Albert Camus wrote “The innocent is the person who explains nothing.” This rather opaque observation describes the left’s increasing stridency when alluding to their guiltlessness in undermining the morale of the American people for carrying on the War in Iraq. In fact, liberals are employing a strategy that attempts to obscure their stated desire that the United States lose the war while at the same time, deflecting attention from a 4 year effort to convince the American people that trying to bring democracy to Iraq was a hopeless exercise in wishful thinking and that the war has been a lost cause from the start.
They deny it, of course. In fact, they get downright nasty if you even try and point it out. They will whine that their criticisms of the war effort have been misconstrued. They were simply trying to help win the war by pointing out the incompetence and wrongheadedness of the Bush Administration. They really had the US interests at heart all along.
Yes, I have an eight foot invisible rabbit as a friend too.
Never wanting for originality and creativity in seeking to defend themselves, the left is employing a tactic that in another time and other circumstances, they profess to abhor. They have adopted the doctrine of preemption while at the same time, using a tried and true favorite analogy that ties the right’s criticism of their curious sense of patriotism to the Nazis.
They claim the right is sharpening their knives in anticipation of employing a “stabbed in the back” defense for our inevitable defeat in Iraq.
It is gratifying that the left has adopted this meme preemptively. Perhaps they can be persuaded to apply pre-emption to other, more important areas of debate such as the well being and survival of the United States. Then again, I haven’t seen any pigs flying lately so I would guess we’ll have to do without any change of heart in that quarter.
This won’t be the first time the left has employed preemption as a tactic in order to go on the offensive against the Bush Administration and the right. You will recall in the immediate – and I mean immediate – aftermath of Katrina, the left was in full throated howl regarding the incompetence and uncaring nature of the relief effort less than 24 hours after hurricane force winds had died down in the stricken city of New Orleans. At a time when the overwhelming majority of Americans were paying attention to the victims of this natural disaster, the left chose to open a vicious personal attack on the President that was unprecedented in modern history in the aftermath of a calamity. Relying on media reports that later turned out to be bogus as well as trotting out the racial angle, and an anti-war meme about the National Guard to boot, the Katrina Narrative was born. The left was able to define the parameters of the debate over the relief effort simply by getting there first with the most ammunition – whether that ammo was based on facts or not.
But this latest attempt at preemption is designed to fulfill the dual purpose of defending the indefensible and changing the dynamic of any postwar debate by raising the specter of conservatives as Nazis. I must say it is a brilliant strategy in that it seeks to completely absolve liberals from any kind of responsibility for undermining the confidence of the American people in the President and the war as well as making themselves appear as the victim of conservative storm troopers.
As far as I can tell, this meme first saw the light of day a year ago in an article by Kevin Baker in Harpers. After helpfully giving the reader some background on the origin of the “stabbed in the back” legend – a legend not started by the National Socialists but rather by the German High Command’s Luddendorf and Von Hindenberg to excuse their defeat by blaming “socialists” in the new Weimer government – Baker connects the theme to modern conservatives and the idea that the very first use of the stabbed in the back (dolchstosslegende) attack on the left was the result of the right’s paranoid fantasies about a “betrayal” at Yalta by FDR:
The right wing’s dolchstosslegende was a small but fateful conspiracy, engineered through “secret diplomacy†at Yalta. Its linchpin was Hiss, a junior State Department aide at Yalta who was now described as a major architect of the pact. Hiss was a perfect villain for the right’s purposes. He was not only a communist and a spy; he was also an effete Eastern intellectual right down to his name—and, by implication, possibly a homosexual. He had been publicly exposed by that relentlessly regular guy, Dick Nixon, as an unnatural, un-American element who had used his wiles to sway all of his superiors in the Crimea.Just how he had accomplished this was never detailed, but it didn’t matter; specificity is anathema to any myth. Bullitt and an equally flamboyant opportunist of the period, Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, offered a more general explanation. The Democrats, Mrs. Luce had already charged, “will not, or dare not, tell us the commitments that were overtly or secretly made in moments of war’s extermination by a mortally ill President, and perhaps mortally scared State Department advisers.â€
The idea of the “dying President†at Yalta was plausible to much of the public, who had seen photographs of Roosevelt looking suddenly, shockingly gaunt and exhausted throughout much of the last year of his life. To the right wing—which had conducted a whispering campaign against Roosevelt throughout his term in office, claiming that his real affliction was not polio but syphilis, and that he, his wife, and various advisers, including Hopkins, were “secret Jews†and Soviet agents—it all made perfect sense. To the many Americans who still loved Roosevelt and whose votes the Republicans needed, FDR himself could now become the Siegfried figure, a dying hero betrayed by the shady, unnatural Hiss.
