The Ministry of Truth Explains It All to Iran

I decided last night to write something about the crisis of US involvement in Iraq, leading to the current standoff between the US, Iran, and Iraq.  And then this morning I heard a sort of interview between NPR's Steve Inskeep and Iran's Ambassador to the United Nations, Majid Takht Ravanchi.  Inskeep was trying to be an adversary journalist, holding Ravanchi's (and by proxy, Iran's) feet to the fire, but as usual with elite US media personalities, he came across as an obnoxious, clumsy buffoon.  I don't remember who introduced the segment, but he advised listeners to pay attention to the tone of Ravanchi's remarks, not to take his words at face value.  This reminded me of some ancient Doonesbury cartoons from the early days of the Iranian revolution, depicting an Iranian student during the hostage crisis. A voiceover balloon reminded the viewer that "this could be propaganda."

First Inskeep asked Ravanchi, "Is Iran's retaliation against the United States finished?"  Presumably he was referring to reports, including a statement by Ravanchi himself, that the retaliation was indeed finished.  Inskeep tried to play "gotcha":

When you said you don't take responsibility for the actions of others, that raises a question because there was an Iraqi militia leader who was killed in the same U.S. drone strike as Gen. Soleimani. So far as we know, no revenge attack has been taken out for him. Are you saying it is entirely possible that Iraqi militias aligned with Iran could still lash out and Iran would not accept responsibility for what they're doing?

It seems to me that if anyone might want to take revenge for the killing of an Iraqi militia leader, it would be the government of Iraq.  And, of course, the US constantly tries to dodge responsibility for
the actions of its proxies, but it wouldn't do to go into that.  Ravanchi replied fairly directly, disavowing responsibility for the actions of anyone but the government of Iran.

A bit later, Inskeep asked:

Ambassador, you're correct that Iraq's parliament did vote to expel forces from Iraq. But we should be clear, they didn't vote to expel the United States from Iraq. They voted to expel foreign forces from Iraq. And that leads us to note that Gen. Soleimani, a member of Iran's military, was in Iraq when he was killed. What was he doing there?

Strictly speaking Inskeep was right, that the vote called for the removal of US, "coalition" and other foreign forces.  The catch is that Iran claims to have no forces in Iraq; the US can't make the same claim.  There are Iranian "technical advisors" in Iraq, a term that covers a multitude of sins, but as Ravanchi replied to Inskeep more generally, the burden of proof lies on the US.  Soleimani, he said, was in Iraq to fight "terrorists," a mission to which the US can hardly object; because of his successes against Daesh, aka ISIS, he was popular in Iraq and in the region.  And, as even Inskeep must be aware, the resolution against foreign forces in Iraq was passed after and as a direct response to Soleimani's assassination.

Inskeep pressed on:

[Inskeep:] As you must know ambassador, the United States asserts that General Soleimani was plotting attacks against Americans, against the United States. Are you able to say if he was plotting such attacks?

[Ravanchi:] It is, it is the duty of the United States to to to prove otherwise, I mean, to prove that he was he was, in fact, plotting to to kill Americans. Because --

[Inskeep:] But I can also ask you, was he plotting to kill Americans?

[Ravanchi:] No, as I said, he was there in order to help the Iraqi government to better, I mean, fight terrorists pure and simple.

We should be as skeptical of an Iranian government representative as we should be of any government's representative.  But Inskeep here is parroting the claims of an administration that has been shown many times to be a gang of liars, and this particular claim has already largely been discredited as a typical Trump fabrication.  But that's NPR for you: when Trump announced the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on a Sunday morning last October, NPR's anchors treated his fantasies with total credulity.

As I've said before, the loud laments over public distrust of the media are hard to take seriously when the media work so hard to be worthy of distrust.  (Which probably isn't why many people distrust them, I realize.)  Inskeep's little clown show this morning was just embarrassing; or would be, if NPR had any shame.

Nearer My Obama to Thee

Sitting in the airport, waiting for my flight, I have nothing better to do than nitpick a reality-based Obama loyalist like Roy Edroso, who writes today:

Not mentioned: The $3 trillion Iraq war which, if Republicans get their way, will soon be going for 4.

You'd think that Obama, the reluctant warrior, had nothing to do with the resumption of that war.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

It's almost funny, in a horrible way.  Of course you all know that there's trouble in Iraq.  Last night my Right-Wing Acquaintance Number One was fretting over it, linking to an article from the Christian Science Monitor, which is a better source than NRO or The Daily Caller.  The "original invasion," RWA1 conceded, "was very badly handled," rather like an Obama cultist admitting that the President has in some ways been a "disappointment."  One of RWA1's friends advocated another US invasion of Iraq and of Iran and Turkey, to divide them by ethnicity and bring peace to the region; this, he said, would be "the best way we could help."  What could possibly go wrong?  It's good to be reminded that there are people even farther out of touch with reality than RWA1.

This morning I saw that liblogger Roy Edroso was having another hearty laugh at the Right's expense on this issue.  And true, there's plenty to laugh at.  Edroso quoted Slate columnist Reihan Salam, who wrote:

So why did the U.S. leave Iraq at the end of 2011? Part of it is that many within the Obama administration simply didn’t believe that U.S. forces would make much of a difference to Iraq’s political future.

Edroso invoked the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated by the Bush/Cheney junta in 2008, which was the main reason the US left Iraq at the end of 2011, more or less, if you overlook the remaining American troops and mercenaries.  In other words, it was the Bush administration, if it was anyone, who "didn't believe that U.S. forces" blah blah blah.  But Edroso neglected to mention that Obama tried to modify the SOFA to allow US forces to remain in Iraq past the negotiated date.  (I looked over the first 70 comments on Edroso's posts, and none of his readers mentioned the facts either.)  The Iraqi government refused to grant "legal protection" to US troops who committed atrocities and other crimes, so Obama had to keep his campaign promise to end the war, which must have been painful for him.

The facts are unpalatable to either party.  Obama fans have made much of his supposedly ending the war, trying hard to forget that the end was negotiated by the Bush administration.  Republican Obama opponents have tried to forget that the end of the war was Bush's doing, not Obama's.  As in so many other areas, the parties have constructed a fantasy version of recent US history.  We live in the United States of Amnesia, darlings.

Richard Seymour posted his take on the matter:

I see it's time to get back into Iraq. It's been a while and, let's be honest, we've all felt the absence of imperial omnipotence registered in daily beheadings deeply. Last time, the US promoted some Iranian clients, installed them into a new patrimonial state, trained up their death squads - and then complained like fuck when Iran seemed to make some strategic gains in the situation.

True.  I guess things have been too quiet lately, or something.

