by Steve Vivian

Special to the G21

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NEW YORK, NY, USA - An old saying tells us that truth is the first casualty of war. That aged quip is newly revitalized thanks to the "debate" between our nation's Establishment Left and Establishment Right. Our ongoing "war on terrorism" is filled with alarming problems, of course - including the inability of the most celebrated on both the Left and the Right to even think straight, much less stumble on to the truth. Indeed, much of the "public discourse" about Iraq, terrorism, the "clash of cultures", etc., is crippled by raving irrationalities and cracked self-righteousness. Let's take a look, in alphabetical order, at the Left then the Right.

A new darling of the Establishment Left is New Jersey's "poet laureate" Amiri Baraka. Baraka, despite a painful inability to produce anything beyond insipid grade-school rhyme schemes, is basking in Leftist praise for his meditation about 9-11, "Somebody Blew Up America."

Stylistically, the poem is exactly what you'd expect by a writer laboring to "keep it real": a clueless pile of self-conscious clichés, the mush you'd suffer through in an "Intro to Creative Writing" class at the local campus. What's noteworthy is the poem's asinine, paranoid world view. The poem sees a world controlled by deeply shadowed, tangled conspiracies. Conspiracy theories are the last refuge of the hopelessly naive and of Oliver Stone. (Yeah, okay,that's redundant.)

"Somebody Blew Up America" recycles the urban legend that "4,000 Jews" didn't show up for work at the Twin Towers on 9-11-01, and you know what that means: the Jews did it! When the Anti-Defamation League criticized Baraka's poem, Baraka stuck to the Establishment Left playbook: whine and sniffle about "character assassination."

Oh the hostilities that tender poets must suffer!

The poem dovetails perfectly into the current Establishment Left's propensity for making dumb - then dumber - statements about our post 9-11 world.

Indeed, much of the Establishment Left is more irrational than ever - this is especially true among the daft "cultural critics" crowd. You know, the self-adoring clerics of PC who preach from university and press pulpits around the world.

An especially illuminating example comes from Australia, where several young Lebanese men were recently convicted for committing gang rapes. The gang's leader received 55 years in jail. Now, you and I might think: "Serves the scum right." But we'd be wrong ... and even worse, we'd be INSENSITIVE.

During the trial, testimony revealed that the gang added insult to injury of one victim, explaining that she was "an Australian pig" and therefore would be "fucked Leb style." See, as Australian citizens of Lebanese descent, the gang leader and his comrades were not merely sodomizing and terrorizing young women. No, they were Fighting the Power! As Monroe Reimers in the letters section of the Sydney Morning Herald explained, the fault really lies with racist Australian society. In full moronic hand-wringing mode, he writes:

"Where has this hatred come from? How have we contributed to it? Perhaps it's time to take a good hard look at the racism by exclusion practiced with such a vengeance by our community and cultural institutions."

This despicable hand wringing is wonderful news to thugs throughout the world ... they can engage in the most pitiless violence and then wait to be rescued by PC missionaries, who even now fan out across the globe to assure us that rape is really an anguished cry for social justice.

We find the same logic throughout Europe, such as in Norway, where a professor at the University of Oslo explains why a "disproportionate" number of Muslims commit rapes in Norway. You see, the women BROUGHT IT UPON THEMSELVES. "Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes ... Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it," professes our professor.

Well of course! Those Norwegian women are sure INSENSITIVE, aren't they, by refusing to don veils and scarves?! How thoroughly thoughtless of them not to bow down before the imperatives of "a multicultural society"! It goes without saying - and goes unsaid - that we can't expect the Muslim rapists to adapt themselves to a multicultural society. That too would be INSENSITIVE, a blow against the intrepid quest for social justice on a global scale.

It turns out, in fact, that social justice was the real reason that Osama bin Laden and gang masterminded and executed the 9-11 attacks. You see, passengers were turned into human missiles to FIGHT THE POWER, man! And thousands were immolated in support of the Palestinians! See how crude our thinking about global violence and mayhem has been? Violence is not always an act of hatred ... no, it's often a selfless act of Justice, if not downright Love for the Oppressed.

Granted, perhaps we can't quite imagine Nelson Mandela turning people into human missiles ... but that's a moral failure of imagination! And if you can't picture Vaclav Havel rounding up a gang of hale and hearty fellows for politically correct gang rapes ... again, that just shows how parochial your thinking really is.

We could cite many, many more examples of dippy Leftist "thought" ... including the very recent praise showered upon the "President of Peace," Jimmy Carter, who was just awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

At this moment, Carter's award is indeed unspeakably rich with irony - this guy ENCOURAGED Saddam Hussein to attack Iran. And we know the rest: Iraq and Iran battled throughout most of the 1980's, with victory nearly within reach of Iran. But Iraq discovered the thrill of chemical warfare, the tide turned in a most ugly manner, and Iran finally waved the white flag. Talk about blowback! Carter eggs on Saddam Hussein, who eventually turns to chemical weapons, and now the Iraqi mass murderer is enamored of ever-scarier weapons ... and - trumpets please! - Jimmy C is a "man of peace"!

But enough of the Left's mush. Let's turn to the Establishment Right, which has grown progressively nuttier from summer onward.

The thought of flogging Iraq now mightily excites the Right. In fact, some "serious analysis" of the global situation suggests that we need not stop at Baghdad. Let's just roll onward to - Saudi Arabia!

