Fear is the foundation of most governments.
-John Adams
Thursday, May 04, 2006
RATIONALIZING WAR FOR IDEOLOGY AND PROFIT
DEPT OF DOOMED TO REPEAT DEPT
"There are people who think that everything one does with a serious face is sensible." --Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 - 1799)
Occasionally, though, the image of a tough, victorious fighter breaks through. We must clobber the North, or break the back of the Viet Cong. Refraining from more intensive bombing of the North is described by Representative Hale Boggs as expecting our men to "fight with one hand tied behind their back."
As part of the rationalization of the poor progression of the Iraq conquest, it has become necessary to develop endless variations using the narrative of unseriousness.
Perhaps the troops were hobbled by rules of engagement or the bombings were not total or there was too much focus on developing local relationships and not enough time spent destroying villages (naturally, to save them). Bonus points for resurrecting the White Man's Burden or viewing military victory as a mere act of Will.
Whatever the particular hokum peddled, there is never a doubt that continuance of the war is necessary.
"If President Johnson, aware of those sentiments, had not created such horribly restrictive rules of engagement and allowed our military to be more aggressive, victory would have been certain." --Jim Simpson on Vietnam, Truth & Consequences
"In fact if the left had not come out so vehemently against that war but instead supported our troops and insisted on rules of engagement that enabled rather than hobbled our troops that outcome may have been different indeed." --Wog's Wonderings, History as a Long Lens
---
There is a fierce pride in our strength; Joseph Alsop describes the launching and recovery of a mission from an aircraft carrier as a spectacle "to fill the mind with wonder and the heart with pride. The whole vast carrier was a single scene of elegantly, intricately efficient, and deadly purposeful activity with a single aim."
There is a strong tendency to equate compromise with surrender, and to insist on decisive victory, at least in the South. Richard Nixon once declared "The lesson of all history warns us that we should negotiate only when our military superiority is so convincing that we can achieve our objective at the conference table - and deny the aggressors theirs."
"Against such an enemy there is only one effective response: We will never back down, we will never give in, and we will never accept anything less than complete victory." --President Bush in a speech at West Point
The Bush Administration has launched salvos against any plan but the head-beating-against-the-wall Stay the Course delightenment mantra. Progress, real progress, good progress, happy news we promise, always seems to be Six Months Away. The idea, one must suppose, posits the Iraq conflict as a wheel, degrading to a six o' clock position at some point before swinging upward toward nine. Perhaps this is a new doctrine of warfare, continuous systemic failure facilitating a counterintuitive catastrophe curve toward victory.
But danger arises when enchantment with a virile self-image causes selective inattention to important aspects of reality and misperception of the situation as a whole.
Americans were so damned focused on Bush's codpiece and his "Bring 'em on" rootin-tootin' tough talk that they didn't stop to ask any questions, and the major media didn't bother to ask any questions, and even if they had the White House wouldn't have provided any answers. The Neocons drummed out any sign of competence and blinded themselves to rational policy planning; Wishful thinking led to rampant stupidity.
There is reason to think that in America it has done just that, by leading militants to exaggerate the magnitude of the emergency and the degree of suffering and of risk that the war involves for America as compared with America's enemies. They often see it not only as "a terrible episode" (which of course it is) but also as a situation of imperative urgency, demanding all we have of courage and of manhood, a test of our moral fiber, a situation in which democracy must prove its "willingness to do what it has to do."
"To achieve this, the victor must be intransigent. He does not accept terms; he demands prostrate surrender, or death, for everyone if necessary." --Thomas Sowell, The Moral Lesson of Hiroshima
Iraq has become the surrogate for the simplistic Clash of Civilizations crowd, the battleground of abstract ideologies unattached to living, complex human beings.
Saddam was inflated to demonic status, Iraq bubbled over with world-threatening weapons, something was imminent, something big. Indescribable. So potentially, hypothetically catastrophic that there was simply no other choice.
Rationalization operates largely by influencing perception of the concrete facts themselves. For instance, in order to feel virtuous about fighting in Vietnam it is almost essential for a militant American to believe that most of the Vietnamese people want his help; consequently, chiefly by focusing on some kinds of evidence and ignoring others, he manages to believe that they do want his help.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies." --C.S. Lewis
The common refrain of "As the Iraqi people stand up, we will stand down," should be recognizable to Americans. It is functionally useful as a vague marker of progress, a fuzzy milestone that promises an end without describing how we will get there or how we will recognize it when we do. How many Iraqi units must stand up? How will we measure their effectiveness?
Throwing around words like "freedom" and "democracy" allow Americans to justify, to themselves, the terrible (and rising) cost of this war. It became not enough to stop nonexistent WMD production. It became not enough to depose Saddam. The objectives of the invasion became more and more abstract, utilizing nationalistic terms to color the war as not just benevolent, but humanitarian and revolutionary. The war must be seen as a moral necessity - in such a light it is highly resistant to even the most reasoned attacks against its continuance.
In any case it seems clear that projection is a major way of explaining to ourselves the morally questionable things we are now doing or are somehow associated with. Torture, for instance, is used by our allies, and we are using napalm. A typical defense when these things are challenged is to cite atrocities of the Viet Cong.
