So here were are in 2020. The start of a new decade. Seemingly, an occasion that calls for some sort of grandiose statement of purpose, or clarity about circumstances, or some sort of synthesis of both.
In our current, tumultuous political and social environment, there are plenty of places from which to start, which made making a choice before I began to write this post a little difficult. Even conceding the reality that, regardless of where I might choose to travel in writing, all roads (to paraphrase the Speaker of the House) lead to T****.
And then I saw this.
I'm going to encourage you to stop reading this right now, do yourself an enormous favor, and read Stephen Metcalf's Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, to which the link above leads, in part because it's going to be the departure point for the rest of what I write here. But I would encourage you to do so in any case, even if you don't come back to the balance of this post, because I have never read anything that does a better job of synthesizing the last 40 years of American politics with such economy of prose. If you have not lived through that time span, Metcalf's piece will go a long way toward helping you to understand how we as a people and a nation arrived at our current, near-disastrous position.
And, as a sidebar, I must confess that I view those 40 years in a very personal way. I was at the beginning of my adult life at the start of that period, and am entering my retirement years at its end. I have, along with everyone else in my generation and those that have followed, been a first-hand witness to what I can only sum up as the s**tshow of militarism, narcissism, and bigotry that has characterized four decades of squandered opportunities and potential for building on the greatness that preceded them I am not ashamed to say I weep for what we have lost. What we have lost, and may never recover.
Though much is made, in what has been written about the 1980s, about the climax and collapse of the Cold War, that war that was already in its end stages by the time the decade began and the Soviet Union was mired in a no-win war with Afghanistan, one that sapped what little ability the Soviet government had to meet the needs of its people. No, the real focus of our foreign policy, from that decade on up until now, has been the Middle East, a portion of the world with which the U.S. has had what can only be described as a schizophrenic relationship. On the plus side, Israel and oil. On the minus side, people of color who for the most part practice a faith often at war with Christianity and Judaism.
As a consequence, all of our foreign policy efforts in the region have been hampered by our inability to resolve, or at least navigate, the conflicts of interest we have in dealing with its peoples and governments. On the one hand, Western nations (including the U.S.) spent much of the 20th century grossly interfering with the Islamic peoples in the region for the sake of the oil underneath the lands in which those peoples lived. On the other hand, apart from the oil (and the defense of Israel) Western nations had no real reason to be connected or involved with the region at all. In particular, culture and religion served as enormous barriers to making connections.
So, when the Iranian revolution occurred in 1979 after the U.S. took in the ailing Shah, and the Iranians retaliated by taking hostage the American embassy staff in Tehran, it served as the perfect flashpoint for exposing all of those conflicts, and united a majority of the American people into demanding uncompromising military action, as opposed to the diplomatic process that the Carter administration used in freeing the hostages. How dare those brown-skinned Jesus-haters push us around! Can't they understand that we need what's under their feet at any price? We can punch our way around the world, and those "ragheads" had better realize it! Or else!
And so, the pious, human-rights advocate Carter gave way to the one-man nuclear warhead, Ronald Reagan, who embodied the militarism, materialism and--let's just say it--whiteness that we as a nation demanded. And kept on demanding from then up until now. Not even our destructive, futile forays into Afghanistan and Iran in the wake of 9/11, which contributed to the near-meltdown of the global economy, have stopped many if not most Americans from thinking we can bully our way into getting all of the oil we wanted, even when Democrats from Carter to Obama advocated the painfully obvious alternatives: develop alternative energy sources and engage Islamic nations in ways that respected the needs and values of all parties.
And make no mistake: animus toward the first African-American President in our nation's history goes hand-in-hand with animus toward the peoples of color in the Middle East. Why else would so many Republicans and conservatives spend so much time trying to convince the rest of us that Barack Hussein Obama was really one of THEM? And they hated him all the more when he changed course in dealing with Islamic nations by implementing policies that promoted energy independence, and recognized that there were new generations in those nations that were willing to take a fresh look at what the U.S. might have to offer? Those policies, combined with the limits of dictatorial governments to meet the needs of their own populations, enabled Obama to negotiate a nuclear treaty with Iran that, like similar treaties negotiated by Republican Presidents before him, opened a path toward positive long-term relations between the two countries. 72
Enter D***** T****, stage very far right, carrying with him little more than a deep-seated hatred toward everyone whose skin color isn't sprayed onto their face.
