A quick follow-up to my last post. I always see a certain response to criticisms of Iraq superhawks who have moderated or dropped their enthusiasm for the war: Why are you focusing on what she said in 2003 instead of what she said last month?
My answer: What a person does before an event occurs (or is averted) matters far more than what she does years later, and that will remain true until time travel is invented. The time to be right about the Iraq invasion was March 2003, not March 2008 or March 2011 or March 2525. And it wasn’t even that hard to be right! Sure, it was hard to stomach all the abuse and ostracism, but that’s not what I mean. The argument for that war was logically, epistemically, and morally feeble, a grim fart joke that only fools, ignoramuses, and liars laughed at. I don’t say that lightly. There are some tough calls in the world; maybe Afghanistan was one, but Iraq sure as hell wasn’t. The more vigorous and vicious a person’s efforts were to bring that war about, the more you should question her judgment to this very day.
Bill Keller provides a handy list of people who should have been eternally discredited by their behavior after 9/11:
During the months of public argument about how to deal with Saddam Hussein, I christened an imaginary association of pundits the I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-a-Hawk Club, made up of liberals for whom 9/11 had stirred a fresh willingness to employ American might. It was a large and estimable group of writers and affiliations, including, among others, Thomas Friedman of The Times; Fareed Zakaria, of Newsweek; George Packer and Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker; Richard Cohen of The Washington Post; the blogger Andrew Sullivan; Paul Berman of Dissent; Christopher Hitchens of just about everywhere; and Kenneth Pollack, the former C.I.A. analyst whose book, “The Threatening Storm,” became the liberal manual on the Iraqi threat.
Alas, the “Eternally Discredited” and “Handsomely Rewarded” files keep getting mixed up in this best of all possible worlds.
While we’re all in retrospective mode, I’ll note that our friends at The American Conservative just debuted a new blog by Rod Dreher. Dreher, as you probably don’t remember, contributed to National Review from around 2001-2006. I do remember, as I followed National Review‘s blog closely during the run-up to the Iraq invasion (I even wrote a little tribute). I particularly remember one hot streak Dreher, then 36 years old, went on on March 17, 2003, the day President Bush gave Saddam Hussein an ultimatum and the day after Rachel Corrie got crushed by an Israeli bulldozer. Some highlights:
TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL [Rod Dreher]
The Little Green Footballs blog has a couple of photographs up showing the dead human shield Rachel Corrie showing Palestinian kids how to burn an American flag. Remind me again why we’re supposed to feel sorry for this America-hating, terrorist-loving idiot?
Posted at 11:32 AM
THE “BLIXIE CHICKS” [Rod Dreher]
“Up with Darryl Worley, down with the Blixie Chicks,” writes a Washington, DC, country fan, who’s thrilled by the news that country stations nationwide are dumping the Bush-bashing trio. The “Blixie Chicks” — I like that.
Posted at 11:41 AM
ONE CASUALTY OF WAR [Rod Dreher]
I’ve noticed, with regret, that it has become impossible to discuss the war with friends who oppose it. Mind you, I live in New York City, so I suppose it’s possible that people who are against the war are having similar problems offering their views in Red America. A liberal neighbor of mine stopped his car in the middle of the street the other day when he saw me on the sidewalk, and shouted out, “Your president is dragging us into a war nobody wants!” An old friend down South who is very liberal, and who denounced me in a scathing letter when I told her I voted for Bush (I then had to “confess” that I worked for NR), seems to have cut me off after a letter of months ago in which I said I supported war with Iraq. Haven’t heard a word from her since. This past February was the first birthday of mine in 22 years on which she hasn’t sent me a card.
Much more difficult for me to deal with are many of my anti-war conservative friends, with whom I have much more in common, and around whom I spend vastly more time. I’ve had no luck discussing things with them. I do believe there is a coherent conservative case to be made against war with Iraq, but in my experience, things from their side quickly degenerate into hot-tempered, paranoid expectorating about — you guessed it — the Jews. And once it goes that far, it’s game over. No rational discussion is possible.
And this is before the shooting has even started! I wonder if friendships are going to be a casualty of this war. Do you?
Posted at 01:23 PM
Well, that’s enough blockquoting, but be sure to check out these two gems: “MYXOMATOSIS” and HUMBLE BUT MAGNIFICENT. Ah, youth! Anyway, congrats to Rod and The American Conservative.
UPDATE: I’ve been accused of cherry-picking. OK. Please, do go read every single word Dreher wrote at National Review — for instance, this dusty relic from prehistory. Islamocalypse! Apparently, at some point after Dreher left National Review for far less prominent publications, he had some second thoughts. I’m not terribly impressed by what people say after the damage is done, but here you go.
