Redefining The Mission

[This post is also up at BlogIntegrity, the integrilicious website. Big thanks to Ripley for giving me the opportunity to participate. I think it's a great idea to get more small bloggers some exposure, and I will be cross-promoting future "Gospel According To...." segments from other bloggers as they are posted at OBI.]

This past week we marked the fourth anniversary of Mission Accomplished Day, which is rapidly becoming an underground holiday on par with Steak & Blowjob Day (the importance of which should also not be misunderestimated).

Mission Accomplished Day is not just about one petulant man-child's dream to dress up like an action hero and talk like a cartoon character, while closet-case pundits salivate over the foil-wrapped cucumber in his flight suit. It's also about the failure of vision and competence. It's about the absence of awareness and accountability, on the part of the lying assholes in charge, and the press ducklings who dutifully toddle after them. And let's not forget the centenarian douchebags who preen twice a week in major newspapers with their inane "pox on both their houses" false equivalences. Every one of those entities failed utterly in their specific duties, enabling a preventable tragedy to unfold and continue.

Or not. Maybe it's all just a trick of perspective, played on the rational observer by the malicious perpetrator. Maybe it's more helpful to consider, rather than lack of accomplishment of the presumed mission, what exactly the mission itself is.

• If you're an oil futures speculator, watching prices soar from $12.00/bbl at the beginning of 1999 to nearly $80 last summer, hovering currently in the mid-60s, you might see the mission differently. This is not to repeat the usual phrase about it all being about oil. Instead, it's about finance, and the mobility of capitalization and futures markets in a deregulated financial services sector.



• If you're part of the top few percent in the country, then an enormous bottom-up wealth transfer might be at or near the top of your mission portfolio. Enhancing the grotesque, banana-republic income disparities accumulating throughout the corporate sector is a pretty overt mission for this class of folk.
  
  

  Today, Wal-Mart is America's largest corporation, with 1.3 million employees. H. Lee Scott, its chairman, is paid almost $23 million -- more than five times Roche's inflation-adjusted salary. Yet Scott's compensation excites relatively little comment, since it's not exceptional for the CEO of a large corporation these days. The wages paid to Wal-Mart's workers, on the other hand, do attract attention, because they are low even by current standards. On average, Wal-Mart's non-supervisory employees are paid $18,000 a year, far less than half what GM workers were paid thirty-five years ago, adjusted for inflation. And Wal-Mart is notorious both for how few of its workers receive health benefits and for the stinginess of those scarce benefits.

  
  Do the math; Scott made 1,278 times what his average employee did, and the CEO/employee ratio on average is around 412:1. Count that as one major mission accomplished almost wholly by this administration's Gilded Age tax policies, and without too many pesky journamalists rocking the boat over such things.
  
  In Russia, for example, the way they get rid of whistleblowers and troublemakers is almost Get Smart-like in the thuggish, sometimes baroque methods employed -- a dot of polonium in a drink here, a contract hit on a woman in an elevator there. In America, they get rid of inquisitive journalists in a much more civilized manner -- they help them out with Hamptons/Nantucket summer real estate, invite them to all the parties, marry them off to political consultants, or acquire compromising photos of them with frightened ruminants.
  
  Or worse yet, they hire them on at The Politico. Problem solved!



• Maybe you're involved with the burgeoning private security contracting industry. Or getting gravy contracts for "reconstruction". How's the mission working out for you these days?



• How about the stock market? Dow's at 13K, big excitement, right? Well, who are the rewards accruing to, the usual top on the pyramid, or did the proles' wages suddenly start keeping pace with inflation? And is this just another bubble waiting to be burst with the next round of profit-taking? Are the P/E ratios realistic, or artificially inflated to reel in the suckers? How does the measly 1st-quarter GDP growth and the imploding housing sector and the increasing number of foreclosures jibe with all this, shall we say irrational exuberance emanating from the financial speculation sphincter of the universe? (Excepting, as always, Larry Kudlow, as we don't want to harsh his mellow.)



• In terms of social conservatism ideology, the mission may not be accomplished per se, but it's certainly not from lack of trying. And given that Bush got two ideologues into the Supreme Court, and set dozens of Marion Robertson U termites loose in the DoJ and other federal institutions, the fallout will be there for years to come.
  
