National Therapy

Perhaps, being human (I presume, but just in case, welcome to our non-human readers), you have experienced some sort of trauma somewhere in the course of your life. It may not be merely a random collection of isolated events; it may be continuous in some form. It may not even be "real", in the sense that other people would necessarily find it traumatic; it may, as we say in the 'hood, just be "all in your head". Maybe it's just the usual frustration and alienation common to most people who are paying attention to the world around them.

Doesn't matter all that much either way -- to you it's still there, and very concrete. It must either be dealt with or avoided. Each strategy takes some form of actual effort to carry out, and each has its benefits and problems. People who are deemed successful at their personal strategies are said to be "well-adjusted". Really, it all depends on the severity of what they were dealing with -- again, whether real or imagined.

Frequently people attempt to mask their anxieties with various addictions -- drugs, sex, gambling, whatever. Anything to take their mind off the problem at hand. Conversely, they may project the anxieties on to others, accusing friends of doing what they themselves are doing. Each is merely a coping mechanism; neither is particularly effective for dealing with the problem itself.

Sometimes these demons manifest themselves much more fiercely, resulting in pathological behaviors, sociopathic, even psychopathic, destructive (self or others) behavioral patterns, etc. Everybody knows somebody who has bottomed out in such fashion, frequently with tragic results. Loved ones might attempt, in the therapeutic parlance, to have an intervention.

Interventions, like funerals, tend to be more beneficial to the bereaved than to the subject. An exception (in my humble secondhand knowledge) is if the person is simply too out of it to have realized up to that point what sort of pain he was causing his loved ones. This is rare. Usually the person is well aware that they're fucking up royally, they have just prioritized much differently than rational people expect.

But occasionally those things are successful, and the person with the problem attempts some sort of proactive rehabilitative program, and gets on with their life, or what's left of it. Even once rehabilitated, there is always the potential for recidivism, for falling back to old ways and bad habits. This is not so good.

So what do you do when such irrational behavior has taken place on a collective level? How does a huge nation set about the task of unfucking itself, and getting out of its vicious cycle of denial and projection?

I commented way back in January, right before the wave of purple-fingered freedom swept Iraq, about the advent of Shiite death squads. Sure enough, it turns out that some of them have been found to be torturing civilians to death in horrific ways:

British-trained police operating in Basra have tortured at least two civilians to death with electric drills, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

John Reid, the Secretary of State for Defence, admits that he knows of "alleged deaths in custody" and other "serious prisoner abuse" at al-Jamiyat police station, which was reopened by Britain after the war.

Part of rehabilitation will be coming to terms with the fact that we don't even know what we don't know -- and that many people prefer it that way. Not me. If something is right, then it's right, and there's no need to hide your light under a bushel, right? If these people took a power drill through the skull, we should find out if it was for a just cause, n'est-ce pas?

There is something so shamelessly duplicitous about all this, when you get right down to it. Bush lectures from the podium in Panama about how "we do not torture" even as Cheney insists on exemptions for just that for the CIA. Plus extraordinary rendition, plus what we already know about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. So perhaps we need to parse "we", "do not", and "torture", the way we used to parse "is" and "alone" in a more innocent time.

I believe the American people are starting to do just that, just as they instinctively know that it doesn't matter what the technical classification of Willy Pete happens to be, they just know they'd be furious if it were used on American troops, much less American civilians. This too is a cause for national therapy, even without the requisite photo of a naked screaming Iraqi child, scorched by napalm or Willy Pete, fragged by a daisy cutter bomblet, whatever.

And if Big Time and his rotten little henchmen want to chuck stones at perfidious Democrats who have reasonable doubts about the Great Strategery, what does he have to say to the democratically elected leaders of Iraq?

Cairo -- For the first time, Iraq's political factions collectively called for a timetable for withdrawal of foreign forces Monday as the Bush administration battled pressure at home to commit to a pullout schedule.

The announcement, at the conclusion of a reconciliation conference here backed by the Arab League, was a public reaching-out by Shiites, who now dominate Iraq's government, to Sunni Arabs on the eve of parliamentary elections that have been put on shaky ground by weeks of sectarian violence.

....

In Cairo, about 100 Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish leaders, many of whom will run in the election on Dec. 15, signed a closing memorandum that "demands a withdrawal of foreign troops on a specified timetable, dependent on an immediate national program for rebuilding the security forces."

The statement said: "The Iraqi people are looking forward to the day when foreign forces will leave Iraq, when its armed and security forces will be rebuilt, and when they can enjoy peace and stability and an end to terrorism."

....

The statement, while condemning the wave of terrorism that has engulfed Iraq, also broadly acknowledged a general right to resist foreign occupation. This was another effort to compromise with Sunnis who have sought to legitimize the insurgency. The statement condemned terror attacks and religious backing for them. It also demanded the release of innocent prisoners and an investigation into allegations of torture.

So if Jack Murtha's a cut-and-run pussy, what does that make Ibrahim Jaafari? No matter. Murtha never proposed cutting and/or running in the first place -- his proposal was entirely reasonable, and involved keeping troops safely nearby in friendly countries like Kuwait and Qatar.

But if there's one thing this administration understands well, it's how repeating the same falsehoods over and over again tend to take on a life of their own, and the benefits nearly always accrue to the propagandists. Especially in the absence of an effective opposition party.

Not so much this time, though not because the Democrats have suddenly grown a backbone. No, they're content to keep their powder as dry as possible until the next election cycle begins after the holidays, then hoo boy, watch out Republicans! Prepare to be pimp-slapped by the likes of Rahm Emanuel, fool! No doubt Rove and the rest of them are quivering in the corner at the very prospect of getting Rahmed.