For years and contrary to all the evidence, many opponents of Obama have denied that he accepted American exceptionalism, and they have tried to interpret everything he has done according to this completely false assumption. – Daniel Larison, March 29, 2011
For some reason — “diversity”? — The Wall Street Journal asked Shelby Steele to pile a thousand more words onto the Obama-denies-American-exceptionalism genre. The Journal probably didn’t expect Steele to use the words “exceptional” and “exceptionalism” 18 times in such a short span, but, hey, when you’re fuzzy about what you mean by a term, it’s best just to keep using it. Definitions can only get you in trouble, as shown by Steele’s lone stab at one:
American exceptionalism is, among other things, the result of a difficult rigor: the use of individual initiative as the engine of development within a society that strives to ensure individual freedom through the rule of law. Over time a society like this will become great. This is how—despite all our flagrant shortcomings and self-betrayals—America evolved into an exceptional nation.
Got that?
The redundancy “difficult rigor” is the least of that circular paragraph’s problems. What does “the use of individual initiative…” have to do with an interventionist foreign policy? I have no idea. Neither does Shelby Steele, but that doesn’t stop him from bringing it up repeatedly. While foreign policy isn’t the focus of the piece — the focus, to the extent that there is one, is on making a corporatist sound like a Yippie — Steele can’t leave it alone:
Mr. Obama came of age in a bubble of post-’60s liberalism that conditioned him to be an adversary of American exceptionalism. In this liberalism America’s exceptional status in the world follows from a bargain with the devil—an indulgence in militarism, racism, sexism, corporate greed, and environmental disregard as the means to a broad economic, military, and even cultural supremacy in the world. And therefore America’s greatness is as much the fruit of evil as of a devotion to freedom. …
Anti-exceptionalism has clearly shaped his “leading from behind” profile abroad—an offer of self-effacement to offset the presumed American evil of swaggering cowboyism. Once in office his “hope and change” campaign slogan came to look like the “hope” of overcoming American exceptionalism and “change” away from it.
But then again, the American people did elect him. Clearly Americans were looking for a new kind of exceptionalism in him (a black president would show America to have achieved near perfect social mobility). But were they also looking for—in Mr. Obama—an assault on America’s bedrock exceptionalism of military, economic and cultural pre-eminence? …
Yet today America is fighting in a number of Muslim countries, and that number is as likely to rise as to fall. Our exceptionalism saddles us with overwhelming burdens. The entire world comes to our door when there is real trouble, and every day we spill blood and treasure in foreign lands—even as anti-Americanism plays around the world like a hit record. …
Our national exceptionalism both burdens and defames us, yet it remains our fate. We make others anxious, envious, resentful, admiring and sometimes hate-driven. There’s a reason al Qaeda operatives targeted the U.S. on 9/11 and not, say, Buenos Aires. They wanted to enrich their act of evil with the gravitas of American exceptionalism. They wanted to steal our thunder.
So we Americans cannot help but feel some ambivalence toward our singularity in the world—with its draining entanglements abroad, the selfless demands [“selfless demands”? Is the WSJ no longer edited?] it makes on both our military and our taxpayers, and all the false charges of imperial hubris it incurs. Therefore it is not surprising that America developed a liberalism—a political left—that took issue with our exceptionalism. It is a left that has no more fervent mission than to recast our greatness as the product of racism, imperialism and unbridled capitalism.
But this leaves the left mired in an absurdity: It seeks to trade the burdens of greatness for the relief of mediocrity. When greatness fades, when a nation contracts to a middling place in the world, then the world in fact no longer knocks on its door. (Think of England or France after empire.) To civilize America, to redeem the nation from its supposed avarice and hubris, the American left effectively makes a virtue of decline—as if we can redeem America only by making her indistinguishable from lesser nations.
I’m quoting the guy fairly, and I still feel a little mean-spirited. But I’m not cherry-picking; the whole thing really is that bad. “America is fighting in a number of Muslim countries, and that number is as likely to rise as to fall,” yet Obama is “assault[ing] … America’s bedrock exceptionalism of military … pre-eminence”? Al-Qaeda spared Buenos Aires out of sheer theatrical whimsy? We have to maintain an empire (though, of course, any charges of imperialism are false) so that “the world” will keep knocking on our door, begging us to bomb it? And, most preposterously, American liberals oppose this militaristic exceptionalism?
Where many mainstream conservative enthusiasts of American exceptionalism define that exceptionalism in terms of being the freest, most prosperous country or the one with the greatest social mobility, some liberals want to define it in terms of superior idealism or morality. It doesn’t make it any better if Obama conceives of this as a struggle to make America more idealistic and moral. In fact, it makes it worse in some ways. It’s one thing to recognize past American mistakes and crimes and vow never to do such things again, but it’s something else entirely to see the use of military force as an appropriate means to expiate past national sins.
