During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable, even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism.
-- Howard Thurman
A few weeks ago, I was dismissing talk of Larger War in the Middle East as being politically transparent and "intellectually" pitiful. The same flatly racist voices have called for the same repeat of the Crusades for as long as I have been politically aware, and there seems to be no problem in the Middle East that could not be solved with an application of sufficiently brutal force. The simple and absolute fact that Iraq did not work out that way -- that Iraq was a test of neoconservative sophistry that failed on nearly every possible level and by nearly every possible measure that it could have failed -- seems not to have done much more than scuffed the office woodwork. If anything, we are hearing now from multiple sources laments that the problem with Iraq, the reason for failure, was that we did not kill enough of them. Whether it be Bill Kristol, Michael Ledeen or his excited band of crass compatriots, a host of other conservative blatherers invoking thin shades of white man's burden, or out-and-out racist thugs and unapologetic war masturbators, that tide is rising.
A few weeks ago I was skeptical of the notion that the more bloodthirsty among all parties could succeed in widening the conflict, but I am far from confident of that stance now, simply because of the sheer volume of such speech, and the lip-licking glints in the eyes of war supporters, who clearly see an opportunity here that meets every one of their requirements for political glory. It is tantalizing, and it has been responded to in an organized and remarkably up-front fashion. No beating around the bush, here: with talk of "World War III" and the blessed "opportunity" of the expanded bloodshed, conservatives and neoconservatives are positively giddy in their proclamations of who else -- which cities, which people -- need to die next, in the service of the city on the hill that can be built on their bones.
A Larger War is, as I have said before, a monkey's paw. Fuck the devil; there are wishes here to be granted, if you ask for them properly. There are political futures to be determined, and a second bite at the almost-lost Iraq apple.
So one by one, the champions of Larger War shed their humanity like the spring melts of an ancient range, civilization, compassion, and basic decency flowing from them in trickles and torrents in creeks and rivers, the shed blankets revealing, in the suddenly brilliant sun, jagged and craggy features. Under the better things, humanity still retains the old primal shape. Watching the most crass televised architects of primality, you get the distinct impression of more ancient beasts clad roughly in borrowed human skin, men whose intellects exist only to provide a context for their omnipresent suits; hatred brightened with a necktie.
It is really, earnestly
important to these people to get into a larger war. And I imagine their voices are so pitched at present because it would be so
easy to widen the conflict. A single cross-border bombing raid by Israel into Syria, and we're there. From there, other things could fall into place -- but because even the White House is, at this point, momentarily hesitant to expand the doctrine of eternal war, they are aching, truly aching for Israel to fire the first shot, that first bomb that could start a thousand
justified others.
There are several things that make a wider multi-state conflict advantageous to Republicans, conservatives and neoconservatives.
First, it will distract from the failure of Iraq, and serve as a public shield obscuring the violence of the emerging civil war. Iraq was a war based on a premise, a new neoconservative doctrine of "democratization" through strategic war that was thought of as laughable by every serious student of politics and history other than themselves, and which at this point is being regarded as a failure by even the more "intellectual" of the True Believers. So long as the conflict is ongoing, neoconservatives and others that viewed Iraq as the key to a new Pax Americana can say that the results are simply not in yet. So long as the killing continues, the verdict on the results, they can say, is still out.
Second, it is fundamentally required for the neoconservative (read: batshit crazy) premise of installing pro-American governments in key areas by force. Regardless of the utter failure of the same advocacy in Iraq, these are not people with a capacity for learning, and like every other think-tank product designed to counteract public opinion, actual intellectualism doesn't have a thing to do with it. It is a political cult, a political premise based on gut instinct and justified ad hoc. Actual real-world demonstrations of their incompetent blundering have not mattered, for this particular crowd, for the span of the last forty years -- it's not likely to start now.
Third: there is an upcoming election. Yes, we are supposed to pretend that bloodshed would never be predicated upon Republican election prospects. However, it demonstrably is: long-planned operations in Fallujah in 2004 were delayed until after the 2004 presidential elections, the siege finally taking place in mid-November. The remarkable coincidences of heightened terror alerts at points of Republican electoral weakness are at this point devolved into fodder even considered old hat by comedians. And the flag-waving of the packaged war on terror, whether it be the Republican convention in New York featuring backdrops meant to invoke the fire and rubble of 9/11 or the insistence by one Republican senator or another that every single vote -- every single vote, be it tax cuts or removal of environmental protections or slashing away medical support for children -- must be supportive of the Republican position or the terrorists, ominously invoked, will have "won."
