Conventional
Wisdom
by
George Giles
by George Giles
DIGG THIS
Conventional
Wisdom
(CW) is a term coined by the economist John
Kenneth Galbraith in The
Affluent Society, to describe certain ideas or explanations
that are generally accepted as true by the public. In recent years
it has gone beyond being the driving, to being the only, force in
American politics and policy debates (the term debate is used really
loosely in the classical grammar, logic, rhetoric sense).
The CW since
1991 is that the United States as the only world’s superpower has
certain obligations. The obligations are fungible depending upon
the media dialog of the moment. We can fix poverty, AIDS, genocide,
terrorists, drug lords, just pick your favorite from a tableau of
the usual suspects, and if we can’t fix it we will certainly spend
prodigiously while trying. Behind all the trying is the coercive
might of the world’s most powerful military machine. The United
States may no longer be the world’s wealthiest nation, but we can
apply some powerful leverage when the "leadership" decides.
In 1992 Robert
Parry wrote presciently about this:
Yet even
as America’s economic wealth is drained the smashing military
victory of the U.S.-led coalition forces in the Persian Gulf established
the United States as the undisputed military power in the post-Cold
War era. High-tech American weaponry crushed Saddam Hussein’s
army, inflicting tens of thousands of dead while holding U.S.
casualties to a bare minimum.
With the
impressive American military victory, the war marked a historic
widening in the relative power between the First and Third worlds.
The qualitative difference between the American arsenal of force
multiplier weapons (designed to counter a massive Soviet invasion
of Europe) and what is available to Third World countries was
comparable to a fight between one army with machine guns and the
other using bows and arrows. No Third World nation, not even one
as heavily militarized as Iraq, could think it stands any chance
against American might, whatever the merits of the cause at stake.
The American
military power that President Bush [the first] unsheathed in the
Arabian Desert was an awesome warning to the poorer nations that,
as Bush put it, "what we say goes". The president envisioned
the crushing bloody defeat of Iraq as the first policing action
of a new world order which would place international law at the
center of relations between nations.
But amid
the CW-silly American political debate there is no guarantee that
the United States will use its terrifying military power wisely
or even within the tenets of the United Nations charter. A trivialized
absorption with the latest CW, mixed with the cynical application
of advertising skills, could make America a dangerous home for
these massively destructive weapons. They could be brought to
bear to prop up pro-U.S dictators facing domestic unrest, or to
overthrows troublesome enemies who somehow angered the protectors
of this ill-defined new world order.
The only
meaningful check on possible abuse of America’s awesome military
might in this unipolar world is the sophistication and vibrancy
of the nation’s democratic institutions. Issues as grave as war
and peace demand a thorough debate by a population given as much
relevant information as possible, not a country governed by a
tyranny of conventional wisdom, not an opinion elite satisfied
with viewing enemies as comic book villains.
Without a
recommitment to its own democratic values and an appreciation
of other people’s history, the United States could flick on its
unprecedented killing machine casually. It could grind up some
geopolitical nuisance who simply found himself on the wrong side
of the Washington CW, a punching bag of the talk show pundits.
The nation would awake with blood-covered hands, realizing too
late that it had slaughtered the wrong people."
~
Fooling
America 1992 p 19–20
On the eve
of Saddam Hussein’s execution these words forewarn of the demise
of our Democratic Republic as an Imperial Presidency commits military
force ad hoc. The current Iraq debacle has taken this to the penultimate
as lies, dressed up as truth with Conventional Wisdom, lead us to
tragedy.
December
30, 2006
George
Giles [send him mail] reads,
writes and thinks in Nashville Tennessee.
Copyright
© 2006 LewRockwell.com
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