At The American Conservative, Daniel Larison did a neat dissection of one writer who called for immediate US intervention in Iraq:

Jeffrey leans very heavily on creating the impression of impending catastrophe, but that appears to be alarmist exaggeration aimed at scaring people into endorsing the very dubious idea of sustained military action in Iraq for months and perhaps years to come. Once we think through what Jeffrey is proposing, we should all be able to see that an air campaign would be just the sort of stupid, knee-jerk reaction to a crisis that the U.S. should strive to avoid.

Of course we should, but will we?  Our rulers are looking desperately for another chance to use our superb military, which requires ginning up popular alarm.  It's a harder sell than it used to be, but sooner or later they'll find a workable pretext.  ISIS is an imminent threat to America!  If we don't act now, these scary Islamic terrorists will pour across the undefended US/Iraq border and conquer us, raping our cattle and stealing our women! These dirty pacifists don't care how many innocent people are massacred by the bad guys (as opposed to the good guys, namely us). We've got to do something! 

I'll be back home in the morning, after an overnight flight from San Francisco.  I don't know how long it will take me to get back in the groove, but I'll do my best.

Propagandists and Anti-Propagandists

The most useful part (for me, anyway) of Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe (Seven Stories Press, 2013), another book of interviews with Noam Chomsky, though by Laray Polk rather than Chomsky regular David Barsamian, is the appendices, which take up almost the last third of the book.  Appendix 1, for instance, is a declassified 1945 dialogue between two US Army brass who want to squelch reports from Japan about the effects of A-bomb radiation on survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima.  They're especially indignant because one of the sources is an American, not just the "Jap scientists" they can easily dismiss as "propagandists."  Appendix 4 is an open letter from a Marshallese magistrate to the US military doctor who'd been waltzing in irregularly to study the effects of radiation from nuclear testing on the islanders in 1970s.  "We've never really trusted you," says the writer.  "So we're going to invite doctors from hospitals in Hiroshima to examine us in a caring way" (105).  There's also material on the use of chemical weapons by Iraq in the early 1980s, and more I haven't gotten to yet. 

Readers unfamiliar with Chomsky's political writings could do worse than begin with this book, especially those with a special interest in the environment.  Since Chomsky is in his eighties now and has been concerned with politics as a dissident and writer for more than half a century, he provides a long view that shows the continuity in US policy and practice over that period.  For example:

It should be remembered that when he escalated the attack on South Vietnam fifty years ago from support for a murderous client state [installed by his predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower] to outright US aggression, President Kennedy authorized the use of chemical weapons to destroy ground cover and also food crops, a crime in itself, even apart from the dreadful scale and character of the consequences, with deformed fetuses to this day, several generations down the line in Saigon hospitals as a result of persistent genetic mutations [36].

This conversation took place before President Obama's manufactured indignation over the use of chemical weapons in Syria this fall, which nearly led to another war in the Middle East.  It's good to be reminded that the US' own record with chemical warfare would (if we applied our own standards to ourselves) require a "humanitarian intervention," or invasion, to clean up our act.

Chomsky also talks about the symbiosis between academia, the military, the government, and corporate interests in the post-WWII period, which fits with David F. Noble's account in Forces of Production.

The actual US economy since the colonies has relied quite substantially on government intervention.  This goes right back to the earliest days of independence, and for advanced industry in the latter part of the nineteenth century.  The American system of mass production, interchangeable parts, quality control, and so on -- which kind of astonished the world -- was largely designed in government armories.  The railroad system, which was the biggest capital investment and, of course, extremely significant for economic development and expansion, was managed by the Army Corps of Engineers.  It was too complicated for private business [56].

Later Polk quotes a right-wing Christian radio pundit who said that Christian voters "would love to see a false smarty pants decapitated [!] by a real intellectual... He [Newt Gingrich] would tear Obama's head off."  Chomsky comments:

When we look over the record of famous debates, we find that they are not "won" on the basis of serious argument, significant evidence, or intellectual values generally.  Rather, their outcome turns on Nixon's five o'clock shadow, Reagan's sugary smile, lines like "have you no shame" or "you're no Jack Kennedy," etc.  That's not surprising.  Debates are among the most irrational constructions that humans have developed.  Their rules are designed to undermine rational interchange.  A debater is not allowed to say, "That was a good point.  I'll have to rethink my views." ... I don't know who Richard Lund is, and if he regards Gingrich as a "real intellectual," I don't see much reason to explore further [68].

Here I part company with Chomsky somewhat.  I think he's using "debate" in a narrow, tendentious way, referring to public spectacles like the candidates' debates staged during the American presidential campaigns.  Maybe we need another word for those performances, because it's true, they have nothing to do with "serious argument, significant evidence, or intellectual values generally."  They're gladiatorial combat, political sports events for people who are watching to cheer on their team, not to learn anything.  But that's not all there is to debate, as Chomsky knows, being a fierce, even bloodthirsty debater himself, whether about politics or about linguistics.  I have the same difference with him over his use of the word "intellectual," which he uses to refer to paid functionaries of the state and of business, not people who are interested in working with ideas.  But as with so many terms, I'm not going to harp too much on terminology: it's not the words but what they refer to, and there I agree about the function of argument and the proper role of those interested in ideas and evidence.

Ten Years After

James Fallows has been writing about Bush's invasion of Iraq as its tenth anniversary approaches, and yesterday he posted some comments from his readers.  This one startled me: Alan Thomas, a guy who says he's "proud to be known as a liberal hawk."  He was profiled in the Washington Post, for whom he says he "filled the role of token leftist."  (That tells you something about corporate media's approach to the war, doesn't it?  They found a leftist who favored the invasion, and apparently figured that was enough diversity.)

His take on the coming invasion was also interesting, for a leftist:

The United States, Thomas says, "should clean up the world. We have the power.  I'm kind of a weirdo. It's wrong for us to sit on our hands and not do anything."

Bear in mind, he thought George W. Bush was going to "clean up the world."  Of course the US has been claiming to do that all along, and we've only made it dirtier.  Thomas told the WaPo that he was going to be on the alert for human rights violations.  "'If Bush tries to install a puppet dictator or if there are human rights violations, I'll be decrying it as loudly as anyone else on the left,' he said."

Ten years later, Thomas is unrepentant, having come up with new reasons for the war.  He wrote to Fallows:

Honestly, although my personal motive had to do with human rights ..., I think just the assassination attempt on Bush 41 is plenty all by itself--what kind of country are we if we let another country's leader pull something like that with impunity?

I have trouble understanding why you think it's so obvious now that the liberal hawks were wrong.  Maybe circa 2006 it looked that way, but aren't Iraqis better off today than they would be if Saddam (or his sons) still had a grip on power?