It turns out that the American people have finally started to give up whatever good faith they had been holding out for this gang to get its shit together. Independents and moderates are giving up on the Bushies in droves, and on the selfsame issues of personality that got Bush installed in the first place. The notion of having a beer with a gutless lying tool suddenly doesn't sound like such a hot ticket. Imagine that.

And note just how sotto voce this little gem just floated over the transom. In the British media, naturally [emphases mine].

Iraqis face the dire prospect of losing up to $200bn (£116bn) of the wealth of their country if an American-inspired plan to hand over development of its oil reserves to US and British multinationals comes into force next year. A report produced by American and British pressure groups warns Iraq will be caught in an "old colonial trap" if it allows foreign companies to take a share of its vast energy reserves. The report is certain to reawaken fears that the real purpose of the 2003 war on Iraq was to ensure its oil came under Western control.

The Iraqi government has announced plans to seek foreign investment to exploit its oil reserves after the general election, which will be held next month. Iraq has 115 billion barrels of proved oil reserves, the third largest in the world.

According to the report, from groups including War on Want and the New Economics Foundation (NEF), the new Iraqi constitution opened the way for greater foreign investment. Negotiations with oil companies are already under way ahead of next month's election and before legislation is passed, it said.

The groups said they had amassed details of high-level pressure from the US and UK governments on Iraq to look to foreign companies to rebuild its oil industry. It said a Foreign Office code of practice issued in summer last year said at least $4bn would be needed to restore production to the levels before the 1990-91 Gulf War. "Given Iraq's needs it is not realistic to cut government spending in other areas and Iraq would need to engage with the international oil companies to provide appropriate levels of foreign direct investment to do this," it said.

Yesterday's report said the use of production sharing agreements (PSAs) was proposed by the US State Department before the invasion and adopted by the Coalition Provisional Authority. "The current government is fast-tracking the process. It is already negotiating contracts with oil companies in parallel with the constitutional process, elections and passage of a Petroleum Law," the report, Crude Designs, said.

Earlier this year a BBC Newsnight report claimed to have uncovered documents showing the Bush administration made plans to secure Iraqi oil even before the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US. Based on its analysis of PSAs in seven countries, it said multinationals would seek rates of return on their investment from 42 to 162 per cent, far in excess of typical 12 per cent rates.

Taking an assumption of $40 a barrel, below the current price of almost $60, and a likely contract term of 25 to 40 years, it said that Iraq stood to lose between £74bn and $194bn. Andrew Simms, the NEF's policy director, said: "Over the last century, Britain and the US left a global trail of conflict, social upheaval and environmental damage as they sought to capture and control a disproportionate share of the world's oil reserves. Now it seems they are determined to increase their ecological debts at Iraq's expense. Instead of a new beginning, Iraq is caught in a very old colonial trap."

Well, gee, I guess we can all put two and two together and take a stab at what Chalabi's little secret meeting with Big Time was about the other day. Hint: it wasn't about the so-called Energy Task Force.

Now, we have some tough choices to make here in the U.S. of A., and we don't seem terribly inclined to make them. Oh sure, more and more of us are getting pissed at the lying. But we continue to lie to ourselves. In terms of long-term US strategic and economic interests, we're screwed royally whether we stay or we leave tomorrow. Jim Kunstler puts it well:

Maybe we ought to ask: what happens to the oil supply of the Crusader West when none of its representatives maintains a garrison in the Middle East? I use the term Crusader not to be cute, but to remind you how Europe and America are viewed by many people of the Middle East. They don't like us. They have a longstanding beef with us. Some of them would like to punish us.

America is leading the current crusade because we are the society most desperately addicted to oil, and the Middle East is where two-thirds of the world's remaining oil lies. The one thing that we apparently cannot bring ourselves to talk about is our addiction itself. The commuters whizzing around the edge cities and metroplexes of this land probably got a big charge out of Congressman Murtha's anti-war blast taking over drive-time radio on Friday. I wonder if they thought about how it might affect their commuting.

This whole spectacle -- both the inept war itself and our debate about it here at home -- is particularly shameful for the official opposition, my party, the Democrats, because we could be talking about the so-called elephant-in-the-room, namely how we live in America and the tragic choices we've made, and the things we might do to change that -- but the party leadership is too brain-dead or craven to do that. As long as we don't, we're going to be wrassling a tarbaby in the Middle East.

Unless an anti-war opposition has a plan to withdraw from the project of suburban sprawl, we're going to have to keep soldiers in Iraq, if not in the cities, then out in desert bases guarding the oil works and keeping planes ready to fly in case some al-Zarqawi-type maniac mounts a coup in Saudi Arabia. It would certainly be legitimate for the Democratic party to oppose the idea that we can continue to be crippled by car-dependency, or that we ought to keep subsidizing that way of life -- which Vice-president Cheney called "non-negotiable." We'd better negotiate that or somebody else is going to negotiate it for us, and that is exactly what they are doing with IED's in Iraq and elsewhere.

That's exactly it. It's nice that the demand for Hummers has waned so precipitously that GM is shitcanning 30,000 Americans and Canadians, but that is not remotely a solution to the bigger problem at hand. It is going to require a great deal of discussion and debate, and real scrutiny of where we are at, and what the true sustainability of our little petroleum paradise is now. We can't pull out and sacrifice access; we can't stay in and lose our souls.

The first step is to admit that we have a problem, and we -- the American citizenry -- have still somehow not reached that point. Shudder to think what it's going to take to get there.