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Four years
since 9/11, thirteen days post Katrina, the president calls upon the Spirit of
9/11, something since squandered with his divisive and combative, take-no-prisoners-make-no-allies
style. That famous GOP unity is cracking, Democrats are lobbing sporadic verbal
attacks, while the public grows ever restless, to what we are not yet quite
certain. Economically and politically, the fourth quarter 2005 is going to be
very interesting and pivotal. But the larger question remains: what kind of
nation are we? 9/11 and Katrina may be bookends to the end of neoconservatism,
but they are also markers for America’s midlife crises. Michael
Tomasky asks Where’s Osama? Day 1461 and
counting: It took the US fewer days to beat the Nazis, less time to defeat
Japan. Mark Danner’s longer
essay in the NYT magazine, Taking Stock of
the Forever War, where he muses, “A terrorist leader four years ago, Osama
bin Laden is now an ideology as well — and a viral movement. Terrorist attacks worldwide are on the
rise. Iraq could well end up a "failed" state. Maybe it's time to
stop fighting on their terms: Four years after we watched the towers fall, Americans have not
succeeded in "ridding the world of evil." We have managed to show
ourselves, our friends and most of all our enemies the limits of American
power. In Iraq, the insurgents have presided over a catastrophic collapse in
confidence in the Americans and a concomitant fall in their power....While the
American death toll climbs steadily toward 2,000, the number of Iraqi dead
probably stands at 10 times that and perhaps many more; no one knows. In the midst of it all, increasingly irrelevant, are the Americans, who
have the fanciest weapons but have never had sufficient troops, or political
will, to assert effective control over the country...."The
illusionists," Ambassador John Negroponte's people called their
predecessors, the officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority under L.
Paul Bremer III. Now, day by day, the illusion is slipping away, and with it
what authority the Americans had in Iraq. What is coming to take its place looks
increasingly like a failed state. To which, Kevin Drum
adds in agreement, “Immediately after 9/11, as neocon influence over the Bush
administration reached its peak, they finally got what they had long wanted: a
war in Iraq to serve as the centerpiece and final vindication of their
distinctive notions of "national greatness" and American power.
Several years on, though, it's clear that what they've really accomplished is
just the opposite: an unmistakable demonstration of the limits of American
power, as well as the limits of the American public's tolerance for overseas
wars that have only veiled and esoteric connections to national security. In
the end, I suspect that the war in Iraq will be for neoconservatism what the
war on poverty ended up being for 60s liberalism: its Waterloo”. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Back to the port-mortems
on the Second Battle of New Orleans, 2005, David Brooks says “so much for
blueprints and planning”, they failed. Oh, well. But don’t think this means
liberals will be swept into power soon. Michael
Kinsley opines all we have is hindsight. I disagree. One can predict bad
outcomes when basic infrastructure and security is neglected. Gingrich
taking advantage of Bush’s wounds to promote himself as a centrist, other
vulnerable Bush loyalists anxious about 2006 midterms, hopes of attracting more
black conservatives into the GOP fold derailed by the images of New Orleans’
poorest trapped in the Superdome. As to those
racism and poverty issues, Sen. Barak Obama (D-Illinois) on a Sunday talk show,
was articulate and commanding respect for his measured words, deflecting race
anger. But this voice below is a preview of what is to come, I think, from what
we have experienced since the first rude awakening four years ago and the
choices made since then. The summer of 2005, marked by Cindy Sheehan and Katrina,
may yet be the equivalent of the summer of 1968. Stay tuned. kwc Exiles from a city and from a nation It
takes something as big as Hurricane Katrina and the misery we saw among the
poor black people of New Orleans to get America to focus on race and poverty.
It happens about once every 30 or 40 years. What we saw unfold in
the days after the hurricane was the most naked manifestation of conservative
social policy towards the poor, where the message for decades has been: 'You
are on your own'. Well, they really were on their own for five days in that
Superdome, and it was Darwinism in action - the survival of the fittest. People
said: 'It looks like something out of the Third World.' Well, New Orleans was
Third World long before the hurricane. It's
not just Katrina, it's povertina. People were quick to call them refugees
because they looked as if they were from another country. They are. Exiles in
America. Their humanity had been rendered invisible so they were never given
high priority when the well-to-do got out and the helicopters came for the few.
