See No Evil, Become That Evil: Supporting the War As An Act of Unpatriotic CowardiceNowadays, Americans have to actively journey far out of their way to blind themselves to how the country was utterly duped into fighting a completely unnecessary war in Iraq.
Last week, the former chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell called the WMD rationale for the invasion “a hoax on the American people."
This week, the top CIA official in charge of intelligence assessments on Iraq reported that the administration “used intelligence not to inform decision making, but to justify a decision already made," and that “it went to war without requesting – and evidently without being influenced by – any strategic level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq.”
Add these to the revelations which have already been made by other top officials and those with access to them – Paul O’Neill, Richard Clarke, Bob Graham, Bob Woodward (along with Powell’s chief of staff and CIA spooks, a bunch of radical anti-American lefties if ever there were any).
Not to mention certain inconvenient facts on the ground, like the complete absence of WMD in Iraq and a war that’s gone completely off the rails. It’s getting to the point where you have to very badly want to believe whatever the president says in order to do so. It’s getting to the point where you have to actively hide from the evidence in order to keep your faith-based war politics safe from the cognitive dissonance induced by overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary.
Unfortunately, that is precisely what many conservatives are now choosing to do.
And to some extent, I don’t even care. If some forty percent of the American public is crouched in such a state of perpetual fear, I guess they have problems enough without being further burdened by somebody’s extended rants on the existential threat which willful ignorance poses to a democracy.
And to some further extent, I don’t even care that they still bolster their own ideological insecurities by throwing down yet again the card which the regressive right plays so well (they must have 53 of them in their decks): the attack labeling critics of the president’s patently failed policies as traitors and threats to American security. By the way, that group includes a heck of a lot of people nowadays. Just once I’d like to see Bill O’Reilly question the patriotism of the 57 percent of Americans (that’s 171 million of your fellow citizens, Bill) who disapprove of the way Bush is handling Iraq. But, alas, more likely that will have to wait for another lifetime...
No, even though conservatives make it their business to constantly worry about my sexual proclivities, I will not return the favor. They are free to indulge themselves in as much private political masturbation as suits them.
But what I do mind, I really have to say, is their loudly-proclaimed belief that they are patriots, and that they support the troops in Iraq.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing could further misunderstand the intentions of the American Founders to create a republic on these shores. Nothing could be more corrosive of democracy. And nothing could be less supportive of our troops suffering in the bottomless pit George Bush created for them in Iraq.
I don’t care if someone concludes on the other side of an educational process that this war really does make us safer, that it really was morally justified, and that those beliefs really do support the troops over there. That’s fine – do your homework and reach whatever conclusion you reach. But, goddammit, if you’re gonna make those claims, the very least you can do is to genuinely examine the facts. The very least you can do is transcend your own fears just enough to learn the truth about the war.
People are dying in Iraq by the tens of thousands, and that destructive project is entirely dependent on the acquiescence of the American people in allowing it to continue in their name, and financed by their tax dollars (or, more accurately, by their children’s tax dollars which will be used to pay back the massive loans we are racking up in China and Japan).
No one who is a true patriot can support such a grave policy decision until they have seriously examined it. No one who really supports the troops can put them in harm’s way without studying and analyzing carefully the justification for doing so.
Anyone who does otherwise is, in fact, an unpatriotic coward.
For what could be more unpatriotic than to support a war – the most serious decision a government can make – without learning the facts? What could be less supportive of the troops than to allow them to go kill, to die and get maimed without being sure there is a good justification for doing so? And if the reasons for thoughtlessly sending people off to war are either laziness or fear of one’s own inadequacies, what could be more despicable?
Recently I published an essay suggesting that the President of the United States was at war with Americanism, for all the obvious reasons (see the Bill of Rights for further elaboration). That piece produced the following emailed response (with the subject line: “Get A Life”) from a conservative reader: “I read your article. Have you ever had any family or friends hit by the terrorists? In my opinion you are just another loser liberal. I served in the military.(Yes, and It was BU*SH*IT) Did you? Go ‘W’.”
