When the Humiliations Bloom
I'll give the Bush administration credit. There might be nothing better to take our mind off the national embarassment that is Iraq than the fear that would be Iran. How better to end one abusive relationship than to start another? These guys are certainly masters at misdirection. Ever the gamblers, they always double down on a losing hand.
Before we lose sight of Iraq, however, there's a question I'd like to see addressed that, to my knowledge, has yet to be asked. When the light finally dawns and we as a nation fully realize that we have LOST--not just Iraq, but much of our previous international standing, credibility, and influence--how will we react? What will the cultural costs of our humiliation in Iraq be? World powers do not usually "lose" with grace. I think of Germany post-WWI, China post-WWII, and Russia today, but we could go on (and I'm sure Paul will have some good examples from ancient Greece). It seems to me that a lot of Democrats believe that retaking Congress and/or the White House coupled with a withdrawal from Iraq would represent a fitting endgame. George Bush retires discredited and everything can go back to normal. But that seems highly unlikely. Isn't the more plausible scenario that there will be recriminations for years to come, giving added fuel to the despair and grievance of the most fervant culture warriors? The Iraq War itself is partly the result of Vietnam hangover: "if we can just win another big one, we could purge the memory of that loss from our national consciousness!" Losing Vietnam certainly did hurt, and it's what stained the 1970s in much of the conservative imagination, but you could read it as an anomaly. Losing Iraq means we're starting a trend.
The war's opponents need to start thinking seriously about what a post-humiliation America will look like. Because history is not "fair" in any simple sense, the long-term landscape may become more, not less, treacherous for liberals.
posted by tenaciousmcd @ 2:26 PM
4 Comments:
I agree with you about the long term risks: conservatives will have awful grudges to nurse as the scope of the US humiliation in Iraq sinks in.
Thankfully, there are a few mitigating factors:
1. No large antiwar movement. No visible domestic enemies. No Hanoi Jane.
2. Unified Republican control. It's hard to blame the Democrats convincingly when they had absolutely nothing to do with it.
3. A narrative about Rumsfeld incompetence. This is the Weekly Standard/David Brooks story about who lost Iraq.
The media will come in for a fair amount of long term abuse. But it's hard to blame Democrats and liberals when they've been nearly invisible for years. That, at least, is one difference from Vietnam that may redound to the benefit of Democrats.
I completely agree that Iraq is lost -- it was lost the moment it was launched on false pretenses and for the wrong reasons. Tenacious asks:
1. How will America react to this failure & how will the Democrats fare?
2. How will the world react to this failure?
For #1, undoubtedly many narratives will compete for adherents from (A) "Should have never gone and don't let it happen again" to (B) "Right idea, bad execution, but too late now to fix" to (C) "Right idea, and if we just hadn't listened to those liberals and had only stayed the course"... Democratic fortunes may very well follow the model of Vietnam. At first they'll fare well, but soon the conservatives are back and strutting their stuff.
#2 is a toughie and it will depend on how America answers question #1. If a majority answers with A and we follow it up with policy changes, then I think a lot of our friends will eventually give us a pass, but they will also be on greater guard for the future. It won't be an immediate pass, though. We're going to have to re-earn their trust. I'm hoping that the anecdote of Winston Churchill, "America will always do the right thing, after she has exhausted all other possibilities," will apply in this case. If as a nation, however, we have a larger portion that answers B and C, then I see Europe and Canada distancing themselves from us even further.
But I think we're getting way ahead of ourselves here. Bush still has almost 3 more years and it's virtually certain that he won't withdraw the troops in that time, so our failure is probably going to get a lot uglier. Also, the American people are slow to admit defeat. They could vote in a guy like McCain in 2008, it which case it will mean that even more troops are sent to Iraq and so the debacle will be even deeper and more painful. Then, of course, there is Iran. If Bush attacks Iran and uses nuclear weapons, then virtually all of our European friends will make a complete break, NATO is dead, and we'll be a nearly universal pariah in the international community and a nation against whom almost all will actively or passively resist. So, at this point there are just too many variables in play and a helluva a lot more damage that Bush can inflict. What is safe to say is that it will at least be very ugly; we're way beyond the positive degree and well into the comparative degree here. In fact, we're already at the doorstep of the superlative degree. I believe Bush may be one of those spectacularly tragic figures that come along only every 500 years. If so, he will take us down through every spiral of the Aeschylean fall before he’s finished. We'll soon find out.
Yes, an attack on Iran will make the US a world pariah, the real rogue state. If nuclear weapons were used, as Fred Kaplan observes in Slate, even our once-friends will see terrorist attacks on the US as our just deserts.
Gosh, Paul, you're really very frightening with the "Aeschylean fall" reference. But you may be right: these folks have already proven themselves as lunatics several times over. I never imagined it was possible to do so much damage to this country in only 6 years.
Frances, I agree that it will be hard, rationally, to blame the Democrats for this failure. But the key word there is "rationally." Counternarratives have already developed in the conservative media, and they're all about how Bush isn't conservative ENOUGH, and how the war was undone by Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, and the liberal media who reported only the bad news from Iraq. The historical facts that Nixon presided over our loss in Vietnam, even while expanding bombing into Cambodia, and after we had committed half a million troops and lost 58,000 lives over three decades, has never dampened the right-wing's zeal for the "stab in the back" theory, much as Germans in the 1920s embraced that same story line to vindicate their own innocence and strength. So my best guess is what Paul dubs option-C.
Whether or not you can rationally blame liberals for this loss is largely irrelevant. What matters is the height of our fall and the depth of the scar it leaves. In other words, I'd bet that structural factors outweigh the battle of ideas here. The Germans of the 1920s were radicalized primarily because their humiliation was so severe, and so they vered even farther to the right after the brief Weimar interlude. Against intutition, the worse Bush screws up the country, the worse things look for liberals long-term. That "Aeschylean fall," if it happens, threatens to take the implicit fascism of the Ann Coulters and Michael Savages and make it much more overt. The question becomes one of how you minimize that danger. Will economic prosperity be enough, or will we need to do some soothing ass-kicking abroad?
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