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The
good
news is that, according to one of President Bush's top
advisors,
"If
many more months go by and our troops are still there, the
Iraqis are still fighting each other and us, and we still
haven't found any WMD, there will be hell to pay."
The
bad news is that all of us, and not just George W. Bush and
the Republican party, will do the paying – and not only in terms
of shelling out cash, but in the up close and personal sense
of losing American lives, breaking up marriages, depriving
children of having two parents, and generally wreaking social
devastation.
For
the Iraqis, the human costs of this war are immediately and
dramatically devastating, while the effect on the American
side – that is, on our own troops, and their families – is slower-acting
but, ultimately, no less destructive of the social order.
That's the lesson of how the Spartan Brigade, the top-flight
unit credited with winning an early victory for the U.S.,
is
being treated. They won the war – and, instead of being
sent home as promised, they have been assigned to occupy Fallujah
– the locus of rising resistance to the U.S. occupation. This
Los Angeles Times story is no doubt an example of "liberal
bias" in the news, because it focuses on what's really
important, and not the grandiose schemes of world-saving ideologues:
"They've
lived in the mice-ridden desert tents of Kuwait, in their
vehicles, in a palace strewn with debris from the bombs of
the U.S. Air Force, in a dingy, looted Baath Party complex
and, as of this week, at a former amusement park called Dreamland.
"Meanwhile,
life elsewhere moves on. 'My son turns 3 in July, and I've
missed every single birthday,' said Maj. Roger Shuck. Pvt.
Clayton Harper said he has been forced to put off his wedding
indefinitely. And Staff Sgt. George Jones said he has 'lost
a wife and two dogs out of it.' Jones, a lanky, tanned Virginian
with sad blue eyes, discovered his house was empty after reaching
his wife on her cell phone for a rare call and asking why
she wasn't home."
How
dare anyone put their own petty personal concerns above the
demands imposed on us by History! Don't they know there's
a war on? How can they complain: they signed up to fight,
didn't they? Yet the truth is these guys didn't sign up to
conquer the world, but to defend the U.S. against those who
would harm us. They were lied to – we've
all been lied to.
Iraq,
we were told in the months leading up to the Iraq attack,
possesses "weapons of mass destruction" – which,
the President solemnly assured us, could be used to attack
the continental U.S. via
drones. He disdained any imperial ambitions, and promised
to let the Iraqis determine their own destiny once they had
been "liberated." But there's no sign of either
Iraqi WMD, or that much-vaunted
"liberation" the Iraqis were supposed to be
jumping for joy over. The U.S. has decided to bypass the Iraqis
and just
appoint an "interim government" – with no signs
of an exit strategy, and more troops headed to Iraq to beef
up the occupation. Former Secretary of the Army Thomas White
avers
that top civilians in the Defense Department "are unwilling
to come to grips" with the size and scope of Operation
Enduring Occupation:
"'This
is not what they were selling (before the war),' White said,
describing how senior Defense officials downplayed the need
for a large occupation force. 'It's almost a question of people
not wanting to 'fess up to the notion that we will be there
a long time and they might have to set up a rotation and sustain
it for the long term.'"
When
General Eric Shinseki testified before Congress just prior
to the commencement of hostilities that "several
hundred thousand" troops would be needed to keep
Iraq pacified, the War Party went ballistic: when Secretary
White agreed with him, Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz forced
him out. In the rush to drag us into war, the details
were slurred over and Americans were presented with a phony
dichotomy: either strike, or be struck. Now we find ourselves
being drawn into the Middle East vortex, with the War Party
eyeing Iran even as we recognize the enormity of what we've
bought into.
Our
war aims have changed without official acknowledgement, from
disarming Saddam Hussein to subjugating much of the Middle
East to direct American rule. This is an imperial policy in
everything but name. Some, like Niall
Ferguson and the
bolder neocons, want us to own up to our ambitions. Exhorting
us to take up the White Man's Burden, and explicitly model
ourselves after our British predecessors, they would make
George W. Bush the twenty-first century equivalent of King
George III, monarch of the Anglosphere.
WMD
or no WMD, the conquest of Iraq was
always a shill. We successfully contained Saddam for 12
years and could have continued the same policy without incurring
any added costs.
Why,
then, did we go to war?
The
rationale for an invasion of Iraq seemed to operate on two
levels, number one being the myth of WMD and the other that
of the "noble
lies" floated by our
Straussian policymakers – the theory of "democratic
dominoes," a liberalizing "transformation"
of the Middle East effected by force of arms. As the smoke
clears, however, we see that both were lies. Yes, the Middle
East has been transformed: not into falling democratic dominoes,
but a solidly
anti-American front.