So it seems hardly eyebrow-raising to suggest that world instability is largely the product Republicans are selling, at this point, and the more instability the better. The longer the conflict lasts, the better -- and unfortunately for them, Iraq is at this point enough of an unambiguous clusterfuck that it is, in polls and in actual, bloody results, a massive net negative. If the conservatives wish to polish their blood-caked and shattered "foreign policy" credentials, then, they need a new target that they can ostensibly have a bit of momentary success with. And that means breaking out the prettier bombs, and closing the curtains on the now constant stream of American soldiers on patrol in blazing-hot Bagdad, shooting and getting shot in turn. And Afghanistan, what of it? If Iraq is now the forgotten war, the efforts to tug Afghanistan into rough stability are at this point buried in cement.
Instead of dealing with the realities on the ground with any competence, we are instead stuck fighting a war using the dull-bladed weapons of neoconservative philosophical premise. We are stuck with a twentyfirst century zombie revival of the Domino Theory of diplomacy, of the Cold War premises of client states and countering states, and of "preemptive" war. In short, name an incompetent clusterfuck of the last fifty years, and this crowd has their hands in that barrel up to their elbows, seeing the current world as nothing more than a canvas on which the old games can be repainted and made new again. Being a neoconservative means never having to say you were ever wrong: you simply declare the test unfinished, and proceed apace.
In worse cases -- the justification of torture, still defended full-throatedly -- the movement has devolved into behaviors representing more primitive eras. And with mutterings on the justifiable use of "tactical" nuclear weaponry on the battlefield, they seem more than eager to make a name for themselves via a new, red-hot and radioactive era of human history. What will that era be called, in the history books? The moment when America, for a brief moment unthreatened by nuclear retaliation, became contemplative of the possible new and grand uses of these weapons?
It was perhaps one of the most momentous notions of the last half century of mankind -- a half century in which a terrible new weapon, used only twice in anger, became regarded as a thing not to be used at all. And yet, it too is a taboo so easily lost...
Honestly, what monstrosity. I wonder if we understand even half of what has vanished, trod under the clumsy footfalls of stupid, stupid men and their willing courtesans.
. . .
Words will never be able to express my loathing for the War Pundit class, a strain of human entirely devoted towards the justification and glittering packaging of carnage.
I am not a pacifist. There are plenty of times when I wish I were, but I might as well wish to have wings while I am at it, for both have equal chance of happening, and the wings would be more functional. The truth is, I understand war, and hatred, and revenge just fine, and don't particularly think of those that don't as being more enlightened or more evolved: just less self-reflective. One of the deepest veins in the writers whose work has dug and scratched at me -- Melville, Twain -- is a distinct vein of self-aware misanthropy. Something to admire? No. But something true, I think, and the honesty counts. There are those that say pessimism and liberalism do not go together, but for me the entire premise of liberalism is that the jagged blades do exist, and will, and that it is the responsibility of civilization to dull them.
Because I know myself, and I am hardly an angel. For example, the day a certain unnamed neoconservative "intellectual" dies, you can bet your ass I will celebrate. I will choose a mound of dirt in the backyard, declare it his grave, and dance on it until the grass itself begs for mercy. The day Ann Coulter sheds the last layer of skin between her shriveled heart and the immortal, I will buy a cheesecake. If the swelled chicken pox scab currently masquerading as Rush Limbaugh were to be hit by a bus on the way to his latest half-erect premise, I would look up at the stars that evening and raise a glass in silent acknowledgment of the eternal, where the best of us, the worst of us, the trees that shade us, and the pets we all loved as children are returned to to same vortex of gas and dust momentarily masquerading as a planet.
Hunter S. Thompson wrote a metric crapload of words in his life, but the sheer, broken-glass pleasure of writing an obituary for Nixon: I wonder if anything was more satisfying?
Alas, all of them will probably outlive me, at this rate. Ah, well; perhaps before that time I can make sure they dislike me intensely enough for me to feel I have done some speck of good in this world.
What is there to say, about the newest war? Both sides are responsible, though not equally. Hezbollah baited; Israel took the bait. Hezbollah has been responsible for an unending stream of infractions, and by "infractions" I mean murders, and Israel is entirely justified in treating such acts as acts of war. Israel is currently dismantling the hard-won structure of Lebanon itself, as a spectacular demonstration of the principle of disproportionate response, and Hezbollah is firing rockets randomly into civilian populations; an unambiguously indefensible act. So if you are looking for blame, there is plenty on all sides, but while Israel I think devolved from a robust to a simply brutish response within the first days of the conflict, Hezbollah started from brutish to begin with. Will that answer suffice, or do the egos of certain presumed pundits require finer nuances of condemnation with which to masturbate over from the comfort of their chairs? I suppose we will soon find out.
