Religion or Civilization: Why Democrats should support the war in the Middle East.

In 2003, when US marines first invaded Iraq,   I looked on with familiar sadness as death and destruction were brought to me live via CNN, Fox Noise, MSNBC and others. At the time I thought the old PBS line  “This program is made possible with support from viewers like you,” should be shown as  fitting reminder to the American people that each  of us were morally responsible for suffering caused by the actions of our military, and that by being apathetic or voting for a hawkish pro-war Republican we were saying that the cause of wrenching Iraq from the hands of a brutal , rogue dictator was worth the price it would be paid in human tragedy; that above  the scars of war ten, fifteen, or thirty years from now a beautiful civilization would spring forth once again between the Tigris and Euphrates and that this would be worth the fatherless children, amputated lives, and bitter hatred toward the sources of that  anguish. Feeling that such a radical social transformation was not possible I opposed the war with a deep indignance, considering it to be the Vietnam of my generation.

Five and 1/2 years later with extremist violence in Iraq still on-going and U.S. withdrawal sure to leave an explosive power vacuum we must ask ourselves that same moral question that we did in Vietnam. Now that we have come to set the stage for Iraqi westernization, how are we to act if our leaving will eventually mean that over 700,000 people, and a handful of American soldiers in comparison  have died as a direct result of our invasion. As Sen. John Kerry so wisely put in his youth ” how do we ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam.”  Are we to let so many Iraqis die by our hands in vain? How will history judge us if we do not continue fight this fight, more importantly, what will be our history?

Let us make no mistake, the gauntlet is off and there is no going back. It is not unreasonable to say that the scourge of Islamic extremism is now an ever present danger in every nation on Earth. At the heart of this campaign is dark form of cultural and religious extremism equivalent to the Catholics during the crusades and the National Socialism of the early 20th century. Radical Islam yearns for world domination and the imposition of wacky religious laws that are based on twisted distortions of the Quran. They feed of of the economic stagnation of many Middle Eastern countries to breed hatred toward Israel and the West. We must push forward with all we have or not push at all. The Islamic extremists are right about one thing, there is a conspiracy to secularize the Middle East and to subvert Islamic theocracies, and I think it’s about time all Democrats got on board. Barack Obama and his army of lets-all-just-respect-each other-and-talkocrats need to buck up and defend the fort.  If sending in 40000 more US troops into Pakistan and Afghanistan means that we make headway against the rising tide of Islamic Extremism, then I say that this is a moral cause not unlike fighting Hitler during WWII, or with  much irony, Catholics during the crusades. While we are there, perhaps we can pass out copies of  The Origin of Species.

A friend and fellow Democrat told me something promising today over lunch, he said that when he goes home to visit his cousins in Pakistan, he finds that more and more of the people around him are Atheists.  Rejection of religion is the only rational insight to have when you see hoards  of barbarians blowing themselves up in the name of some socially reproduced  delusion called “god,”  or in Arabic “Allah.”

The question one must ask him or herself  when considering  whether the U.S. involvement is warranted must go beyond pretensions of pacifism, or blind faith in the milk of human kindness. The question is one of a combination of ethical judgment in the spirit of Jeremy Bentham, and practical wisdom of Winston Churchill. Bentham argued that “that which is ethical  minimizes pain and maximizes pleasure for the largest number of people.”  Churchill continuously warned British prime minister Neville Chamberlain of the danger the rise of National Socialism posed to Europe and the world many years before  the ruthless Hitler violated the Warsaw pact by annexing Czechoslovakia. If Chamberlain and the isolationist United States had heeded his call for action the world could very well have avoided a long and brutal war which caused human suffering on a truly unimaginable level. Alas, this is the argument for the neoconservative doctrine of  pre-emption, a dangerous ideology which must measure the need for intervention with the imagined need for intervention, or the call for war in the name of military-industrial, or other economic reasons.

