… Sometimes war is just war, sufficient unto itself, self-justifying.
Inserting myself into an debate in progress… Yes, I think we’re definitely looking at a “stab in the back” reaction from the right, should we pull out of Iraq in any sane time period. I’m doubtful it will actually carry any weight with the public at large … but what do I know?
But that sentiment will exist, and it’s because there’s a signficant percentage of Americans who are simply reflexively pro-war. I think it’s an unfortunate but powerful aspect of human nature. It’s not just that we had to defeat the Nazis and Tojo (for instance) to “preserve our freedom”, since many of us rarely try to define that freedom, nor do many of us cherish the very real freedoms we enjoy, as Matt enumerates. War is a essentially a tribal affair: It’s good enough that war is Us vs. Them, and there need not be any external justification for it.*
The shenanigans leading up to the Iraq War were not so much appeals to reason hijacked by faulty evidence, as appeals to a national post-9/11 blood-lust buttressed by flimsy or downright dishonest justifications. And we’re learning — again — that war is not its own reward. I wonder if it will stick this time.
*That’s why John Edwards says “We need to be patriotic about things besides war.”
…because your misquotation makes no sense.
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What Clausewitz wrote was that war was a continuation of politics, by other means. What he meant by that was that war was not an end in itself, something that is lost on many people.
…here is Clausewitz’s complete Zitat: “Krieg ist die Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln.”
I don’t really see what difference that makes in my thesis.
The Right is definitely working itself up over the myth that the war effort was “stabbed in the back” by liberals. (Greenwald has also written on this.) It’s nonsense certainly, but we will hear it. Just as we still hear that propping up the government of the S.Vietnam, an unpopular U.S. creation in violation of the 1956 Geneva accords, could have worked if only we killed still more Vietnamese still more ruthlessly. The deaths of one million Vietnamese were insufficient.
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There are is another upcoming attraction. We can expect to hear that Bush was never a “real” conservative and that it is mean and unfair for Democrats to associate upstanding Republicans with him.
…General von Ludendorff blamed the German loss in WWI on the Social Democrats, because they resisted funding of the war effort beginning in 1916. Remember the famous Zitat? First they came for… Actually it was the communists that they (the Nazis) first came for. Then it was the Social Democrats.
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The Mighty Righties in den USA blame the loss of South Vietnam on the Democrats refusal to fund the South Vietnamese, and this despite Eisenhower’s duplicity in the 1950s. And now the Mighty Righties are preparing themselves to blame the Democrats for the “loss” of Iraq, despite the fact that the Iraqis don’t want us there. Any more than the Lebanese wanted us there (remember the bomb attack on the Marine compound in 1982?), or the Vietnamese wanted us there (remember the self-imolation of the Buddhist monks?), or the filipinos wanted us in the Philippines in 1901.
Donald Rumsfeld and his minnions , aided and abetted by our current sitting president.
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Liberals, (so called) just twisted the knife after it was thrust in. Not the cause of death as republicans would have you believe, this was done to inflict as much pain as possible on the victim, which is ultimately the US military. Very similar tactics viz a vis RVN.
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Thank you John Kerry and Joseph Bangert et al.
The $438 billion spent to date has hit a lot of balance sheet bottom lines in a very attractive manner.
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I think most Americans believe that war generally works out well for us in an economic sense. WWII ended the Great Depression. The booming prosperity of the post-war years was helped along by the massive military buildup of the Cold War (never mind that the boom would have been even greater if the money had been spent on schools and infrastructure, and research). This is not self-justification or blood lust, but dollars and cents.
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As to the “stab in the back,” argument, Democrats need to be aggressive or it may indeed get traction. I’m still amazed at how soft we have been on the Republicans about 9/11. There seems to have been a national, “no one was to blame for this tragedy,” conclusion, when actually it was George W. Bush, Condoleeza Rice, Dick Cheney etal who were asleep at the switch, or on vacation, and failed to keep us safe on that terrible day.
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The best argument, I think, is that the Republicans botched the war in Iraq and can’t be trusted with the Army. They are weak, ineffective, and primarily concerned with making money from war, not keeping our great country safe. The Democrats are the only effective alternative for people who want to see this country succeed, rather than flounder in a quagmire. In short, it is time to get some grown ups in charge of the country.
for the comment on 9/11, I would. The plain facts say that Bush, Rice & Co. basically allowed 9/11 to happen through rock-headed negligence, nothing else. That they were ever accorded heroism over that is beyond brain-boggling.
most Americans realize the amount of money that’s been spent to date in Iraq, or have any idea how much $$$ is being recycled through Halliburton/Blackwater no bid contracts, back into GOP coffers. Wingnut welfare on steroids.
