What better journalistic symbol of the
Beltway know-it-alls than the Washington Post? Their coverage
of the Iraq debate in the run-up to invasion mirrored the uncritical
assumptions and stereotyped thinking that led to our quest for
"weapons of mass destruction" that didn't
exist – and their commentary in many instances epitomized the hubris that led
to what General William E. Odom rightly
describes as the biggest
military blunder in our history. Post editorialists
contributed mightily to
the misinformation that was deliberately
spread by the administration, and their columnists were first to
jump on the pro-war bandwagon, with Charles
Krauthammer and the neocon brigade leading the charge. Now, as
the nation observes the fifth anniversary of this avoidable
catastrophe, we are subjected to yet
more editorials taking opponents of this war to task: those who
call for withdrawal of US forces, the editors of the Post
aver, are being "unrealistic."
It isn't enough that half a
million or more Iraqis, and 4,000 Americans (plus 50,000
wounded) have paid a horrific price for the Post's
abdication of its journalistic responsibility – they want more
victims.
The Post's latest peroration takes the familiar form of
the "hard realities" trope: only they, being responsible
and sober
sorts, have the verve to take on the Hard Realities – first and
foremost of which is the utter impossibility of leaving Iraq in the
foreseeable future. This is the conventional wisdom in the
Washington Beltway, as pervasive as antiwar feeling is beyond the
boundaries of that narrow province.
The editors take a perfunctory jab at the President, who
"rightly" claims "credit" for the escalation of the war: their only
quarrel with Bush is that his trumpeting of a coming "victory"
seems, to them, "premature." Then they go after their real
targets: the Democratic presidential candidates, who have pledged to
withdraw our troops from Iraq – albeit, in one case, a bit
disingenuously, as far as her own responsibility
for our present predicament is concerned.
Be that as it may, the hubris that infects all of official
Washington – regularly given voice on the Post's op ed page –
has reached fever pitch, to wit:
"The president at least recognizes, from ‘hard experience,'
how quickly progress in Iraq can unravel. Yesterday he pledged not
to order troop withdrawals beyond the five brigades due to return
home by this summer unless ‘conditions on the ground and the
recommendations of our commanders' warrant it. That means that if
Mr. Obama or Ms. Clinton become president, he or she will be the
commander in chief of at least 100,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. Yet
their speeches suggest an understanding of the conflict and the
stakes for the United States that is as detached from reality as
they accuse Mr. Bush of being when he decided on the invasion.
"Barely acknowledging the reduction in violence, the
Democratic candidates insist that U.S. troops are, as Ms. Clinton
put it, ‘babysitting a civil war.' In fact, the surge forestalled an
incipient civil war, and U.S. commanders and diplomats in Iraq don't
hesitate to say that if American forces withdrew now, sectarian
conflict would probably explode in its full fury, causing bloodshed
on a far greater scale than ever before and posing grave threats to
U.S. security."
"Reality," for the Post editorial board, doesn't mean
recognizing that, after five years, we have nothing to show for our
efforts but thousands of dead, tens of thousands wounded, and a mountain
of debt. Nor does it mean recognizing the failure
of the "democracy"-implantation experiment, an error for which many
thousands – Iraqis and Americans – paid with their lives. For the
editors of the Post, it means the recognition that American
power, once established, can never be abandoned: no matter
how far-flung the outpost, no matter how peripheral – or diametrically
opposed – to our real interests, and regardless of cost. We must
"pay any price," as our most overrated
President put it, and "bear any burden." But must we?
The assumptions behind the Post's magisterial dismissal of
calls for withdrawal are never challenged in Washington, where the
conceit and power-intoxication of the elites is most concentrated.
Assumption number one is that our actions in Iraq must be predicated
on what is good for the Iraqis – and the equation of our national
self-interest with this inclination. To the Post, the
re-introduction of "sectarian
violence" would be the worst possible outcome, and all hail to
Bush for surging ahead with the Surge. Yet it is necessary, here, to
separate out what is good for the Iraqis – or, at least, some
individual Iraqis – and what is good for us.
Now, stifle those squeals of outrage, for a moment, and consider
the
virtue of selfishness in foreign policy, especially in this
instance.
