Jonathon Delacour the heart of things

The sanctity of (American) life

Yesterday in Melbourne I was working in a building with high-tech pretensions: the Internet connection was down but George W. Bush’s State of the Union address was screening live on TV monitors in the lobby and elevators. On my way down to the coffee shop in mid-afternoon, watching this “well-meaning but ignorant, untravelled man with grandiose goals” on the tiny screen, I couldn’t help but wonder by what strange alchemy someone so unexceptional had become leader of the greatest military and industrial power in history. When we reached the ground floor, a young man muttered at me as he strode out of the elevator: “He better not bloody try it without UN approval.” An empty jibe, to be sure, since we both knew that UN approval is the least of the Bush cabal’s concerns.

Today, back in Sydney, I went first to the pool then to the movies in an effort to escape the 39°C (102°F) heat (my house isn’t air-conditioned). As the final credits began to roll at the end of The Quiet American, the woman sitting next to me turned and said: “This film should be compulsory viewing for everyone in the country, particularly that person in Canberra.” Had I seen her in the lobby of the multiplex before the movie, I would have assumed from her clothing, her hairstyle, and her demeanor that she had voted for “that person in Canberra” (Prime Minister John Howard) in the last three elections and for his party throughout her entire life. Yet though she may have been a wealthy, elderly, conservative woman she saw as clearly as any starry-eyed young radical the parallels between Grahame Greene’s tale of the beginnings of US involvement in Vietnam fifty years ago and the events about to unfold in Iraq—American arrogance and hubris being a constant in post-WWII history.

So this is what it’s come to: strangers in lifts and movie theaters express to me uninvited their disapproval of the coming war with Iraq. Not out of some bitter or envious anti-Americanism, as the defenders of American imperialism like to suggest, but because—like most Australians—these strangers disapprove of the new world order Geoff Kitney describes, “in which America chooses which regimes stay and which should go.”

“What an outrage,” I said to my friend P the other day, “that Howard can turn us into America’s lapdog once again, when only six percent of Australians approve of attacking Iraq without UN approval.”

“We’d be lucky to know even six percent of what’s really going on,” he replied.

Therein lies a difficulty: formulating a position with hardly any real information. Then what’s the alternative? To acquiesce? I have no interest in supporting or defending Saddam Hussein. He’s clearly a threat and we’d be well rid of him. Let’s do it, with UN approval. But at what cost without? A few months ago I quoted Robert Manne:

At the centre of [Bush’s pre-emptive strike] doctrine, a huge conceptual hole appears. Does the US, as the world hegemon, alone possess the sovereign right to act unilaterally against a supposed threat to its security by prosecuting a preventive war, or does an identical right exist for other states?

If the right does not exist for others, the Bush doctrine amounts to an almost formal claim to US world hegemony. If, on the other hand, all states possess the same right, the Bush doctrine opens the way to the return of the jungle, where the powerful have the capacity to impose their will.

What’s good enough for America will turn out to be good enough for China, India, Pakistan, Israel, Japan (when China poses a threat), Russia (as soon as it stabilizes its economy), the European Union (once it rearms).

Don’t tell me that the US will use its overwhelming power for the common good. The US has always acted to further its own interests, as powerful states invariably do. And as much as John Howard might imagine he’s guaranteeing our safety by signing us up (unwillingly) for America’s Iraq adventure, the Americans will sell us down the river for two pins if their national interest demands it.

So what’s to be done? Nothing. I’m not even sure that a campaign of massive civil disobedience would be enough to bring our soldiers home. But bad things will come of this and we’d be better off allowing the Americans to secure their oil without our assistance.

It would be marginally less unpalatable if America’s ruthless pursuit of its own economic interests wasn’t wrapped in a saccharine coating of moralistic cant:

America is a strong Nation, and honorable in the use of our strength. We exercise power without conquest, and sacrifice for the liberty of strangers.

Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America s gift to the world, it is God s gift to humanity.

We Americans have faith in ourselves but not in ourselves alone. We do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history.

May He guide us now, and may God continue to bless the United States of America.

God give me fucking strength. “Placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history” as Bush prepares “to shatter Iraq ‘physically, emotionally and psychologically’ by raining down on its people as many as 800 cruise missiles in two days.” Wasn’t irony supposed to have died on September 11?

And this a week after he declared January 20 to be National Sanctity of Human Life Day, which I imagined was some bizarre joke when I read the derisive references to it in Get Your War On:

“‘National Sanctity of Life Day?’ Does that have something to do with sanctions?”

“Don’t be sanctimonious! It applies to innocent fetuses in the sanctum sanctorum, not dirty, miserable children who already exist in this world of sin.”

“Maybe if Iraqi mothers fuckin’ stuffed their children back into their wombs we’d go a little easier on them.”

But it’s not a joke. It’s real, in a breathtakingly offensive way:

This Nation was founded upon the belief that every human being is endowed by our Creator with certain “unalienable rights.” Chief among them is the right to life itself. The Signers of the Declaration of Independence pledged their own lives, fortunes, and honor to guarantee inalienable rights for all of the new country’s citizens. These visionaries recognized that an essential human dignity attached to all persons by virtue of their very existence and not just to the strong, the independent, or the healthy. That value should apply to every American, including the elderly and the unprotected, the weak and the infirm, and even to the unwanted.

Every American, note. The rest of us can burn in hell.

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