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The soundbite to come out of today's unveiling of Part I of the 9/11 commission report is that the attacks revealed a "failure of imagination" more than anything else. No doubt this will be attacked as fuzzy-headed meaningless jargon by all and sundry, but IMHO it is actually a pretty good statement of what's basically wrong with the world view driving this administration.
It has long been one of my crackpot theories that ethics are really founded on imagination. Actually, I am not the first person to formulate this crackpot theory; but I do endorse it heartily because it seems at least to bear out my own experience. The ability to imagine what it would be like to be someone else is what allows you to feel compassion; and without compassion, it's impossible to make ethical decisions that involve other human beings.
I wouldn't want to argue that in the world of realpolitik compassion should be the *only* thing driving the formulation of foreign policy; but it should certainly be in the mix, if only for practical reasons. The importance of this kind of imagination is stressed by, of all people, Robert McNamara in Errol Morris's film *The Fog of War,* in which he argues that one of the major problems with the way they fought the Vietnam War was that they were incapable of understanding their enemy. He doesn't use the phrase, but basically he's ascribing the outcome of the war to a failure of imagination on their part, one that he can apparently realize now with the benefit of his 20/20 hindsight.
I've said it often enough about this administration, but I'll say it again: the Mark of the Bush Adminsitration Beast is a complete indifference to, or else contempt for, the people who are affected by what they do. Now this does allow them to be ruthless in their climb to the top. However, it is not helping them stay there.
The Iraq war, for instance, has been marred from the beginning by their total inability to imagine what it would be like to be an Iraqi--either a member of the "ordinary Iraqi people," or a soldier in the Iraqi army, or a member of Saddam Hussein's cabinet, or an Iraqi resistance fighter, or Saddam Hussein himself. Time after time they have made both military and public-relations blunders simply because it has not occurred to anyone on Bush's staff that in Iraq, things might look a little difference. For instance, there was the whole "they will greet us as liberators" fallacy--which, if anyone on that team had even a glimmer of this kind of imagination, would have been revealed as the fantasy that it was. Then there was Abu Ghraib, where nobody ever tried to imagine what would happen when news of what was going on in that prison got out. The conduct of the occupation and the 'transfer of sovereignty' have all borne the mark of someone who doesn't know what the average Iraqi thinks of all this and at the end of the day really doesn't give a shit. I cite the unveiling of the new blue-and-white Iraqi flag as a classic example. "Duh...now that you mention it, I guess those ARE Israel's colors. Gee, you think that's really gonna matter to people? Whoops, guess it does."
The bottom line is that nobody on Bush's team is willing to make the effort it woudl take to imagine what we look like to Iraqis, because that would involve being willing to step outside their own view of themselves. And that's why they don't have a fucking clue as to how to deal with the opposition: they don't understand it.
They never thought they were going to have to understand it, because that's something else they could never imagine: that they and their army would be anything other than omnipotent. They went into this assuming that failure was not an option. A little imagination would have allowed them to forsee that actually, with an enterprise like this, failure is really the only option.
Well, here's another thing they've never imagined: their own fall from power. And once again, we're seeing that they have no idea what to do about it now that it's happening. Hey, looks like *Fahrenheit 9/11* is reaching mainstream audiences. Wow, maybe the American People aren't just an empty vessel into which we can pour whatever crock of liquid bullshit Rove feels like dishing out today! Who'd'a thunk it. Now that the average American voter is starting to get hip to Rove's shit, they really have absolutely no idea how to reach him/her--because they don't have any fucking clue about what that hypothetical average American is really like. All they know is what their focus groups tell them. Bush's latest makeover as the wannabe "peace president" is exactly the kind of crazed flailing we can expect to see from this campaign as they get ever more desperate. They cannot solve their own problem because they do not understand its causes; and that's because they can't imagine why it is that people would be sick and tired of three years of being manipulated, lied to, and screwed out of their jobs and taxes by a bunch of rich bastards who clearly don't give a shit about them and their problems.
I, on the other hand, have always had too much imagination. So, as a treat for myself, I'm going to spend today imagining Bush and his crowd losing the 2004 election, and then getting indicted, and then having some nice long televised trials, and then getting sent to the slammer where they can all hang out with Ken Lay to their hearts' content.
Yee ha,
The Plaid Adder
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