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NEWS & LETTERS, NOVEMBER 2003The logic of freedomby Tom More As much as the Bush administration would like people to believe that only the Fedayeen Saddam is hostile to the U.S. military occupation of Iraq, signs are everywhere that the season of discontent is nearly universal. It’s not just the myth of liberation purveyed by the Bush Doctrine that blinds certain people to the brutal reality and naked contradictions of military occupation. Considered on a world scale, these people are few in the first place--more than 70% of the public around the world opposes the U.S.-led war. Rather, a certain logic is afoot that impoverishes our understanding of the second Iraq, an Iraq that wants neither Ba'athist rule, nor Halliburton, nor theocracy, but freedom. The binary logic of first negation and its corollary--a politics of comparison and “lesser-evilism”--permanently inhibits the capacity to conceive a history of a freedom alternative to Bush/Halliburton (what Marx called “free-trader vulgaris”) on the one hand and ayatollahs and Stalinists on the other. “No to Saddam, No to Bush!” is the expression of a struggle from below that demands a better logic of explanation and a new philosophy of freedom. There is no easy answer to Lenin’s question, “What is to be done?” But we cannot so much as pose this question until we ask the prior ones: done about what, and for the sake of what? Intelligence has no choice but to conceive an idea. Since theocracy murders questions, it is also the death of ideas; it issues a FATWA instead. This is the characteristic that fundamentalism shares with totalitarianism, the purge and the death squad. Likewise, the regime of the Bush Doctrine is the anti-idea. First come the requirements of capital; afterwards, the rationalization--be it whacky born-again Christianity, the debauched, Strauss-inspired ravings of a Wolfowitz and the Plan for a New American Century, or the anti-intellectual jingoism of the warmonger’s inheritance of the White Man’s Burden, on which Blair and Rumsfeld are indistinguishable. “No to Saddam, No to Bush!” is a SECOND negation: the negation of the negation is not the return to the same, not the dog chasing its tail. Rather, “No to Saddam, No to Bush!” is the positive, creative, irrepressible idea of freedom itself. The second Iraq is talking to the second America. The first step in knowing what is to be done is to listen to these voices. To hear them well we need a different logic, beyond the weird triangulation of Bush, Ba'athism, and bin Laden. |
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