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Afghanistan Proves It
By David Michael Green
03/26/07 "ICH
" -- --What I often find most astonishing
about the scorched earth tactics the regressive right uses to
sell its policies is how utterly lame they are. Utterly, and
embarrassingly lame.
If you just
stop to think for a moment about most of them, they are
transparently foolish on their surface, and often laughably so.
I realize that that’s a big if for a lot of folks, but still...
C’mon, people!
The
administration has invested the most energy of all in its
efforts to justify its war in Iraq, a war gone so terribly
wrong, even by their standards and intentions. That was true
before the war when it was relatively easy, with a compliant
press and a frightened so-called opposition party, to gear up a
giant merchandising machine to get the public – also frightened
at the time, though for very different reasons – to believe that
Saddam was Satan incarnate, and that Iraq had to be invaded
pronto. And it’s been true ever since, when much the same
approach has been used to browbeat opponents to the war, which
group is increasingly just about synonymous with the entire
American electorate.
It helped a lot
that Saddam truly was a beast – if not The Beast – and that 9/11
was still relatively close in the rearview mirror. Just the
same, and even without mentioning the dirty little secret that
we had helped create Saddam originally – and had ignored, when
we weren’t abetting, his worst crimes prior to 1990 – it still
took some serious propaganda of the kind Goebbels could have
admired to move public opinion sufficiently to launch the war.
Hey, wasn’t it Osama that did 9/11? Aren’t we supposed to be
fighting al Qaeda? True, those Arabs are all alike (even the
ones in Iran, who aren’t even Arabs), but this still seems a
little fishy.
But just in
case you had ever doubted the perceptiveness and prescience of
George Orwell before, you knew the man was a genius when a poll
demonstrated that by the summer of 2003 69 percent of Americans
had come to believe that Saddam had a direct part in planning
the attack on New York and Washington. Ironically, it would now
appear that George W. Bush had more to do with that little crime
– at least by allowing, if not perpetrating it – than did
Saddam, but that’s a story for another day and another essay.
Poor, stupid
Karl Rove (heck, nowadays even he probably agrees with that
assessment). If you could get that many dummies to plunk down
for such a transparently absurd little Mid-Eastern war, he
probably should have been selling them two-acre plots of green
cheese on the Moon, instead. You know, take the money and run.
Get while the gettin’ is good. All that. He probably could
have set up shop on a beach in the Marshall Islands without fear
of extradition (they already do everything we tell them to,
anyhow), sipping daiquiris and watching his money grow. Maybe
he didn’t cause he knows the truth about that other little scam
they’ve been peddling in America, and realized that global
warming will soon put that country forever in the drink.
But, seriously,
you gotta figure that even the Bush junta were themselves
probably amazed at the success of the ludicrous invasion whopper
they’d managed to foist upon a breathtakingly foolish public,
nearly the only one in the world who went for this walking
non-sequitur of a war. Then again, once you’ve put a guy like
George Bush in the White House, claiming as one of his great
achievements that he licked forty-year alcohol addiction, you
probably figure it is impossible to underestimate the stupidity
of the American public. Then, yet further, again, you’ve
probably also been part of the long-term conspiracy of dumbing
down American politics, which makes it even less likely that
you’d be surprised.
There was so
much that was inane about the claims that were made at the
time. Fifteen of the so-called hijackers were from Saudi
Arabia, and none from Iraq, but nary a word was said about
that. Iraq had never attacked the United States. Iraq had
never threatened the United States. Iraq was such a big bad
looming power that at the time it controlled a whopping
one-third of its own airspace. Iraq was so powerful that half a
million of its people had just died from disease and starvation
because of the American-led sanctions. Iraq was imminently
preparing to use its weapons of mass destruction that the UN
inspectors couldn’t find. Donald Rumsfeld knew exactly where
the WMD was, but somehow couldn’t get the message to the
inspectors (or maybe they just couldn’t get batteries for their
GPS units). Bush, out of his deep concern for international
law, was going to war to enforce the will of the UN Security
Council, which had refused to pass a resolution sanctioning
war. Even after the US had nearly snapped off the arm of every
member-state, bending them behind their backs to torture them
into voting aye.