Obama is lucky that Steele has a bigger platform than Larison.
A headline on the front page reads “Netanyahu possibly drawing own peace map.” A source close to the prime minister has provided me with an early draft (click to enlarge):
In June, the Army negotiated a first-of-its-kind sponsorship deal with the producers of “X-Men: First Class,” backing it up with ads telling potential recruits that they could live out superhero fantasies on real-life battlefields. Then, in recent days, word leaked that the White House has been working with Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow on an election-year film chronicling the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.
A country questioning its overall military posture, and a military establishment engaging in a counter-campaign for hearts and minds — if this feels like deja vu, that’s because it’s taking place on the 25th anniversary of the release of “Top Gun.”
That Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster, made in collaboration with the Pentagon, came out in the mid-1980s, when polls showed many Americans expressing doubts about the post-Vietnam military and about the constant saber rattling from the White House. But the movie’s celebration of sweat-shined martial machismo generated $344 million at the box office and proved to be a major force in resuscitating the military’s image.
Not only did enlistment spike when “Top Gun” was released, and not only did the Navy set up recruitment tables at theaters playing the movie, but polls soon showed rising confidence in the military. With Ronald Reagan wrapping military adventurism in the flag, with the armed forces scoring low-risk but high-profile victories in Libya and Grenada, America fell in love with Maverick, Iceman and other high-fivin’ silver-screen super-pilots as they traveled Mach 2 while screaming about “the need for speed.”
The high-flying hardware turns Top Gun into a 110-minute commercial for the Navy — and it was the Navy’s cooperation that put the planes in the picture. The producers paid the military $1.8 million for the use of Miramar Naval Air Station near San Diego, four aircraft carriers and about two dozen F-14 Tomcats, F-5 Tigers and A-4 Skyhawks, some flown by real-life top-gun pilots. Without such billion-dollar props, the producers would have spent an inordinate amount of time and money searching for substitutes, and might not have been able to make the movie at all.
The partnership has been profitable for both Hollywood and the Pentagon. Top Gun, which has raked in $160 million so far at the box office, is the year’s highest-grossing film. Its glorified portrayal of Navy life spurred theater owners in such cities as Los Angeles and Detroit to ask the Navy to set up recruiting exhibits outside cinemas where Top Gun was playing to sign up the young moviegoers intoxicated by the Hollywood fantasy….
But there is a catch. Before a producer receives military assistance for a TV or movie project, the screenplay is reviewed by officials at the Department of Defense and by each of the services involved. The Pentagon ends up rejecting many projects that come its way on the grounds that they distort military life and situations. An Officer and a Gentleman, which like Top Gun dealt with naval aviation training, was turned down because of its rough language, steamy sex and, to the military mind, inaccurate view of boot camp. The Pentagon said no to WarGames because the military contends that a teenage computer hacker could never crack the U.S. strategic defense system. Even Rambo’s lone-wolf heroics would have failed to pass muster, despite later praise from President Reagan. The Pentagon guidelines do not condone “activities by individuals . . . which are properly the actions of the U.S. Government.”
Nick Turse covered the “military-entertainment complex” here and here.
The Ames Straw Poll, which actually has some predictive value, gave noninterventionists some reasons to smile. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas placed second with 28 percent, just behind Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota (29 percent). After finishing third with 14 percent, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who may well have been the most neoconservative candidate in the race, quit. Sadly, he was immediately replaced by his “less boring clone,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who achieved 4 percent with write-in votes.
The two worst of the other candidates, former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and former Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia, finished with 10 percent and 2 percent, respectively. Among the moderately atrocious, businessman Herman Cain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney also combined for 12 percent. Not-entirely-wretched former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman got 1 percent. Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson did not participate.
As I noted last week, Bachmann has infuriated some of the right people by being less than reflexively bellicose. Whether her deviation on Libya reflects mere opportunism or nascent realism is hard to say, though her reported coziness with Frank Gaffney makes me shudder. Still, if we place Bachmann in the center of this nonet, with Paul, Huntsman, Romney, and Cain to the less-Gaffneyesque side and Gingrich, Santorum, Pawlenty, and Perry to the other, we get 41 percent for the former set and 30 percent for the latter. In the 2007 straw poll, Paul was the only candidate who wasn’t running on a Bush-Cheney foreign policy, and he received only 9 percent of the vote. The winner that year, Mitt Romney 1.0, was much more belligerent than either Mitt Romney 2.0 or Michele Bachmann has been so far. Maybe even the Republican base is inching our way.
