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March 26, 2008
Grim Prognosis?
I’ve just spent the last two evenings watching Bush’s War, Frontline’s competent and reasonably non-partisan dissection of the US invasion of Iraq, produced for Public Television to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the US invasion. I have no idea of what share of the total TV audience was watching, but am reasonably sure it was only a tiny fraction.
The good news is that it was a riveting documentary that brought home the stunning incompetence and lack of planning with which the Bush Administration has been abusing the public trust. The bad news, in addition to the fact that it will probably have little impact on our distracted nation, is that it really missed the biggest point to be made: the Iraq war is just one failure of many. In fact, our species’ record is so bad and the intellectual dishonesty responsible for its many follies so pervasive as to raise serious doubts about whether humanity can ever cope with its own cognitive prowess.
The main theme pursued in this blog is that my relatively simple study of a drug policy long protected against scrutiny has shown that its effects are far worse than suspected. One of the ways I’ve been emphasizing the drug war’s folly has been by comparing it to Iraq, where the bodies have been more difficult to hide.
Every real war is a tragedy that might have been avoided with more foresight; nevertheless; and probably because they provide such excellent cover for the theft of public funds, metaphorical wars have become preferred “solutions” for variously perceived social problems ranging from drugs and crime through cancer and poverty. A prime example was Nixon’s opportunistic expansion of a failing policy of drug prohibition into a Drug War during his first term in office. Despite its continuing failure on a much grander scale, the drug war has remained bullet proof through a continued conspiracy of silence by nearly all American institutions.
The fall of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the Eighties soon provided an opportunity for expansion of metaphorical warfare into an updated variant of traditional warfare when resentful Muslim fanatics created a loosely affiliated structure to take on the victorious capitalists.
Although the Muslim have-nots have been embarrassing their more affluent opponents thus far, neither side seems to be paying much attention to a growing scarcity of both water and petroleum, nor to the real possibility that our continued dependence on oil may have already set the stage for disastrous coastal flooding; to say nothing of the possibility that implosion of the American economy may cause serious unrest in creditor nations over the next few months...
Rather than maximizing the benefits of empirical Science for the entire species, we humans seem intent on blindly pursuing our competitive urge to survive to the point of mutual destruction.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at March 26, 2008 06:02 PM