The Israel-Lebanon war will stop when all sides are tired of it -- and we don't have the slightest bit of indication that anyone is getting tired of it. Far from it: it is the earnest wish of a great many people, there and here and elsewhere, that they continue. (The Bush administration itself seems insistent on measured, tactically engineered apathy, waiting to see what will happen next and if there is an opportunity here, somewhere, for attaching the deaths to some politically expedient meaning.)
Against the backdrop of what is already, by any definition of the term, a crisis, the sheer classlessness of stupider things stands out. Watching a few right-wing bloggers petulantly demand Daily Kos or their other chosen blog enemies write more, or differently, about the Israel-Lebanon conflict, last week, would have been like watching puppies chewing on an older dog's paw, trying to rouse it into rough play, had the underlying subject matter not been so charred. Instead, the result was -- what is the word? Unfunny? Sad? Brain-bleedingly self-aggrandizing?
It takes a masterful amount of ego to presume that if only your blog enemies were to speak more on the conflict, so that you could valiantly smack them around from the strategically vital hill that is your butt in your office chair and be a mighty hero -- well hell, then we'd be getting somewhere in the Middle East.
You know, there are times for rough play, and then there are times when you should shut your holy festering gob and get a shred of basic human comprehension about which board games, in this world, are games played with pieces crafted from the shredded remains of children, and which television pictures were brought to you alongside the most unholy and acrid of smells.
But it is also all part and parcel of the more general conservative and warblogger premise, one that has been kicked into a higher gear now that the smell of new and different blood is in the air: that writing about fighting an ostensibly noble war is equally noble to actually going to fight it, and perhaps more important, in the grand scheme of things. After all, what takes more courage, pulling the trigger on someone attempting to pull the trigger on you -- or enthusiastically opining on who should live and who should die from the confines of your living room, in the hopes that you can do your part to turn the tides towards a more xenophobically-based wider conflict? Or is "courage" the word to use, there, in the latter case?
Where the ostensible strategic giants among the neoconservatives and other hawks act with at least pretensions of subtlety, lesser lights like Dan Riehl offer full-throated croaks, complaining to themselves of their own noble restraint against the goddamn traitors that do not want war, or do not deem this war to be anything more than the clusterfuck it is widely recognized to be. I offer his words not under the premise that anything Dan Riehl has to say is worth listening to, but because the ring of the words, stripped of the manufactured cleverness of a Kristol or Gingrich, is so familiar as to almost be musical -- self-mockery in a minor key:
Yet, as purveyors of what some might call pro-war rhetoric, how do we respond to the people we see daily undermining the very effort required to fight that war and adequately support our troops?
Isn't the tendency to go soft on them? To not actually say what we believe to be true in our hearts - that, ultimately, their short-sighted reasoning, or lack of resolve weakens America's prospects in what is an increasingly dangerous world as a result of the rise of radical Islam?
Isn't it disproportionate to give anti-war folks like that a pass when they sit safe and protected pumping out un-war-supportive prose, while better men and women than all of us fight and die? I'm starting to think that it is.
What I do know is that, if we are to defeat Islamofascism, many more innocents will die. And even more innocents will die if we don't defeat it. With stakes that high, is it really such a crime to call certain individuals cowards, or traitors, or somehow un-American, or dangerously misguided Americans, at best?
Riehl titles his post Have We Lost The Rhetoric War. You can compare it to the now infamous and oft quoted words of a more knowledgeable pundit on the subject of wartime rhetoric, and Godwin will shrivel and die of embarrassment -- and to hell with him, anyway:
Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
-- Hermann Goering
Indeed, it does. It works the same. And we indeed should be grateful for those that frame it crudely, for in their eagerness they illuminate what the more clever know not to say. That in order to foment a Larger War, we are now on the cusp of a new round of traitor talk. Is that not the least that the armchair warriors can provide, in order to gain new blood, new bones, a new city on a new hill, a monkey's paw that might -- despite the clusterfuck of Iraq and of neo/conservative foreign policy over the last decades -- just have one more tantalizing wish to be granted?
We are where we are, now, and as sure and steady as the hands of a clock, the "meaning" of the conflict has moved, and what was once a series of low-grade border skirmishes now points to the same place the hands of the clock always point, sooner or later: carefully etched and polished reasons for a Larger War.
Call it Iraq: The Quickening. Call it the Neoconservative Do-Over. Call it The Unbearable Lightness of Being Syria, for all I care. A stupid, shit-laden intellectual premise deserves a shit-laden response, whether it wears a tie or not.
What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn't kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn't the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?
-- John Podhoretz, New York Post