Note that Baker skillfully mixes legitimate criticisms of Yalta with the paranoid right’s insistence of a conspiracy. For instance, Baker relies on FDR admirers to debunk the notion that Roosevelt was in any way hampered by his declining health. But historians are not of one mind on the issue, most notably Michael Beschloss
Roosevelt’s illnesses toward the end of the war were well known to his inner circle, and Stimson and Secretary of State Cordell Hull were openly defying the president by late 1944. And though Beschloss says in his book that Roosevelt wasn’t as easygoing with Stalin as some have suggested, he acknowledges that FDR’s health couldn’t help but affect talks at the 1945 Yalta Conference and afterwards.“At the very end, Roosevelt was not what he was,” he said. “But he felt he should delay [making certain policy decisions] until the last possible minute.” The catch was, when FDR died in April 1945, nobody knew exactly what he had planned to do, which forced Truman into a quick learning curve.
Baker’s point about Yalta – that it was the best deal that could be gotten at the time – was true up to a point. Should FDR have known that Stalin had no intention of abiding by certain terms of the agreement relating to free elections in Eastern Europe? Roosevelt was no starry eyed worshipper of Stalin and knew perfectly well what the Soviet dictator was capable of. Since we can rule out naivete we are left with cynicism – signing a document that FDR knew would be honored in the breach. This, in fact, was the responsible criticism of the agreement coming from the right. I happen to agree (others don’t) that FDR got the best deal possible at Yalta and that it is over the top to suggest we “sacrificed” Eastern Europe. But there is little doubt that the agreement itself gave Stalin a free hand to meddle in post war elections – especially in Poland and Czechoslovakia.
We could go on about Yalta as an historical event but Baker used it to highlight what he saw as the original version of the stabbed in the back theme used by the right. No doubt the Birchers, the isolationists, and even some mainstream Republicans signed on to this paranoia. But to compare the right at the time of Robert Taft to the right of today is extraordinarily stupid. With the exception of a few mossbacks, conservatism has evolved far beyond the narrow strictures of the 1950’s with its deadening conformist orthodoxy to become a dynamic intellectual force for change. Even today, with the movement in disarray and the Republican party without a clue, there is incredible dynamism to be found in conservative thought. How that will translate into change and reform is still an unknown but to compare today’s conservatives with the “Who Lost China?” crowd is repulsive and ignorant to boot.
Baker could care less if his exaggerated myth making about conservatives is accurate because he’s not out to prove anything about Yalta, or Viet Nam, or any other historical event except as they can be used to buttress his thesis that the coming post-war debate on Iraq will try and pin the blame for any defeat on the left. But there is a subtle yet significant difference that Baker and others on the left are failing to make clear when preemptively accusing conservatives of contemplating perfidious accusations regarding the left’s loyalty. And that is quite simply, no responsible conservative I know is blaming the left for the monumental blunders, mistakes in judgment, errors of omission and commission made by the Bush Administration in the prosecution of the military aspects of the war in Iraq. The blame there rests solely and exclusively with the President and his people.
What I and I hope other conservatives will blame the left for is a deliberate, coordinated effort to undermine the confidence of the American people in the war by carrying out a campaign of personal destruction against President Bush while positing several crazy, paranoid conspiracy theories of their own.
(Note: I am not going to accuse the media of the same tactics because I believe reporting from Iraq – which has been abominable – can be explained by the fact that this conflict has proven to be impossible to cover in any traditional sense. With 74 journalists killed in Iraq since 2003, the western press has not only been forced to rely on stringers of unknown ability and whose loyalties can only be guessed at but also, they have been extremely limited in their ability to supply background and context to the story of the war. This is a story begging to be told and I suspect it will be soon enough.)
Dinesh D’Souza (I know he’s a bomb thrower but I’m only quoting his research into leftist thoughts on Iraq) supplies some of the evidence to make my case:
It seems that there are many on the left who want Bush to lose in Iraq. “The United States needs to lose the war in Iraq as soon as possible,†Gwyne Dyer writes in a recent book. Michael Moore claims that “the Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘the enemy.’ They are the Revolution, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow—and they will win.â€Moore may be right, but what’s striking is that he appears to be cheering them on. He is not unique in his sentiments. “I have a confession,†Gary Kamiya wrote on salon.com after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “I have at times secretly wished for things to go wrong, wished for the Iraqis to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage.â€
Indeed there are many on the left who seem to hope and work for the war in Iraq to end in dismal failure. Susan Watkins, editor of the New Left Review, affirms that “U.S.-led forces have no business in Iraq†and “the Iraqi people have every right to drive them out.†Political scientist Robert Jensen argues that the U.S. is losing the war in Iraq “and that’s a good thing. I welcome the U.S. defeat.†Sentiments such as this have been expressed by leftists like Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and Markos Moulitsas.
