I know it’s hard for my conservative friends to imagine, but not every war an American president chooses to fight is a good one. To understand this complicated concept, perhaps it will prove helpful for them to cast their memories way back into American history, and remember how the opposition party treated Bill Clinton over Bosnia and Kosovo. Uh-oh. I’m seeing smoke rising again. Well, so be it. The truth is that some people are capable of thinking for themselves (no!), and when they do, a whole lot of them look at the casus belli for Iraq and see nothing but rank garbage, with a heavy seasoning of tragedy.
Afghanistan proves it. It proves that neither left-leaning Americans (like Brent Scowcroft, for example, or George H. W. Bush) nor just about everybody else throughout the entire world opposed the invasion of Iraq because they hate America, or because they are weak on national security. They opposed it because the goddam thing was based entirely on lies. They opposed it because destroying a country without the justification of national defense or in response to a prior attack is a crime against humanity, plain and simple. Or, like Messrs. Scowcroft and Bush the Elder, who are rather less troubled by such petty moral nuisances than you or I, they opposed it because they knew it had disaster written all over it.
Afghanistan proves that when the foaming right attacks anybody living in the now ever-expanding "reality-based community" as wimpy or appeasing, they are in fact only attesting to the poverty of their case. And deep down, they know it too. They know they could never win on facts (and that was true even if Iraq had gone swimmingly), and so they rely instead on lies and character assassination. You see, you’re not wrong about Iraq because the president didn’t lie our way into it, or because Cheney wasn’t full of crap when he said we’d be greeted as liberators, or because Rumsfeld wasn’t stretching a wee bit when he said we knew exactly where the WMD were. Oh, no. You’re wrong about Iraq because you hate America and you’re a sissy. (You’re also probably gay, and French to boot, but we needn’t mention that. We’ll just hint at it.)
Yep, if only you could be strong and manly and Republican and a red-blooded ‘Murican through and though, you’d support a tough American foreign policy. With other people’s kids, of course. I mean, you wouldn’t actually have to do any fighting yourself. You just talk the talk, rack up the draft deferments, win the elections, and let the sons and daughters of lily-livered Defeatocrats do the actual killing and dying part.
Not only does Afghanistan prove that the right is desperately lying (what, again?) when they accuse opponents of the Iraq war of not being serious about national security, it also proves something else. Afghanistan proves that, in fact, the reverse is true – that they’re the ones who are not serious about national security.
Anybody here still remember a fella named Osama? Remember how that really macho other fella, the one sporting the looks-like-he-bought-it-off-the-shelf-of-a-Wal-Mart Texas swagger, said he and his bad posse was gonna bring the first fella in, "dead or alive"? Well, guess what? It’s now been over five year since that particular date that they can never stop reminding us about, but somehow they decline to remind us also of the fact that Mr. bin Laden and his colleagues remain free to this day, happily ensconced in their mountain lair, plotting the next attack just like the one on... well, you know the date. (And if you don’t, just see every other word of every single speech (still!) delivered by George Bush. Maybe we should get it over with and start calling it Bush Day.)
The honest truth is that the Iraq invasion was not only not in the interest of national security, it was actually cataclysmically and quite demonstrably detrimental to our national security. Think about it. Suppose you wanted to invent a foreign policy that would maximize the damage to your country. I suppose I have to concede that provoking Russia into a nuclear exchange probably would win the prize here for best performance by a country attempting to commit national suicide. But short of that, how about a nice little third-world war that locks up all your land forces, costs a couple of trillion, kills about a million people, makes another four million or so into refugees, alienates the entire rest of the planet, divides your country at home, recruits droves of new suicide-bombing enemies, massively strengthens the hand of a hostile bad actor in the neighborhood, and risks a regional multinational religious cataclysm along with a global economic depression? Oh, and also all this having nothing – absolutely zero – to do with attacking the enemies who are actually at war with you.
Seriously, if you sat down with pen and paper to design a more catastrophic bit of self-destructive stupidity, could you possibly top George Bush’s little Iraqi stinker, apart from the nuclear exchange scenario? I doubt it. This war has not only failed to enhance American security, it has radically diminished it. And by indulging in this pet project which many thoughtful analysts have now come to rightly describe as the worst foreign policy blunder in American history, instead of actually pursuing the folks who did 9/11, the Bush administration and its cheerleaders from the Armageddon Army of the Fright-Right have demonstrated that they are the ones who actually are not serious about American security.
I once stopped for breakfast at a roadside New Hampshire diner in the middle of nowhere. Evidently, it was run by some devout Christians who were anxious to provide us patrons with a side-order of proselytizing to go along with our waffles (at no additional charge, too!). There was literature everywhere, and the menu was prominently adorned with the phrase, "Easter Proves It".
Now, I generally figure that those who need to shout to you how convinced they are of something are typically the ones who are actually most in need, deep down, of the reassurance they’re offering others. But even apart from that, it wasn’t exactly clear to me what was meant to be proving what here. Surely they didn’t mean that the existence of bunnies and colored eggs proved that their god was the right and true god. Did they? I suppose it had something to do with the resurrection story and all that, which, interestingly, appears to be more challenged than ever these days, as far as I can see. Seems like everybody’s coming out of the woodwork nowadays to say that Jesus came down off the cross and finished out life raising a family and – who knows? – sitting around the telly on weekends rooting for the home team with twelve of his closest buddies.
But there more’s than a whiff of this same maniacal urge to self-reassurance-through-marketing in the Bush Believers camp these days (who anyhow overlap to a considerable degree the Easter Proves It crowd, and who may well have learned on Sundays their handy techniques for stabilizing a shaky psyche). I mean, what kind of powerful delusory tactics are required for the 29 percent in this country who are still giving this guy a positive job approval rating? After blowing our defense before 9/11, losing two wars, watching a city drown, turning a massive federal surplus into a massive deficit, leaving wounded vets to rot with cockroaches in Army hospitals, hiring and firing US attorneys to do political prosecutions, and the treasonous exposure of an undercover CIA agent and her network to punish a political enemy for telling the truth about their lies – after all that, what kind of serious hallucinogens are needed to give your approval to this president? And where can a fella get ahold of some of those?
It’s truly scary, but at least this mindset might provide us a small handle – the slightest beachhead in the minds of the massively deluded – when they trot out all the usual shibboleths about our feckless failures at patriotism, just because we don’t happen to agree that it was such a hot idea to plunge all of America’s land forces into the festering open wound of an unwinnable war that nothing to do with our country’s security. Or that failing to seriously fight a war that had everything to do with American security, and thus leaving dangerous enemies free to strike us again, was not a good idea. Call me crazy, if you must, but I don’t think those are particularly good presidential decisions. And it looks to me like you pretty much have to be an ordained deacon in the Church of Bush to even continue going through the motions of arguing they were.
Arguing with dogma is like trying to negotiate with a tsunami. The likelihood that even your most powerfully persuasive applications of empirical fact and logical reasoning will succeed in getting either to change course is, shall we say, less than outstanding.
But next time you find yourself in one of those inane conversations with a True Believer from the regressive right (and, if you’re like me, you really just don’t bother much anymore), just tell ‘em: "Afghanistan proves it".
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