Iraq was such a
ticking time-bomb that we had to get the inspectors out and bomb
before they used their WMD they didn’t have. Iraq followed the
UN resolution and reported that it had destroyed all its WMD,
which proved that they obviously hadn’t. Iraq was somehow
singularly immune from the laws of deterrence, which had
miraculously kept the Soviet Union, with its 20,000-plus nuclear
warheads from attacking the United States because of the sure
annihilation which would come in response. But that would never
work against the “madman” Saddam. Who was worse than Hitler.
Etc., etc. Yadda, yadda and lots more yadda.
Isn’t it
amazing? I mean, this is only a partial roll-call of the stuff
that was either clearly known or easily logically deducible at
the time. Forget about what we later learned (er, some of us,
anyhow) from the Downing Street Memos, from the Circus
Powellimus tour de force at the UN, from the Libby trial, and
more. It is astonishing that so much flat-out dishonesty could
be crammed into just one single fiasco, with the American public
signing on the dotted line.
The list goes
on and on, but the one that slays me most to this day is the
small bit of logic concerning opposition to the war that somehow
fell through the memory hole.
Those who had
the audacity to oppose the war in 2003 were excoriated in the
worst terms, whether they were bleeding-heart liberals,
perfidious Frenchmen, or even the odd Republican. We were
unpatriotic. We were disloyal. We were America-haters. We
were weak. We were effete. We were appeasers. We were
Defeatocrats. We were moral relativists. We gave aid and
comfort to America’s enemies. We were called cowards by
super-patriots who had always found ways to not quite make it to
Vietnam when it was their turn. We were even called treasonous
by those who would later expose a CIA undercover agent, just to
discredit her husband for uncovering some of Bush’s lies in
selling the war. I’m surprised they didn’t also call us
poorly-groomed, but maybe Hannity or Drudge or one of those
idiots actually did, and I just (mercifully) missed it.
In fact, we
still are called all those things today. But next time somebody
lays one of these golden-oldie absurdities on you, just ask them
one question in response. Ask them to name one liberal, one
Democrat, or – for that matter – one French president, German
chancellor or weaselly UN official who opposed the American
invasion of Afghanistan. Just one.
Now watch the
smoke rise up from under their collar and out their ears as
their regressive circuits fry. ‘Cause here’s the problem for
them, and here’s the simple tonic to all their efforts and
winning through intimidation and character assassination what
they can’t win with facts and logic: The Afghanistan invasion
was a scant single year before Iraq. If the American-hating,
weak-kneed, defeatist appeasers who undermined the troops by
opposing the Iraq war were in fact all those things, how is that
they weren’t so just a year earlier?
Did something
strange happen to them during 2002? Did they start the year
with big, brassy, red-white-and-blue balls clanging about in
their pants, only to somehow finish it pathetically searching
hither and yon for their gone-missing now-shriveled raisins?
Did the iron-rich, good-old fashioned American blood that
coursed through their veins in January somehow dilute itself
down to a thin, ironic, post-modernist French relativist anemia
by December?
Yes, yes, it’s
all quite possible. Quite possible, quite possible. But
usually it is the simplest solutions to puzzles which turn out
most often to be correct. So let’s just try this one on for
size: Maybe the reason that the same people who applauded the
Afghan war then opposed the Iraq war is because they saw the
first one as justified and the second one as not. Maybe the
reason that virtually the entire world community supported the
invasion of one Muslim country and even volunteered to
participate (and, yes, that includes the French and Germans),
but has reviled the other invasion is because the first country
was sheltering the folks who did 9/11, and the second had not a
damn thing to do with that attack, nor any other against the
United States.
