WordPlay - Language, Politics, and Meaning

Where the Hell Do You Put the Gas Tank?: or, Thinking Clearly About Iraq

    War, as William Tecumseh Sherman famously said, is hell. I'll go further - war is intrinsically evil. So far from resenting the opposition to the Iraqi War in concept, I respect it. War as a policy choice in a democratic society should always be regarded with deep, dark suspicion.  The notion of dispensable people, 'cannon fodder', eggs for omelets, and all the rest, are almost the touchstone, the authentic signature, of a totalitarian state - whether you can its head king, kaiser, fuhrer, or comrade secretary.

    But to state categorically that war is intrinsically evil is not to say that it is intrinsically the greater evil. The bumper sticker cliché that 'war is dangerous to children and other living things' is absolutely true. But peace can be dangerous, too, as the children of Rwanda, of Cambodia, of Bosnia, of pre-World War II Europe, of Bosnia, could tell you. There are dangers in letting loose the dogs of war, always and everywhere, no argument. But there are also dangers in placating despots and in appeasement. You can go as badly wrong with peace as with war. This is possibly the saddest commentary on human history that I can state.

    What has galled me for some time about the Demented Left is that it seems completely blind to this rather elementary analytical framework. The only way to think sensibly about the decisions as momentous as these is to make some rational, decently intelligent assumptions about the way history would unfold if there had been no invasion of Iraq, decide in some logical way which course of action produces the lesser evil, and come to the appropriate conclusion. If any member of the mainstream media ever did that, I'd respect the process, even if I disagreed with the analysis.

    But that is not the way the war opponents behave. There is no comparison of alternatives, there is no attempt to judge whether the world is better or worse off for what happened five years ago. Instead - until recently, when the situation in Iraq began to up tick and the silence suddenly became deafening - there has been vehement, shrieking, hysterical denunciation - as if the evils of this course of action were the only evils, as if there were not serious and even greater risks in NOT acting. Of course, lives have been lost, of course there has been a huge human cost - and every one of those lives, every  iota of that cost, matters. But that does not mean that the War was the greater evil. In the world that never came to be, the human cost, the loss of life, might have been incalculably greater.

    I will descend to a loose analogy. An automobile designer has to make a decision as to where to put the gas tank - that is, the 12 plus gallon firebomb designed into every car. No matter where it is place, particular individuals are going to die because of the placement. If the cannister were only two inches forward (or back, or here or there), the worst sort of tort lawyer pontificates, that child would be alive. True enough - but there are numberless other children, not present in the courtroom, alive and well because the tank was place where it was. It requires a deliberate act of intuitive imagination to conjure them up - one that most of us can accomplish, given the cue and impetus.

    Exactly the same sort of intuitive imagination is required to think clearly about Iraq. There are thousands of persons who are dead or maimed because the invasion took place. These we know, and count, and mourn. The issue is whether there are a much greater number of persons alive and well (or who will remain alive and well over the next few decades). This is the process the Demented Left deliberately refuses to undertake - for to do so implies that the War was one alternative among others, with costs and benefits that could be, and had to be, calculated. Admitting this prosaic fact would deprive it of its shrill, moralizing voice. That is the self-serving reason clear thought is  anathema to it. 

    Being sensitive to the real human cost of the War does not mean melting into a pool of limpid, insipid  sentimental pathos. A year or so back, I picked up a truly priceless book, "The New Yorker Book of War Pieces" (ISBN 00805209018). It is a collection of the real time journalism that appeared in the New Yorker between 1939 and 1945 - 'Letter from London', 'Letter from Paris', 'Letter from Warsaw', and so forth. These days the New Yorker is heavily politicized, but there is nothing political at all about these pieces. They are contemporary journalistic reports, written to describe in great depth the emotions and reactions of the people of those cities to events in real time. Neither the population they observed, nor the writers themselves, all of whom are very gifted, could know that Hitler would batter his army to pieces in the Soviet Union, that the United States would ultimately enter the war with decisive effect, that all would end happily - at least for the survivors. That real time ignorance is what makes the collection priceless.

