Tuesday 11 September 2007

Pic of the day: It is payback time! Every day!

Unhappy anniversary

I am not sure what to say on a day such as today. Even my American friends - which may be most of the people who consider me a friend these days - seem to be deeply divided.

I was about to say that the USA has been distracted for six years, but the choice of verb is just wrong. It would be like saying you were distracted by being raped. Someone destroyed your trust and innocence for no reason that makes sense to you. It is not just a wound that will not heal, it is a wound you don't want to heal, for fear that it will happen again. Not a distraction, but an obsession. Still, there is a price to pay for those who go down this path.

In light of this metaphor can we understand the seemingly meaningless attack on Iraq for clearly spurious reasons. (No, that is not hindsight, I wrote about this while the USA was still pretending to not prepare for the invasion. It was obvious to all except the Americans, and might have been to them too if any redoubtable media had told anything other than propaganda. Why Iraq, which so obviously did not pose a threat to America? Because Iraq was an archetype of a rapist country. It had already invaded Kuwait once before, and showed no sign of regret. It was boasting and bragging, an extreme (if somewhat hollow) show of machismo.

In the end, Americans could not simply nuke the cities or burn them down and salt the ground. Being highly civilized, they instead made an ill-received attempt to help their conquered enemies. This may work with other civilized people, like the Germans and Japanese after World War II. It was less of a success in the barely medieval culture of Mesopotamia.

(By barely medieval I don't refer to their tech level, but to their vMeme, the level of complexity at which they understand the world. While the American society spans the levels of Blue (lawful), Orange (reasonable) and Green (cooperative), the Arab world is only partly Blue, but partly Red (authoritarian) and partly Purple (tribal). There is very little overlap. Add that the Blue vMeme is expressed in competing religions, and there is really no overlap at all. The Americans could practically just as well have been aliens.)

***

It isn't hard to understand what has driven our American friends this far. But that understanding does not mean they won't have to pay the price. While they have been looking elsewhere, civil rights have been eroded. This is a fact, the question is just whether it was worth the price. I don't think so. But this is too emotionally raw a topic for a foreigner to belabor. Also, Americans are starting to bring it up themselves.

What I do talk about quite often is the economic aspect. Again, I think part of this is because Americans have not really had the mental resources to deal with that kind of silly little details at this time. They have not elected their lawmakers or their president based on the ability to secure the economy in the long run, but on defending the country. Of course people still have to work and pay taxes, but they can't be bothered to give it too much of their attention. Tax breaks? Fine, as long as we don't lose any public services. Budget deficit? We'll deal with that later. After the war.

A blogger at the web site of the well-known British newspaper The Guardian wrote about his experience of returning to the USA after a mere two weeks abroad. What struck him was how disconnected the USA was from the rest of the world, as if they were stuck in a loop. He compared it with the legends of people who sleep for ages while the world goes on without them. His impression was that the world had moved on, leaving the US behind.

Let us hope he is wrong. The last time the USA turned inward and ignored the world was during the Great Depression. Before they came back, we had Nazism, Fascism and the beginning of World War II. Don't let it happen again, please.