I agree with Glenn Reynolds that much of this defeatist wish making – a theme that has endured since the war even started – is really all about Bush and the left’s utter and complete hatred of anything and everything he has ever done.
They have posited conspiracy theories involving the wildest, most ridiculous charges of vote stealing in both 2000 and 2004. In fact, one could say that the number one goal of the left these past 6 years has been to delegitimize the President of the United States as the rightfully elected leader of the country. The exaggerated and bogus narratives liberals have used to “explain” why we went into Iraq – from enriching Bush and his cronies to revenge for Saddam’s attempt on his father’s life – would have been laughed out of existence a decade ago but have been given credence by both rabid dog bloggers and mainstream Democrats alike. (The paranoid nature of these conspiracy theories mirror the same nonsense brought out by Baker above.)
And it has worked like a charm. The integrity of the President, his motives, and everything that a Chief Executive depends on to carry out the duties of his office, has been systematically undermined by the most hysterically overwrought charges of “fascism” on the home front and “misleading us into war” overseas. It is an easy step to make from there to preemptively defend yourself using what is basically a Nazi analogy while denying something that no one is actually accusing you of doing. If the war is to be “lost” (and liberals will make damn sure that no matter what happens, they will find themselves in agreement with the enemy and a loss it will be), the strategies of the Bush Administration will be to blame. But please don’t play the innocent when it comes to trying your damndest to destroy the American people’s confidence in the integrity of the Administration.
I’m not ignoring the correlation between everything that has gone wrong in Iraq and a loss of will of the people to continue what by all accounts has been a botched effort to win the peace. But one is forced to wonder if the people would have been more forgiving of the blunders and would be sticking with the Administration today in much larger numbers if the left hadn’t been insidiously chopping the President off at the knees by falsely accusing him of every perfidy known to man.
Jonah Goldberg wonders if the stabbed in the back meme isn’t just a lot of puffery. He responds to a Ross Douhat post where the Atlantic Online blogger uses the Nazi analogy approvingly:
Now, it’s nothing new for liberals to draw invidious comparisons between American conservatives and Nazis, but I’m not clear why Ross so gamely goes along with it. If you read his post today, he uses the “stabbed in the back” phrase uncritically. Why? Why not just talk about the Vietnam syndrome? Or media bashing? Which, after all, is what he’s really talking about anyway. I’m not reflexively opposed to the comparison to the end of WWI Germany, but nobody’s really tried to make it in any serious way. The assertion has simply caught on. In that sense it really is a meme, an idea that spreads around because of its superficial seductiveness alone. (Oh and please spare me the emails from people who seem to know what I write in my book better than I do. You don’t).And speaking of the Vietnam syndrome, I think Ross is basically wrong when he says that the Vietnam syndrome didn’t help conservatives. Vietnam saturated American politics in myriad ways that helped the Reaganite Right, particularly after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, become the party of American confidence. “Morning in America” makes little sense without Vietnam. This is not to say that I think blaming the liberal media is a particularly persuasive explanation on the merits for failure in Iraq (if we fail), but it’s far from clear that an American defeat in Iraq helps those Democrats who seemed, fair or not, determined to make failure a self-fulfilling prophecy. He may be right that if we fail in Iraq, conservatives will shrink their appeal if they blame anyone but themselves. But my guess is that the psychological and geostraategic fallout from failure will be sufficiently enormous and complex that nobody can predict who comes out a winner or a loser from it.
Does the constant drumbeat from the left predicting failure or saying outright we’ve already failed have an effect on the people’s morale and consequently their support for continuing the effort in Iraq? Are they seriously trying to deny that this hasn’t been a deliberate effort to sap the confidence and will of the American people? I think they are. And the way they are doing it is by changing the subject to one where they posit themselves as victims of the right wing smear machine not as perpetrators of actions that by any standard has given aid and comfort to the enemy – who, after all actually counted on the left to perform in this manner since it was the only possible way they could be victorious.
Nice try but it won’t wash.
Every action taken by al-Qaeda, the insurgents, and the militias has been with one eye glued to western media to see how their useful idiots on the left have been reacting to the heartless brutality in killing so many of the innocent thus making Iraq an extraordinarily difficult place to govern. Their strategy has worked to perfection. The left has predictably played their role as destroyer of the people’s will while the Bush Administration has obliged them by committing one mistake after another in trying to defeat them. The combination has been unbeatable – for the enemy.