The Attorney General of the United States defends extraordinary rendition and torture and detaining people indefinitely without charges. All of this safe from the normal, and legally mandated, oversight.
Abu Ghraib was dismissed as frat pranks, or perfectly okay as retaliation for the actions of terrorists. That's right, justifying the betrayal of American moral standards by citing our zealous enemies.
Thousands of Iraqi civilians died during the war and hundreds die each week in the sectarian clashes that are a direct result of the instability created by the United States. Thousands of American troops have died, some of them on the wild WMD goose chase cooked up by Cheney's OSP.
But here's the equation. No matter how bad America acts, Saddam was worse. That's the justification given every single time.
Even if Iraq becomes a smoking hole in the ground, there will still be right-wingers clucking the phrase Saddam was worse.
Another is to speak of these things as "a regrettable necessity," or as inevitable in view of the nature of war itself, or of this particular war. In such expressions it is as if the guilt were shifted not to a concrete human enemy but to an impersonal Fate or Necessity.
In order to defeat the enemy, we must become as bad as the enemy.
We act to hasten our own destruction in the name of our salvation.
God told Bush to invade Iraq. He must have forgotten to tell Bush what to do afterward.
Since hurting or killing others is emotionally satisfying to a normally conscientious human being only when it is done in a mood of righteous indignation, there may be an unconscious need to work up such a mood, and in so doing to exaggerate all evidence of the enemy's criminality, while shutting off every impulse of empathy with the enemy as a human being like oneself.
"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war." --Ann Coulter
The paranoid element in politics rises to its most irrational, most freedom-destroying pitch when it turns inward and seeks the destruction of "traitors in our midst." It happened in Germany in the years after World War I when Hitler, indiscriminately attacking liberals, democratic socialists, Jews, and Communists, and accusing them all of joining in the "stab in the back" that had allegedly led to Germany's downfall, engineered the establishment of a regime dedicated to the purging of such poisonous elements. It happened in Stalin's great purges of the 1930s. It happened to some extent in the United States in the McCarthy era, and it is happening to a nightmarish extent in Communist China as the main theme of the great "cultural revolution."
"And when he [Durbin] went out there, his intent was to whip up the American public against the Bush detainee policy. That's what his intent was. His intent wasn't to undermine the war effort, because he never even thought about it. He never even thought about it. But by not thinking about it, he made an egregious mistake because you must know the difference between dissent from the Iraq war and the war on terror and undermining it. And any American that undermines that war, with our soldiers in the field, or undermines the war on terror, with 3,000 dead on 9-11, is a traitor." --Bill O'Reilly on Senator Durbin's comments regarding Guantanamo Bay
Buchanan, Limbaugh and Stein blame those who "brought down" Nixon for the fall of Vietnam and the Cambodian genocide. [link]
"The Dixie Chicks (Traitors in our midst) have pissed off yet more people and now the radio stations are revolting...I say take their seditious asses and try them all on the world stage." --Liberalismisamentaldisorder
It happens on a far smaller scale in the United States whenever an opponent of the Vietnam war, or an advocate of a compromise peace, is denounced as disloyal or as soft on Communism; and it happens whenever a right-wing conservative asserts that the danger of Communism "right here at home" is greater than the danger of Communism abroad.
"[W]e also have to understand that our words have effects, and put yourself in the shoes of a soldier who thinks that we're going to pull out precipitously or immediately as some people have proposed. Obviously, they have to wonder whether what they're doing makes sense if that's the idea, if that's the debate. Put yourself in the shoes of the enemy. The enemy hears a big debate in the United States, and they have to wonder, maybe all we have to do is wait, and we'll win. We can't win militarily. They know that. The battle is here in the United States." --Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on Rep. Jack Murtha
There is another root of diabolism that has not been discussed: The mystery of weapons directed against an "innocent" self. Each side arms, believing that its weapons are essential for self-defense. The other side, feeling wholly peaceful and innocent because of rationalization and all the other psychological processes we have considered, cannot understand what these arms portend unless it is aggression. Similarly, any actual military action by either side, no matter how great the provocation, and no matter how defensive the motive, is perceived by the other side almost inevitably as aggression. The Arab-Israeli dispute is an outstanding instance of this process. The vicious-spiral possibilities here are obvious.
Likewise, the leadership of the United States cannot conceive of any other reason why Iran might seek nuclear power other than in pursuit of nuclear weapons. And not only that, but the nuclear issue is completely non-negotiable - either cease the program entirely or prepare for escalation.
Iran, naturally, prepares for escalation.
On both sides it is fear that motivates, fear masked by an image of strength. That fear pushes each side into a game of brinksmanship.
When a person goes looking for a fight, why are they so often surprised when they find one?
Finally, all the mechanisms that sustain an enemy-image once it is established come into play, including social mechanisms such as conformity, loyalty, and distortion in the channels of communication, as well as psychological mechanisms stemming from the need to reduce ambivalence.
-THE MANAGEMENT
[All italicized blockquotes are from the book "Nobody Wanted War" by Ralph K. White]
