The conventional wisdom on Iraq for decades was that it was a country of three different ethnicities, cobbled together by the British into one national unit.  Not a nation.  A national unit.  And it was held together as a national unit by a dictatorial strongman, whom the United States had alternately supported and fought.  Take away the strongman, the conventional wisdom went, and Iraq would disintegrate into a bloody fight for turf between the different ethnicities.  This viewpoint was held at almost all levels of world and American foreign policy and intelligence establishments through multiple presidential administrations.
 
George W. Bush and many other conservatives say that 9/11 changed everything.  It changed US domestic policies, especially the need for internal security measures.  And it changed US foreign policies.  And somehow, they decided, it changed the conventional wisdom regarding Iraq.  No longer was Iraq a national unit cobbled and held together by a dictatorial strongman.  Somehow, an attack by a group of Saudi nationals on US soil using US commercial airliners transformed Iraq into a multi-ethnic society ripe for immediate transformation into a multi-ethnic peaceful democracy.  Most of the inhabitants of this country accepted this astounding non-sequitur unquestioningly, and offered up their money and many, their children, husbands, and wives to the claimed change.  Had they been told that the attack by the Saudi nationals had destroyed Frank Zappa’s posthumous reputation as a guitarist, or that it had caused the corn crop in the southwest corner of Iowa to fail, they presumably would have been dubious.  And yet when told that the attack had transformed the decades old conventional wisdom about ethnic rivalries in an ancient country, they bought it, and have paid for it, and have even died for it.
 
Most of us know now, if we didn’t know then, that the transformation was not in Iraq, but in the mind of George W. Bush.  For in the wake of 9/11, Iraq remained more or less Iraq, a national unit cobbled and held together by a dictatorial strongman.  And yet it is even fair to question just how much change actually took place in Mr. Bush’s mind.  For when the President and his henchmen and supporters say that 9/11 changed everything, what they really mean is that 9/11 gave them carte blanche to change everything, or more specifically, to change whatever they felt like changing.  Like the non-sequitur of Iraq, many of the changes that they have insisted appeared out of 9/11 now seem so unconnected that clear thinking can only lead one to believe that those changes have really been only Oz-like coverings for their long-held static beliefs.
 
This talk about changes is slippery.  In the interconnected world in which we live, everything changes everything every minute, including us.  A prevailing notion of chaos theory is that a butterfly flaps its wings and a tornado forms in response in the atmosphere.  Perhaps 9/11 really did have an effect on the southwest Iowa corn crop.  Buddhism, to which I subscribe, has held this viewpoint on the nature of things for millennia.  And so perhaps it is that we should not be surprised that 9/11 might change everything, but instead we should be surprised at how little 9/11 really changed, how 9/11 in a way stands as a colossal exception to the rule of change.  For 9/11 should have led directly and immediately to true change in many things.  It should have changed American energy policy within a week, American environmental policies within months, global education efforts within the first quarter, nuclear arms reduction efforts within the first years, and impressed upon the entire world how vital peace is as the buildings themselves fell.
 
One of my favorite poems is “The Beautiful Changes” by Richard Wilbur, written in 1947.  Wilbur, keep in mind, was a young man who had just served as a soldier in WWII.
 
One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides
The Queen Anne's Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.
 
The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon's tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.
 
Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things' selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.
 
And so it is that we wait, and we work, for beautiful changes.  That was what George W. Bush promised to so many, but he has instead delivered only ugliness everywhere and in everything he touches, a bleak and depressing landscape of manifested non-sequiturs.  Your membership with KPFT 90.1 Pacifica Radio enables this radio network, this radio station to keep working for more beautiful, more noble changes.  Your membership is beautiful, and the beautiful changes.  I hope that during this fund drive you will consider how much your membership and your donation are needed, for the words that you hear now are made possible by you, and only by you.  Won’t you take the time today to change everything?
 
I’m Leo Gold.  This is the New Capital Show.