As this doctrine is dangerous to our democracy, and yet still the threat that militant Islam poses to the world is very real and very frightening, we must point to  the larger philosophical driver for the reproduction of militant Islam in the first place- religion. It is without hesitation that all of us, in good conscience and clear thought , cannot deny that at the heart of this conflict is human religiosity and that it should be fitting that  the place where the three major world religions were born is also the place that they should die.  Now this sounds harsh to the cultural and moral relativist ear of the average Democrat,  but we must remain objective and realistic about what drives , and has been the driving factor behind the scourge of war throughout human history.  Behind nearly every dark story of the suffering of war is a leader or movement which claims to be divinely ordained. Hitler claimed to have been acting under the authority of an Aryan Jesus, and even visited the head of the Palestinian army before embarking on a brutal campaign of ethnic genocide.  Mahmood Amadinejad and his theocratic overlords have repeatedly claimed divine authority in their campaign to engage in a proxy war using the Palestinian  PLO and Hamas as fronts. In WW II we had emperor Hirohito of Japan, who claimed divinity by inheritance. In Ireland we have Protestants and Catholics, in the Middle east we have Shia and Sunni. When confronted with proof of evil in tangible human suffering throughout modern history, religion answers back with nothing but dangerous superstition. It is time to wrestle our world from the hands of myths wrought in human fear. Religion is the poison which allows otherwise moral and decent people to be manipulated into purveyors of the inhumane.  And if we oppose the war in the Middle East because we are disgusted by the  endless parade of human suffering we must also oppose the core ideology which  begot  its existence.  Thus as a Democrats , We should support  the war because occupying the middle east, and installing leaders who support our interests will help facilitate the spread of  western secularism to the Middle East, which will serve as an antidote to the emergence of dangerous Islamic Theocrats, and Caliphate ideology in the future. In short, the less religion is accepted in the  Middle East, the more stable, prosperous, and peaceful it will be.

Democrats have too long  straddled the fence on this all-too-important issue, we have walked softly and now it is time to show those lunatics just how big our stick really is. Barack Obama should follow the advice of his Pentagon advisors and send in more ground support. And you, as a Democrat, and especially as an Athiest or Agnostic Democrat should stand in full support, sad that while we are temporarily increasing human misery,  in the end it will serve as a great first step toward a New World Order in which religion will be considered as quaint as burning witches. Over and Out.

President Obama Suspends Gitmo Arrests

As one of his first acts as President, Barack Obama has suspended all arrests for Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for 120 days. The President has said that this time will be used to review the practices at Guanatanamo Bay with the ultimate goal of ending torture tactics.  Obama and Gates made a direction to the military courts to suspend 21 trials until a full comprehensive review of the tactics used at Guantanamo Bay.

 

This news comes hours before President Obama signed his ethics reform conference, where he set high standards for his staff including a ban on gifts from lobbyists, a ban of lobbyists from working for the government in their field, and a pay freeze for the White House Staff.

 

So…this is what change looks like.

Reflections on History

For me, today isn’t a Black or White thing, although I acknowledge the importance of such.

For me, today is about the culmination of my young political experience. I remember watching the 1992 election, although I was rooting for Bush 1, since he was old and reminded me of my grandpa. In 1996 I started to understand the political ideologies at play, and watched Bill Clinton promise to build a bridge to the new millennium.

2000 was an awakening of more political awareness for me, as I realized I would be voting in the reelection of whichever candidate won, four years from then. I watched the debates actively, even though I didn’t quite understand all of the jargon. I saw Gore as confident but bland, unable to ignite much passion from within the Democratic party; a party which had become a little too arrogant and complacent after the Clinton years. I saw Bush as the everyman, the guy who spoke to the voters while Gore tended to speak at them. Bush appealed to everything that Republicans and Moderates had come to dislike about the Clintons. He was an outsider, a born-again Christian who lived the straight-and-narrow, and promised smaller and more responsible government.

