I know it’s easy to assign blame to others for the mess that has currently engulfed the Middle East. Easy to blame Hamas and Hezbollah for kidnapping Israeli soldiers and sparking this nightmare of violence. Easy to blame Israel for its brutal overreaction to the kidnappings by bombing, bulldozing and killing innocent Palestinians and Lebanese. Easy even to blame President Bush and his administration for their incredibly moronic foreign policy which seems to take literally the Maoist dictum that power flows from the barrel of a gun.
After all, each of the foregoing actors have taken step after miscalculated step to bring this current conflagration of death and destruction to a fever pitch. But the truth is that none of these are the ultimate cause of the current conflict. That responsibility lies elsewhere.
Because, in truth, all of us are to blame. We, the People of the United States of America. We’re the guilty parties. It’s our fault.
Cont.
MY INDICTMENT OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
COUNT 1
We have known for 50 years that foreign wars of occupation do not solve problems, but only grow new ones. We had all the evidence we needed in the examples of Vietnam and Afghanistan. The after effects of Vietnam plunged all of Southeast Asia into a nightmare of war and genocide for a generation, from Laos in the north to Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge in the South. And we all know the end result of the Russians defeat in Afghanistan: the rise of the vicious Islamic fundamentalist regime of the Taliban, and the birth of Al Qaeda.
We knew, and yet we allowed ourselves to be deceived and seduced into an invasion of Iraq, which served no purpose other than to enrich the coffers of certain defense contractors. Too few of us in positions of power or influence (and too few of us, period) stood up to denounce George Bush’s grandiloquent folly of invading Iraq, and his dream of bring peace and justice to the Middle East through the blunt instrument of American Military Power. And what was once a precarious regional stasis has now been transformed into an orgy of regional chaos and bloodletting all across the region in Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Israel and now Lebanon.
We allowed our own fears and misguided desire for vengeance after 9/11 to give President Bush and his neocon enablers free reign to wage his misnamed “War on Terror” as they saw fit. We allowed ourselves to be persuaded that torture and brutality, missiles and bombs, and the deaths of innocent Iraqis (a country and a people that had no relation to the atrocity of the 9/11 attacks) were righteous acts and the correct strategy to defeat our new enemies.
And in doing so we laid the groundwork for the fruits of that criminal waste of lives and property: a civil war in Iraq that we can do nothing to stop, a budding crisis with Iran over its nuclear program, border skirmishes between Iraqi Kurds and Turkish and Iranian forces, the breakdown of the Palestinian and Israeli peace process, and the resulting violence in Palestine and Lebanon involving the Israeli Defense Force, Hamas and Hezbollah..
Yet, this was only the most recent in a long line of mistakes, errors in judgment and outright misconduct that we have made collectively, as a people, as citizens of these United States.
COUNT 2
We abandoned the peace process between Israel and its neighbors. Each time the United States has actively worked for, and promoted peace, in the Middle East we have had encouraging, if modest successes. The Camp David accords that were the work of President Carter, and ended the decades long strife between Israel and Egypt. The Oslo Accords which were supported by the first President Bush and President Clinton did not succeed in bringing a final solution to the Israeli/Palestinian problem, but they brought peace for a time, and hope that future negotiations would lead to a final resolution.
Yet, since that time we have abandoned any policy of encouraging negotiation and diplomacy. We have left Israel and the Palestinians to their own devices, and have failed to stay engaged in seeking peace. Rather, we have encouraged the most hard-line elements in Israel to spurn peaceful processes and engage in an aggressive policy of settlements and military oppression. Then when the inevitable terrorist response by radical extremists occurs we condemn the Palestinian people as a whole, and throw the full weight of our support behind Israel’s military reaction. In short, we are now enabling a cycle of violence.
It is not enough to say that this is solely the fault of the Bush administration’s hand off approach to the Palestinian problem. It has been a recurrent theme in America’s relationship with Israel over the past half century. We promote peace for a while (usually after some explosion of violence in the region), achieve some small diplomatic success, and then put the issue on the back burner, again. Rarely has there been a consistent and vigorous focus on promoting peace by the American government.