Ah, the assassination attempt on Bush 41.  That was only taken seriously at the time by Bill Clinton (who bombed Iraq in 1993, ostensibly in retaliation for it), and perhaps by Dubya himself.  It didn't play much of a role in the campaign of lies Bush-Cheney and their collaborators waged to justify the war, perhaps because the story had been mostly discredited.  Now it hasn't a leg to stand on: the invaders found no evidence in the records of Saddam's regime that it had ever happened.

The US has also attempted to assassinate foreign heads of state, notably Fidel Castro.  Does Alan Thomas wonder what kind of country Cuba is if they let another country's leaders pull something like that off with impunity?  Surely an invasion with some regime change is long overdue.

As for whether Iraqis are better off today with Saddam gone, that's hard to answer.  Many Iraqis don't think so.  It's certainly not for an American, scrambling to justify his support for the war, to say.

By an interesting coincidence, a writer at the Guardian today, Nick Cohen, defended his own support of the war.

Every few months a member of the audience at a meeting I am addressing asks whether I regret supporting the overthrow of Saddam Hussein ... I reply that I regret much: the disbanding of the Iraqi army; a de-Ba'athification programme that became a sectarian purge of Iraq's Sunnis; the torture of Abu Ghraib; and a failure to impose security that allowed murderous sectarian gangs to kill tens of thousands.

For all that, I say, I would not restore the Ba'ath if I had the power to rewind history. To do so would be to betray people who wanted something better after 35 years of tyranny. If my interrogators' protesting cries allow it, I then talk about Saddam's terror state and the Ba'ath's slaughter of the "impure" Kurdish minority, accomplished in true Hitlerian fashion with poison gas.

And, he might have added, with the support of the Reagan administration, who supplied Saddam's regime with the materials to produce that poison gas, and protected him from any consequences.   In 1983 Reagan's special envoy Donald Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad to shake Saddam's hand and assure him of America's continued support, no matter what he did to the Kurds.

Cohen tries to insinuate that anyone who still thinks the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea must miss Saddam and wish he was still in power.  This is absurd, because the principled opponents of the invasion had always opposed Saddam and criticized the US and Britain for supporting him.  It's an astoundingly dishonest performance, repellent in its disregard for history.

If Bush was against dictatorships, Obama would "reset" relations with Russia and Iran and treat them as partners. The failure of his initiatives never deters him. Despite his efforts, Russia remains a mafia state and Iran remains a foul theocracy determined to acquire the bomb. Their peoples, naturally, are restive. Russians demonstrate against Putin's rigged elections. The Iranian green movement tries to overthrow the mullahs. But Obama and the wider tribe of western liberals have little to say to them.

In the real world, Bush was never against dictatorships: he was quite comfortable with Mubarak in Egypt and with the Saudi regime, for two obvious examples.  Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapons program as far as anyone -- certainly not Cohen -- knows. and Obama was threatening war against Iran as long ago as 2007.  Cohen says that "Arab liberals now want nothing to do with the supposed leader of the world's liberal left," but says nothing about Obama's efforts to keep Mubarak in power, or his support for the Saudi and Bahraini regimes.

I can't speak for everyone on the left or everyone who opposed Bush II's invasion, of course, but I have no sympathy for Saddam and would not want him restored to power.  But I think he could have been removed from power much sooner and with less horrific human cost if the US had simply let him fall, instead of propping him up, as we did consistently until we decided to take him out.  There were always Iraqis who opposed Saddam and favored democracy in Iraq.  Not surprisingly, the US wasn't interested in them; when the time came we chose a thoroughly corrupt huckster as our official Iraqi-in-exile.  Bush did not intend to allow elections in the new regime: only huge nonviolent demonstrations by Iraqis forced him to permit them to take place -- and then he ignored the results.  The last thing the US government was ever interested in was a democratic Iraq.

What Did "We" Know, and When Did "We" Know It?

We're now approaching the tenth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, and Democracy Now! had a remarkable exchange today between longtime media critic Norman Solomon and Colonel Lawrence Wilkinson, who as then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff helped him prepare Powell's notoriously mendacious presentation to the United Nations of the case for war.  Wilkerson surprised me by being fairly forthright: "George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and others had decided to go to war with Iraq long before Colin Powell gave that presentation. ... It added to the momentum of the war. ... Frankly, we were all wrong. Was the intelligence politicized in addition to being wrong at its roots? Absolutely."

Solomon quite properly pointed out that "We weren't all wrong," that many people at the time were right: they shredded Powell's presentation immediately, and opposed the war.  The trouble, of course, was that the critics weren't "we": they weren't government insiders or mass media personalities, who almost unanimously and uncritically supported Bush and Powell and their war.  I noticed while listening to the program (as you can by clicking through on the first link above) that some of those TV news guys reacted to Powell's speech as if he were a football player who'd kicked the winning goal, as if war were a football game.  I'm thinking mainly of Sean Hannity, though it may not come across unless you hear his voice --

This irrefutable, undeniable, incontrovertible evidence today. Colin Powell brilliantly delivered that smoking gun today. Colin Powell was outstanding today. I mean, it was lockstep. It was so compelling, I don’t see how anybody at this point cannot support this effort.

 -- and Morton Kondracke: 

It was devastating, I mean, and overwhelming. Overwhelming abundance of the evidence. Point after point after point with—he just flooded the terrain with—with data.

But why not?  War is sport and football is a continuation of war by other means.

Solomon came down very hard on Wilkerson, stressing the lack of accountability for the men (they were mostly male) who fabricated the case for war, part of

a pattern of impunity—impunity to lie, impunity to deceive and distort, impunity that is personal, that is professional and is governmental. And that kind of impunity, which has caused so much death and misery in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, is being fast-forwarded, is prefigurative for where we are now.

He accused Wilkerson and his colleagues of using the long-discredited "We were just following orders" excuse.  Wilkerson's response was interesting, not quite what I expected.  First he tried to dismiss Solomon as

someone who makes comments as if he’d never been in government a day in his life or never been in—associated with power at this level. But I will say, first of all, that when I said "we," quote-unquote, I meant those in government, not people like him or Scott Ritter or anybody else who were protesting that Iraq didn’t have WMD at the time.

You see?  He made it explicit that "we" means only our ruling elites.  The rest don't count, even if they were right.  Solomon pointed out that whatever support there was for the war was a result of the relentless propaganda barrage, excluding critical and dissenting voices.  Wilkerson then tried to paint Solomon as a cultured despiser of The People:

I find it very difficult to, in the whole, say that all of those entities that you just described to include the American people were led down the primrose path by the propaganda flowing out of the White House and the Congress and elsewhere. That presents a picture of a pretty purblind, apathetic, ignorant public, representatives in the government and elsewhere. I can’t support that kind of broad-brush painting of the situation.