So yes, blame Bush and his people for what they should be blamed for; the incompetent prosecution of an ill-planned war. But if blaming the left for deliberately seeking to break the will of the American people to carry on the struggle to at least the point we could leave behind some semblance of a viable Iraqi state means that I will be called a back stabber, allow me to coin a phrase: Bring It On.
1:53 pm
As far as I can tell, this meme first saw the light of day a year ago in an article by Kevin Baker in Harpers.
Not even close.
2:09 pm
You’re right – at least as far as blaming the press. I think Baker was the first to actually include the anti-war community as those who would be accused of stabbing the country in the back.
3:19 pm
I love it when folks trot out Gwynne Dyer! The first half or so of his book WAR was readable… before he got into the National Sovereignty trade-off quagmire. But he did have one salient thing that he appears to still believe, which has been changed by the nature of the enemy. From that lovely book, stuck just before the namer of ‘terrorism’ got stuck to the activity of terrorism, he addressed urban guerrilla warfare which is a vital part of terrorist doctrine. On p. 167:
“As in the case of rural guerrilla warfare attempted outside the colonial environment, however, the fatal flaw in the urban guerrilla strategy is that it lacks an effective end game. The theory says that when the guerrillas have succeeded in driving the government into sufficiently repressive posture, the populace will rise up in righteous wrath and destroy its oppressors. But even if the population should decide that it is the government and not the guerrillas that is responsible for its growing misery, how is it to accomplish this feat? By the urban uprisings that have rarely succeeded since the nineteenth century? Or by the rural guerrilla warfare that has just demonstrated its ineffectiveness?”
No end game? Well, the conflict against al Qaeda and other groups has gotten a number of documents and there are a few very disturbing and surprising doctrinal documents that were captured. On is The Management of Savagery, which examines the doctrine and methodology to get to a Caliphate State against the current Nation State system. I reviewed that (in part through the major areas, it is a thick and didactic text that gets stuck in detail on assumed early premises) and one of my conclusions is the following:
“In its simplest conception al Qaeda is performing ‘divide and conquer’ strategy against Nation States. By being unable to attack large Nations, al Qaeda seeks to destabilize them so that internal rebellion can be fomented and the Nation itself dissolve into smaller pieces. al Qaeda analyzes this with the USSR, fall of European Empires and with smaller Nations that also have separatist movements. One of the main problems that al Qaeda identifies is that new Nations spring up from the old, but they are less able and less strong than the original, larger established Nation. Even then al Qaeda realizes that they have little opportunity in that realm as even small Nations that have good interior definition are resistant to their influence.
To counter this al Qaeda proposed ‘the rich man’s road to Global Empire’: set groundwork during the pre-chaos, encourage it through some actions, and then, when the larger Nation falls into disarray, send money, fighters, supplies and everything necessary to gain control and be seen as a way to rebuild a Nation along the al Qaeda tenets of operation. By gaining trust in sending fighters and setting up hospitals, al Qaeda wishes to use the dissolution of the people inside of a Nation in tumult and ‘guide’ those people to the ‘true path’ given by the Divine. Once that trust is gained, then a framework for a strict, authoritarian Islamic based State can be developed and put in-place and the new territory exploited for its goods, people and money, to spread influence.”
Yes, the goal is not to take over Nations, but to dismember them to amenable sized chunks, exploit those and continue the destabilization process further. At some point the glorious Caliphate will be declared, but the process continues onwards against weak states or states in unstable conditions and then spreading that instability outwards. That is not a recipe for orderly rule, but for tyrannical, exploitive and dehumanizing rule willing to expend individuals as necessary to achieve larger goals. Expended either as ideologues, committed fighters or as exploited labor, those that fall under rule by this paradigm are not accorded humanity, even if they are catered to at first to gain acceptance.
At this point that would also include most of the Western Nations as targets for further destabilization, beyond the internal divisions that are already going on. Those that aid and abet those divisions do, indeed, cause long-term problems and work to the benefit of al Qaeda and any other organization that takes up this doctrinal thesis. At its highest level, this doctrine can be stripped of its islamic overlay and the basic ‘divide and conquer’ concept comes forth, but with ideological and methodological backing for the modern era.
The modern Left does not want to examine this, as it is anathema to multiculturalism and transnational goals: here an ‘oppressed’ group has already put forward its totalitarian goals and end-state and has demonstrated its want to put that to work, but calling them on it means making a value based judgement. Can’t do that if ‘all cultures are equal’. Better the bad old US gets grief for going to war against a genocidal, mass murdering tyrant that then sucks al Qaeda in to pit its ability to destabilize against ours to try and create stability! Yes, let the US fail and that will prove how bad the US is…. and fracture the Middle East far and wide because the West has no guts to stand by the tenets of liberal democracy to help rebuild after wars.