If
you didn't support the war, you didn't support the troops
– that was the poor excuse for an argument made by the War
Party as soon as the shooting started. But now the shoe is
on the other foot: As a reward for their victory, the Spartan
Brigade is being thrown into a quagmire. The only way to support
the troops is to demand that they come home immediately. American
patriots say: Out Now!
NOTES
IN THE MARGIN
The
ongoing debate between the neocons over at National Review
and the rest of the conservative movement is taking on some
pretty ugly connotations. The obscene accusations made by
David Frum against Taki Theodoracopulos, of The American
Conservative, which don't even bear repeating, are a new
low for the fired White House speechwriter. His arsenal of
political smears has given way to personal attacks meant to
degrade the accused no matter what the truth of the matter.
Taki has answered the swine here.
Frum
is a liar, and a poor one at that: the sheer monotony of his
complaints, which always revolve obsessively around the single
issue of his opponents' alleged "anti-Semitism,"
ought to set off alarm bells in conservative ranks. When Jesse
Jackson and Al Sharpton use accusations of "racism"
to deflect their critics, conservatives rightly disdain them
for playing the race card. But apparently it depends on what
race, or religion, we're talking about it. Political correctness,
neocon-style, means that others can be called on playing the
politics of racial and religious victimology, particularly
if they're black or of a Third Worldish hue. It is never
ok for Al Sharpton to play the Black Card, but it is always
ok for David Frum to play the Jewish Card.
This
whole tiresome routine is getting to the point where people
can literally not see straight, as in the case of the Chicago
Tribune cartoon
that caused an uproar from all
the usual suspects, including the rival Chicago paper,
the Sun-Times. Defending
his work in Editor & Publisher, cartoonist
Dick Locher denied charges that his portrayal of Sharon as
being bribed into accepting Bush's "roadmap to peace"
reinforces a "classic" anti-Semitic caricature.
Looking at the cartoon, with its bridge of cash being laid
out by Bush while a delighted Sharon exclaims ""On
second thought, the pathway to peace is looking a bit brighter,"
one could just as easily take it as an ultra-Likudnik critique
of the road-map. Without knowing anything about the cartoonist,
one could easily see it as a visual representation of the
idea that the whole process is selling Israel down
the river. Critics descried the depiction of Sharon as hook-nosed,
but on the other side of the money-bridge stands a hook-nosed
Yasser Arafat..
Former
NRO editor Jonah Goldberg has complained about drawing
any connection between the neocons' leftist past and their
present-day incarnation: the Trotskyism of Irving Kristol
and the gang in Alcove
#1 supposedly has nothing to do with the revolutionary
zeal of these same people as they hail the spread of militant
democracy by the sword. Now, from the other side of the political
spectrum, we
have the World Socialist Website denying the Trotskyist
heritage of so many of our neocons. They mention Antiwar.com,
but concentrate their fire on some obscure leftist writer
in El Diario/La Prensa, an easy target. We can only
wonder how, at the end of a long exposition on the key role
played by "third camp" Trotskyist Max
Shachtman, they can write the following drivel:
"Whatever
connection these [neoconservative] elements may have had with
Shachtman were the result not of the latter's former connection
to Trotskyism, but rather their agreement with the politics
of anti-communism, militarism and Zionism that Shachtman had
embraced over the course of some three decades following his
break with the Fourth International."
But
Shachtman remained a socialist until end of his life, albeit
an unorthodox one. And he wasn't the only Trotskyist, as the
folks over at WSWS.org are well aware, who took an identical
path: the ex-Trotskyist turned ferocious cadre of the War
Party is a veritable syndrome, by now. From Shachtman to Christopher
Hitchens, the pattern is constantly repeating itself down
through the years: Trotsky's errant children swell the ranks
of the War Party; furthermore, their connections
to their former comrades on the left
were never
really severed. How does the World Socialist Website explain
this?
Frum's
attack on Robert Novak, Pat Buchanan, and other paleoconservatives,
including this writer, provoked a reaction from mainstream
conservatives like David
Keene and Donald
Devine of the American Conservative Union. Here
is Devine's response to the many letters he received in response
to his substantive critique of Frum's interdict. While Frum
is busy smearing the loveable Taki and descending into character
assassination, Devine takes the high road and continues his
principled defense of what he calls "fusionist"
conservatism.
William
A. Rusher, the grand old man of the "official" conservative
movement, weighs
in on the neocon-paleocon debate once again, inadvertently
confirming Devine's point that the American Right is far too
beholden to an administration that has abandoned the program
of limited government in favor of empire-building abroad.
–
Justin Raimondo
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