Amy Goodman then mentioned a million people protesting the war in the US alone before it even began; she might also have mentioned millions more around the world.  As Noam Chomsky says, it was virtually unprecedented to have so much activism against a war before it started.  Wilkerson then tried to justify the war after all.  There were, he claimed, good reasons to believe Bush's fabricated case for war:

—which was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, had used them against his own people. No one thought he would get rid of them, since his number-one enemy, Iran, was kept at bay, certainly in part, because he possessed them. I think there was a pretty good feeling across the world, not just in the United States, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. And by the way, there is no question, I don’t think, in anyone’s mind, that once the international sanctions were off Saddam Hussein and once the international focus was off of him, he would go right back to building weapons of mass destruction again, including a pursuit of a nuclear weapon. So, let’s not make this too much of a—of, essentially, a calumny on the American people, their representatives in the Congress and all of those in the government.

NORMAN SOLOMON: It’s not a calumny on the American people at all. It’s an accurate accusation that the administration of George W. Bush, which Colonel Powell—former General Powell and you served—

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: You thought for yourself. You thought for yourself. Why can’t other Americans think for themselves?

NORMAN SOLOMON: —lied and deceived and spun for war continuously. And that’s reality. And the public responded to that.

I've probably quoted more of the debate than I should, and I recommend anyone who's interested to at least read the transcript, or watch the video.

Wilkerson surprised me because he ingenuously described the highest levels of government as an echo chamber where wishful thinking and outright lies bounce around and drive out any alternate, let alone critical or dissenting ideas.  To dissent, far from being desirable, is disloyalty.  Since war is the default approach to foreign policy, with diplomacy merely a frustrating form of foreplay, high officials inevitably look for reasons to go to war.  But these are rationales, not reasons: as the Downing Street Memo put it, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

To this day many people will say, and evidently want to believe, that the President knows more than we do, so we should trust his claims about policy.  This is probably the opposite of the truth: the President is at the center of the echo chamber, sealed off from the real world.  It doesn't have to be that way, since there is an expensive and well-organized staff organization whose job is to follow the media and brief the President on what it reports.  Clearly this process is highly selective, not merely weeding out but ignoring and excluding media that aren't part of the echo chamber.  The elite media get their information from (often anonymous) government sources who may or may not be trustworthy, but usually aren't.  This material is then fed back to the President in the daily press briefings. The President and his advisors, therefore, are probably less well-informed than many citizens outside this feedback loop who follow a wider range of media.  One example of how this can go wrong is President Obama believing at first the the Supreme Court had overturned the Affordable Care Act, partly because he relied on CNN instead of reading the opinion, and partly because the President and his partisans expected the law to be overturned.

Wilkerson asked Solomon why "the American people didn't think for themelves", but the question is why no one in the government thought for themselves.  Wilkerson even complained that Solomon hadn't come pounding on his door with the information that would have proven Bush and Powell wrong!

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: You did not call.

NORMAN SOLOMON: Are you saying Colin Powell would have met with us to talk about this information? It wasn’t secret at all, as well you know.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: We met with a number of people.

NORMAN SOLOMON: You knew how to reach Scott Ritter.

Of course Wilkerson had already dismissed Ritter, and Solomon himself, as ignorant nobodies whose opinions don't count.  His "we" only refers to those who count, even though he's explicit that those people were ignorant and even malignant.  Wilkerson got up in front of Democracy Now!'s audience -- who aren't "we" either, from his viewpoint -- and announced that the wise insiders who are qualified to guide our nation into the future aren't wise at all.

The reason all this is still important, and not the vain looking backward our President has so often deplored, is that we face a similar situation now, though it hasn't yet reached critical mass.  The US government and elite media continue to claim that Iran is a threat because of its "nuclear program," and the more they're corrected the more they keep repeating it.  Aside from that, we have the President continuing to talk about various crises -- Social Security and other "entitlements," health care, unemployment, the deficit (and the "fiscal cliff," averted for now but yawning not far ahead), and education, -- while making it clear that he has no more idea what he is talking about than Bush did, and doesn't care.  Or he's simply lying.  (Ah, the old Lying or Incompetent? conundrum.)  A president who wanted to hear a wider range of information and opinion could do so, at least in theory.  It would take some effort and would surely encounter resistance, but it could be done.  President Obama, however, won't be the president to do it.

Doomed to Repeat It

What with one thing and another, I never got around to writing a blog post yesterday.  (I did, however, manage to finish reading Connie Willis's Lincoln's Dreams, which had been my priority for the day anyhow.)  It turned out to be just as well, though, because I picked up some more information this morning that came in handy.

President Obama gave a Memorial Day speech that added another dollop to my contempt for him.  Speaking at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, he addressed Vietnam War veterans (or maybe just the veterans in his head):

"You were often blamed for a war you didn't start, when you should have been commended for serving your country with valor," Obama told a crowd gathered at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, which lists names of those who died in the conflict.

"You came home and sometimes were denigrated, when you should have been celebrated. It was a national shame, a disgrace that should have never happened. And that's why here today we resolve that it will not happen again," he said to applause.

The president noted that many Vietnam War veterans have gone to airports to personally greet soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom joined the military in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks that triggered the now-unpopular wars.

According to the same Reuters story, he also "promised as commander-in-chief not to send U.S. troops back into harm's way without a clear mission and strategy."  What was our "mission and strategy" in Libya again?  What was our mission and strategy in Iraq?  In Afghanistan?  The US had a clear mission and strategy in Vietnam, as far as that goes: to stop the spread of World Communism by aiding a loyal ally in South Vietnam.  It was as transparently fake as our missions and strategies since then, of course, but we had one, and you work with the mission and strategy you have.  Considering that Obama continues to lie about what the US military is doing and why, I don't suppose he's breaking his perfect record this time.

But what jumped out at me from his remarks was the claim that returning Vietnam veterans "sometimes were denigrated", seconded by the article's writer, who said that many "of those who survived brutal fights in the Southeast Asian jungle faced derision when they got home in the 1960s and 1970s as a result of public opposition to that Cold War battle."  I didn't want to jump to any conclusions, but it sounded like Obama was repeating the false claim that the antiwar movement demonized Vietnam veterans, which in its purest form says that hippies spat on them.  There is no evidence that anything of the kind ever happened. The antiwar movement worked with soldiers and veterans, denigrating and deriding the politicians who had sent them to Southeast Asia to kill and die.  The group Vietnam Veterans Against the War soon emerged, and if anyone denigrated or attacked Vietnam veterans, it was the political establishment.  Nixon's vice president Spiro Agnew fag-baited veterans who participated in demonstrations against the war, for example, and ultimately there emerged an official discourse of Vietnam veterans as unstable and dangerous.  It didn't help that the US economy was having trouble, and returning veterans had trouble finding or keeping jobs.  As VVAW member John Zutz wrote, "There is no place in the American memory for the factually accurate image of vets throwing their medals back at Congress."  Or at NATO.  And nobody who's anybody suggests that it was shameful and disgraceful to send American forces to destroy a country that hadn't attacked us in the first place.

