Mongering

Is warmongering the only type of mongering there is?

Is anybody out there baseballmongering, or surgerymongering, or drycleaningmongering? Or, heavens, windmillmongering?

But back to straight-up warmongering: you have to hand it to society's current crop of mongers. I was left incredulous after reading another little-noticed story about the amazing inability of the Bush Administration to recognize reality, even as reality is biting it in the ass day after day. This month's Esquire is running a feature by John H. Richardson titled "The Secret History of the Impending War with Iran That the White House Doesn't Want You to Know".

Richardson goes forth to build a story around the frustrations of a number of former Administration staffers--most notably Colin Powell--around Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney ("Bumsfeldney"?) booting a post-9/11 thawing of US-Iran relations, including major Iranian diplomatic and military concessions, in favor of simple-minded moralizing and demonization of Iran as part of a largely imaginary "axis of evil".

Just like in the run-up to the Second Gulf War, intelligence is being ignored and the truth-tellers are being prosecuted. Just like in late '02, they won't talk to the people who are having sabres rattled in their faces because their form of government is not like our form of government--as though the fact that it hasn't been for the approximate 12,000 year history of humanity there fails to register at all. The neoconservative collective mind, it appears, is as made up as it's ever going to be. Iran either immediately becomes a secular pro-American government, or we're going to invade the ever-loving crap out of it.

Were this to actually happen, it would be probably the largest and single most ironic blow to American Democracy since Samuel Tilden felt the greasy sting of electoral idiocy in 1876. The American people were asked what they thought about continuing the war in the Middle East about a year ago, and they responded with a mandate that enough was enough: finish what you have to over there and get gone. The majority says that it's time to hit the Mesopotamian bricks. Yet as surely as the truth keeps interfering with the Administration's simplistic view of geopolitical, military, and economic reality, the majority will be ignored, and democracy will be subverted--even as democracy becomes the symbolic MacGuffin around which this war is being organized.

The reason for the runup to firepower is supposedly the improvised explosive devices manufactured in Iran being used against American soldiers. No doubt that those who manufacture the roadside bombs that take out Americans are our enemies. But you can't always best an enemy by running at him with a broken beer bottle. Sometimes, a better, cheaper, more permanent, and whole-lot-less-bloody option is to make him NOT your enemy.

Besides, even after you've sliced his face open and are standing on his defeated, embittered chest, what chance do you have of going forward peacefully? Ever?

We've already Bumsfeldneymongered that chance away. We can only hope that a few key people in charge of running this country realize that it's not too late to avoid blundering into another war the American people don't want, don't need, and can't afford.