The Pakistani Spectator

American actions in the ‘war on terror’ have been driven by fear – at home and abroad. Fear that it may happen again, fear of the unknown, fear of the alien.  It explains not only the radical thrust of Washington’s actions in the Greater Middle East but also the dulling of critical faculties.  That pertains to torture and illegal surveillance as well as the ready resort to military power.  Another dimension of the current deep-seated disquiet derives from American betrayal of its principles and ideals. Torture as a demonstrable matter of fact, torture as the official policy of the White House, torture without reasonable cause – has no precedent in America. Its routine occurrence in the ‘war on terror’ testifies to the amorality of those managing the country’s affairs. Its tolerance by the public, by Congress, and the accessory role played by the enabling courts before, during and after the fact add up to a national pathology. For decades, Americans looked back on the internment of fellow citizens of Japanese ancestry as an aberration which never could happen again. Now, no such assumption can be made. Imagine this picture: Iranian armies have conquered the Middle East and have reached Morocco; an Iranian armada has sunk most of the country’s Atlantic fleet at anchor in Norfolk; and a few hundreds of thousands of American citizens of Iranian descent live clustered on the Northeastern seaboard. Is there reason to doubt that their treatment would be such as to make them envy the condition of the Nisei during WW II?

This phenomenon bespeaks stark, rooted fear. The Bush administration, the media, and – in their own way – the cottage industry of terror specialists have stoked that fear. It has faded somewhat since March 2003. But it is still powerful enough to condone the sins of systematic torture; powerful enough to repress feelings of guilt and shame that must lie beneath the placid surface.. Those suppressed emotions, though, contribute to our collective self-doubt and dread.  The exact same politico-psychological pattern that motors the United States campaign across southwestern and central Asia to extirpate radical Islamist forces in all their manifestations prevails in regard to the gross infringement on Americans’ own civil liberties. Massive wire-tapping, eavesdropping, and trespassing on the privacy of personal transactions in violation of explicit legal stipulations have been occurring routinely for years. The Bush administration audaciously claimed presumptive powers of a sort associated with autocratic governments. The critical reaction has been feeble – in Congress, in the courts, in the bar associations, in the AMA, in the universities, in scholarly associations. Nearly total silence. Let us recall that as early as the summer of 2008, Democratic presidential aspirant Barack Obama, too, found it expedient to vote for a seriously flawed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which he had vowed to filibuster against just weeks earlier. That silence, and subsequent acts by a ‘change’ president, proclaims loudly two things: a people and their leader living in morbid fear for which they will sacrifice their freedoms, and a people and their leader whose timidity is fear by another name.

A process of sublimation is going on – collective and individual. Sublimation occurs when a person seeks to avoid the distress of recognizing consciously an unwelcome truth or truths. In this instance, there are several unpalatable truths: our attempt at putting the Iraqis and Afghans on the path to freedom and prosperity (a la Germany and Japan) has failed – America is thwarted; the Iraqis and Afghans are not grateful and most of the world dislikes/hates us — Americans expect and need to be loved for our natural virtue; the terrorist threat, al-Qaeda and Osama bin-Laden are still there to bedevil us – America is unnaturally unsafe; Americans have been deceived by their President - the bond of trust central to our civic religion has been broken; we torture and we abuse others – America’s moral leadership is gone; we have subverted our own liberties – we have panicked in an unmanly manner. Taken together, these failures and transgressions are a heavy load on the collective national psyche. An America that is not able, that is not moral, that is not smart, that lies, that lies to itself – that America is incompatible with the myths that sustain us.