Part of the elite contempt for Vietnam-era veterans was shown by the initial media and Beltway reaction to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall: they hated it, and there was even some attempt by the right to gin up some racist hysteria because the designer was (American-born!) Chinese.  Only when it became clear that the public liked it did the elites suddenly remember that they'd really recognized its greatness all along.  But if you want to talk about neglect of American veterans, consider Korean War veterans, who didn't get a memorial in Washington until 1995, although 36,000 died there (along with a million or more Koreans).  As with Vietnam, the willed amnesia came largely from the fact that the Korean War ended in a truce, not the glorious unconditional victory that Americans are promised by birthright.  (I mean, isn't it in the Constitution?  We always win?)  Returning Vietnam vets found that people -- not dirty hippies, but their school classmates -- just didn't want to hear about their experiences; it seems to have been even better for Korean War veterans.  I must have known some as a child in the 1950s, but I don't remember hearing anything about that war: it was World War II that was all over the place, as American interference in Vietnam gradually increased.

Still, I didn't want to accuse Obama of saying something he didn't mean, so it's a good thing I put off writing this post until today, when VastLeft linked to this takedown of The Audacity of Hope, which quotes Obama committing the lie to print on page 29: "the burning of flags and spitting on vets."  So he evidently believes it.  (An apologist could argue that in context, Obama was just describing the beliefs "white ethnic voters" to explain why they voted for Reagan, but his use of the trope this weekend shows that he believes it -- or else he was just pandering.)

The Reuters story kicks off with another piece of Obama propaganda, referring to his "own efforts to wind down the Iraq and Afghanistan wars started by his predecessor, George W. Bush."  Korea and Vietnam may be ancient history, but Obama has only been in office for three and a half years.  It shouldn't be necessary to go to the archives to remember that Obama campaigned on his intention to escalate the war in Afghanistan (a promise he actually kept), or that Bush-Cheney had already begun winding down the war in Iraq with a negotiated Status Of Forces Agreement that Obama tried to ignore.  But he wasn't able to persuade the Iraqi government to cooperate, partly because of revelations by Wikileaks of US crimes which made the Iraqis unwilling to grant US troops legal immunity; so he had to wind down the US war (while still keeping thousands of regular forces and mercenaries in place).

Vast Left summed it up well, writing of Americans who served in Vietnam:

The horrors we subjected them to, and the ones we sent them to visit upon so many others, are not—or by gum should not be—something to celebrate.

Pity, learn from, heal from, yes. But to use the language of disgrace to describe some Americans' reticence to celebrate Vietnam troops as conquering heroes is a vulgar display of pandering for the head of a nation that remains ready, willing, and able to repeat the sins of that war as long as our empire has bullets, bombs, and Selective Service and military volunteers.

Non-Corporate Media Stumble

Okay, see how this looks to you:

The Obama administration has announced plans to withdraw nearly all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of the year after failing to reach an agreement with the Iraqi government. The United States had discussed keeping thousands of troops in Iraq, but had insisted their immunity be extended as a pre-condition. After the Iraqi government refused, the administration said Friday it would withdraw all its forces except for around 150 troops to guard U.S. sites. At the White House, President Obama said the withdrawal will mark the end of the Iraq war.

If you didn't know that the US had agreed in 2008 to remove all our troops from Iraq by the end of 2011, and if you didn't know that President Obama had been pressuring the Iraqi government to allow American forces to remain there since he took office, would you have gotten that impression from the paragraph above? Or would you think that the US position was that "If the Iraqi government wants us to stay we will stay"?

The second sentence especially: it doesn't explicitly say that it was the US who wanted to stay and Iraq who wanted us to leave, but it is exactly the kind of thing I've been hearing and reading in the corporate media. Same for "failing to reach an agreement with the Iraqi government": it's literally true, but it still sounds to me like the US was negotiating in good faith, which wasn't happening.

And those paragraphs came not from CNN or the New York Times but from the left-liberal Democracy Now. Listening to Amy Goodman read them on the radio brought me up short. To give credit where it's due, she went on to describe the ongoing US mercenary presence in Iraq and

In addition to maintaining a large private force in Iraq, Obama administration officials have also floated the possibility of maintaining a large military deployment in neighboring countries such as Kuwait. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the United States will negotiate a new agreement with Iraq over military training and assistance.

You know -- we'll come back if they ask us nicely, and grant our forces carte-blanche to commit more atrocities. It's probably naive and foolish of us, but that's how America is: we keep giving and giving no matter how little appreciation we get from those ungrateful wogs.

I'm still listening to the same installment of Democracy Now. Goodman's talking to her guests Cornel West and Michael Moore. West annoys me intensely with his gaseous religiosity ("let me just first say I’m blessed to be here") and both of them annoy me with their dishonesty.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, you both supported President Obama.

CORNEL WEST: It was critical support, I think, we both had—

MICHAEL MOORE: Yeah, yeah.

CORNEL WEST: —because we looked at, of course, the right wing, and the right-wing takeover would have been even more atrocious. But I think both of us knew that he tended to move too much toward the center.

I don't remember either of them having been critical of Obama on principle during the campaign, and since then Moore has been giving Obama the benefit of every doubt, while West has been indulging in creepy ad hominems against Obama like accusing him of "a certain fear of free black men…" rather than substance. Even today Moore hopes that Obama "can either go down as a historic president, who becomes the FDR of this century," as if that were any interest of Obama's.  Obama wants to be the Ronald Reagan of this century, and he's well on his way.

And then Goodman -- who knows better -- says:

AMY GOODMAN: And [Obama] won by many, many people giving very little money each. Now going for a billion dollars, he is going to massive fundraisers throughout this country—what, $38,000-a-plate, etc., fundraisers—continuing through all of this period.

Obama's been going to such fundraisers all through his term, this one last September for example, and the small donors to his presidential campaign were outweighed by big donors from the insurance industry, the oil industry, Wall Street, and corporate America generally. He also voted for Bush's bank bailout. And he's doing even better with Wall Street this time around, which no doubt will mean lots more cozy golf outings with the corporate elite (I got this one from Democracy Now, in fact).

Look, Amy and Michael and all the rest of you: I know you're in a codependent relationship with Obama, but you mustn't go on being his enablers. Break the cycle of abuse now!

(Image was a banner ad at Salon.com)

A Great Day to Be Indigenous

There was outrage in Native American circles (and others) recently when it was learned that the mission to take out Osama Bin Laden was codenamed "Operation Geronimo."

BoingBoing reported:

Even the NYT's account would appear to have inaccuracies now: They report that "Geronimo" was code name for bin Laden, but CNN cites an administration official later clarifying that this was the code name for the operation, not the man himself.