So I wrote back at some length, posing some difficult questions for my interlocutor to consider.
He did not. But he did write back to tell me of his surprise at receiving my note and his admiration at my actually responding. I get this all the time. I think the shock troops of the fearful right must be so bought into their own stereotypes (and perhaps also inadvertently reflecting their own level of political comprehension) that they figure all of us on the other side are just mindless Michael Moore clones taking our marching orders from Havana. They seem so surprised when you show them that you can think on your own, that you’re willing to engage in dialog, that you have facts to support your arguments, and that you can actually string two coherent sentences together, back to back.
That became more evident when my correspondent wrote “I don't follow or believe the likes of Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, Hillary and of course, the great Jesse. I have to assume these are the leaders you follow. Your arguments mirror these jerks.” Leaving aside the rich irony of his presumption that I’m a fan of Hillary Clinton’s, what I think this comment reveals is a mind set in which politics is a game where citizens pick the ‘leaders’ they then slavishly follow and support, never quite coming to their own conclusions or interpretations. In my book, it is a politics which is a lot more reminiscent of either baseball or religion than it is of citizenship in a participatory democracy.
Which brings to mind another comment my friend on the right made in this second and last note to me, after apparently believing he had parried the questions I posed to him: “I will concede you are a good writer. You must teach English.” This I took to actually mean, “Your words make a lot of sense, and so does the evidence you present, but that can’t be right because you’re a liberal and these ideas contradict my political gospel. Therefore you must be tricking me with your fancy rhetoric.”
After receiving from me just a handful of challenging questions, my right-wing correspondent replied “How do you know the W planned to invade Iraq before 9/11? How do you know Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11? How do you know the W is a liar? All liberal propaganda.”
And then he concluded with this: “Please do not write back. I will not open your mail again. I see neither of us winning this war of words. I'm too busy thinking about more important issues.”
Clearly, he is saying that he doesn’t want to think about this stuff. Rather than letting me answer his questions, which is easily and conclusively done, he immediately writes it all off as “liberal propaganda”. But, just to make sure no errant facts should crawl beneath the door and invade his warm cocoon of self-deceit, he then not only asks me not to write back, but insists that he will refuse to look at anything I send. Why he didn’t just come right out and say “See No Evil”, I don’t know.
‘Course, I wrote him back anyhow. ‘Course, I know he read my note, too – though he was careful not to give me the satisfaction of telling me so.
I have no desire to pick on this nice gentleman, who appears from his own description to be a good family man, successful career guy, etc. I just think he is entirely reflective of a very pervasive mentality in this country, and that this mentality is crippling us. Agreed!
This is the reason why those of us on the thinking left are just so incredulous, so paralyzingly shocked at the support that exists for George Bush. It is as if someone wrote the textbook on how to be a disastrous president and he walked into the part as an object lesson.
Imagine if everyone, left and right, had sat down five years ago and agreed (which to some large degree we probably could have) on the criteria to define a successful presidency. We probably would have included items like protecting American security from foreign attack, proactively protecting against natural disaster and responding competently when it hits, building on the federal surpluses in order to pay down the national debt, honest and open government, improving relations with our allies and American moral leadership in the world, making the world environmentally safe for our children, improving the standard of living for all economic classes, serving as a force for peace in the Middle East and elsewhere, preventing WMD proliferation and discouraging it by our own actions, deploying American forces prudently so as not to decimate the military, genuinely supporting the troops by providing them proper armor and numbers adequate to the task, and more.
What is so shocking is that George W. Bush has failed every objective test, including all those which virtually all Americans, regardless of their ideological commitments, would have agreed to five years ago. But what is even more shocking is the degree to which this has pushed so many of us into simply going post-empirical, so that we can avoid the ugly task of confronting a reality contrary to our political beliefs. The absolute easiest way to see this is just to consider what these folks would be saying if we took the entirety of the last five years’ historical record, completely intact, and simply changed one word. Imagine the howls of foaming outrage which would bellow across the land if this president, with this track record of unending failure, was named Clinton.