And, in just a little bit under three years, he has made every single mistake in the book when it comes to foreign policy in the Middle East. Some of that is well summed up by Connecticut's Senator Chris Murphy here. But let me take a few moments here to see if I can break it out in complete detail.
He has given the Netanyahu government in Israel everything it has ever wanted, including and especially recognition of Jerusalem as the nation's capital, thereby destroying any chance for a peaceful resolution of its territorial conflicts with the Palestinians.
He has, despite lauding the success of "his" policies in making the U.S. largely independent of foreign oil, gone out of his way to cement our inherently corrupt relationship (and yes, I know F.D.R. launched it) with the despotic, murderous government of Saudi Arabia, even to the point of not only enabling its genocidal war against Yemen (a human-rights disaster all by itself), but overlooking its brutal murder of a journalist who held permanent residency in our country and worked for one of its leading newspapers, the Washington Post.
He has, presumably at the behest of his principal patron, Russian President Vladimir Putin, ended our alliance with the Kurdish people, allowing Putin to expand his influence in Syria and simultaneously re-invigorate ISIS, a threat to both the U.S. and Iraq, an ally in which we have invested tremendous financial and human cost.
And, on top of that, he ludicrously over-reacted to a minor assault on the American embassy in Baghdad, presumably fearing a repeat of the Tehran 1979 episode, by killing one of Iran's senior leaders, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, a pointless effort at retaliation that T**** could not even adequately defend even to members of his own party, and which otherwise merely gave Iran a pretext for a military response, which it wasted no time in seizing, while uniting a divide Iranian population in a way that it had not been united since--wait for it--1979. Oh, and not too terribly unimportantly, he gave Iran the final chance it needed to completely repudiate the nuclear treaty it had negotiated with the Obama Administration, thereby risking the start of a nuclear arms race in the region, and perhaps even beyond it.
I consider all of this in the context of all of the smarmy, smug name-calling and tongue-wagging the rancid right has spent four decades throwing at Jimmy Carter, a good and decent man who was in many respects a better President than we deserved, and want to tell the whole lot of them to take a very long walk off of a very short pier. Compared to the current racist, sexist, Bankrupt-in-Chief, Jimmy Carter looks like a cross between George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
And let's be as clear as we possibly can about the role in which naked racism has played, and continues to play, in all of this, and how badly it has damaged not only our short-term interests in the Middle East, but our long-term interests as a member of the family of nations. Iran, in its military retaliation for Suleimani's assassination, was very careful to ensure that only Iraqis, not Americans, were killed, because they knew (correctly) that T****'s supporters would not care about Iraqi lives. Sadly, that calculation was correct. This has allowed the Iranian government to seize the political high ground by showing a degree of restraint while simultaneously exposing the bigotry that lies behind whatever foreign policy suits T****'s purposes at any given moment.
And the Iranian government is also aided by video such as this. Video which proves that, in spite of all our belligerence and stupidity, the Iranian people are smart enough, and sophisticated enough, to tell the difference between the American people, and the American government.
Or, perhaps, are we aided by this?
If we're smart enough to take advantage of it.
If we're clever enough to know how to take advantage of it.
If we can somehow move beyond the militarism, the materialism, and the bigotry that has seemingly trapped all of us in 1979 for the past four decades.
If we can fully realized that the biggest problems we face are no longer nation to nation, but span the entire globe.
If we can elect political leaders that can help us do all of the above.
IF WE CAN JUST START BY GETTING RID OF D***** T****!
We just might be able to find our escape velocity from 1979, and finally find the future that my generation, and the ones that follow us, were promised to have.
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