Profiling Muslims, Arabs, Persians, Asians, etc. etc.?
In every age ... the ultimate sources of war are the beliefs of those in power: "their idea about what is of most fundamental importance and may therefore ultimately be worth a war."
- Evan Luard, International War
James Dobbins, director of the Defense Policy Center at Rand, recently wrote in Foreign Affairs that “by losing the trust of the Iraqi people, the Bush administration has already lost the war.” Moderate Iraqis can still win the war but only if they wean themselves from Washington, “the United States should reduce and ultimately eliminate its military presence,” Dobbins added.
The ongoing indictments against the war in Iraq now come from every reputable institution, conservative and liberal, government and non-governmental. Most of the Christian world has turned against the United States over this preemptive war against a corrupt, tyrannical but recognized sovereign nation state.
But, and this is too well-known to argue, Mr. Bush will not have any critique of his policies. Not at the White House, you are fired; not at the Pentagon, the Office of Special Plans not abolished; nor at CIA where Boss Goss oversees a purge of professional analysts and senior members not seen since the days of Stalin.
The answer to all these heady indicators of trouble inside the Beltway? Blame it all on 9/11. Place the blame on Arabs, all Arabs, all Muslims. Bush said that everything had changed because of 9/11. It didn’t have to and it shouldn’t have.
Leadership is in question. Every act of subordinates flow back to the leader, the President. Subordinates reflect the leader’s lead: whether it is torture, killing civilians, random atrocities against insurgents and even the hubris of “hurrah,” in the face of meager victories.
Ideas held by the domestic population flow back to the President. Concepts quietly slipped into the consciousness of day to day lives of the citizenry are those of reaction. We refuse to admit that due to our policies the entire Muslim world, once so divided, are now of one mind: that Americans hate Muslims. A Muslim world unified because of U.S. policies, not because “they” hate our freedoms, “they” hate democracy, “they” hate our way of life! Not even Bush’s Defense Science Board believed that pre-9/11 and now its September 2004 Report rejects it once again stating: “[w]e must understand the U.S. is engaged in a generational and global struggle of ideas, not a war between the West and Islam.”
The world hates our government and corporate policies abroad in their countries. But rather than allow the policies to be looked at, altered, ameliorated, changed drastically, Mr. Bush reacts in a most expected way. Blame all Muslims and especially Arab state Muslims for everything failing in America; take away their civil liberties and end our domestic disputes by racial profiling of yet another internal enemy of the state.
Hannah Arendt observed that every state with ambitions abroad will “attempt to divide mankind into master and slave races, into higher and lower breeds, into colored and white men, ... all of which were attempts in the past to unify the people on the basis of the mob.” She called it tribal nationalism.
It has been a staple of our liberal free Republic no less than the old Soviet Union. Arendt noted well that it was important to see “Nazism and the Holocaust as something entirely comprehensible” though by no means determined within a historical-geographical trajectory.
Americans didn’t mind Chinese building our railroads for pennies a day, as long as they all lived in China-town -- still. We alternatively hated Irish Catholics -- then Protestant Irish; we despised greasy Italians only to make it greasy Mexicans; we alternated between hating and segregating our foreign enemies’ domestic equivalents: the Japanese while allowing German Americans a free ride, after all, America almost chose German as our national language over English. And Americans really didn’t care too much for those Jews either, now did we? - still. Native Americans? - still!
Vietnamese shrimp fishermen were beaten and killed in the Gulf States of America, particularly but not peculiarly in Texas, long after we had lost the war in Vietnam. We incarcerated, banned and blacklisted liberals during the deaf days of McCarthyism. Our own Uncle Joe calling one and all ensnared, socialists and communists. Like Fox’s talking-head bigot brown-shirts do today, - still.
Bigots forgetting that all the Founding Fathers were liberals with such fine liberal tokens passing muster as free speech, the right to practice one’s religion unmolested by the state and the right to keep and bear arms: a decidedly liberal experiential notion that the state might return to tyranny at any turn of events, profiling yet another internal threat ... all these were highly liberal notions of the day, - still.
But let us go ahead and profile all Muslims, take away their civil liberties: Arab Muslims first but let us not forget the Persian Muslims and so may of them are so very white in skin tone. Add Algerian Muslims, who are so very brown in skin tone. Add Asian Muslims from Indonesia to Burma, Azerbaijan to China: ah yes, China’s Urghers who look like the Dali Lama’s Tibetan brothers. Then add the Chechyan rebels of the former Soviet Union and those rabble in the Balkans who we once helped in Kosova, they may join Al Qaeda at any moment?
Better be smart about this. We need to fingerprint, infiltrate, surveillance of all opposition that direct dissent at the American Imperium. Just as we did during Woodstock, love-ins, anti-war groups and Yippies. (I still do not know exactly what a Yippie was but I know they must have been a threat because Nixon said so.)
Or shall we wait until we get hit by terrorists again like 9/11 or the World Trade Center bombing that preceded that? Or the worst terrorist act in American history pre-9/11? Oklahoma City and that irascible Timothy McVeigh? Linked inextricably to the clandestine Militia Phantom cell groups, McVeigh, a Caucasian Christian, U.S. combat veteran of Gulf War I, was no Muslim. Indeed, after over 600 exploded pipe bombs, trains derailed, homes torched, bank robberies, death threats against everyone that opposed their movement from radio stations to liberal Constitutionalists, threatened and kidnapped judges, these Caucasian Christian groups presaged these days.
Should we not think about profiling American Caucasian Christian militants whose acts of violence during the 1990s were nearly equal to 9/11 over an entire decade?
The state cannot stop with Arab Muslims. The threats are too varied, too many, and too often too white.
--Craig B Hulet? Quinault Rain Forest June 2005
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Craig B Hulet was Special Assistant for Special Projects to Congressman Jack Metcalf (Retired); he is periodically a consultant to federal law enforcement ATF&E of Justice/Homeland Security; he has written four books on international relations and philosophy, his latest is The Hydra of Carnage: Bush’s Imperial War-making and the Rule of Law - An Analysis of the Objectives and Delusions of Empire. Mr. Hulet served in Vietnam 1969-70, 101st Airborne, C Troop 2/17th Air Cav graduated 3rd in his class at Aberdeen Proving Grounds Ordnance School MOS 45J20 Weapons.
Hulet will be giving a lecture July 8th at the Wyndham Commerce Hotel in Commerce CA at 7:30PM -- info is at www.kcandassociates.org -- Hulet can be reached by white serial e-mailers at
cali@localaccess.com 