 Political
Corrections
with Margo Kingston
And who's left holding the bag?
It's crunch time in the great game of pass the Iraq parcel. Many players who defied world public opinion to join the game are going or gone, and those who remain need to conspire to postpone the dreaded moment when one of them wins the booby prize.
So far, five players - Spain, the Philippines, Thailand, Dominica and Honduras - have left, mainly after angry booing from supporters, taking 2572 soldiers with them. Another five - Poland, Hungary, The Netherlands and the Ukraine - have given notice of early retirement, removing another 5750 soldiers.
Remaining players are weakened not only by the blood and money they've paid so far to stay in the game, but the morale-sapping exodus of their supporters at home. The USA has sacrificed nearly 1500 soldiers, plundered its treasury, and must now bribe potential recruits with big bonuses to maintain its fighting force. Bush waited until after the election to obliterate Falluja, and in February, the Pew Research Center poll showed the country split 47-47 per cent on whether the invasion of Iraq was the right thing to do, with 53 per cent disapproving of Bush's war leadership.
Italy has sacrificed 20 soldiers, and Berlusconi just scraped through Parliament an authorisation to extend the nation's stay in Iraq beyond June. He flatly rejected Bush's recent plea to send more soldiers, and no wonder - 90 per cent of Italians didn't want him to send any, and few have changed their minds. All Italian journalists in Iraq have now fled the country in fear of their lives.
Japan bought its way into the game by spending three times more than the entire European Union in assistance to Iraq, in exchange for other players killing for them and saving their soldiers from being killed.
Britain has sacrificed 86 soldiers, and a February poll for The Times showed 66 per cent of voters say British troops should be withdrawn ASAP. Tony Blair's lead over conservative rivals has dramatically narrowed as he limps towards a May election, and sending in more soldiers is not on, unless and until he wins it. You're disqualified from the game if you lose an election and your replacement is highly unlikely to choose to take your place, so fellow players will help where they can.
Australia had played a cagey game after John Howard defied 70 per cent of his citizens by invading Iraq without UN sanction. Last May, 63 per cent thought the war unjustified, but he kept our soldiers out of harm's way so well that when we last voted, many thought the war was over. But the time has come to pay in blood for the right to stay in play, despite Howard's admission that this "is not all that popular".
Now it's Blair's turn to lie to his people at an election, so he's passed the parcel to Oz to avoid the odium of sacrificing more soldiers for British citizens who don't want them sacrificed.
Howard took the parcel by breaching trust with his supporters, to whom he'd promised not only that enough was enough, but also that we didn't have the men or hardware to send more anyway. He needed to keep both Japan and Britain in the game, but The Netherlands will stop protecting the Japanese in April and the Brits won't take their place.
Blair will owe Howard big time if he gets re-elected, and Howard could pass the parcel back to him to reinforce the Australian soldiers.
When the players get really, really nervous as their numbers contract, their supporters dwindle and their options narrow, game creator, rule maker, player, referee and enforcer America cheers them up with a hymn to the chosen ones.
"Them out there, those reality-based types who reckon you're dumb to play this game, they believe answers and solutions will emerge from a judicious study of discernible reality. They reckon events flow from actions. But not the way the game works any more. We're an empire now and this is OUR game, and when we play we CREATE a reality, we create a whole new set of laws of physics, which they then judiciously study for their solutions while we make up a whole new set. We're the actors, and they study us."
(Based on a conversation between a Bush representative and journalist Ron Suskind; see http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/sloth/2004-10-16b.html).
The players' reality keeps changing, of course, as the events they trigger keep slapping them in the face.
And we, the pawns in their game, the people who'll suffer when someone drops the parcel and it blows up in our faces? They'll blame us, and write memoirs of what could have been if only we'd kept cheering them on and prayed hard for their non reality-based reality to be real.
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