Although ample evidence abounds, it does not appear that most Americans appreciate the fact that American politics has descended into the darkest depths of (M)adness, (I)mmorality and (R)acist (S)elf-Righteousness, which I call the MIRS syndrome. Helpfully though, Ron Suskind in his 2006 book, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11, explicates MIRS’s origins in the Bush White House and illuminates its ongoing menace to us today. 

America’s New Foreign Policy: The Cheney Doctrine 

In November, 2001, not quite three months after 9/11, Suskind describes a White House meeting in the Situation Room in which then CIA Director, George Tenet, briefed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney on a Pakistani group of scientists, military men, and other leaders called UTN (Islamic Revival), who the CIA feared was involved “in making nuclear technology available to Muslim nations in the world.” 

Suskind quotes Cheney saying at that briefing, “If there’s a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response… It’s not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence. It’s about our response.”(emphasis mine) 

Suskind then interprets for us the meaning and significance of Cheney’s comment:

Once enunciated by Cheney, the doctrine was speedily embraced by Bush and elevated to his own ego-gratifying foreign policy of Preemptive War. One says “ego-gratifying” because, stripped of its pseudo-strategic political verbiage, the policy is nothing more than claiming the right to: Do Whatever one Wants, against Anyone one Wants, Whenever one Feels like it. That such an attitude is the epitome of imperial narcissism goes without saying. But it is precisely that imperial attitude that brought us the War in Iraq and now threatens to take us to war against Iran. 

Witness Bush’s Case Against Iran 

In an interview this month on German television, President Bush suggested a new - and more frightening - scenario to bolster his argument for launching military strikes against Iran. 

Iran, he said, must be prevented from acquiring the nuclear capability to attack Israel because such an attack might plunge the world into World War III. Now, leaving aside the striking similarity of this alleged cataclysmic threat to “the mushroom cloud” fiction which his administration used to hustle the nation into the war in Iraq, one is left to wonder why an Iranian attack on Israel would, ipso facto, lead to World War III when Israel’s attack on Lebanon, its unilateral air strike against Syria, Bush’s own invasion of Iraq, and even Russia’s attack on Chechnya, produced no such dire consequence. Moreover since the Washington Times last August reported that even the Pentagon planners believed it would take Iran five to eight years to build its first nuclear weapon, why is Bush attaching so much urgency to his Attack Iran Before It’s Too Late campaign? And there’s another question one might ask, just on the level of military logic… 

Let us, for a moment, assume everything Bush says is true (I know that’s hard to almost impossible, but bear with me). Why would an Iran, in its right mind, attack Israel with its five to eight nukes (the most all concede could be developed in years to come from its nuclear energy program) when Israel has hundreds of nukes with which it could retaliate? So, even taken at face value, Bush’s scare story doesn’t make sense. Perhaps, then, one must look elsewhere for an explanation of Bush’s behavior and here one recalls Bush saying that God told him to attack Iraq. Perhaps, then, he is echoing the sentiments of some of his religion-oriented supporters. 

One means by that (though its significance is not commented upon by the corporate media), that a significant portion of the Republican Party base consists not only of evangelical Christians but also of Christian Zionists who believe in “the Rapture,” i.e., that Jesus’ Second Coming is imminent. These “true believers” anticipate and look forward to “the end days,” i.e., the end of the world, which will be the preamble to the ascent into Heaven of “the anointed.” 

At the center of this apocalyptic view is the role of the Jews who are supposed to be the medium for bringing about the string of catastrophic events that will usher in the Messiah’s return. Thus these Christian Zionists have contributed millions to Israel, have established an office in Jerusalem, and fervently support Israeli influence on American Middle East policy. 

Ironically, though indispensable to the fulfillment of the prophecy, Jews are not guaranteed access to “the Kingdom” since when the Messiah comes, they will be given the opportunity to repent and embrace the true religion or be consigned to “the fiery furnace” with the rest of us. 

Now why do I bring up this seemingly tangential concern? Because it brings us back to the MIRS syndrome and reinforces a point made by Bill Fletcher in one of his most recent Black Commentator articles when he opined that, with this administration, we may be dealing with “maniacs,” Bill wrote:

Nor is Bill speaking for himself alone, since no less a distinguished personage than Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency, said the same thing in Vienna this June: that an attack on Iran “would be an act of madness.” 

But it is not only the current administration we have to worry about. Ponder the fate of the nation in the hands of the candidates now running for the Republican presidential nomination who are, presumably, the ‘‘best and brightest” that their party has to offer…If they are, consider who and what they really represent, i.e., the MIRS syndrome again. 

For example, in the Republican presidential primary debate in New Hampshire in June, Romney and Giuliani, the two Republican frontrunners according to the polls, both refused to rule out attacking Iran with nuclear weapons! 

Nor is military mindlessness their affliction alone, since nearly all of the other Republican candidates dismissed evolution and affirmed their belief in creationism. While on the racial front, the four top candidates, Guiliani, McCain, Romney and Thompson, disdained to show up for the September debate at historically black Morgan State, pleading “schedule conflicts,” even though the debate had been cleared with Republican officials back in February! And to emphasize even further the Republican disinterest in black and brown people, Univision, the Spanish-language media company, had to cancel its debate on Hispanic issues when only McCain agreed to appear. So we have military “maniacs” on the one hand, and/or racially contemptuous moral defectives on the other. 