    What jumps out in the early pieces, written in London and Paris in the first two years of the war, is how frustrated the public in Western Europe was, that Western leadership had allowed the momentum of Nazi Germany to develop into such a towering, apparently irresistible, force by 1939. This of course is a historical cliché these days, but it is interesting to read it described by journalists who - beneath all their professionalism - were genuinely afraid, for themselves, for their friends, for their nations, for the world. The articles do not contained the studied judgment of history, but the real immediate anguish of intelligent people who agonized that the civilization they knew and loved might be endangered by the short-sightedness of English and French political leadership in the late 30's. They agonized, even though they did not know anything then of how barbaric the Nazi regime would actually prove to be.

    Interesting reading - but to me it brought clearly to mind the essential temporal paradox in intuiting the direction of the path not taken. If the prime ministers of England and France (specifically Stanley Baldwin and your choice of one of five or six French heads of state) had reacted to Hitler's initial acts of aggression in 1935 with the force that everyone now agrees they should have, then the time track in which the wisdom of that use of force is clear would never come to be. The statesmen would not have been praised. They would have been vilified, attacked, denounced, damned. The temper of those times was even more pacifistic than these, and with more reason. Over one million students around the world signed a pledge not to bear arms for their country in 1935. The utterly senseless slaughters of the Great War, the true cause of most of the misery of the last Century, lay only two decades back in the past,

    So the mainstream media of that day - the Keith Olbermans, Paul Krugmans, the editors of the New York Times - would almost certainly attacked that leadership with the same venomous hatred we see expressed these days. Hitler was no threat - he had disavowed the claims in Mein Kampf when he assumed power (which is true), his actions were only a fully justified attempt to rectify the imbalance of the Versailles Treaty (also true). Look at this needless loss of life - in the dozens, perhaps the hundreds! This unnecessary disorder! This leadership should be dismissed - or worse!

    Yet the war that would have been dangerous to living things, did not commence in 1935, and a peace that proved to be far more dangerous continued. In 1940, the same intellectuals who would have sneered at an earlier, timely intervention, feared for the existence of their community and their lives, and denounced Baldwin, Chamberlain, and the others for their myopia. Such is it always on the editorial pages.

    (I can't write like this article and duck the implicit challenge. It's my own belief that Bush and Blair chose the least of the evils, and here are the reasons. If there is no invasion of Iraq, the enlightened self-interest of both Hussein and Osama Bin Laden leads to Al Quaeda seeking sanctuary in Iraq, or some affiliated safe haven in the Mid East. There had been discussions between the factions as early as 1998 - their enmity  was only skin deep.  Bin Laden would retain his mythic, invulnerable status, Hussein would gain among fundamentalists by the alliance. They would also both be confident that they could act without any fear of consequence, because the West would once again have demonstrated its pusillanimity. Hussein would be free to continue seeking WMD, which he would have every chance of obtaining in an open ended time frame. He would have at his disposal a well-financed and intact distribution mechanism in Al Quaeda. The support the US has garnered for the war against terrorism would not be nearly so significant, because of its own failure to walk the walk.

    The world, in short, would be a much more dangerous place than it is. Just one man's opinion - it may be wrong, but it is not irrational. I say this fully knowing how much this war has cost men and women who deserved much better from life. The fault lies with Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, and the others who preach and practice religious warfare. But a fat lot of good assigning blame does for dead soldiers. I will not dismiss our honored dead and the others as cannon fodder, necessary sacrifices. Yet I do believe they have not died in vain.)

    Can it be that Bush and Blair are martyrs to a history that never happened? Saviors without honor in the land of might-have-been? I do believe it is certainly possible. For the reasons given above, I believe it is a fact.  But I have to say that is only my belief. The automobile designer at least has collision studies, historical data, test runs. A policy maker has only insight, intelligence, and intuition.   There are simply too many human and random factors involved to say with any definite certitude, with respect to a decision as far reaching as invading Iraq, which is better or worse. No responsible person can plausibly claim to know for sure. Like it or not, the debate has to end in some sort of conjecture.

