blind rage of Americans into support for an illegal, immoral unprovoked war against Iraq.
Moreover, such moral rot explains why, even in the disastrous wake of the evil invasion he inspired, Darth Cheney could send out Christmas cards containing Benjamin Franklin's words: "And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?" And, alas, such moral rot explains why President Bush - who, until two months before ordering his evil invasion of Iraq didn't even know that the country was populated by Sunnis and Shiites - could feel sufficiently confident about the collective stupidity of Americans to erroneously compare Iraq to Vietnam (a war that the moral coward supported, but worked so mightily to dodge).
Moral rot also explains American's current inability to see through Bush's "surge" propaganda. Simply consider two incontestable truths: (1) "As of late-August, no progress had been made in achieving the key objective of the "surge" - to provide safe space for political progress at the national level."
and (2) such political progress, in the form of national reconciliation, cannot occur because the Shiites now in power consider their permanent political ascendancy to be predicated upon their ability to outlast the American occupation.
As the New York Times correctly noted: Mr. Maliki's government "is the logical product of the system the United States created, one that deliberately empowered the long-persecuted Shiite majority and deliberately marginalized the long-dominant Sunni Arab minority. It was all but sure to produce someone very like Mr. Maliki, a sectarian Shiite far more interested in settling scores than in reconciling all Iraqis to share power in a unified and peaceful democracy." <"The Problem Isn't Mr. Maliki," New York Times, August 24, 2007> Of course, it's difficult to foresee such problems, if you're a president who did not even know that the country he was preparing to invade contained such Shiites and Sunnis. Moral rot!
Finally, moral rot now explains what appears to be the inevitable march to war against Iran, or at least the bombing of its nuclear energy facilities. Having supported an illegal, immoral invasion of Iraq, which has inflicted untold suffering upon its people, most Americans - including Americans currently sitting in congress and running for president - find themselves incapable of thinking through just how to deal peacefully with Iran, the sole regional power to emerge preeminent from the debacle we initiated.
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