In the Gaza Strip portion of occupied Palestine, today is the announced deadline for the evacuation of all the Israeli settlers who have enjoyed decades of extremely pampered (and quite illegal) residence there until now.
Lest we forget, these settlers are far from the first in modern times to be evicted from from a heavily government-subsidized existence when the government of the metropole decided that maintaining their colonial venture in a foreign land was no longer a good thing to do.
In 1962, a million French citizens who, as colons rooted in Algeria for many generations had considered that territory was just one other departement of Mother France, realized that Paris had changed its mind: Algeria was being summarily over to the FLN.
How much slaveringly attentive media coverage did the pieds noirs get from the rest of the world as they rushed back to France with often only the clothes on their backs?
In 1975, hundreds of thousands of Portuguese colonists in Angola and Mozambique learned in turn that Lisbon had changed its mind and would no longer subsidize and protect their colonies. Many fled to South Africa; others slunk back to Portugal, dazed and confused.
In those earlier cases– and scores of others around the world– the deeply racial order of things that had previously supported their exploitative colonial-settler lifestyle was brought to an end. Millions of (mainly European-origined) colonists from around the world found their previous dreams and expectations rudely cancelled or curtailed. That can be a difficult thing for anyone to come to terms with…
On the other hand, if the earlier dreams and expectations were based on the continuation of a deeply inegalitarian system and the actual maintenance of highly abusive military rule of “the Other”, then evidently they needed to be curtailed or cancelled… And the indigenous “Other” certainly needed to be given a chance to pursue her dreams on a quite egalitarian basis. That is, including the provision of a fair degree of reparations for the extensive damages of the past.
No discussion yet of such reparations in the case of Gaza’s Palestinians.
Lest we forget, meanwhile, the Israeli settlers departing Gaza are being given very generous compensation packages for giving up the subsidized lifestyle they have enjoyed for much of the past 38 years. (Paid for through the generosity with which the US Congress hands out my tax dollars to the Israelis, time after time after time.)
But despite all the evident inequities that continue between pampered Israel and the Palestinians… despite all that… at least Ariel Sharon and a huge chunk of the Israel center seem finally to have understood that a contraction of Israel’s former colonial order is a wise thing to do. But in the US meanwhile, there is still sadly little public recognition yet from the Bush administration or the mainstream of the US political elite that exactly the same is true regarding their former dreams of neocolonial domination in Iraq.
Grassroots sentiment inside the US body politic now does, thankfully, seem to be pushing increasingly harder for a speedy pullback from Iraq. But President Bush is still– publicly, at least– “standing tall”. He is “resolute”. He is “staying the course.” And so on.
That’s in public. In private, though, there are increasing signs that his administration is preparing to undertake a maneuver that none of us should be so insensitive as to call “cutting and running”…. Um, “reordering and rationalizing the US presence in Iraq” might be, perhaps, what we could call it.
In this important piece in yesterday’s WaPo, Robin Wright and Ellen Knickmeyer– reporting from Washington and Baghdad, respectively– wrote:
- The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad.
The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.
“What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground,” said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. “We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we’re in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning.”
Immediately, one tries to judge how high-up and therefore how well-informed about current cabinet-level thinking this anonymous “senior official” is. One first point: No-one that I can think who truly fits the description “senior official”– and who’s a civilian– only started his/her involvement in policy in 2003. There were no major turnovers of civilian policymakers at a high level that year, that I can remember. Therefore, we are most likely talking about one of the generals.
Interesting.
Later in the piece, Wright and Knickmeyer write:
- “We set out to establish a democracy, but we’re slowly realizing we will have some form of Islamic republic,” said another U.S. official familiar with policymaking from the beginning, who like some others interviewed would speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity. “That process is being repeated all over.”
And later still, this:
- Washington now does not expect to fully defeat the insurgency before departing, but instead to diminish it, officials and analysts said. There is also growing talk of turning over security responsibilities to the Iraqi forces even if they are not fully up to original U.S. expectations, in part because they have local legitimacy that U.S. troops often do not.