    But that said, it is possible to insist on rational assumptions, and a logical approach to the issue, rather than a simple reiteration of pre-existing value judgments. My complaint with the vast majority of war opponents is that they limit themselves to bemoaning the present situation, without even considering the thought that there were negatives in the alternatives. It is not that I disagree with their thinking. It is that they don't think at all.   

Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley, or Vietnam Revisited

    Back in 1963, when I was a junior in high school, summer jobs were not so easy to come by - the negative aspect of Baby Boomer demographics. Finally, a friend managed to line me up with a job busing tables at a local Catholic retreat house. I served breakfast, lunch, and dinner, washed dishes, and did my best to keep a low profile. It wasn't much, but the start of my career of gainful employment.

     A strict rule of silence was enforced then on Catholic retreats. The participants, entirely male, did not speak to each other, and particularly at meal time. Instead, they listened to a tapes on a variety of thematic topics. These were not all religious talks, which might surprise some. There was a considerable amount of diversity. There were not all that many, and so I heard the same speech over and over again that summer. One of the most striking, so striking that it has stayed with me these 45 years, was a speech that Dr. Thomas Dooley had given to a group of nuns, reporting on his experiences in Southeast Asia between 1954 and 1960.

    The Kingston Trio had made the name famous back in 1958, with a superb arrangement of an old Civil War song. But the flesh-and-blood Tom Dooley was well known before that. He was the author of three solid books about conditions there, the most well-known being 'Deliver Us From Evil', published in 1956. He'd been dead prematurely dead two years (of cancer) when I did that repetitive listening. So what I was hearing dated back to 1961 at the latest, probably earlier, long before there was any political baggage attached to discussions of Southeast Asia.

     If you did have to listen to a talk over and over, that was a good one to hear - light and entertaining (though the subject was very serious), and leavened with a lot of humor. The subject was the same as the books, Dooley's first-hand impressions of the refugee camps in Haiphong and the repulsive cruelty of the the Stalinist regime from which they fled. I still remember him describing the exact meaning of the title 'Deliver Us from Evil' , which only indirectly referenced the Scriptural passage. The direct reference had to to do with an incident which Dooley had personally witnessed and in which he even participated.

    Three young Vietnamese children had been brought to the border by the police of the North Vietnam. Their vocal cords had been cut (or tongues cut out, I forget which) as punishment for treasonable speech. When Dooley asked the guard how children so young could possibly have committed treason, the guard asked him, Dooley, to recite the Lord's Prayer. When Dooley reached the phrase, 'And deliver us from evil', the guard stopped him.

    "That is the treason", he declared, "for there is no evil in the People's Republic of Vietnam."      

    The Vietnam debacle was the second greatest trauma in the history of the United States. (First is the Civil War, without any serious contender, and we may all hope to God that it remains unrivaled on the list.) It was fought on the wrong terms, by the wrong nation, with the wrong Army, with the the wrong tactics, and explained in the wrong way. It ended, when it finally ended, with a total collapse of interest and will. The precipitate and hasty abandonment was followed by the most monstrous atrocities perpetrated in my lifetime. Domestically, It engendered a cynicism about American power, American objectives, and American values that persists to this day - in fact, that seems to be permanently embedded in Western culture. It was an improvident, unwise, absolutely absurd exercise in mismanagement. It was in every respect but one a complete disaster.       

     The one respect in which it was not a disaster, or should not have been, was the moral perspective. The Vietnam War was colossally unwise. It was never immoral. Anyone who heard Tom Dooley once, let alone all summer long, knew – or should have known - that reality. At base, after all the heat, after all the millions of words, after all the sound and fury, what the war was about was a frightened, even terrified, people resisting the imposition of a relentlessly tyrannical and inhumane regime. The moral judgment should always have been weighed in their favor, and their allies by association. 

      But as the 60's lengthened, and Vietnam became more controversial with each passing year, that base insight was lost. There is no question that the tactics and posturing of the Johnson Administration had much to do with this. The War should never have been fought primarily by the American military. The rationale should never have been expressed in the Cold War grandiosity language of the Kennedy inaugural address. Vietnam was a sideshow to the major East-West conflict, if it was a part of it at all. The issues were local, Vietnamese resistance to Vietnamese oppression. But as South Vietnam came to be perceived as an American client state, awareness of the elementary justice of the basic cause - small, but anything but trivial - became obscured by the superheated rhetoric.