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As far as this goes:
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Might get traction? It’s been a staple of the GOP playbook for years to accuse anyone and everyone on the “left” of being a traitor if they dare to question the foreign policies of the GOP, no matter how inept. As mentioned upthread, Greenwald and others have documented it pretty well, especially as it’s been internalized by the “liberal” media. If there could be any doubt that this premise is gospel to wingnuts, check out a few of the regulars on BMG. From Rush’s drug addled brain to your blog.
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Your overall points are well taken however, especially the dawning reality that the GOP cannot govern. Period. Ten plus years of Delay, Bush, Cheney, Gingrich etc, have set our country back in ways that haven’t even been considered. We’ll be paying the price for years to come.
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BTW, slightly OT, but NH is a harbinger of the future for the GOP, “stabbed in the back” memes or not.
and who it is spending on, you might run, not walk, to your local Blockbuster and rent Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers
William Jefferson Clinton had more pressing matters on his hands rather than the whereabouts and doings of UBL. Every time Monica came up someone got bombed and it wasn’t UBL.
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Khobar Towers, USS Cole. Need I expand?
W was. He and his team were asleep at the switch and it is their fault more than anyone else’s that we got hit. Stop trying to dodge responsibility.
…Khobar Towers was sponsored by Iranians. Moreover, those of us who have some understanding of the region know that the Iranians and ObL are in different, conflicting sects of the Muslim religion (Iran-Shi’ite, ObL-Sunni).
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Stop trying to BS us. Some of us know what’s going on.
Islamo fascism was targetting USA long before the village idiot took office with his even more incompetent national security advisor.
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i don’t give a crap who blew up what. The fact is that “The War hero” did absolutely nothing to target and destroy these individuals. WJC instead thought it more prudent to traet it like it was a B&E&L, or a A&B, DW or whatever. I wonder if WJC was trying to figure ourt whether bombing embassies in Africa was a misdemeanor or a felony.
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Shame on you Raj. I would expect more from you. The facts speak for themselves. And pray tell, why was Sandy Burglar dispatched to the national archives to purloin and destroy the original documents?
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GWB #43 is a babbling idiot. WJC is among many things derelict in his responsibility to protect USA, be it proactively, preemptively, retroactively or anything. Our enemies were killing us and he was more worried about semen stains on a blue dress.
…Even the US government was unable to verify that ObL’s gang was involved in the Cole bombing (which occurred in Oct 2000) until Feb 2001. I suppose that the US government could have been going bombing willy-nilly at whatever target was in sight, but it would have been about as useful as burning down a house to catch a flea. The point being, that you might not have caught the flea.
It’s no secret that we missed UBL on several occasions. Once when our esteemed president was playing gold and the Sudanese wanted him “taken care of.”
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Oh ya, then there was the Haitian with the .45 ACP then fended off a Marine Amphibious Force, and the Somalia Debacle. Our even more esteemed Sec Def was reluctant to provide our troops light armor, and an effective rules of engagement until we had a bunch of GI’s killed, but hey, that’s OK, they are nothing more than a bunch of ignorant southern redneck’s who voluntarily enlisted. No big deal.
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Bush is an incompetent fool. Clinton did nothing and then succeeded in destroying the evidence. Don’t give me that smoking gun nonsense. If someone is coming after you, you don’t allow them the first round. They might just put it right between your running lights.
…your comment is about as dumb as the comment by the mayor of Philly after he bombed a neighborhood that housed one building including a “terrorist” organization known as Move.
Vietnam was JFK and LBJ’s baby. LBJ went so far as to concoct a fictitious attack on US warships. being the stalwart republican, he was later attacked by the up and coming far left wing/whacko’s of the democrat party aided and abetted by thousands of drug addled fools, who could be led by their noses to do almost anything.
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My mistake LBJ wasn’t a republican. Sure were a lot of democrats that got rich over all those cold corpses.
…instead of merely bloviating over it.
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In point of fact, Vietnam was a relic of the Eisenhower malAdministration. Eisenhower took over from the French after Dien Bien Phu. Eisenhower promised country-wide elections by 1956, and then he reneged on the promise when it became clear that his chosen enemy would win the election.
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Some of us actually do understand history. Some of you do not.