“We’ve said we won’t leave a day before it’s necessary. But necessary is the key word — necessary for them or for us? When we finally depart, it will probably be for us,” a U.S. official said.
Not clear if this is the same official as the first one quoted. Or maybe it’s the second one. But anyway, the picture that emerges is that rather quietly, behind the scenes, people actually involved in implementing the policy are starting to implement one involving considerable retrenchment and downsizing of goals… And– speaking always “off the record”– they are now starting to be ready to admit to this.
But how about the president, with his puffed-up little chest down there in Crawford, Texas? When will he be able to start leveling with the US citizenry, and to tell the worried parents of the US fighters in Iraq that the lives of their loved ones are now being put on the line there for a venture that, as is increasingly evident, has failed?
By the way, George Bush, if you want someone to help you write the speech in which you do this, in stirring rhetoric that reaches to the heart of our national principles, just give me a call…
- We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men [and women] are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Note, George, how this refers to all men [and women.] Not just to “US citizens” or any other subset of world humanity.
So yes! Now surely is the time to pull speedily out of Iraq– just as Israel is pulling out of Gaza– and to allow the Iraqis to exercize their God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
(As for the Iraqi “Constitution”– deadline being today– you’ll note that I’m still steadfastly not writing about it. What a sad, sad, farce.)
Let’s think about this for a minute: When we lose Iraq, what will we have left?
I remember how America felt in 1969, which solely in terms of the Vietnam war might be considered comparable to today, solely in terms of the Iraq war. But 1969 was nothing like today in America. In 1969, everything BUT the war was looking up. America was a progressive, middle class country, in which the average person’s prospects looked better than anywhere, ever, in the history of the world. In a few short years, we had landed men on the moon – what couldn’t we do? I can still feel the intense optimism of those days, despite all the bad news from Southeast Asia.
There is no reason for any such optimism today. As the late stages of global capitalism play out in ever more desperate attempts to further exploit already devastated regions of our resource-depleted world, we are facing the end, not just of the neocon illusion of American omnipotence, but of the founding mythololgies of the American state. Instead of conquering the universe like Captain Kirk, we are going to be eating a lot more beans and rice.
Everybody knows the stock market, now dominated by hedge funds and their phantasmagorical derivatives, is just a confidence game. Same with the housing market and the so-called “service economy.” We don’t make much stuff you can use in American anymore. For the last 25 years, we’ve been buying junk from the Chinese on credit, and selling each other rosy scenarios. The only thing that’s been holding all of this together is world-wide belief in the superiority of American weaponry and military might, and in the competence and self-correcting mechanisms of our national political institutions.
Those beliefs are already changing. The world has already seen our inability to deal realistically with major economic problems, such as the looming health care crisis, budget and trade deficits, urban and rural poverty and unemployment. When the world fully absorbs the lesson that aircraft carriers, F-15’s and intercontinental balistic nuclear missiles are completely irrelevant in determining the outcome of parliamentary debate in occupied Iraq, there will come a reckoning.
The governing elites in the U.S., both Democrat and Republican, understand this intuitively. That’s why there are no politicians leading the charge to withdraw from Iraq, notwithstanding the dramatic turn of public opinion against the war. The fact is, the U.S. defeat in this war WILL be devastating, on many levels. Those of us who have opposed the war from the beginning need to brace ourselves for that fact. This ain’t 1969.
Sorry for the rant.
Peace.
“What
The phrase “involved in policy since the 2003 invasion” doesn’t actually imply that the source wasn’t involved before. And, as others have pointed out elsewhere, the weird bureaucratic wonkibabble of the quote (“absorbing the factors,” “shedding the unreality”) brings to mind one very senior official indeed: Rummy. But I admit that seeing him as the source requires attributing to him rather more intellectual flexibility than I can find plausible . . .