    It was the wrong army. It was also the wrong type of army. If it was to be fought by the US, it should have been fought by a professional military, and not sullen and discontented draftees. (Popular armies perform wonderfully well in wars of national survival, or great causes, as Victor Hanson Davis has convincingly pointed out. But the Vietnam War was neither.) The military tactics were the wrong tactics. The war was sold to the public on the wrong basis, duplicitous if not outright fallacious. But none of this accounts for the complete reversal in the moral polarity that occurred in the late 60's and early 70's, in which the Stalinist thug Ho Chi Minh was somehow transformed into the a native Populist, the actually elected South Vietnamese government perceived as a repressive state, and the assistance of the United States as some sort of imperial venture. It does not account for the vehemence, the shrill, shrieking hysteria that became the dominant tone of war opposition. The reasons for that lie elsewhere.

    They have to do with the determination of the New Left and its fellow traveler draft resisters to characterize the opposition as a moral issue, a crusade, a matter of good versus evil. It was not sufficient simply to question the practicality, the wisdom, the sensibility of the military approach to Vietnam. To wax philosophical for a moment, arguments of that type address the means only and leave the end intact. Accepting the justice of the end (resisting the tyranny of North Vietnam) would not do for the war opponents, and particularly not for draft opponents. Success on that limited basis would not lead to an end to the war, but only an alteration in the manner in which it was conducted. Above all, it would not lead to an end to the draft.
   
    Full disclosure must be made here. I did not serve in Vietnam or in fact in the military at any time. When I began college in 1964, I enrolled in ROTC, fully expecting to complete the course and do my service as a ROTC officer. I was not particularly looking forward to it. I am not militaristic. I did think it would be a valuable maturing experience. But fate intervened in 1965, in the form of the first episode of mild rheumatoid arthritis with which I have coped without too much difficulty my entire adult life. Almost the first words out of the mouth of the internist who diagnosed it was, 'at least you won't be going into the Army'.

    So when I opposed the War in those years - and I most certainly did - it was not because I had anything personal at stake. I believed the war was foolish because it was wasteful. I did not buy completely into the New Left dogma, with its endless misquotation of Eisenhower about Ho Chi Minh's likely success in a referendum in 1956. But it was also the case that my memory of Tom Dooley and all he had seen and reported was a long time in the past. 

    But even for a fervent war opponent, the extent to which the war opposition had at base the self-serving interests of the Boomer generation was unsettling. Everyone mouthed the sentiments - moral language is as easy to mimic as any other - but the bottom line for a huge percentage of resisters, maybe the majority, was a resentment of being inconvenienced by two years military service, with kp, field drill, and master sergeants with their own view of the world. Simply insisting the war was badly conducted would not do - it didn't avoid that inconvenient two years. So the war became an impassioned moral cause, a crusade. 'Hell, No, I Won't Go' became a slogan that was chanted with blazing eyes and and an even more blazing self-righteous indignation. The United States Army was recast as an invading army, and the defense of South Vietnam as an imperialist venture, a Western power imposing its will on a Third World people, as so often in the past. America thus became Amerika in those years of mass insanity.

 Insisting that the issue was a moral one, rather than simply a matter of political alternatives, neatly linked draft resistance to war opposition. Obviously, if the war was evil and immoral, to participate in any form was to become complicit in the immorality. That inconvenient two year obligation thus disappeared. Consistency with that transparent rationalization is also the reason why Vietnam soldiers were treated so disgracefully shabbily in those years. To the extent that one acknowledged that the troops in Vietnam were not acting immorally, one had to acknowledge that maybe the righteousness of war opposition was in some doubt. Maybe - perish the thought - some of the protest was motivated by selfishness and moral cowardice. That was not a notion that could even be entertained as a thought at that time, let alone spoken aloud. So the troops were vilified and the motives of the protesters never questioned.