Mind you, the Right is quiet in this by its inability to formulate that basic rights of Nation States to hold each other accountable and to go to war over such so as to remove threats to the Nation is a necessity for building a world of reduced threats. Much prefer to fall back on the tired old ‘free markets free people’ and just walk away after pulling a Nation down and let ‘the magic of the marketplace’ work its will. Two World Wars should have disabused us of that little notion, but obviously not. There is ZERO inevitability on human rights, human freedom and accountability moving forward in the affairs of mankind unless you actually exercise them all… that includes the accountability part. And, yes, that costs lives, blood and money. Always has, and until we reach that sweet nirvana of human divinity where everyone is born swell and good and nice without a single atom of rancor in their soul, that is the way it will remain. Humans get into conflicts. We work out holding each other accountable to standards we set between us. That means, in this lovely era of the Nation State that Nations must act as Sovereigns to assert that Peoples have a right to have others respect their agreements with them.
The hippy-dippy, flower spewing, bomb-throwing Left can take a hike, until they realize that common society within Nations must be adhered to between them. That means doing such nasty little things as enforcing ‘cease fires’ and when one side does not adhere to that, then ‘going to war with them’.
The corporate espousing Right, with its free-market mantras had better wake up to China and Russia not turning into lovely places of liberal democracy. Just like a couple of Reichstags I could name from last century. Trade is a means to uphold societies not an end in, and of, itself. If free trade worked, then the Mexican economy would be booming and its people some of the most free and happiest on this planet. Likewise, after 90 years of ‘trade to encourage societies’, I believe the originator of this doctrine put it in 1917, the Middle East would be sweet lands of liberty, with the benificence of Western trade.
Time to wake up! The 20th century expiration date passed a few years back. It was overdone, over-ripe and quite fetid in the number of deaths supplied by ideologues the world over. Continue to espouse the same, tired, ideologies and you get the same, tired horrific death tolls. Accuse one side of being Fascist and that marks you out as a Communist, just as it did in the streets of Berlin in 1931, when the two sides had a fun old time of squirting prussic acid on each other for instant assassination. Orderly, though! Have to give them that!
The Nation State in the 21st century is under siege… not by the lovely hearts of mankind to form together into a sweet land of liberty across the globe, but by a buncha folks looking to drag us back before 1648. They are a threat to the Left and Right… if they could stop the verbal venom and get some smelling salts administered to them. Iraq is not Vietnam: there is no sea to stop the expansion of disorder. Iraq is not Germany or Japan: it has no ethnic homogeneity, to feeling as a Nation with accomplished scholars and statesmen for a couple of centuries, it is not industrialized as we in the West know that concept, and human liberty has been unknown there with Empires and tyrants being the rule, not the exception, for 4,000 years.
Iraq is the centroid for all the crossing ethnic, religious, cultural, familial, economic, communication and deep history ties going all the way back to Babylon. It was already broken when we got there, Saddam just kept the pieces in a vicegrip which cracked them still further. It is prime territory, #1, for al Qaeda to advance The Management of Savagery: a brutal, dictatorial and genocidal doctrine that will exploit individuals to the death, kill for any minor infraction of ideology and use all its funds to then spread that disorder outwards.
I do not see a long-term survival for the West and the US in particular, if Iraq falls into that plan. There are three or four other places where it is slowly getting put into place, and I don’t like those either. If we get a bit queasy over a few thousand deaths there… then the end death toll from the dissolving of the Nation State sysem will be horrific once that spreads. In this lovely era of the ‘global village’ there is no way to stop that spread unless we work damn hard to put forth that the rights of man as an individual is worth fighting for. Even if we gain a bitter enemy, so long as they hold together as a Nation, it is, yes, worth it.
Because once the ‘blame wars’ start, we will all lose no matter who wins. We will have lost the meaning of fighting for a better world to protect ourselves. Absolutely selfish, and best to stay out of fights until you have no choice. Then you fight to win no holds barred, no economy spared, nothing kept back. And when you win, you put your money where your mouth is and help build those honorably defeated or who have been under the boot of tyranny for generations up to something better. So that THEY can tell you off! I like that. At least I know where I stand in such a situation. This pre-finger pointing at home will get us killed because it assumes that human liberty and freedom is not worth that cost.
And those fingers are not pointing blame… but measuring our chains as our liberty is lost, because it is so priceless as to be worthless to us. Then we will, truly, be savages to manage.
3:47 pm
ajacksonian –
Thanks for the link to “The Management of Savagry”.
4:05 pm
“The modern Left does not want to examine this, as it is anathema to multiculturalism and transnational goals: here an ‘oppressed’ group has already put forward its totalitarian goals and end-state and has demonstrated its want to put that to work, but calling them on it means making a value based judgement. Can’t do that if ‘all cultures are equal’”
What utter rubbish. Point me to one commentator who doesn’t rate a bunch of torturing murderers as a worse society than a liberal democracy.
