Despots R Us
They've Got the Guns But We've Got the Numbers

By: Alan Bisbort

Bush's arrogance may cost us for quite a while.

While I try to keep my personal life out of this space, sometimes world events conspire to spill over into my home. So, a disclosure: my wife is also a columnist. Though we are far enough apart on some issues to make for lively dinner-table discussions - in between playing "Itsy Bitsy Spider" with our son - she and I rarely argue over politics.

It's not unusual for us to run column ideas by each other, for some usually reliable feedback. When Bush invaded Iraq, my wife was assigned to write a column - to run as a sidebar to the news stories about the war - about notorious despots of world history. She wondered if I had some reliable statistics about how many people had been the victims of despots like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin - all the usual and "acceptable" suspects.

Though I was not trying to play devil's advocate, I thought it would be more truthful - as far as any of us can really know the truth about these gruesome matters - to find out what her newspaper deemed a "despot". Was there a certain number who had to be killed by this "despot", or illegally incarcerated, tortured, mutilated, raped, etc., to qualify for this honorific?

"It all depends on how you define despot, honey", I began, pedantically. "Some would consider the Shah and Ferdinand Marcos despots, as well as Augusto Pinochet, General Somoza, Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier, and Colonel Noriega. But all of these were our close allies in the 1970's and 1980's. And so was Saddam Hussein in the early 1980's, when the Reagan administration set him up with chemical, biological, and other weapons of mass destruction."

It dawned on me then how the mainstream press - for which my wife toils - would be playing this invasion of Iraq: as a giant Morality Play, us (good) vs. them (evil). This, despite the fact, as Oscar Arias, former Costa Rican president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate pointed out at last Thursday's Connecticut Forum, 90% of the world's population is opposed to Bush's war. Because of Bush's arrogance, Arias warned, the 21^st Century may be the Anti-American Century, just as the 20^th Century had been the American Century.

"People all over the world were grateful to you after World War II and the end of the Cold War. But don't mistake gratitude for servitude", said this brave, diminutive man, who stood down the Reagan administration without a single weapon and brought peace to Central America.

As for the semantics of "despot", Arias pointed out what no one in this country dares admit: "We all talk about terrorism, but let me tell you, your dropping bombs on civilians in Baghdad might be the definition of terrorism."

Americans want this war in digestible chunks. They want this banquet of bombs done, and the dishes washed and put away in time for Opening Day. The sidebar on famous despots that my wife was asked to write seemed tailor-made for such a short order. And so, I was about to point out to her what Arias suggested - that to some people, George W. Bush is a despot. But she drew me up short and said, in so many words, "Just the stats, man, stow the political diatribe."

Surely, this is boiling over in homes nationwide at the moment. Americans are decent people and I sincerely believe they are being visited by a sinking sense that we are involved in something indecent.

My sense of Bush as a despot was confirmed when it was noted by a Knight Ridder correspondent that, just prior to addressing the nation on March 20, he was pumping his fist in the air, mugging for cameras and saying things like "feels good".

This, my fellow Americans, is a sick man. I can't prove it, of course, and my charge can easily be dismissed as partisan demonizing (something the right wing does so much better than I do). But I know this in my gut. It's just palpably, undeniably there, if you have the stomach to look for it.

But let me share a hopeful little secret: Their power, their arsenal, their illegal searches and seizures and intimidations, and so on and so forth, all of it ultimately is within our means to control. As Jim Morrison once so perfectly put it: "They've got the guns but we've got the numbers."

Indeed, in his brilliant two-part Harper's essay, "No More Unto the Breach", Jonathan Schell cites Gandhi as Exhibit A. "The central role of consent in all government meant that noncooperation - the withdrawal of consent - was something more than a morally satisfying activity", writes Schell. "It was a powerful weapon in the real world."

Gandhi said: "No government can exist for a single moment without the cooperation of the people, willing or forced, and if people suddenly withdraw their cooperation in every detail, the government will come to a standstill."

He, like Arias, defeated an empire without firing a single shot.