    This transformation of the dialog from a limited political issue to a great, sweeping moral condemnation that was absurdly blithe to the actual facts of Vietnam has had huge repercussions. It was catastrophic for the people of Southeast Asia. Persuaded by all the inflamed rhetoric that the United States was interfering with the popular will of a distant people, Congress not only withdrew troops, but cut off aid to South Vietnam, at a time in 1974 when many military historians believe that nation might have been able to withstand the assault with reasonable support. The successors to Ho Chi Minh, as Stalinist as he was, overran Saigon in 1975 and imposed the same brutality as they had in Hanoi two decades earlier. Deliver us from evil. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge took advantage of the power vacuum the West had left behind to perpetrate the most appalling genocide since World War II, maybe in history, in the killing fields. (In 2005, filmmakers trying to make a documentary about the massacre found too few survivors to contribute. 

   In the United States, the war protest gave birth to the Great Sacred Cow of the demented Left - that it had taken to the streets and, by heroic measures, brought an unjust and immoral war to its knees. For many Boomers, participation in the anti-war movement is the most significant moral action of their lives. For many, these are life episodes too precious to rethink critically – and they don't. But the protests didn't stop the war. What it brought to a halt was the draft, which ended in 1971, as did the protests – for it is hard to deny that had been the real point all along. The war went on until 1975. And the events that followed? The repugnant atrocities of Pol Pot and the concrete demonstration that North Vietnam had intended all along a ferociously tyrannical Communist regime? In one of the great acts of collective rationalization in recorded history, the Baby Boomers - my generation - shrug their shoulders. Not our problem. 

     But the fact was that Tom Dooley had been telling the plain, unvarnished truth. The Vietnamese people - the real flesh-and-blood kind, that live and die, suffer and hope - not the mythic 'People' of immemorial Leftist cant - began running from Ho Chi Minh in 1955. They kept running for the next two decades, as far south as the land would take them, then into boats and the open sea when the land ran out. The war was a dumb war, unwisely formulated, stupidly communicated, even more stupidly fought. But it was a just cause and a moral undertaking. It was the protest, with its utter contempt for the actual human reality, that was immoral.

    Tom Dooley had it right. I heard him clearly enough back in 1963. But by 1968, I'd stopped listening. So had everybody else.

                                                                                                - Genuine Realist

(This article first appeared on the website American Thinker on February 15th, 2008 under the title 'Boomers and the Vietnam Shrug', at the site linked here.

The History of Two Hard Centuries in One Hundred Easy Words

   A brief history of Western civilization (or anti-civilization) in the last two hundred years.

    The major nations of Europe were never able to assimilate the ideas of liberal British philosophy as articulated in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the United States of America. During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries,  cultural arrogance and xenophobia impelled them to inflict appalling, unforgivable horrors on other peoples in the form of colonialism. Before they could actually be made to pay for these crimes, they spent the Twentieth Century battering themselves to pieces in a series of utterly absurd tribal wars. They also created the monstrously cynical Soviet Union, which furthered  its own imperial ambitions by perversely corrupting one liberation movement after another in the ostensible name of the 'People'. Old Europe then handed the whole Godforsaken mess it had created to the aforesaid United States of America. The great irony of our times was thus created. The original anti-colonial nation has to bear the totally slanderous label of colonialist.

    That's actually about one hundred fifty words, but give me a cookie. The point is this. Over the course of the last century, what the  relentless barrage of Soviet propaganda did was create an ambiance, a sense, that the effects of American power are somehow intrinsically negative. The pronouncements were relentless, ruthless, and utterly cynical. It was the Soviet Union (so it said) that upheld the banner of human freedom. The United States backed the forces of reaction for its own despicable national interest.

    Now that happens not to be true. It is in fact an outrageous lie. It should by rights have ended in 1991 and the years immediately thereafter, when the curtain was ripped off and the full extent of the corruption and brutality of the Soviet Union was relentlessly exposed for what it was. All of the Communist mythology was completely debunked. Alger Hiss was indeed a perjurer. The Rosenbergs were in fact spies. All those various liberation movements that postured as popular uprisings were Soviet dominated, and actually fascist.  But the most important insight, the global discovery, was the complete absence of good faith in all of this posturing. Respect for truth behind the Iron Curtain was non-existent.