And that falls squarely in our laps, ladies and gentlemen, because we have not demanded that our politicians keep their attention focused on dealing with this ever smoldering powder keg. We, as a people, have never demanded that our government in Washington use its full power and leverage to keep all of the relevant parties at the peace table. Diplomacy and negotiation between peoples who have such mistrust and anger toward each other is not an easy or particularly rewarding task. But it is infinitely preferable to violence and war.
Indeed, just look at the Balkans where the US and its European allies have done a much better job of staying engaged. That region is still filled with many land mines (both literally and figuratively) but it is at peace. An uneasy, uncomfortable peace, yes. But peace nonetheless. There are no more rape camps and massacres, no more snipers indiscriminately killing ordinary people as they try to get water or food. The Serbs, Croats, Macedonians and Bosnians still do not love one another, still harbor resentments and vendettas for centuries old offenses, but they are no longer at war with one another.
We can blame Bush all we want, but he is not alone in condemning the Israelis, Lebanese and Palestinians to generation after generation of death and war. We are just as much to blame, because we are the ones put Bush and the Republicans in power, and we are the ones who turn away from the Israel’s conflicts with its neighbors as soon as the media quits broadcasting images of buildings being demolished with missiles, and dead bodies being pulled from the rubble.
We have the power to force our politicians to take positive actions for peace, through the ballot box and through other forms of activism, but we have fallen down in our responsibility to our fellow human beings who reside in the Middle East. And trust me: they are holding you and I responsible for our government’s policies toward Israel and the Palestinians.
COUNT 3
Our biggest misdeed has been the failure of our imagination. We have permitted those among us who hate to dominate our discourse regarding the Middle East. Republican politicians and lobbyists, conservative talk show hosts, the mindless bobble heads at Fox News, and the editorial pages of the majority of our newspapers have tarred every Arab and Muslim in the world as a terrorist or Islamofascist. These demagogues have encouraged among us a narrow, bigoted view of the peoples of the Middle East. A view that is demeaning, both to those at whom it is directed and to those who, out of fear or anger, swallow this demagoguery as the one and only truth.
These hate-mongers and warmongers have been allowed to dominate our national discussion because too few of us have stood up to their demonizing, racist screeds. We’ve been afraid of being called unpatriotic, or “liberal pacifists” or even “traitors” and “terrorist sympathizers.” Republican politicians call for nuking entire Arab countries, but pay no political price for such sentiments, because we have failed to make them pay that price. Instead of driving people like Michael Savage and Ann Coulter, who call Muslims vermin and call for their eradication, off the airwaves, we have stood by and allowed our once great nation to descend once more into mindless bigotry. Is it any wonder that our soldiers in Iraq employ racial epithets like “camel jockeys”, “towel heads” and “hadjis” to describe the very people they have “liberated” from Saddam Hussein?
Too many of us have failed to see past the lies and propaganda from the right wing apologists for never ending war in the Middle East to the truth of our shared humanity with the very people who are now being killed, maimed or made homeless. Too many of us have accepted as true that only military force can bring victory in the “War on Terror.” Indeed, too many of our fellow citizens accept that any action against the peoples of the Middle East is justified by that very non sequitor.
It is our collective failure to empathize with the very people whom we have victimized which has led us to this point.
CONCLUSION
We, the American people, are collectively guilty for what is being done to our fellow human beings today in Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East. We make up the greatest, most powerful nation on earth, yet we have allowed that power to be hijacked by those who would rather wage war than encourage peace, who see violence as the only means to achieve their ends.
We have failed to require our leaders to promote peaceful negotiations as an alternative to war. Indeed, we have willingly elected the very politicians who have waged illegal wars on innocents, and brought the entire region of the Middle East to the brink of disaster. No one can hold us blameless for their crimes anymore.
But it is not too late to change our Nation’s path, and begin to make amends for our many failures. Our first opportunity for that comes this Fall. We can choose to elect people who will promote peace in our dealings with other countries, and who will truly see the use of our military power as a last resort, or we can return to power the very people who see war as the first, best and only option in our foreign relations. In short, we can choose the path of peace or the continuing death and destruction and hatred of war.
It really shouldn’t be all that difficult a decision.
