[lit-ideas] Re: with or without Bush
- From: Robert.Paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Robert Paul)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 02 Aug 2004 21:59:42 PDT
Eric writes:
By this metonymy, "Bush" has come to mean, not Dubya's particular directives
or policies, but everything that happens. "Bush" becomes our scruples about
the Pakis. "Bush" becomes FBI bureaucrats covering their butts. "Bush" is the
PhD sweeping Walmart floors. "Bush" is the tacky, anti-intellectual,
antipopulist fill-in-the-blank.
That can't be right. If everything is "Bush," then we can't really complain
about "Bush" because there's nothing but "Bush" out there, and hence nothing to
which we can compare "Bush." It's "Bushes" all the way down.
--------------------------------------
The original unanswerable question was (I thought) whether Bin Laden would have
been captured (or killed?) had Bush not been in office on 9/11. As
counterfactuals go this is a dilly, as they say in Memphis. It has the form, but
not the clarity of 'Had Ichiro not caught it it would have gone for at least a
double.'
What seems to me relevant and answerable though is whether Bush (and by 'Bush,'
I mean that whole neocon, empire-fixated crew), had not been hell bent on going
into Iraq even before 9/11, Afghanistan would be, as it is now, on the verge of
chaos. For those who get their news (no one here, surely) from the usual
mainstream sources, it is as if everything was cool in Afghanistan, with only a
few recalcitrant war lords yet to be converted to democracy and Walmart.
No. The Taliban are back. The mandatory burquas are back. Women are
back--inside. Westerners are not safe outside Kabul. Doctors Without Borders,
which has been engaged in Afghanistan for 24 straight years has pulled all of
its personnel out of the country, after five of its workers in a plainly marked
vehicle were assasinated last week. There is no 'war against terrorism' in
Afghanistan. There is no active pursuit of anybody important, let alone OBL.
(I'm discounting the phoney Pakistani 'sweep' of that fictitious hotbed of
hardcore bad guys last month, a raid telegraphed so long in advance that an
entire WW II division could have ambled unmolested through the 'trap.') And it
is Bush's fault. He was never--they were never--serious about Afghanistan. And
"Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man need only open
his eyes to see them."
Robert Paul
relaxing near
Reed College
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