I know it’s
hard for my conservative friends to imagine, but not every war
an American president chooses to fight is a good one. To
understand this complicated concept, perhaps it will prove
helpful for them to cast their memories way back into American
history, and remember how the opposition party treated Bill
Clinton over Bosnia and Kosovo. Uh-oh. I’m seeing smoke rising
again. Well, so be it. The truth is that some people are
capable of thinking for themselves (no!), and when they do, a
whole lot of them look at the casus belli for Iraq and see
nothing but rank garbage, with a heavy seasoning of tragedy.
Afghanistan
proves it. It proves that neither left-leaning Americans (like
Brent Scowcroft, for example, or George H. W. Bush) nor just
about everybody else throughout the entire world opposed the
invasion of Iraq because they hate America, or because they are
weak on national security. They opposed it because the goddam
thing was based entirely on lies. They opposed it because
destroying a country without the justification of national
defense or in response to a prior attack is a crime against
humanity, plain and simple. Or, like Messrs. Scowcroft and Bush
the Elder, who are rather less troubled by such petty moral
nuisances than you or I, they opposed it because they knew it
had disaster written all over it.
Afghanistan
proves that when the foaming right attacks anybody living in the
now ever-expanding “reality-based community” as wimpy or
appeasing, they are in fact only attesting to the poverty of
their case. And deep down, they know it too. They know they
could never win on facts (and that was true even if Iraq had
gone swimmingly), and so they rely instead on lies and character
assassination. You see, you’re not wrong about Iraq because the
president didn’t lie our way into it, or because Cheney wasn’t
full of crap when he said we’d be greeted as liberators, or
because Rumsfeld wasn’t stretching a wee bit when he said we
knew exactly where the WMD were. Oh, no. You’re wrong about
Iraq because you hate America and you’re a sissy. (You’re also
probably gay, and French to boot, but we needn’t mention that.
We’ll just hint at it.)
Yep, if only
you could be strong and manly and Republican and a red-blooded
‘Murican through and though, you’d support a tough American
foreign policy. With other people’s kids, of course. I mean,
you wouldn’t actually have to do any fighting yourself. You
just talk the talk, rack up the draft deferments, win the
elections, and let the sons and daughters of lily-livered
Defeatocrats do the actual killing and dying part.
Not only does
Afghanistan prove that the right is desperately lying (what,
again?) when they accuse opponents of the Iraq war of not being
serious about national security, it also proves something else.
Afghanistan proves that, in fact, the reverse is true – that
they’re the ones who are not serious about national security.
Anybody here
still remember a fella named Osama? Remember how that really
macho other fella, the one sporting the
looks-like-he-bought-it-off-the-shelf-of-a-Wal-Mart Texas
swagger, said he and his bad posse was gonna bring the first
fella in, “dead or alive”? Well, guess what? It’s now been
over five year since that particular date that they can never
stop reminding us about, but somehow they decline to remind us
also of the fact that Mr. bin Laden and his colleagues remain
free to this day, happily ensconced in their mountain lair,
plotting the next attack just like the one on... well, you know
the date. (And if you don’t, just see every other word of every
single speech (still!) delivered by George Bush. Maybe we
should get it over with and start calling it Bush Day.)
The honest
truth is that the Iraq invasion was not only not in the interest
of national security, it was actually cataclysmically and quite
demonstrably detrimental to our national security. Think about
it. Suppose you wanted to invent a foreign policy that would
maximize the damage to your country. I suppose I have to
concede that provoking Russia into a nuclear exchange probably
would win the prize here for best performance by a country
attempting to commit national suicide. But short of that, how
about a nice little third-world war that locks up all your land
forces, costs a couple of trillion, kills about a million
people, makes another four million or so into refugees,
alienates the entire rest of the planet, divides your country at
home, recruits droves of new suicide-bombing enemies, massively
strengthens the hand of a hostile bad actor in the neighborhood,
and risks a regional multinational religious cataclysm along
with a global economic depression? Oh, and also all this having
nothing – absolutely zero – to do with attacking the enemies who
are actually at war with you.