But don’t think of green-lighting the war on Iran as just a Republican Party malady because - four months before the Republicans had their June debate in New Hampshire, Hilary Clinton, at a February 1st dinner organized by AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, (for a full discussion of the role of AIPAC, see The Isreal Lobby (Mearsheimer & Walt, 2007) foreshadowed the Republican anti-Iran chorus when she said: 

And, black people, don’t gloat. Obama made essentially the same pledge to Israel’s supporters. Thus, we have an unforgivable political bipartisanship with Democrats as well as Republicans marching to Bush’s drumbeat for war. 

The War on Terror Blowback: We Are Not Safer 

Those people who mistakenly believe that George Bush’s John Wayneism has made us safer are delusional because exactly the opposite is true. 

In point of fact, terrorist attacks have increased not decreased since 9/11! According to a study conducted last year, NYU’s Center on Law and Security found that fatal terrorist attacks around the world after 9/11 had increased over 600% since the US invaded Iraq!! 

They occurred in the Madrid train station in 2004,on London buses in 2005, and in a foreigner-frequented nightclub in Bali, Indonesia where Americans were known to hang out - but wound up killing mostly Australians.(When Bush subsequently visited Indonesia, his handlers, fearful for his safety, flew him back thirteen hours to the safe haven of Hawaii rather than risk his spending the night in that most Muslim land. Indeed there is nowhere in the world - except in Rumsfeld’s “New Europe,” or in carefully sanitized Republican events here at home - that Bush can go, where he is not the target of outraged protests.) 

There have also been terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia on a housing compound where Americans used to reside, as well as attacks in Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, and, of course, in Afghanistan, where the suicide bombing strategy, perfected in Iraq, has now been exported with lesson-learned perfection. 

What these attacks all have in common is that they were directed against states and individuals seen as collaborators with the United States, which means that we are now living in a new age, facing a new peril, whose guiding principle seems to be: Collaboration with the United States Equals Death. 

One sees that equation especially at work in Iraq where Iraqis working for the United States, go to great lengths to hide that fact from their fellow Iraqis. Indeed many, to save their lives, have been forced, like their two and half million fellow-citizens, to flee to Jordan and Syria who now, unable to support the massive exodus, have closed their borders. 

Again, to reiterate the point about what is now categorically different: in decades past, those nation states alleged to be “enemies” by the United States, like Russia, Cuba, China, North Korea, etc. always distinguished between the United States government and the American people but that is no longer the case. We are now no longer dealing with nation states but with mobile groups and individuals who perceive America to be what the late Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran dubbed her: The Great Satan, and perceive Americans, in general, to be as culpable as their government. 

Why is that, you ask? 

Well, there are several reasons. One is due to the failure of the Democratic Party to make it clear to the world that Bush stole elections 2000 and 2004. Thus, despite the recent rebuttal by the women’s bridge team in China, that “We didn’t vote for Bush,” most of the world believes that a majority of Americans support Bush and his policies of torture, military tribunals, elimination of habeas corpus, unilateralism, etc., etc. Or, as one British newspaper asked after the 2004 election: “How can 59 million people be so stupid?” 

But the Islamic world is more potently aggrieved because 

Remember that the latest estimates of civilians killed in Iraq range from 600,000 to 1.2 million or ten to twenty percent as many as the number of Jews killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust. But few Americans put these deaths into context or call them by their proper name: war crimes. And what animus do you think the relatives and friends and co-religionists of these deceased bear toward the United States? 

Well, we don’t have to guess because one terrorist group has asserted that Muslims have the right to kill four million Americans, including two million children, in proportionate revenge for those whom Bush has killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. So are we safer? I don’t think so. 

Is it not clear therefore that the depths to which American political culture - and its political system - have sunk cannot be overcome by conventional politics; that an unprecedented political movement is needed to save us from — and empower us to prevail over — the fools and fanatics who now rule, or aspire to rule, over us and who, in supporting or capitulating to Bush and Cheney’s imperial dementia, have placed us all, wittingly and unwittingly, in mortal danger? 

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, William L. (Bill) Strickland - teaches political science in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is also the Director of the Du Bois Papers Collection. The Du Bois Papers are housed at the University of Massachusetts library, which is named in honor of this prominent African American intellectual and Massachusetts native. Professor Strickland is a founding member of the independent black think tank in Atlanta the Institute of the Black World (IBW), headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Strickland was a consultant to both series of the prize-winning documentary on the civil rights movement, Eyes on the Prize (PBS Mini Series Boxed Set), and the senior consultant on the PBS documentary, The American Experience: Malcolm X: Make It Plain.  He also wrote the companion book Malcolm X: Make It Plain. Most recently, Professor Strickland was a consultant on the Louis Massiah film on W.E.B. Du Bois - W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices. Click here to contact Mr. Strickland.