Long gone are the days (as when George W. Bush launched the so-called “War on Terror” to believing citizens), when the US government could claim to be spreading (militarily, which is an oxymoron) some sort of enlightened “democracy” across various flashpoints and countries, particularly in Asia.
No one, not even most Americans, believe that any longer, believing instead that what the government has been about is the maintenance of the privileges and power of an entrenched oligarchy of politicians and Wall Street elites and military brass who for too long have been catering to themselves at the expense of most everyone else in the US and a crumbling U.S infrastructure.
The attention for the moment is on the excruciating wrangling in Washington and across the country over the nomination by Donald Trump of one Brett Kavanaugh, 53, a conservative judge, to the U.S Supreme Court. Several women have charged him with crude, traumatic sexual advances when he was a younger man, actions not befitting anyone who is entitled to gain a lifetime appointment to what was at least formerly considered the most august deliberative court anywhere.
And if the US Senate does vote later this week, after some albeit restricted FBI probing of the charges, to install Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the primary concern is what this entirely banal character might do to the future autonomy of women, over half the US population, to control (to use the words of one widely respected scholar and law professor of the US Constitution, Garrett Epps, who happens to be the former husband of a sister of mine, “their own reproduction, their healthcare, their contraception, their legal protection at work against discrimination and harassment”.
The question is, Epps writes, whether the US “shall move backwards to the chimera of past American greatness…when the role of women was -- supposedly for biological reasons -- subordinate to that of men”. Moreover, Professor Epps has written, this theme became obvious when Trump before the 2016 election said he would pick judges who would overturn landmark legislation that obviated punishment for women who sought abortions for an unwanted pregnancy. It is possible that this platform propelled Trump to victory in 2016 because many “Christian” evangelicals chose to ignore Trump’s own perennial immorality, believing he would end any women’s control over reproduction.
Indeed, Trump’s “base” of evangelicals has surely informed and amplified his dangerous and obtuse foreign policies in the Middle East, especially when evangelicals claim that “Israel” will usher in the return of Jesus Christ and some sort of Apocalypse -- which would, if it ever occurred and it won’t at least as they imagine, be the ruination and extinction of all of humanity, including those of Jewish faith, too. Trump and his supporters in the Republican Party, in any event, really don’t care what evangelicals or anyone else literally believe regarding religion as long as this bloc of voters continue to support the current status quo of power and privilege in Washington and elsewhere.
You’d think that anyone of sincere faith, whatever their religious faith, would have long ago rejected Trump since he is a man with no morals whatsoever, and has proven it time and again since he became an adult. As for entirely banal Brett Kavanaugh, who once advised and cheered on George W. Bush during the disastrous war on Iraq, he may well become a Supreme Court justice in a few days, but for Trump and the GOP this could become a welcome disaster for them with female voters and liberals in the midterm elections on November 6th, and GOP legislators seem unconcerned about that possibility or just blind to it.
In the broadest terms, as a “empire” of sorts that is faltering and pretends otherwise, and has few real friends overseas, any extant presumption in the US that rationality and wisdom prevail, and that the US is a beacon of it AND an exemplary “democracy”, has to be the sad joke of the century, and most Americans tremble at the growing divisions inside the US that may make the country virtually ungovernable before too long. Iran, meanwhile, a storied country with thousands of years of fascinating history, whatever its current make up and government, whatever its merits and demerits (and governmental and cultural perfection has always and everywhere been a complete chimera) suffers again because the U.S. just won’t let it and other nations alone to work out any internal social or political issues they may have.
However, despite the urgings of Trump’s Neocon advisors and the Zionists, it remains hard to believe that as long as Iran and Iranians manage to remain intact and forbearing during this difficult period, that the US will literally attack Iran militarily. That would surely be the undoing of any credibility the U.S. government still has. It was anyway refreshing to hear President Rouhani speak at the U.N.: his words were thoughtful and measured, and he wasn’t even close to being laughed at by the General Assembly as Trump clearly was.
MNA/TT