4:39 pm
Rick Moran Said:
2:09 pm
You’re right – at least as far as blaming the press. I think Baker was the first to actually include the anti-war community as those who would be accused of stabbing the country in the back.
Not even close. (Ahem, again, cough, cough.)
5:05 pm
” The left wing socialist” of our country will accept nothing less than total acceptance of their “All cultures are equal” philosophy. This bye the way will bring about the demise of The United States of America.
5:09 pm
Oh, and just as a prophylactic, there is this.
August 29, 2003, about a year ago, or four.
5:12 pm
Milo:
What’s your problem? I said in the piece “As near as I can tell.” I did not make a statement of fact that the Baker piece was the earliest example of the stabbed in the back meme.
Jesus lord what a dick.
5:51 pm
The problem for you, Rick, is that at this point you are one of the stabbers.
http://rightwingnuthouse.com/archives/2007/06/26/smells-like-vindication-to-me/
5:54 pm
Why? Just because I don’t subscribe to your myopic view of the war? I don’t support retreat nor a withdrawal nor any kind of timetables. I support, as Senator Lugar does, a change in mission.
And if you bothered to read the post you may have figured that out all by yourself.
5:54 pm
In fact, liberals are…[trying to]...convince the American people that trying to bring democracy to Iraq was a hopeless exercise in wishful thinking
Before we reasonably debate this, I think we first have to establish that the US is in fact trying to bring democracy to Iraq.
Recall please, that the original pretext for the war was Saddam’s awesome Weapons of Mass Destruction, and how we had to attack him before he could use them. The reality has turned out to be something else, as I think any reasonably intelligent individual could have divined for himself from day one. Of course, ‘reasonable intelligence’ leaves out 99.99% of the general public, but we know from the statements of Paul ‘bureaucratic reasons’ Wolfowitz, among others, that the public argument for war was not believed by those making it.
The usual reason that politicians lie is that they know that their actual motives will either a) not be acceptable to the general public, or b) fail to motivate the general public to participate in their plans.
So what are we to believe here? That Bush wanted to spread democracy all along, but had to frighten the cowardly and self-centered American people in following his ‘noble vision’ with bogey-men? Is that what you think of your fellow citizens?
One thing to notice is that Americans, whether of the right or the left, are, in droves, failing to show up at recruiting centers to actually fight the war. Stabbing America in the back is a game everybody seems to be playing, if we judge by actions rather than words.
You see, daydreaming about ‘noble motives’ which can be neither proven nor disproven, is doubtlessly great fun, but in the end it amounts to little more than a kind of mental masturbation. It feels good, but doesn’t change anything.
I can (sort of) see the need for a vigorous battle against the ‘internal enemy’ here on the home propaganda front, but surely at least a few right-wing nut-jobs can be spared to actually, you know, fight the enemy, who is supposedly threatening our very existence? And if not, why not?
Whatever we may choose to believe about the motives of politicians, the original pretext for the war is no longer valid, as a) the WMD had been destroyed before the invasion anyway, and b) Saddam is dead. The Iraqi people inked their fingers sometime ago, so the DemFree meme is wearing a little thin at this point.
The only unresolved issue I see at this point is the control of Iraqi oil. I know it is a sign of dementia to imagine that the most avowedly capitalistic nation in human history would launch a war over anything so tawdry as profits, but there you have it. I’m a cynic. Sue me.
5:59 pm
Don’t worry Rick, I’ll keep our little secret. Mum’s the word.
6:01 pm
No secrets here. You’re a dick. Just what”secret” are you keeping to spare my feelings?
6:03 pm
You’ll just have to undelete it to let everyone know. (You remember, the one about not taking the Lord’s name in vain.)
6:06 pm
Since you have commented more than three times today, your subsequent comments are ending up in my spam filter. I have had to manually retrieve them as I did this one.
That comment must have been inadvertently deleted and I apologize. Why delete a comment from someone making himself appear ridiculous?
6:53 pm
Okay, Rick, on to substance:
When you say: So yes, blame Bush and his people for what they should be blamed for; the incompetent prosecution of an ill-planned war. But if blaming the left for deliberately seeking to break the will of the American people to carry on the struggle to at least the point we could leave behind some semblance of a viable Iraqi state means that I will be called a back stabber, allow me to coin a phrase: Bring It On. you display a fundamental misunderstanding of the subject on which you are posting. The Dolchstosslegende or “stab in the back” that is the subject of the post refers to war opponents being accused of the act of stabbing in the back. You are not in danger of being called a back stabber. Sleep well.
