Mesopotamia and America

A comment to an Iraqi blog post.

A lot of Americans want a more ruthless and efficient policy towards the foreign enemies of the Constitution of the United States of America.

Unfortunately, we only have President Bush to work with, and while he is better than the available options, he lacks hate. And he is too beholden to his weak kneed diplomatic State Department advisors. Bush might have the guts for a harsher policy, but the bureacracy certainly doesn't.

Our military can implement programs like the Phoenix Program to put the fear of God and annihilation into the terroists, rebels, and insurgents both in iraq and OUTside Iraq, but the military cannot do that if the President does not tell them to.

And the President will never do that, unless Americans are dieing by the millions.

Things would be a lot more stable in iraq if there were puppets and agents and covert CIA programs like many American weaklings want to believe. But because Americans don't like conquest, and fear to do anything that looks like conquest or British colonialism, we place most of the initiative on the local population. This has the effect of creating a power vacuum for terroists, insurgents, and Iranian-Syrian foreign agents.

The reason for this is simple. Americans are used to having the locals having the best knowledge of what to do. We did it doing Hurricane Katrina, we do it through our local state governments as outlined by the Constitution of each State and guaranteed by the Constitution of the US. This works fine if the locals are smart, knowledgeable, and motivated. It does not work so well in cities that are corrupt, weak, and stupid. Nor did it work so well in Iraq, where fear, intimidation, outlaws, criminals, and injustice were the norm.

The reason why Americans still chose to want to uplift the Iraqis to the role is even simpler. It is because AMericans do not fear violence, chaos, and terroists in Iraq so much as we fear ourselves. Because America is a sleeping giant, and our government bureacracies do their best to contain that power. Because they are greedy and want the power for themselves, for one thing, and another being because if the American people ever awakened and exercised the full power of our 50 states united in Empire, then the bureacrats would be deprived of both life and power.

It is this irrational fear, of AMerican power, which is the reason why you see Americans in Iraq hedging and hawing, emphasizing diplomacy. It is not because we fear using force, it is because we do not want to return to the times when we did have to use force, like WWII. America is a young nation, our traditions are not warlike or empire builders. We are unsure of our place in this world.

The terroists believe this is a weakness, and indeed it may very well appear to be one. But Osama Bin Laden needs to understand something, which is that one of the ways to remove the fears Americans have towards our power, is to kill more Americans. It is a geometric progression. If you replace our fear of ourselves for fear of you, then you're going to die.

Because while the fear is real, so is the Power. The world has not seen the iron fist within the velvet glove, our allies the Japanese have. And they have never forgotten it. In some respects, America is a mask and an onion. It has layers. There is our popular culture, there is our military culture which is the foundation of our society, patriotism, economic vitality, and so on. Deep inside the onion, there is a core of ruthlessness, and it is covered up and hard to get to.

One of the reasons why Americans want to ally with the Iraqis is not because we are lazy and want the Iraqis to do most of the dieing and fighting, it is because we fear that there will be nobody alive in that region if we do all the fighting. Some of us in America embrace that fear and conquers it, others of the fake liberal bent, are subsumed by it.

The American military recognizes that the fury and the hate and the ruthlessnes in Iraq is a lot closer to the surface, and because of that we can get to it easier than we could get to our own core strength.

Americans doubt their own control over our power, our Superpower status came about because we annihilated and defeated every enemy in the course of history itself. No nation could ever claim that except the Roman Empire.

The American philosophy is to conserve our strength, until the time we need it. Different from the history of Rome, which was to exercise power in order to strenghten themselves.

Thus America is capable of high bursts of speed and power, because we don't flitter it around the world. Yet that is only the strength prepserved, it is not truly the essence of our core power. We only tap that core power when our outer reserves are depleted. In Iraq, nobody had any reserves since Saddam didn't allow anyone to hoard power and strength for themselves and their family. In Iraq, the core strength is being tapped. And Americans feel safe because of that, because if the Iraqis can tap their core strength, then America would not have to.

Iraq is unsure of themselves and fear being alone because they think they will fail. America is unsure of ourselves and fear being alone because we think we will kill everyone and succede.

Al-Qaeda doesn't understand this, even after 9/11. And neither do most Americans and 95% of the citizens of other nations. Hitler didn't understand the secret of American power either, in fact. Only the Japanese understood even a glimmer of the inner power of the United States. And even they miscalculated in some respects.