Seriously, if
you sat down with pen and paper to design a more catastrophic
bit of self-destructive stupidity, could you possibly top George
Bush’s little Iraqi stinker, apart from the nuclear exchange
scenario? I doubt it. This war has not only failed to enhance
American security, it has radically diminished it. And by
indulging in this pet project which many thoughtful analysts
have now come to rightly describe as the worst foreign policy
blunder in American history, instead of actually pursuing the
folks who did 9/11, the Bush administration and its cheerleaders
from the Armageddon Army of the Fright-Right have demonstrated
that they are the ones who actually are not serious about
American security.
I once stopped
for breakfast at a roadside New Hampshire diner in the middle of
nowhere. Evidently, it was run by some devout Christians who
were anxious to provide us patrons with a side-order of
proselytizing to go along with our waffles (at no additional
charge, too!). There was literature everywhere, and the menu
was prominently adorned with the phrase, “Easter Proves It”.
Now, I
generally figure that those who need to shout to you how
convinced they are of something are typically the ones who are
actually most in need, deep down, of the reassurance they’re
offering others. But even apart from that, it wasn’t exactly
clear to me what was meant to be proving what here. Surely they
didn’t mean that the existence of bunnies and colored eggs
proved that their god was the right and true god. Did they? I
suppose it had something to do with the resurrection story and
all that, which, interestingly, appears to be more challenged
than ever these days, as far as I can see. Seems like
everybody’s coming out of the woodwork nowadays to say that
Jesus came down off the cross and finished out life raising a
family and – who knows? – sitting around the telly on weekends
rooting for the home team with twelve of his closest buddies.
But there
more’s than a whiff of this same maniacal urge to
self-reassurance-through-marketing in the Bush Believers camp
these days (who anyhow overlap to a considerable degree the
Easter Proves It crowd, and who may well have learned on Sundays
their handy techniques for stabilizing a shaky psyche). I mean,
what kind of powerful delusory tactics are required for the 29
percent in this country who are still giving this guy a positive
job approval rating? After blowing our defense before 9/11,
losing two wars, watching a city drown, turning a massive
federal surplus into a massive deficit, leaving wounded vets to
rot with cockroaches in Army hospitals, hiring and firing US
attorneys to do political prosecutions, and the treasonous
exposure of an undercover CIA agent and her network to punish a
political enemy for telling the truth about their lies – after
all that, what kind of serious hallucinogens are needed to give
your approval to this president? And where can a fella get
ahold of some of those?
It’s truly
scary, but at least this mindset might provide us a small handle
– the slightest beachhead in the minds of the massively deluded
– when they trot out all the usual shibboleths about our
feckless failures at patriotism, just because we don’t happen to
agree that it was such a hot idea to plunge all of America’s
land forces into the festering open wound of an unwinnable war
that nothing to do with our country’s security. Or that failing
to seriously fight a war that had everything to do with American
security, and thus leaving dangerous enemies free to strike us
again, was not a good idea. Call me crazy, if you must, but I
don’t think those are particularly good presidential decisions.
And it looks to me like you pretty much have to be an ordained
deacon in the Church of Bush to even continue going through the
motions of arguing they were.
Arguing with
dogma is like trying to negotiate with a tsunami. The
likelihood that even your most powerfully persuasive
applications of empirical fact and logical reasoning will
succeed in getting either to change course is, shall we say,
less than outstanding.
But next time
you find yourself in one of those inane conversations with a
True Believer from the regressive right (and, if you’re like me,
you really just don’t bother much anymore), just tell ‘em:
“Afghanistan proves it”.
David
Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra
University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers'
reactions to his articles (mailto:dmg@regressiveantidote.net),
but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to
respond. More of his work can be found at his website,
www.regressiveantidote.net.
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