Furthermore, you ought to drop the Bush hatred theme. My opposition to the invasion of Iraq has nothing to do with George W. Bush. Hatred is really not my gig, nor do I believe it motivates much more than a handful of Bush opponents. Your mileage varies, but it ain’t economical.
1:39 am
RLAing—
If you looked at the Peace movement you’d conclude that middle aged and younger women were getting blown up in Iraq. Yet consistently troops engaged in combat re-enlist in record numbers.
Moreover you and Milo evade the question. Withdraw/Surrender to bin Laden and Iran (if we lose they win, simple as that) and prove that we can be driven out of anywhere at the cost of 3-4 thousand dead.
[Note: predictably Maxine Waters and the CBC are calling for an immediate surrender in AFGHANISTAN, calling it just like Iraq. If Dems get their way in Iraq, which is likely, they will also run away with the White Flag in Afghanistan. Making things even worse.]
Please explain how that absent something ELSE does not put a giant “nuke me” sign on every American city to get the US to submit to Islam and Islamic rule?
Particularly when Musharaff hangs by a thread and the Taliban controls much of Pakistan. The Red Mosque in Islamabad controlling the capital. The ISI filled with the followers of Mullah Omar and Osama. Forget Iran, PAKISTAN is at least a mortal threat.
If Dems/Leftists/Liberals proposed: “look Iraq and Afghanistan have not worked out, let’s nuke the hell out of Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi, withdraw to Saudi, pump every last drop of oil dry and then leave” well sure, I’d be for that. If you want to change course and leave unmistakable that it’s a VERY VERY VERY BAD IDEA to attack the US, be seen to even threaten to attack the US with nukes, I’m all for it.
Because the game we are playing for literally is the death of MILLIONS of Americans and the loss of a number of our great cities.
Want to keep NYC? LA? Chicago? Boston? Dallas? Then you damn well better have SOMETHING to deter Pakistan, Iran, and every other lunatic with enough cash at Lil Kim’s Korean Nuke’s n Things take-out. Weakness invites aggression, if you look at A Jacksonian’s link to Management of Savagery these guys are not idiots.
Hitler, Stalin, and Tojo, all serious and dangerous enemies of the US, never managed to bring down NYC skyscrapers, and kill thousands of Americans in the center of our commercial and political centers. Osama did.
It’s about time we got about to killing him and dragging his corpse around, or failing that killing everyone around him in Pakistan as an object lesson if we are going to bug out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
If you don’t like those measures, you’re up for a long nasty fight in both those countries. Taking maybe generations. Choose your poison. But don’t forget the stakes:
NYC. Chicago. LA. Boston. Dallas. Seattle. San Diego. Atlanta. Denver. Kansas City. St. Louis. Minneapolis. Miami.
Forget stab in the back. Want to play, “who got those cities nuked?” I didn’t think so.
4:01 pm
[...] – Rick Moran, “STABBED IN THE WHAT?” [...]
6:05 pm
“This rather opaque observation describes the left’s increasing stridency when alluding to their guiltlessness in undermining the morale of the American people for carrying on the War in Iraq.”
Ok, let’s take it easy now. I understand that each side takes their own axioms as a given and judges the other side on their own, not the other side’s, tactics. That’ll never change.
But GIVE ME A BREAK.
I accept NO GUILT criticizing the war, none. I didn’t want it, and I watched as my fellow “Americans” tried to squelch discussion and dissent as best they could by throwing around words like treason from day one.
We may differ over the war’s necessity, justness, etc. But I don’t accept your invoking of Camus as some sort of explanation. Get real.
If some thought this country was heading in the wrong direction in the way we went to war, then it is our moral duty to speak up. You don’t seem to understand that simple point. And, in fact, the critics were right. This is probably the point that pro-war types cannot comprehend, they struggle so very hard with it.
You seem to think of morale as an unqualified good. What if it’s misplaced? Misdirected? Then undermining of it is a very, very good thing. Maybe the GWOT is too diffuse and unwinnable, as defined, just as your criticisms of the ‘left’ are too diffuse to defend or concur with.
I won’t bother trying to divine what ‘most’ lefties or righties think, nobody really knows and neither do you.
But if you think that Bush Derangement Syndrome is some cute and accurate name for irrational Bush hating, well, I’d say you haven’t been paying attention to the contempt this Admin. has shown its republic for the past 6 years. But if you want the “Left” to be ashamed of undermining morale, not a chance in hell.