Almost everyone stuck on rooftops, in the shelters, and dying by the side of
the road was poor black. In the end George Bush
has to take responsibility. When [the rapper] Kanye West said the President
does not care about black people, he was right, although the effects of his
policies are different from what goes on in his soul. You have to distinguish
between a racist intent and the racist consequences of his policies. Bush is still
a 'frat boy', making jokes and trying to please everyone while the Neanderthals
behind him push him more to the right. Poverty has increased
for the last four or five years. A million more Americans became poor last
year, even as the super-wealthy became much richer. So where is the
trickle-down, the equality of opportunity? Healthcare and education and the
social safety net being ripped away - and that flawed structure was nowhere
more evident than in a place such as New Orleans, 68 per cent black. The average
adult income in some parishes of the city is under $8,000 (£4,350) a year. The
average national income is $33,000, though for African-Americans it is about
$24,000. It has one of the highest city murder rates in the US. From slave
ships to the Superdome was not that big a journey. New Orleans has always
been a city that lived on the edge. The white blues man himself, Tennessee
Williams, had it down in A Streetcar Named Desire - with Elysian Fields and
cemeteries and the quest for paradise. When you live so close to death, behind
the levees, you live more intensely, sexually, gastronomically,
psychologically. Louis Armstrong came out of that unbelievable cultural
breakthrough unprecedented in the history of American civilisation. The rural
blues, the urban jazz. It is the tragi-comic lyricism that gives you the
courage to get through the darkest storm. Charlie Parker would
have killed somebody if he had not blown his horn. The history of black people
in America is one of unbelievable resilience in the face of crushing white
supremacist powers. This kind of dignity
in your struggle cuts both ways, though, because it does not mobilise a
collective uprising against the elites. That was the Black Panther movement.
You probably need both. There would have been no Panthers without jazz. If I
had been of Martin Luther King's generation I would never have gone to Harvard
or Princeton. They shot brother
Martin dead like a dog in 1968 when the mobilisation of the black poor was just
getting started. At least one of his surviving legacies was the quadrupling in
the size of the black middle class. But Oprah [Winfrey] the billionaire and the
black judges and chief executives and movie stars do not mean equality, or even
equality of opportunity yet. Black faces in high places does not mean racism is
over. Condoleezza Rice has sold her soul. Now the black
bourgeoisie have an even heavier obligation to fight for the 33 per cent of
black children living in poverty - and to alleviate the spiritual crisis of
hopelessness among young black men. Bush talks about God,
but he has forgotten the point of prophetic Christianity is compassion and
justice for those who have least. Hip-hop has the anger that comes out of
post-industrial, free-market America, but it lacks the progressiveness that
produces organisations that will threaten the status quo. There has not been a
giant since King, someone prepared to die and create an insurgency where many
are prepared to die to upset the corporate elite. The Democrats are spineless. There is the danger of
nihilism and in the Superdome around the fourth day, there it was - husbands
held at gunpoint while their wives were raped, someone stomped to death, people
throwing themselves off the mezzanine floor, dozens of bodies. It was a war of all against
all - 'you're on your own' - in the centre of the American empire. But now that
the aid is pouring in, vital as it is, do not confuse charity with justice. I'm
not asking for a revolution, I am asking for reform. A Marshall Plan for the
South could be the first step. Dr
Cornel West is professor of African American studies and religion at Princeton
University. His great grandfather was a slave. He is a rap artist and appeared
as Counsellor West in Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions. http://www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,16441,1567249,00.html Related readings to this post: Brooks: A Failed
Plan http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/opinion/11brooks.html?hp Danner: Taking
stock of the Forever War http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/magazine/11OSAMA.html Kinsley: The
Fetid Aroma of Hindsight http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-kinsley11sep11,0,5939744.column?coll=la-util-op-ed Tomaski Day
1461 and counting: where is Osama? The [9/11] anniversary should be the
occasion for a thoroughgoing discussion of how America has combated terrorism
in the last four years. And on that front, even the disaster Bush has created in
Iraq takes a back seat to one overwhelming fact: By the time night falls on
September 11, Osama bin Laden will have been at large for 1,461 days. America vanquished
world fascism in less time: We obtained Germany’s surrender in 1,243 days,
Japan’s in 1,365. Even the third Punic War, in which Carthage was burned to the
ground and emptied of citizens who were taken en masse into Roman slavery,
lasted around 1,100 days (and troops needed a little longer to get into
position back in 149 B.C.). Whatever the
apologists say, the truth is simple: The administration held back troops from
Afghanistan so that it could send 150,000 to Iraq. That, and nothing else, is
the reason bin Laden is still at large. http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10229 |
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