  The public in general seems to be gradually coming to their senses over prioritizing issues such as gay marriage and abortion, but the goofballs now have sufficient leverage to keep themselves in play for another generation. So the mission may not be accomplished to their liking, but short of chasing every homo down with torch and pitchfork, and stoning every harlot in the town square, it never will be.



• And finally, even in the context of the war itself, some of the early proponents' most articulate thinkers and planners were quite open about some things they'd prefer not to talk about these days.
  
  

  If we yield control over the nation-building process in Iraq, we won't necessarily end up with Saddam V2.0 there. But we will guarantee that whatever replaces Saddam won't achieve the political goal we require. Too many who would be involved are totally opposed to the idea of attempting to reform the region, for reasons of their own. They need the new government in Iraq to not be an example of a better way, and would work to make sure it didn't become one.
  
  Their goal would be to minimize disruption and destabilization of the region. Let's be clear that our goal is to maximize destabilization. We can't win the larger war until we've done so.

  
  Let's be clear on den Beste's context here -- he was voicing skepticism at the notion of internationalism achieving a practical gain in the region, as well as an unequivocal assertion that "Arab civilization" had "failed", and since all Arabs understand culturally is pride or humiliation, their rage at their own failure was and is being directed externally. Therefore, the best possible solution to this long-standing cultural/sectarian malaise is to go in and fuck everything up.
  
  Destabilization is talked about as a flaw only in retrospect with these guys; this is merely a prelude to establishing den Beste's worst internationalist nightmare -- a hopefully less bloodthirsty Saddam 2.0. The fact of the matter is, every war-blogger at the time that I knew of took their ideological cue from guys like den Beste, who merely vocalized what the PNAC had already alluded to -- it's not a flaw, it's a feature. Perhaps this is true in the pages of hairy-chested, heavily-armored fiction, where women look like something out of a Frank Frazetta painting and the noble hobbits no longer live in their mother's basements, sacrificing their pudgy virginity nightly to a gunny-sack of Cheetos.
  
  But in the real world, where the leader of the most powerful nation makes a point of noting how he prays before every dump he takes, and openly brags about not even bothering to read newspapers, well, destabilization might be a fucking flaw after all, noble intentions aside. Prayer is nice and all, and I'm sure that when a skydiver's chute doesn't open, he prays all the way down. But that doesn't alter the immutable laws of gravity, and it doesn't make a fuckin' parachute magically spring out of his back.
  
  This is a textbook example of selectively viewing premises so as to reach a completely wrong conclusion. Most people understand the international community's inherent bureaucratic imperfections in multilateral military action, even though that's hard to square with what appears to be success in the Balkans over the last decade. And any misgivings or assumptions regarding the "Arab mind", if not placed in context with the region's history since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, are disingenuous and deceptive. Politically, the two most oppressive countries in the Middle East are Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Who are our best allies in the region?

So maybe we've looked at the prime movers in the wrong order all along, because we've been too rational about it. It's a waste of time to think rationally about the actions of irrational people. The key is finding the nature of their irrationality -- blind stupidity, ideological hubris, or sociopathic greed and indifference. Or, in this case, all of the above.

Politics, in the most cynical of terms, is the art of picking people's pockets and having them thank you for it. One of my favorite political aphorisms is the one about how, if you're robbing Peter to pay Paul, you can always count on having Paul's support.

Now, let's put that into the scenario of "Paul" being the corporate donor or golf buddy or ideological crony of the people who set policy and disburse the money. People in "Paul"'s class seem to literally view poor people as another species, and their travails as merely another bidness opportunity. Let's face it, if there weren't government grifts for these fuckers to get into, they'd be directing Bumfight videos.

From there, it's not hard at all to imagine these people envisioning a voluntary war as a sort of stage-managed ideological loss-leader. It got out of hand because they had no idea what the fuck they were getting into, and they're stupid as well as sociopathically indifferent. But none of that changes the redefined context of what the "mission" really might have been in the first place.

And the keepers and purveyors of the official narrative, as they now find their fortunes intertwined with the people they objectively report on, are invested in retaining their lost cred by finding ways to slowly back away from that narrative. Which leaves it to us to return to how the original terms of debate were set and taken for granted. It's not nearly so complex or oblique as to be the realm of conspiracy theory; it's just a matter of whether we want to trust proven liars and co-opted messengers, or our own lyin' eyes.