20% of the US still think that Saddam had DIRECT involvement in the planning of 9/11. This is the kind of morale that needs to be punctured. Americans who think that ‘victory’ is possible – but won’t support another hundred thousand troops for another 10 years – who seem to think that 6 months can stitch together a working coaltion in Iraq – well, let’s just agree to disagree. But I say it’s unrealistic, and this kind of morale needs to be dismantled. Patriotism, one thing. America-haters who cry out for conformity in time of war – don’t know what America is, and are tentative Americans in the first place.
Your post is pretty long, too long for me to really comment on. This one was disappointing, but the one on race was pretty insightful. But that’s another commment…
R
3:39 pm
The hate and blame Bush meme is very powerful,
but if you look at results, things are not going
that bad except in DC and the media.
Taliban and Al Qaeda are dying in great numbers.
Al Qaeda is unwelcome in Afghanistan and much of Iraq including Anbar.
There have been no major attacks within the United States.
We are a strong country, our military is solid, our economy is steady; unemployment low, stock market high. Our problems are political. Our Democrat elites hate Bush more than they love their country or their children.
This is strange and dangerous, but at least now we know.
1:24 pm
LOL!
At some point, Rick, I think you really need to ask yourself.
Why do you hate America so much?
1:43 pm
Looking for liberals to blame that were hiding under the bedsheets gets very tiring. Your foray into saying “blame Bush and his people for what they should be blamed for; the incompetent prosecution of an ill-planned war…” and “I’m not ignoring the correlation between everything that has gone wrong in Iraq and a loss of will of the people to continue what by all accounts has been a botched effort to win the peace…” as a way of convincing everyone you are just a reasonable person who is calling them as you see them doesn’t wash. You accuse others of being conspiracy theorists and then come out with this crap?
For your own sake, give it up.
3:05 pm
Oh come on Halffasthero! Rick Moran is a very serious reasonable person when he questions the patriotism of his fellow Americans just because they disagree with his childhood fantasies.
3:07 pm
For your own sake, give it up.
For YOUR sake, cut the teenage drama queen act and say with a straight face that the deliberate attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the President as well as his authority has been done to injure his standing with the American people, thus delegitimizing the war in their eyes.
Since only a bald faced liar would be able to do so, I assume you won’t try.
3:18 pm
You’re obviously too stupid to tell the difference between questioning someone’s judgement and questioning their patriotism. All I’m asking is that you admit the obvious – that from day one you and your friends sought to undermine the Administration’s legitimacy.
What’s so hard about that?
4:35 pm
You are doing both.
So Democrats question GWB going into Iraq, question what he has done there and by your reasoning, THAT is why the war has gone badly and he is undermined. Not those minor details of incompetence running this war which will cost us billions to restore our damaged military hardware and near trillion to take care of the soldiers we are damaging physically and mentally. And most certainly not his reckless disregard for the history of the region which has been at war with itself for thousands of years – and marching us in their in the first place.
No, it was the Democrats all along. Is that right?
He didn’t need any help to do that.
I would have loved to see him succeed but the tragedy is, he was not interested in succeeding any other way but his own way. He took no advice and changed no course even after it was becoming glaringly obvious that one was needed. It didn’t help that he surrounded himself with bobble heads that would back him and support him even over a cliff – which is where we are going now. In the end, he was out to prove himself right and everyone else wrong.
So sorry, but I don’t have to admit anything. He did it to himself. No one who had been riding at 90% approval and then squanders it as entirely as he did was “undermined”. He did it to himself.
I really wished his brother had president instead of him. Now that is a wish that will never happen.
4:58 pm
You’re right. All that talk about Bush stealing the presidency was just a joke.
Pathetic.
1:08 pm
No it wasn’t a joke but it also predated the Iraq invasion and even 9/11. It was the direct result of the disputed 2000 election and the manner in which that dispute was resolved: Judicial Fiat.
Such criticism was muted in the aftermath of 9/11 but it was inevitable that the issue would re-emerge if the Administration’s policies proved unsuccessful. In the event, they proved to be far worse than unsuccessful. Catastrophic is more like it.
Now you appear to be insisting that the “stolen election” meme was something cobbled together soley to undermine Bush for the “stated purpose” of bringing about an American defeat. This is anachronistic nonsense. “Hail to the Thief” signs were abundant at the first Bush inaugural years before the war and before there was any idea of the GWOT.
I don’t doubt that you see this as just one stitch in a seamless garment of irrational, partisan Bush hatred which you would like to blame for the collapse of hopes for a “conservative” ascendancy. Nevertheless, in light of the actual train of events it simply won’t wash.
The American people have turned against Bush and by extension the GOP because, after 6+ years, they are’nt satisfied with job he and his party have done. The Iraq fiasco is largely, though not entirely, responsible for this. Your attempts to shift responsibility by re-writing history are painful to watch, as are all such instances of public self humiliation.