Given that the invasion and conquest of Iraq was a mistake, and
remains so, let us look at what the American occupation has averted:
an all-out civil war, the vaunted and feared "sectarian violence"
that the Post and other stay-the-coursers invoke as the
reason we can't leave. This was partially
aborted on account of our massive military presence, but what's
important to understand is that it was the inevitable result of the
invasion. We smashed the Iraqi state, and shocked and awed the
Ba'athist party apparatus out
of existence, paving the way for a bid
by the Shi'ite majority to fill the void.
This was bound to be resisted
by the Sunni elites, who had dominated the Ba'athist regime: if we
had simply gone in, crushed Saddam, and marched out in the wake of
the President's "mission
accomplished" proclamation, the dreaded civil war would have
been bloody but brief. The large, well-organized, and well-armed
Shi'ite party
militias,
backed by Iran, would have made short work of the Ba'athist
remnants, and that would have been the end of that. A Shi'ite
strongman would have taken Saddam's place soon enough, and the
sectarian battle would have died down: surely it would not have
persisted five years after the break-up of Saddam's hated
regime.
A natural process was aborted, the struggle for power was not
allowed to be played out, but Washington has merely succeeded in
delaying the inevitable. Powerful indigenous religious and social
forces have been held in uneasy abeyance by US troops, who are,
today, sitting atop a pressure-cooker
constantly in danger of exploding.
Like the Federal
Reserve's pumping
cash into a system bankrupted by government and private debt,
which can
only delay the day of reckoning, the efforts of the American
colonial administration and its occupying army to keep "order"
merely prolongs the consolidation process of the emerging Iraqi
state.
John McCain wants a
century of this. If we continue on our present course, urged on
us by the editors of the Post, he'll get his hundred years –
or, at least, until the Treasury is emptied.
The great enemy of both the Fed governors and their foreign
policy equivalent is deflation. In the case of the former,
the deflation of overvalued assets, including the value of the
almighty American dollar: in the case of the latter, the deflation
of the hubris
that animates our elites, who imagine themselves lawgivers to the
world.
If we withdraw from Iraq, the sectarian violence delayed for so
long will no doubt be terrible, exacerbated by the recent turn in US
policy of encouraging
the Sunnis and even arming
them – supposedly against al Qaeda – which further postpones and
complicates the resolution of Iraq's internal crisis. Yet the blame
for this rests squarely on the shoulders of the War Party. It is
just like the neocons to blame others for the consequences of their
own policies, and that's just what they're doing – even as they call
for the acceleration of the very policies that led us to the present
disastrous moment.
The virtue of selfishness in foreign policy is that it allows us
to see clearly what this policy realm is really all about, and that
is the pursuit of narrowly and specifically American interests. It
isn't about spreading "democracy," or uplifting the global masses
into modernity: billions in US taxpayer dollars are supposed to be
going to the defense of our shores, and the legitimate interests of
American citizens overseas. It may be that the stationing of
American troops in, say, Darfur, or Iraq, will prevent some people
from being massacred, or allow some degree of freedom, however,
conditional and ephemeral, and yet it has to be asked: at what cost?
And I am speaking, here, of moral costs, as well as the economic
consequences of our present foreign policy.
Asked if fighting the Iraq war was worth it, Americans
overwhelmingly answer no, but the elites
– speaking through the Washington Post – think the question
is itself impertinent, and, in any case, impermissible. We, the
peons, must be made to pay any price, bear any burden in the endless
task of funding – and dying for – the Beltway's delusions of
imperial grandeur.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
This interview with Scott Horton of Antiwar
Radio turned out a lot better than I remembered. I'm not always at
my best in the morning, and that morning in particular was, as I
recall, rather rocky – yet I almost sound thoughtful, although maybe
I was just tired.
The official publication date of my book, Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement,
is May 30. You can pre-order, though, through Amazon.
It is published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
I wrote Reclaiming in 1992. It was published the next year
by the Center for Libertarian Studies, went through two editions,
and then went out of print. It is an alternative, and admittedly
polemical, history of conservatism in America, seen through the
prism of changing foreign policy perspectives, from the
"isolationism" of the Old Right to the openly imperialistic
doctrines of neoconservatism.
ISI is bringing it back, with a new introduction by George W.
Carey and commentaries by Scott Richert and David Gordon, as well as
the original introduction by Pat Buchanan.
~ Justin Raimondo