THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES: DISSEMINATE FREELY
The age of occupation, like the age of empire, is dead. All that remains is the funeral.
The
availability of sophisticated weaponry in mass quantities from multiple
channels (official and black market) renders long-term military
engagement on foreign soil untenable. The occupier will always confront
a native resistance and that resistance will have long roots in land
made fertile by the blood of sacrifice.
In the twenty first
century, an occupation can never find righteous cause. The flow of
information and dissenting views is omnipresent and the myth of
virtuous conquest, the wars for liberation and justice, is broken and
shattered in the archives of history.
The current situation in
Iraq is a compelling case. It is so far beyond redemption and repair
that anyone who stands up now to defend the invasion, occupation and
decimation of that unfortunate country (condemned not by its weapons or
aggressive nature but by the oil beneath its sand) should be tarred,
feathered and run out of the political arena on a rail, beginning with
John McCain.
As Americans grudgingly accept grim reality in
Iraq, we have only begun to confront the grave and deteriorating state
of the occupation in Afghanistan. Given the post-911 climate of rage
and fear, few questioned and fewer opposed our actions at the time but
the succeeding years have revealed a fatal flaw in the war strategy
that defined and christened the Bush Doctrine.
What began as a
brutal demonstration of America’s awesome destructive power, with
profound implications for oil pipelines, strategic deployment and the
opium trade, has evolved into a prolonged occupation in which the
occupying force is slowly drained of resources until the costs of
maintaining the occupation are no longer worth the costs of withdrawal.
The strategic errors of our Afghan policy are numerous:
-
Failing to negotiate with the ruling Taliban government (a government
which after all inherited Al Qaeda from our manipulations in the Soviet
era),
- Failing to focus our attack on those who attacked us on 911,
-
Outsourcing fundamental elements of the assault on Al Qaeda to Afghan
warlords who had no vested interest in fulfilling their contract with
America,
- Setting up a long term occupation rather than getting the job done and getting out,
- Handing the ball to NATO allies who are clearly not prepared to see it through.
The
destruction we have wrought is so far reaching and widespread it is
impossible to understate it. America’s fall from grace (real or
imagined), its loss of credibility and good will, is but one part of
the equation. Broken alliances, creeping instability from Palestine and
Lebanon to the Persian Gulf and beyond, a new arms race and the
ever-increasing probability of nuclear war are clear byproducts of our
experiment in aggressive conquest.
Even more critical (if such
a designation is even possible) is the wholesale waste of resources
essential to confront what should have been and must become the most
pressing crisis of our short time on this earth: global climate change
and the poisoning of the planet.
The enormity, vastness and
depth of destruction we have delivered to the world in the name of
freedom, justice and democracy is so great that we cannot hope to undo
or repair it in our lives but it is imperative that we begin.
There can be no war in Iran.
There can be no more invasions and occupations anywhere on earth.
The age of occupation must end here and now.
It
is time for a universal decree, acknowledging the fundamental truth of
the modern age: The scourge of war is no longer a proper instrument of
socio-political change – if indeed it ever really was.
Let every nation, culture and society follow its own evolutionary path.
If we are to survive, the twenty first century must become the age of diplomacy and cooperation.
As
the wisest man of the elder generation has written in his new book, A
Power Governments Cannot Suppress (City Lights, 2007): “The world has
been at war, again and again all through the twentieth century, and
here it is, a new century, and we still have not done away with the
horror of war. For that we should all feel ashamed. But that shame
should not immobilize us. It should provoke us to action.”
In
less than three weeks, the fourth anniversary of the Iraq War will be
marked by massive protests across the nation. Let every man and woman
of conscience answer the call.
It is a cause that can wait no longer.
Writings 
The critical flaw in the neocon philosophy captured by the phrase
“We have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here”
is that foreign occupation is a nineteenth century concept. It died a
slow and tortured death in the twentieth century, punctuated by the
failed Soviet occupation of beleaguered Afghanistan. 
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