It’s time for a new regime in Washington because the old regime suffers from a dangerous lack of imagination.
After all the old reasons for invading Iraq — weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist, democracy that wasn’t implemented, torture that continued — fell away, this is what the hawkish Bush administration had left: well, we had to do something.
You’ll hear this refrain repeated on right-wing talk radio shows and websites: when someone points out that the war in Iraq didn’t work, the exasperated defender of it all spits out the phrase, “well, we had to do something!”
Perhaps we didn’t have to do something, and perhaps we did. That’s an argument for historians to settle, but for the moment let’s just accept the premise that something did have to be done regarding Iraq. In the dichotomous black/white, on/off, good/evil vision of the Bush administration and its ideological sympathizers, there were and are only two options: war, or nothing. For dichotomous thinkers like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, there is only one kind of action and only one tool, and that is the action of violence with the tool of warfare. Bush and his fellow travelers are blind to other opportunities, and so they are incapable of taking them.
If we want a government which will look for and seize non-violent opportunities for action in the world, we need to put people in charge of the government who can see them. That means we’ll need some regime change in 2008. But don’t be worried by the use of that language. You see, there are plenty of non-violent ways of bringing regime change about. The election of progressive candidates with open vision is one of them. Open your eyes and be on the lookout.