All this being said, Gore still appeared significantly more qualified for the job. Gore’s campaign, however, was run atrociously – some of it bad luck, but plenty of it his doing. Gore wasn’t himself during the campaign (as we’d find out far too late), and Bush came off as the candidate most comfortable in his skin.

Bush impressed me with his leadership after 9/11, although he will forever be held responsible for his administration disregarding the “terrorist threat on US soil” memo. For me his administration’s downfall came after mid-term election in 2002. I fought hard for Kerry in 2004, and cast my first election ballot for him. I watched in disbelief from my Hofstra dorm room as the election results trickled in. ‘First the Yankees in the ALCS, and now this,’ I lamented. I could not understand why the country would reelect a President who, aside from a two-week war in Afghanistan, hadn’t accomplished anything he set out to do. I crossed my fingers that I would be wrong.

The country was bitterly divided down partisan lines, each side cynical, each side distrustful, neither side right. After 9/11 I was glued to CNN and MSNBC like I was once glued to ESPN. After 2004 I couldn’t watch anymore. No politician I saw on TV inspired me, no one gave me confidence. Republicans had a huge air of arrogance surrounding them, Democrats had no accountability…and visa versa.

I went to see Ralph Nader speak at Hofstra after the ’04 Election, and was inspired. He insisted that Washington was broken. He understood the crisis in Washington that I was currently feeling – that the Republicans and Democrats were no longer responsive to their electorate, and were engaged in so much partisanship that they were taking the nation down in order to pursue their selfish, stubborn pursuits. I bought his pamphlet that he was selling, which was modeled after Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”. His speech changed my outlook on politics forever, and I still have my notes from it.

Another thing happened late in 2004 that changed my political outlook – I came across a Newsweek cover-story on Barack Obama, a young Senate-candidate from Illinois. I was in class when he gave his famous speech at the ’04 Democratic Convention, never saw it, and never heard about it until I came across this article. The article detailed his radical political ideology – compromise, and bipartisanship. His radical stance sounded vaguely familiar – mostly because it was the major tenets that our country was once built upon, what we all learned in school growing up. This guy had the nerve to try and translate those ideals into practice. Didn’t he know that what we learned in school wasn’t how things actually worked? School teaches us what was, and we have to figure out for ourselves what is, since the two were mutually exclusive.

But here’s this Obama guy, and he’s trying to make it simple. Instead of appealing to the lowest common denominator – disagreement, he was appealing to something more. Instead of complicating things, going deep into rarely understood political jargon to find fault with one’s opponent, Obama was taking a step back in perspective, and realizing that the bickering, one-up-manship of contemporary politics was stalemating the entire country’s progress. Obama didn’t point his finger at Republicans, he said that both parties were responsible for this stalemate and gridlock. Finally, there was a charismatic, affable leader who was echoing the conflict of ideals that had been plaguing my view of politics.

From that point on I felt like I had a political ideology of my own, a voice. I surely would not have gotten involved in politics on any level if not for Nader’s speech and Newsweek’s article on Obama.
I deeply disagreed with the Bush Administration’s direction, but didn’t consider myself a Democrat. I had more moderate stances on some issues, and Obama taught me to embrace that, not to run from it.

And so today stands as further affirmation of that truth. It proves that people are skeptical, but ultimately yearn for someone to appeal to their prefrontal cortex, the best, most evolved version of themselves. Sure, Obama might have transcended the realm of politics and entered the realm of trend, but it is only because people embrace his appeal to a higher good, and such belief is contagious.

And now that today has come and gone, the Bush Administration is no more, and the Obama Administration is in its infancy, all that’s been is nothing but history. And that’s why we, as young Democrats, must continue to forge ahead to make sure that all of the progress of this campaign isn’t lost on the merits of Obama’s decisions as President. We must not forget this moment, when all seemed possible, because tomorrow will not be as perfect as today, and the cynics and skeptics will inevitably try to reclaim their supremacy. If we remember this moment and how it redefined what we thought was possible, then anything is.