Cohen: Killing is Justified Because Those Who Oppose It Offend Me
Tue Nov 21, 2006 at 04:48:40 AM PDT
Today, Richard Cohen renews his quest to explore the very limits of wankerdom in his latest Washington Post op-ed column. It's valuable for its insight into how the opinion elite in Washington, and in particular the so-called "liberal hawks," can simultaneously recognize the war has gone disastrously wrong while continuing to maintain it was not wrong to have started it in the first place.
Cohen is exactly right when he says that at this point in the war,
... this talk of the Iraqis doing more on their own behalf is Vietnamization in the desert rather than the jungle. What remains the same is asking soldiers to die for a reason that the politicians in Washington can no longer explain. This, above all, is how Iraq is like Vietnam: older men asking younger men to die while they try to figure something out.
But how did we come to this point? On that, Cohen, like the DLC politicians who backed the war before it began, is considerably less critical:
I ... originally had no moral qualms about the war. Saddam Hussein was a beast who had twice invaded his neighbors, had killed his own people with abandon and posed a threat -- and not just a theoretical one -- to Israel ... We are a good country, attempting to do a good thing. In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic.
Well, yes, Dick, therapy would clearly seem to be in order. Let me dial you up a nice fat syringe full of Thorazine while we deconstruct your lunacy ...
What Cohen and others like him refuse to acknowlege is that war, however one attempts to justify it, invariably involves the slaughter of innocents. Whether we look to the children we send off to fight, or the children whose homes happen to be under the bellies of the bombers, the parade of burned and mangled flesh, broken limbs, and open graves are what distinguish war from all other forms of human competition. Even if everything Bush had said about going to war were true, and even if Rumsfeld had managed the war to perfection, Iraq would still be a charnel house, because that's what war is -- always, now, and forever. The only thing that changes is the magnitude of the butcher's bill.
This is not news: the whole of human history stands as a testament to the price of war. There may not be a square inch of soil on the face of the earth that has not been washed by human blood. It's not therapy: it's massacre. Cohen, like the other "liberal hawks," may be stupid, but he is not ignorant. Having served in the Army and lived through Vietnam, he knows what war is.
So why did he support this one?
The answer lies buried in the middle of the column, and a truly gut-turning one it is. Not only was Saddam a bad man, Cohen writes, and a threat to Israel:
If anything, I was encouraged in my belief by the offensive opposition to the war -- silly arguments about oil or empire or, at bottom, the ineradicable and perpetual rottenness of America.
And there you have Cohen's final refuge: he supported the war because those who opposed it were "offensive."
The entirely inevitable slaughter of war, the mass murder of hundreds of thousands, was justified in part because this twisted bastard found us offensive. And for all that I think Cohen is frantically dissembling about his rationale for the war, that much rings true: in the final analysis Cohen, like the others, was a cheerleader for the war because it made him feel smug.
And so for Cohen, it was not wrong to go to war, because going to war made him feel good about himself.
This, Dick, is the answer to the perpetual whine "But why do they hate us?" It's not for our freedoms, Dick, its because to some of us -- to you, and others like you -- the lives of their children are worth less than your own ego.
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