Oh, well! That's all right then. But it didn't appease the administration's critics. An LA Times op-ed agreed:

Present-day Native American leaders have rightly objected to the implied comparison between Geronimo and Bin Laden. As Jeff Houser, chairman of the Fort Sill Apache Tribe noted in a letter to President Obama, "to equate Geronimo … with Osama bin Laden, a mass murderer and cowardly terrorist, is painful and offensive to our tribe and to all native Americans." No religious fundamentalist, Geronimo never sought to create an all-encompassing caliphate. Rather, he simply wanted to be left alone.

(Geronimo as Greta Garbo -- I like it.) I'm not defending the mission's title, I only want to suggest that Native American critics should treat it as a salutary reminder of the history that they seem to be trying to forget as fiercely as any other Americans. The op-ed drew on an article by Karl Jacoby, a history professor at Brown University, who wrote:

The appropriation of Indian labels is particularly unseemly given the reality of today's military. Native Americans have one of the highest per capita enlistment rates in the military of any ethnic group. Powwows often begin with the entering of an honor guard, composed of military veterans who carry the U.S. and tribal flags. At the San Carlos Apache Reservation in Arizona, where Geronimo was confined in the 1870s and '80s, the tribal government maintains a billboard proudly listing all the San Carlos Apaches serving in the military.

It's no wonder that Indian peoples feel their sacrifices have been dishonored by the labeling of our worst enemy as Geronimo and that they themselves have been treated as other than real Americans. As Guyaalé's great-grandson, Joseph Geronimo, noted recently, using the name in the operation to kill Bin Laden was a "slap in the face." His ancestor, after all, "was more American than anybody else."

Kaplan acknowledges "the 1939 movie 'Geronimo,' (a film advertised at the time as featuring images of 'war-maddened savages terrorizing the West')". Whatever the reality of Geronimo's career, that's how he was long seen in white American culture. The US military still uses the term "Indian country" to refer to "enemy territory"; the usage is apparently of Vietnam-war vintage, but survives in Iraq. (A Marine general's use of the term in 2003 also aroused controversy and hand-wringing.) In the American military imaginary, they're still fighting the Indian wars.

The Indian wars are reckoned to have ended with the capture of Geronimo in 1886, though, so I guess it's not too surprising that many Native Americans now want to see and present themselves as patriotic Americans. But I can only go along with that wish so far. If Native Americans want to overlook their past sufferings at the hands of the US Government they are now so proud to serve, so be it; it's their choice. There's another inseparable side of that story, though: it means supporting, endorsing, and participating in the present crimes of the US. Which is not okay.

This morning I was listening to the Native American music program on my local community radio station. Today's installment was dedicated to Memorial Day, and between songs I vaguely heard references to "defending our country." Then they played a song called "She's My Hero", by Radmilla Cody, a tribute to Lori Piestewa, described on Cody's label's website as "the first Native woman to die in the Iraq war". (Well, no. "Native" in Iraq would mean "Iraqi," and I'm sure that many native Iraqi women were victims of our invasion before Piestewa was killed. This is another indication why "Native" is not a suitable label for the pre-Columbian peoples of the Americas. But that's another issue.) I listened more closely to the words as the song played:

Her name was Lori
synonymous with Glory
she answered her country's call
she did it for us all
Oh the woman warrior
she's my hero

The price that she paid
the sacrifice she made
There's peace all around us
embraces all Americans
Oh the woman warrior
she's my hero

The CD's liner notes describe Piestewa as "the first Native American woman warrior to die in battle protecting the freedom of her people and the United States of America." So few words, so many lies. Piestewa wasn't a warrior, she was (according to Wikipedia) "a member of the army's 507th Army Maintenance Company, a support unit of clerks, cooks, and repair personnel." An Iraqi in an analogous position could have ended up in Abu Ghraib or Bagram.

Far from "protecting the freedom of her people and the United States of America", Piestewa was a participant in an illegal and horrific war of aggression against people who had not attacked the US. Even if she was, according to Jessica Lynch (who was injured in the same ambush -- remember her?), "the true hero" of the debacle, and even if Lynch named her daughter "Dakota Ann" (?) in Piestewa's honor, and even if "Her death led to a rare joint prayer gathering between members of the Hopi and Navajo tribes, which have had a centuries-old rivalry," what she was doing in Iraq should not be whitewashed. It had better be possible to sympathize with her and her family's loss without obscuring this reality. I am sorry Piestewa died, but she didn't do it "for us all." Not for me, and not for you either.

"There's peace all around us"? The song and the program's content were especially outrageous coming on the heels of this (via) defense of America and our freedoms:

For the second time in three days, a night raid in eastern Afghanistan by NATO forces resulted in the death of a child, setting off protests on Saturday that turned violent and ended in the death of a second boy. . . .

"American forces did an operation and mistakenly killed a fourth-grade student; he had gone to sleep in his field and had a shotgun next to him," [the district's governor, Abdul Khalid]. said. "People keep shotguns with them for hunting, not for any other purposes," Mr. Khalid said.

As Glenn Greenwald commented,

Just imagine the accumulated hatred from having things like this happen day after day, week after week, year after year, for a full decade now, with no end in sight -- broadcast all over the region. It's literally impossible to convey in words the level of bloodthirsty fury and demands for vengeance that would arise if a foreign army were inside the U.S. killing innocent American children even a handful of times, let alone continuously for a full decade.

When I hear about women warriors (or any others) proudly hearing their country's call and defending us all, I can only think of "heroic" exploits like that one. There've been so many.

Defending the Indefensible

I knew there was something else I meant to write about here, but it kept slipping my mind.

I've always liked Doonesbury, though since I don't regularly read newspapers there have been prolonged periods when I didn't follow the strip closely. For a few years in the 1980s I would just buy each collection as it was published. Now that it's available online, I've done a little better. It was fun to watch certain right-wingers fume when he started up some plots about the Iraq War, with very sympathetic and intelligent portrayals of the troops. When longtime character B.D. lost a leg and his football helmet, a lot of people took notice, but Trudeau has also given serious story time to Leo aka Toggle, an Iraq vet who returns to college after his medical discharge, where he becomes romantically involved with Mike Doonesbury's daughter Alex. Leo lost an eye and has trouble speaking due to Traumatic Brain Injury; he's also a heavy-metal fan who drives a pickup truck. Not exactly the kind of character the Right (or many liberals, alas) would expect to get sensitive kind of treatment in Doonesbury. Which only goes to show how little they know. Sure, Trudeau is a liberal, but he's the kind of liberal that gives liberals a good name.

