Productive Anger
Being against the war is tricky business, especially for those who saw disaster coming from the very beginning. Despite being proven right in nearly every respect, war skeptics are accused of being “defeatist” merely by telling the truth, and are now being set up to take the blame for a catastrophe that they, above all else, tried to prevent.
A few of my fellow bloggers have captured the outrage of this situation better than I can. Digby at Hullabaloo writes:
Memo to those on the right who say the Left supports Islamic fundamentalists: we're the Godless Heathens, remember? We're against the religious zealots running governments across the board. Of course, that includes your "base" here in the US too so you'll have to pardon us for our consistency and ask yourselves why we find you incoherent on this matter.
We always understood that while deposing Saddam was easy, the risk of civil war or an Islamic theocracy were very high. We thought it might be worthwhile to wait for just a fucking minute to see how this little terrorism problem played out before jumping into the middle of the hornets nest and swinging wildly. So, please don't blame us. We don't like totalitarians. We don't like theocrats. And we understood that when you go mucking around in the middle east at the direction of con-men and ideologues, you are likely to fuck things up.
America isn't magic. The military does not have magical powers. We knew this. Michael Ledeen and his fanciful cohorts apparently didn't. Now they are blaming everybody --- and I mean everybody --- but themselves for the failure they have wrought.
Eric Alterman wrote in a similar vein yesterday:
What’s is perhaps most galling about this is the fact that if you tried to warn your fellow citizens against just this likelihood three years ago when it was still preventable, you were part of some decadent, fifth-columnist coastal elite that hated America, while the chest beating patriots were the ones who drained this nation of its blood and treasure is the service of their own lethal combination of ignorance, arrogance, and ideological obsession. Onward Christian Soldiers.
And finally, Harold Meyerson in the American Prospect:
…[I]n the information age, an administration can’t, and doesn’t, market alone. It takes an army of salespeople -- it takes a village, you might say -- to accentuate the positive. And when an administration spreads demonstrable lies and falsehoods, or offers “evidence” that can’t be wholly refuted but for which there is nevertheless no existing proof, it takes that same army to stand up and say: “Yes! These assertions are true! Those who deny them are unpatriotic, or simpletons, or both!” And finally, when the war goes terribly, terribly wrong, that same army is called to the ramparts one last time, to say, in a fashion that approaches Soviet-style devotion: “Things are in fact going well! The insurgency is dying! Abu Ghraib is not a scandal! Saddam Hussein did have ties to al-Qaeda; you just don’t know it yet!” And so on.
For its war in Iraq, the Bush administration relied on and benefited from the cheerleading of a group of pundits and public intellectuals who, at every crucial moment, subordinated the facts on the ground to their own ideological preferences and those of their allies within the administration. They refused to hold the administration’s conduct of the war and the occupation to the ideals that they themselves professed, or simply to the standard of common sense. They abdicated their responsibilities as political intellectuals -- and, more elementally, as reliable empiricists
…
The delusions for which they were apologizing weren’t only the administration’s; they were their own as well. There was an odd sort of integrity to their dishonesty; they believed (most of them did) all the theories that justified the war. But they didn’t present these theories as theories. They presented them -- misrepresented them -- as facts.
Yet by some curious code of Beltway etiquette, the war hawks are still sought out for their judgments on war and peace, geopolitics, and military and political strategy. They are, in varying degrees, the journalistic equivalents of Donald Rumsfeld -- authors of disaster, spared from accountability, still bewilderingly in place.
The final indignity in this situation – the colossal disappointment for those of us who still want to think the best of this country and our fellow citizens – is that it’s not clear to what extent the rest of the country understands or cares exactly what went on here. Even respected establishment Democrats have been hesitant in their criticism for fear of sounding “weak” or “dwelling on the mistakes of the past.”
Newsflash: dwelling on, and correcting, the mistakes of the past is how we avoid mistakes in the future. If someone has lied to you systematically for years, consistently delivering exactly the opposite of what they promised, eventually you start to ignore that person. If the lies have done damage, you may start getting angry, and maybe even taking measures to get even.
This is a basic survival skill: don’t trust those who are proven untrustworthy. Don’t throw good money after bad. It’s reasonable to assume that someone who is a proven serial liar will continue to lie, not just about one thing, but about everything.
Bush’s sinking approval ratings are starting to show that this message is sinking in. But at the core of the debate, there’s still this kernel of credulity: that maybe things will turn around, that maybe all the lies and blunders of the past were just bad luck.
Sadly, there are no happy endings to the Iraq situation. Bush and his gang have seen to that. Optimism that was ill-advised in the first instance is, at this late date, simply denying plain reality. And it doesn’t help to have been right, since war skeptics were given no hearing when it would have mattered. The choice before us now is: are we going to get a little bit smarter about how we approach these things in the future? Are we going to temper our optimism with a bit of level-headed practicality, look past the hucksters and their phony, manipulative appeals to “patriotism” and “standing tall”? Or are we going to continue to trust our country to the authors of calamity and marginalize those who try, against the odds, to prevent the next disaster?
10:28:43 AM 
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