February 09, 2007
The people "running" this war were never capable of distinguishing between the vision of the war they were selling to the country for propaganda purposes and the reality of what was happening. Even if torturing people to get "intelligence" was something which actually worked, the premise that such "intelligence" would actually help to solve the situation was based on the fantasy vision of what that problem was. They really believed that there were some evil masterminds with evil lairs - first former Baathists and then various "foreign fighters" - and if only they could find them and kill them then the problems would go away. There was an "enemy" which could somehow be vanquished, and once we did that the ponies would arrive.
This was a cartoon version of the war they tried to sell to the American public, but it was also what was driving their truly barbaric behavior.
That's quite right. I'll link again to Mark Danner's wonderful piece on the many different wars folks in the Bush administration thought they were fighting, which I still think is the smartest analysis of Iraq yet written. It's also worth dipping into an essay my friend Chris Hayes authored on the role World War II nostalgia played in all this. It wasn't an accident that the right kept comparing Bush to Churchill and Bush keeps comparing himself to Truman.
On September 11, 2001, George W. Bush wrote the following impression in his diary: “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.” He wasn’t alone in this assessment. In the days after the attacks, editorialists, pundits and citizens reached with impressive unanimity for this single historical precedent. The Sept. 12 New York Times alone contained 13 articles mentioning Pearl Harbor.
Five years after 9/11 we are still living with the legacy of this hastily drawn analogy. Whatever the natural similarities between December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001, the association of the two has led us to convert—first in rhetoric, later in fact—a battle against a small band of clever, murderous fundamentalists into a worldwide war of epic scale.
No leader wants to be a mediocrity, a technocrat, a manager. Even the CEO President wants to engineer a dramatic turnaround and series of takeovers, not leave a record of competent governance and incremental achievements. But Bush entered office at a moment that seemed capable of little more. No wars in the offing, no powerful enemies looming, a surplus in the budget, relatively high contentment and satisfaction among Americans. 9/11 was his chance for greatness, and he took it. But Afghanistan was too easy, too quick, too simple, too obscure. We roared to Kabul and then it was...what? Over? So the reprisal against al-Qaeda became a war against not only terror, but tyranny, and illiberalism. A war against evil. As more and more Americans recognize that deception, and as our own actions in Iraq -- which will leave the country a maelstrom of murder, chaos, and tribal enmity -- begin looking somewhat dark themselves, I wonder how great the psychological damage will be to America. Back to Chris:
It is a grand irony that Spielberg claimed repeatedly that his entire motivation behind making Saving Private Ryan was to deconstruct the simplified version of WWII that Americans had come to accept. “All wars,” he said in a typical interview, are “chambers of horrors.” And that’s certainly true of the film’s opening and of the gruesome descriptions in Ambrose’s books and Brokaw’s recounting. But what emerges from these works is a picture of war as a chamber of physical horrors—torn limbs, exposed viscera, muck, blood. Absent completely are the moral horrors of combat, the horror of taking a life, of feeling the killer within. There’s a good deal of evidence that suggests the most traumatic experience of war isn’t being the target of violence, but rather the agent. A 1994 study of post-traumatic stress in veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam found that “responsibility for killing another human being is the single most pervasive, traumatic experience of war.”
What America is going through isn't, I think, a revulsion at the physical horrors of war. Nor is it a precise analogue to the Vietnam Syndrome, wherein we question our own power. Our power is massive, our ability to salve ancient ethnic conflicts is less so, but that's a different issue. What no longer looks certain, though, is the righteousness of our cause, the morality of our mission. American exceptionalism is what's taking a beating, even among Americans. We're shocked at the moral transgression of this invasion, and the blithe ease with which the country accepted a tragic conflict which will leave, when all is said and done, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, dead. It is the ease with which we have taken those lives, and the realization that we were capable of doing so immorally and irrationally, that will be most unsettling to the American psyche.
February 9, 2007 | Permalink
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