In last Sunday's strip, Alex and Leo go out for coffee. Alex makes some slighting remarks about some men carrying guns, "open-carry yahoos" as she calls them. (Do such men regularly kick back at Starbucks?) Leo intervenes in the argument: "Listen, dude," he tells one of the men, "I spent two years behind an M60 machine gun defending, among other things, your right to be a moron about guns!" Alex exclaims in delight over Leo's unexpectedly getting out a full sentence.

It's a cute little story, but one thing jumped out at me. Leo was not defending freedom in Iraq. No Iraqi was a threat to Americans' right to be morons about guns. No Iraqi was a threat to American rights or freedoms. It was, and is, our government that is the biggest threat to American rights or freedoms -- remember the Patriot Act, which was passed under Bush but was originally a Clinton-era project? -- and it was in the service of that government that Leo and thousands of other soldiers went to Iraq.

I know, I know, what he said was in character. For that matter, the latest Doonesbury collection, Signature Wound, has a Foreword by retired US Marine Corps General and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace, who hails "all who have stepped forward and volunteered to protect the freedoms we hold dear." Such talk is a conditioned reflex, not only in the military but among most people who can't quite bring themselves to object to any war the US starts. I must respectfully but firmly differ with the General, and with Leo, and with Garry Trudeau if it comes to that. The United States has not fought a defensive war in my lifetime, and I was born in 1951. With all proper sympathy and empathy for those who feel the need to rationalize and justify their participation in the wars of aggression we have fought and are fighting now, I can't go along with them on this point. As far as I can see, until Americans can recognize what their government and their armed forces are doing, we will continue to get involved in these wars, and that will mean more young people getting chewed up and spat out by the military, with more or less support from their society. (Not to mention the vastly greater numbers of innocent foreigners who suffer.) But the best way -- the only way, really -- to support them is not to damage them in the first place.

P.S. May 9, 2010: Oh, dear, here's another one. (Via)

I am a homosexual American citizen and while I fight to defend the rights of free speech and a democratic legislature process, I suffer because these very same freedoms are denied to me as a gay Sailor.

Again, this is mere rhetoric (read the whole letter for his account of the highlights of his service). Which, as I've said before, doesn't mean the ban on gays in the military shouldn't be lifted, only that it has nothing to do with defending anyone's rights.

P.P.S. May 16, 2010: This one from the Give a Damn Campaign's website, an open letter to President Obama from a gay soldier on leave from deployment in Iraq:

When serving in a war zone, you learn quite a bit about yourself and what’s important to you. I’ve had the chance to work on a close and personal level with the people of Iraq, and in doing so, I have realized more than ever that the freedoms we enjoy as Americans should not be taken for granted – we must protect them at all costs. These freedoms are essential to the very foundation of our society. Yet so many men and women who fight for these freedoms aren’t allotted their own. Our freedom to love and be loved by whomever we choose. The freedom to live of a life of truth and dignity.

I wonder if it's possible to talk about an issue like this without relying on such pious garbage. But this young man isn't protecting my freedoms, or your freedoms, or anyone else's freedoms. If anything, he's fighting for a state that is dedicated to taking freedom away. (In an exchange on the Campaign's Facebook pages, one guy inadvertently came closer to reality: "I'm gay, and I would love to serve my military..." (But then I noticed that "Serving the Military" is the thread topic; I can't even give this poor kid credit for the Freudian slip.)

Duty, Honor, Country

I finished reading Tamler Sommers's A Very Bad Wizard yesterday, but I'll probably be writing about it for a while to come. Certain themes keep turning up, as in the concluding interview with law professor William Ian Miller about societies based on honor. In his introduction to the session Sommers writes (208),

Many Arab and Islamic societies are thought to be honor cultures, and as a result research on this topic has attracted the attention of political and military strategists. Former US Army Major William McCallister, for example, has attributed the US's initial unpopularity with Iraqis during the Iraq War to, in part, our failure to grasp the pervasive role that the concepts of shame and honor play in Iraqi society; they are as important to the Iraqis as land and water. McCallister, who now consults with the Marines in Iraq, writes that "It has taken us four years to realize that we must execute operations within the existing cultural frame of reference."

(The link to McCallister is given by Sommers in a footnote. It's amusing, in the same way that having a finger shoved down your throat is amusing. Among McCallister's recommended readings are Eric Hoffer's The True Believer, which I must reread soon and write about here; Bernard Lewis's The Multiple Identities of the Middle East; Kanan Makiya's long-discredited Republic of Fear; and The Code of Hammurabi, translated by L. W. King.)

So, really? The US was initially unpopular (well, "in part") because of "our failure to grasp the pervasive role that the concepts of shame and honor play in Iraqi society." That the US had invaded Iraq, devastated the country, killed and injured thousands of Iraqis, installed a corrupt gangster as our local puppet -- none of this, and more, rates a mention. (Though as I recall, many Iraqis did initially welcome the US invasion for dislodging Saddam Hussein from power -- but they didn't want us to stick around afterward. That seemed reasonable to me at the time, but now I realize that I misunderstood their honor culture.)

In the body of the interview (which is actually pretty interesting; I may look up Miller's writing on honor in the Icelandic sagas), Sommers brings up the subject of Iraq as follows (224):

TS: ... Let me put it like this: you see in reports from Iraq that some officers come back almost bewildered by the honor codes. One former army guy said that honor and shame are their moral currency, and that until we understand that, we're screwed. Do you think a general misunderstanding of honor cultures has led to (honest, in a way) mistakes, like thinking we'll be greeted as liberators, or that we can establish a democracy without too much pain and loss of life?

WIM: It isn't honor culture the officers don't understand; hell, they live in one. It's the particular substantive matters that trigger honor concerns in Iraq -- just what precisely they will take as a big offense and what they'll shrug off. That's where the misunderstandings take place.

Miller's initial comment is good: it's true, career military officers live in an honor culture -- but he doesn't question Sommers's delusions about US motives in Iraq. I have to remind myself that for these guys, the fact of the invasion, the aggression, is simply off the table; they don't even ignore it, because that would mean being aware in some way that it's there and it's a problem. Just as in Sommers's interview with Joseph Henrich, there is no question that the US, in its honest but bumbling way, was trying to "liberate" Iraq, to "establish a democracy without too much pain and loss of life." (Noam Chomsky likes to tell how the original Great Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Company "depicts an Indian with a scroll coming from his mouth pleading 'Come over and help us.' The charter states that rescuing the population from their bitter pagan fate is 'the principal end of this plantation.'") Only the pacifists, the isolationists, the reflexive opponents of the Republicans or the US military would dwell on such trivial irrelevancies. Nor can Sommers and Miller begin to imagine, apparently, that Iraqis might see it any differently.

