Who’s Rebuilding Us?
Though most of the Middle East’s headlines were commandeered by our commander-in-chief in the first week of June – and most of our emotion is, or should be, invested in the fact that our tax dollars have become seed money for the government’s foray into the car business – Iraq managed to sneak up on us again; although, it seems not to have made it all the way into the news. According to this report, issued on June 3, “ … given the management weaknesses in State’s PRDC program [Provincial Reconstruction Development Committee], including a lack of an overall program manager, measures of effectiveness, and a lack of a focus on capacity building, it is unclear if the program is achieving its objectives.”
Imagine that. A bureaucratic report that takes a full 105 pages to reach the conclusion that a government program is unclear and that it lacks adequate management, measurement, and focus. It makes you long for the time in the not-too-distant future at which the government takes over health care, doesn’t it?
The entire enterprise is dismaying. The misguidance in power, purpose, and peccancy would be troubling in any case. But the report is troubling beyond the waste of money because it’s another illustration of the extent to which we’ve lost our way. And it rubs our noses in the difficulty of finding the truth of the matter – or any matter for that matter.
To be sure, there is a short list of truths: Governments waste. Power and politics corrupt. Bureaucracies fumble. War is horrible. The chaos of war creates more waste, corruption, fumbling, and horror. Beyond those truths, we’ll never get an objective view. Our President isn’t coming clean. He’s proving to be more adept at glossing over problems – obfuscating them with rhetoric or throwing money at them with his right hand while sticking his left in our pockets … again – than he is at fixing them. And we’re surely not going to get a fair shake from the mainstream media.
If we’ve done anything noble in Iraq, if we’ve achieved anything positive for any human beings, are we likely to find out about it from our local or network news? Probably not. Regardless of your stance on the war in Iraq, chances are you’ve never seen this from the actor, Gary Sinise:
The kids I saw were loving our soldiers and were so grateful to them for having liberated them from Saddam Hussein. It was a tremendous feeling to see these children hugging and kissing our soldiers, cheering them with the thumbs-up sign and in broken English saying, ‘I love you’. Good things are happening over there. On the nightly news it looks like all hell is breaking loose. But I know, from being over there, there’s another side to the story.
It should be surprising that we didn’t see that because Gary Sinise is a celebrity. Come on. He even played the sympathetic, anti-war, Vietnam-vet, double- amputee, Lieutenant Dan, in Forrest Gump, for goodness sake. And celebrities are authority figures, aren’t they? But we didn’t see it because Gary Sinise falls on the other side of the mainstream slant. We will, however, hear every lunatic rant from Rosie O’Donnell, Sean Penn, Janeane Garofalo, Martin Sheen, Tim Robbins, Sheryl Crow, Bono, et al., because they’re … well … you know … famous.
Clarity and objectivity become increasingly difficult to achieve in a U.S. society that liberalizes itself beyond multi-ethnicity (and common causes) and adopts multi-culturalism (and individual causes of politics and entitlement). They become impossible when that national disunity is exacerbated by circumstances in which, as Ayman El-Amir wrote in Al-Ahram, “the national debate surrendered to the power of government … a messianic sense of mission [stifled] public scrutiny … [and we were] blinded to the edicts of a higher moral order by transient military might.”
That’s why – regardless of the “rightness” or “wrongness” of the wars – we’re fighting in Iraq the same way we fought in Korea and Viet Nam. It’s a vicious circle: Powerful governments, seduced by military might and senses of mission precipitate wars. National disunity and political grandstanding lead to “limited engagement”. Limited engagement protracts wars. Protracted wars take more time and kill more people. More time and death breed more disunity and public outcry. The media exploit the public outcry because disunited people love to be told they have “rights”. Politicians exploit the media because disunited people who love to be told they have “rights” love to have powerful governments promise them more “rights”. Consequently, we’re rallied to arms for a little while after a few thousand of us who made the mistake of going to work one sunny Tuesday morning in September 2001 are killed. We want blood. But then we discover our “right” NOT to be protected from being killed like that again. On it goes.
And after all that, we still don’t know the truth of the matter. Or maybe it’s so simple we just hate to face it: War is an inevitable human eventuality because stupidity is an inescapable human characteristic. And so, we have waste, corruption, fumbling, horror, and very short memories.