The Poet's Eye 
          commentary by Lightning Rod

the Poets' Eye is skeptical
without being cynical, innocent
without being naive and
critical without being
judgemental

Mock Sovereignty

07-01-04

The Poet's Eye looks askance at the idea that just by adding another layer or two of bureaucracy, somehow Iraq has achieved sovereignty. The same organization is in charge, the flow-chart has just changed a bit.

In hereditary monarchies (like Saudi Arabia, for instance) sovereignty of the state rests on the head of one man, the king. This was the established system in the 'enlightened countries' of Western Europe for some several hundred years prior to the onset of democratic reforms shortly after the advent of the printing press. Then in countries like England, representative government began to emerge, but the symbol of sovereignty was still the crown. The crown was the continuity that passed from monarch to monarch.

"In 16th-century France Jean Bodin used the concept of sovereignty to bolster the power of the king over his feudal lords, heralding the transition from feudalism to nationalism. By the end of the 18th century, the concept of the social contract led to the idea of popular sovereignty, or sovereignty of the people, through an organized government." Encyclopedia Brittanica

With the Enlightenment and the revolutions in America and France, the idea evolved (pure heresy) that sovereignty rested with the citizens. For the last couple of hundred years we Americans have been trying to make our system work based on this idea. We have had our successes and our failures. Power has shifted from place to place from time to time just as The Founders anticipated.

The American Revolution was a glorious affair as we remember it. We have heroic portraits of Washington on the prow of a rowboat, face pelted by snow, hurling the silver dollar across the Delaware. We have Cornwallis's humble surrender which merely indicated that England was ready to wash its hands of this messy and expensive affair. At the stroke of a pen, (two years later, Treaty of Paris) sovereignty transferred from the crown of King George III to the people of the former English colonies who would eventually organize themselves into The United States of America. This was a signal moment in history and one of which Americans can rightly be proud. It symbolized the ideal of a free and robust people throwing off the yokes of economic and political tyranny and establishing for themselves a government.

This is hardly the story that we see in Iraq today. In this episode of imperialism, the redcoats have become American soldiers in camouflage and flak jackets. Citizen militias like the ones we called The Minutemen in our revolution are called insurgents if they are in Iraq today. So called sovereignty in Iraq has not risen from the native population to create a legitimate government, but has been imposed on the citizenry at the point of a gun. The transfer of sovereignty that Bushco has in mind won't be complete until there is a McDonald's, an Exxon station and a Wal-Mart at every intersection in Baghdad.

One of the definitions of sovereignty is, according to Mr. Webster: "freedom from external control." When you have better than 160,000 occupying troops in your country and your ministries are being run by puppet appointees, and your 'government' has to ask the American Embassy before it can take a crap, this is not sovereignty. This is imperialism, no matter how Bushco wants to cloak it for PR purposes. The very definition of sovereignty precludes having an occupying force in your country.

The present bunch of idiots who are running our government think that if they say something enough times, that makes it true. Even though there are no weapons of mass destruction, they think that by simple process of repetition they can convince you that these weapons existed at one time or another perhaps. They count on the theory that if they call an authorization for a police state 'The Patriot Act' that the plebes will think that it has something to do with patriotism instead of robbing them of their Constitutional rights. The 'transfer of sovereignty' in Iraq is a PR event. It reminds me of Bush's declaration of 'the end of hostilities' five hundred American bodies ago.

Can you imagine that if in 1781 when Washington and the French had Cornwallis surrounded at Yorktown, that the English had proposed an "interim government" for America? How would we have reacted to the idea of "limited sovereignty?" No. We put them on the boats back to England. After liberation, there is no occupation. It took us another six years to establish our trembling democracy after the American Revolution. If the war in Iraq was really about liberation, we should come home and let the Iraqis establish their own government.

The so-called 'coalition of the willing' is pursuing a strange course if they are to be called liberators. They are training cops. This was the same method that the British used when they colonized India. They trained large numbers of native Indians under the command of colonial officers and used them to secure the occupation. They 'put an Indian face on it.' But they didn't call it sovereignty.

When Blair and Bush smugly shook hands on the 28th, two whole days before the advertised transfer date on the 30th, they were celebrating what? A political illusion? The only transfer of sovereignty has been from one US agency to another. We have installed Iraqi puppets to do our dirty work for us.

The Poet's Eye sees that 'transfer of sovereignty' is such a joke that they should have gotten Mel Brooks to produce it.

 

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This is about sovereigns,
not Sovereignty
"Ok, boys, try not to look like insurgents."

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