The pattern is familiar: we tried to help the Iraqis / Vietnamese / Haitians / Filipinos / name your favorite recipient of Euro-American assistance, to bring them democracy, freedom, Christianity, but they just aren't ready for democracy. Their values, their "norms," are different from ours, and that's "where the misunderstandings take place." Even worse, they are crafty, deceptive, corrupt and irresponsible, and we simple, innocent, direct Americans don't know how to cope with their devious ways. We're the New World -- fresh, scrubbed, untouched by Old World wickedness -- so how could we possibly understand them?

One thing that doesn't get covered in the interview, unfortunately: Sommers mentions in the introduction that among the topics covered in his more than three hour gabfest with Miller was "the appalling hypocrisy of the Israeli University boycott" (209). I guess he means this? I feel sure that Sommers's take on the matter would be every bit as profound as his understanding of Iraqis' reaction to the US coming over to help them.

But Enough About You ...

This article – well, really it’s only a squib – by one Megan McArdle has been linked by IOZ (in a strong, eloquent post), if not by others, on the web. It’s interesting to watch Ms. McArdle squirm:

Obviously, there are people who were right about the war for the right reasons, and we should examine what their thought process was--not merely the conclusions they came to, but how they got there. Other peoples’ opposition was animated by principles that may be right, but aren’t really very helpful: the pacifists, the isolationists, the reflexive opponents of Republicans or the US military. Within the limits on foreign policy in a hegemonic power, these just aren’t particularly useful, again, regardless of whether you are metaphysically correct.

“It won't work” is the easiest prediction to get right; almost nothing does. The thought process that tells you something probably won't work is not always a good way to figure out what will, even if you were right for the right reasons, as I agree lots of people were. That’s why libertarians have a great track record at predicting which government programs will fail (almost all of them) and a lousy track record at designing ones that do work.

On the other hand, “I thought it would work for X reason”, when it didn’t work, is, I think, a lesson you can carry into both decisions about what to do, and what not to do. On a deeper level, understanding the unconscious cognitive biases that lead smart and well meaning people to believe that things which will not work, will work, is a very good way to prevent yourself from making the same mistake.

It’s a repulsive performance, and while I’m tempted to say that it’s surprising to find it on the site of a liberal magazine like The Atlantic, I have to recall that The Atlantic also spotlighted Dinesh D’Souza’s right-wing tract Illiberal Education, publishing an excerpt before the book was published. Of the first few dozen commenters, most fault McArdle for thinking that the invasion of Iraq hasn’t worked, or it would have if not for the Iraqis, which is probably the best refutation of her position one could ask for.

Notice, in the first paragraph I’ve quoted, how blithely she dismisses the “pacifists”, the “isolationists”, not to mention those who are “reflexively” opposed to the Republican party. I wonder who she has in mind. It’s so easy, and such a popular tactic, not to name names, so no one can quibble over the accuracy of the characterizations. But if someone argues nowadays that the Japanese should not have tried to take over Asia in the 1930s, is that “isolationism”? Does only a “pacifist” say that the Japanese should not have killed Our Boys at Pearl Harbor, or that al-Qaeda was wrong to destroy the World Trade Towers? American pundits and politicians never hesitate to make moral judgments on the actions of our certified enemies; it’s only the US whose motives are beyond question.

Next McArdle moves to the Realpolitik so beloved of mainstream liberals and conservatives alike: well, we live in a world of hegemony, so we have to work within those parameters, don’t we, and not be afraid to get our hands a little dirty. So, the question becomes something like: how can we effectively achieve our aims – never mind whether those aims are good ones? How could Hitler have gone about establishing hegemony over Europe, for instance, in a way that would work? When the Soviets crushed democracy in Czechoslovakia in 1968, is the only permissible question whether their hegemony worked? And how about China’s hegemony over Tibet? A Chinese Megan McArdle could explain that only an isolationist or a pacifist, surely, would deny China’s right to run that country as it wishes. The only question is whether Chinese methods will work, and if not, how to make them work.

As I remember it, American liberals who opposed the invasion of Tibet -- I mean Iraq, sorry! – mostly expressed the fear that “we” would get into another “quagmire” there, like we did in Vietnam. Gloria Steinem, for one, expressed that fear in a speech here at Indiana University. What about the Iraqis who might be killed by our bombs and artillery and white phosphorus, you ask? Who cares? No one’s going to accuse Steinem of pacifism or isolationism! There was debate in The Nation, too, about how comparable Iraq was to Vietnam, though a few knee-jerk anti-Republicans were allowed to express their reflexive rejection of hegemony in its pages.

One commenter at IOZ asked, “But did anyone opposed to the war intelligently warn what would happen if the US went in without a governance plan? I don't recall that being their message.” Gracious, so many demands here, demands that would never be made of supporters of the war – intelligence, for one. But leaving aside those who warned of a quagmire, there’s this article by Noam Chomsky, and all you have to do is browse around Counterpunch in the months leading up to the invasion to find numerous warnings that it would not be the cakewalk promised by the Bushites. Those predictions have mostly been borne out by events, too. But for the likes of Megan McArdle, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the flight of millions more are of no account in themselves, only as signs of our doing our hegemony wrong.

But then there’s Pete Seeger, the granddaddy of privileged white kids learning folk music, blacklisted from American TV as a Red for many years until he appeared on The Smothers Brothers Show in 1968. Seeger wrote a song called “Waist-Deep in the Big Muddy” about the American experience in Vietnam. The Smothers Brothers bucked CBS censors so Seeger could perform this radical, cutting-edge political song on their show. The key offense, much as in a Stalinist state, was the song’s reference to “the big fool [who] says to push on,” widely taken to mean President Lyndon Baines Johnson. The song is about American soldiers “on maneuvers in Louisiana,” training for the Big One, WWII, who are nearly sucked down into quicksand because of the incompetence of their captain. If we take this song as it was meant to be, as an allegory of America in Vietnam, it’s notable that what menaces Our Boys is a force of nature – opposing human beings are conspicuously absent, to say nothing of napalmed children and slaughtered villagers. Seeger knew better, I hope. But that this pretentious song could have seemed extreme (or daring, depending on your point of view) tells me a lot about American hegemony, even among opponents of the US invasion of Vietnam. … A few years ago I happened on a Pete Seeger songbook at the library and began working through it, learning songs I hadn’t heard in years. I started to learn “Big Muddy,” but as I listened to the words I was singing I couldn’t go on.

I’m also reminded of a joke, which I first encountered in Leo Rosten’s The Joy of Yiddish but found again in Paul Breines’s very serious and important book Tough Jews. Some rabbinic students were drafted into the Tsar’s army more than a century ago, and much to their trainers’ surprise they turned out to be excellent sharpshooters. On the target range they never missed. But when they were put into battle, they refused to fire their guns. Their officers screamed at them, “What’s the matter? Why don’t you shoot?” They replied, “But those are real men out there, sir – if we shoot, we might hurt them.” Crazy pacifists!