I don’t know what’s gotten into the perhaps forty percent of Americans who cannot seem to be dissuaded from supporting this president, regardless of how badly he screws up. What I do know is that we progressives need to think broadly and deeply about this very question if we hope to save the republic from Cheneyism, the Founders’ worst nightmare come to life. These legions of the willfully mindless are the death knell of American democracy if ever there was one.
I suspect the causes for Bush’s support are multiple. Obviously, if you’re one of the narrow sliver of Americans in the economic elite and all you care about is your own wallet, Bush is your man. Moreover, poll data shows that ridiculous percentages of Americans believe that they will be joining that club one day and so are tempted to swallow anything, including a war consuming their neighbors’ children, to receive their precious would-be, someday, tax cuts.
I think other Americans are simply tuned out of politics for a variety of reasons, making them easy prey for the Rovian tactic of employing simplistic, emotional-button laden politics, of which conservatives are now the undisputed masters. Between educational failures, shameful media commercialization and trivialization of news, and pounding conservative ideology that government is the problem, we have dumbed down sufficiently to become a very politically unsophisticated country, perfect fodder for the politics of fear, caricature, personalization and slogan which the right employs ruthlessly, even against such radical leftist threats like John McCain.
Some Americans undoubtedly don’t have time for politics. With a criminally low minimum wage of five bucks and change, many people have to work all the time to stay afloat. It is especially ironic that they can’t spare the time somehow to change the government’s law (if not the government itself) so that they could then get some rest. At a campaign stop, the president once marveled at the greatness of America when a woman announced that she worked two-and-a-half jobs. No wonder he and his ilk would. Low wages, high profits, prostrate politics – hey, what’s not to like about that? (Oops, sorry – am I engaging in ‘class warfare’? We can’t have that.)
But many of us have that free time – especially those among the more potentially influential segments of society – and we spend it mesmerized by yet another football game on the idiot box, yet another life lived vicariously in the pages of celebrity magazines, yet another pathetically self-affirming episode of reality TV degradation. I know it’s easy for me to preach. I love my work, and if I had to dig ditches or wait tables for twelve hours, I’d probably be inclined to collapse in exhaustion at the end of each shift, no more interested in intellectual stimulation than physical.
But I still think we have an obligation to muster up the energy to do more, especially if we’re fond of calling ourselves patriots. We have eighteen year-old kids, fellow citizens who are willing to slog through the hell George Bush created on Earth, all in the name of protecting our security. Can we not give up one game and educate ourselves about their lot? Can we not forego one more breathless article on why Brad left Jen, and devote that time to learning about the war being fought in our name? Could we not turn off American Idol and instead read the Downing Street Memo?
And if we can’t, could we at least please just stop calling ourselves patriots who nobly support our troops in the field? If ol’ Zell Miller were to experience a momentary lapse into sanity, he might rightly ask, “Support the troops? With what? Bumper stickers?”
Never mind that the last years’ deluge of such ‘stickers’ (tellingly magnetic, not actually stuck on) are fading, when they can be seen at all. I guess we can’t even be bothered with that anymore.
There is a war going on in Iraq which is fast consuming America’s blood, treasure, reputation and security. The simple fact is, this war goes on in our name. The rest of the world certainly believes that, and they are right to do so. Whether they are also right to condemn we individual Americans for our actions in Iraq is a matter we ought to care about, for reason of our reputation and honor alone. But, of course, a better reason is that people are dying there with our acquiescence.
Patriots? Supporters of the troops? I say if you can’t be bothered to learn about this war which your taxes, votes and silence enable, you are a traitor and a coward.
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (pscdmg@hofstra.edu), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond.