The Rand Corporation, a think tank that specializes in global realpolitik analysis, recently suggested - to the Pentagon - that the US should invade Saudi Arabia and claim its oil fields. The Rand fellow claimed that Saudi Arabia is a chief exporter of terrorism through funding of Islamicist religious schools (which is true). Therefore we should treat the Saudis to a juggernaut invasion and run the US flag up the oil rigs to boot (NUTTY!).

Incredibly, those attending the event apparently didn't find such a scheme certifiably crackpot ... True, the scheme wasn't adapted, but the mere fact that it was seriously pondered speaks volumes about the triumphal Imperial ethos gripping the Party Of War. And now, as we enter the winter of our discontent, more and more of the think-tank/pundit community talks rather openly about just that: turning Iraq into a vassal state, paying for the effort with Iraq oil money, and then - well Hell, who knows? Maybe do the same in Iran and then Saudi Arabia.

Make no mistake: the context of this cracked discourse is the Bush Doctrine, which claims that the U.S. has the moral and legal right to attack an enemy preemptively.

In a very narrow sense, this is reasonable, and it's recognized by the UN charter: if we know that country X is about to pull the trigger on a rocket, then of course - attack. But to the Establishment Right, the Bush Doctrine's beauty is its generality. It gives enormous room in which to terrify the rest of the planet with ominous threats of raining hellfire in the form of the U.S.'s unmatchable firepower.

The sheer thrill of holding far more big guns than any other nation has apparently addled the Right's ability to make a coherent argument. Bush and his supporters have offered a smorgasbord of "reasons" why Iraq must be attacked. For instance, Saddam Hussein is a bloodthirsty lunatic who has grown ever more aflame with irrationality. And we can't have an unbalanced lunatic with WMD's, can we?

In fact, Saddam Hussein's behavior has been perfectly "rational" in the coldest sense. No sane person can deny that he is a murderous thug; however, this murderous thug has been in power since 1979, and he has managed to live beyond all the predictions of his eminent fall. He has done so by being remarkably cruel and remarkably calculating. In fact, the Bushies unwittingly concede this point by claiming (correctly) that Iraq's pledges to open its borders to inspectors is just more of the same cat-and-mouse game. "We've heard this all before," the administration has said many times of Iraqi overtures about inspections. And that's true: we've heard the machinations of a terribly cruel - but entirely calculating - dictator.

We're also told that Saddam Hussein has used chemical weapons upon his enemies in the south of Iraq and the Kurds in the north. That's true. Again, nobody claims that he is not a monster. But the context of these horrendous gassings is revealing: the United States encouraged the uprisings and, as is now well understood, offered no assistance. The butcher of Baghdad understood what this meant: he could poison the rebels with impunity. And he did. Is this ruthless? Of course. Is it "insane"? Of course not.

The wobbling arguments just don't stop: first Bush wants regime change, then he backs off and says that Iraq must disarm - which is not, technically the same thing as regime change. Then the arguments become one of stability: the entire Middle East region could be held "hostage" if Iraq acquired nukes. Then there was the stalled attempted to link bin Laden to Iraq - despite the mightiest of PR efforts, that linkage has failed, and for some pretty good reasons. The evidence is skimpy at best, and logic suggests that bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are natural enemies, not natural allies.

Bin Laden (assuming he's alive, which is a big assumption) and company thirst for an apocalyptic and cleansing jihad against the infidels, while Hussein wants to maintain his crushing grip on Iraq. He almost certainly does not want to contend with bin Laden and his ilk. And so the War Party has quietly dropped that argument even as it moves on to the next, and the next ...

The War Party's impassioned rhetoric looks ever more suspect each day. Even as Congress passed the resolution giving Bush the right to attack, the White House knew that North Korea - a literally starving nation under the thumb of an erratic and brutal regime - had a covert nuclear weapons program. Most curiously, the White House did not reveal this fact. Why?

We can only guess, but certainly one reasonable guess is that the White House feared the revelation would distract the nation from Iraq. Bush is, if anything, relentless in his determination to topple Hussein.

But as Democrats correctly complained - along with some Republicans - to withhold such information is troubling, to say the least.

And this knowledge raises an interesting question: why not attack North Korea, too? They're a third of the Axis of Evil, after all. But the White House insists that diplomacy will likely do the trick ... well then, why won't diplomacy do the trick with Iraq?

Good questions, sure, but we shouldn't expect serious answers ... Bush is simply hell-bent on removing Saddam Hussein, and if new global details emerge, these details will be just shrugged off by Bush or delegated to Colin Powell - indeed, Powell's head must be spinning of late, trying to put the best face on a series of conflicting arguments.

And so it goes onward, onward. Now we hear from the Imperial Right that, once toppled, the US can rebuild Iraq as a modern democracy, just as Japan was. The ghost of General McArthur stalks the White House!

Dream on. Iraq has zero tradition of democracy, and democracy takes time ... it cannot be simply grafted, like new skin, upon a gaping wound. Therefore, Iraq's "democracy" would, in plain English, be a military stability imposed by Western troops. And this occupation would almost certainly stretch many, many years into our brave new millennium ... an occupation that would cost billions and - who knows - perhaps many American lives.

Given the asinine and addled "arguments" offered by both the left and right ... what are we to do? Perhaps call Ross Perot? Sure, back when he was campaigning for President, Perot often sounded touched. But these days, the War Party and its mushy counterpart aren't sounding any saner.

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STEVE VIVIAN - is a freelance writer living in New York whose commentary has appeared in various independent, alternative journals. He has been a contributor to The World's Magazine for approximately three years.