    Now, what should have happened after these revelations, as a matter of simple intellectual honesty, was a complete rethinking of the entire history of the Cold War - for it is impossible to underestimate how completely pervasive, how universal, the effects of Soviet propaganda actually were during those years. Quite apart from the avowed Marxists and sympathizers, most persons of good will assumed that there was something to Soviet claims, even if exaggerated -  that there was at least a kernel of accuracy - that there were rights and wrongs on both sides. (I myself fall into that category.) But that was not the case. Absolutely nothing - literally nothing - that the Soviets and their sponsored states could be accepted as valid.  Complete bad faith - to use blunter language, whole cloth fabrications, in which nothing is true - is a surprisingly difficult phenomenon for most people to assimilate.

    So  a complete reexamination of recent history was required. But did it happen? No. Rather than thoughtful confessions of error and studies revisions of opinion, what the Demented Left did was subside into a sullen silence. Yeah, the revelations following the Cold War had  - reluctantly - to be accepted. But that did not mean that  - somehow - you know - the influence of the United States  - you know - was negative. Don't ask us how, but somehow. Above all, the baseline, the mother ship, the Great Sacred Cow of the Baby Boom Left - the opposition to Vietnam - remained unaffected. Since it had survived the revelations in the Killing Fields and the Stalinist thuggery of the Vietnamese Republic, that was hardly surprising. But it was disappointing.

    This attitude that the effects of United States power are somehow negative is just that - an attitude, an unattached value judgment, seldom or never reduced to concrete terms. There is a good reason for this. It isn't true. I don't mean to imply that US influence is some sort of panacea, a cure for all that ails ya in a particular society. That's nonsense. The racism, sexism, class-ism, culturism - above all, the xenophobia which is the the universal human disease - which run through the whole sordid history of humankind was hardly going to vanish with Thomas Jefferson's wonderful pronouncements. I also don't mean that force majeure does not produce intimate human tragedy. Military force never gets the real Bad Guys cleanly and elegantly - they're always hiding in a bunker somewhere, with champagne and concubines. The damage is always collateral. Bad Guys hold whole nations hostage.

    But despite these considerations, the plain fact is that in my lifetime, the enormous crimes against humanity have not occurred where the United States is. They occur where it is not - in Cambodia, in Rwanda, in Bosnia, in Eastern Europe. Where United States influence has been pronounced, human values have always advanced and often thrived. I will make one example stand for all. In the first half of the Twentieth Century, anyone who argued that the authoritarian militarist societies of Japan and Germany - both traditions a thousand years old -  could be reformed into working democracies, would have been considered insane. But it happened, in the most successful nation building in human history.

    These mundane factual observations counted for nothing, in relation to that sullen value judgment. When the Iraq War began, it was interesting to me how all that old Cold War machinery sprang back to life. Like some banal science fiction story in which an unlucky astronaut stumbles into a lost city and triggers its ancient weapons, all the cliches of the 60's were enthusiastically revived. Everything old became new again. There must have been tears of nostalgia in the eyes of some of the old New Lefters.

    The Demented Left KNOWS that any exercise of United States power is negative.  It doesn't know why. It can't say why the deposition of a repulsive monster was an exercise in imperialism, or what is immoral about the attempt (apparently succeeding as of the date of this posting) to mediate the conflict of two ancient sects. (The radicals have become reactionary over Iraq - a subject of a later post.) It doesn't have to say why. It just KNOWS. That ancient value judgment, the product of systematic Soviet disinformation and propaganda over four decades, was never revised, never re-evaluated.

     I have to wax philosophical here for a moment. As a matter of elementary logic, pure value judgments are absolutely insignificant. The reason is that they aren't reasoned. There is no progression from predicate fact to conclusion. If you can't say why you are for or against something, and back it up with some meaningful reference to actual factual criteria, then - despite all your moralizing, your passionate intensity - your opinion is no better or different than your preference for rocky road ice cream over butter pecan. That happens to be the situation in which most of the members of the Demented Left find themselves.

    But it doesn't make any difference to them. They don't know why they know, but it doesn't make any difference. They KNOW.

                                                                                        - Genuine Realist

   

'Imposing American-Style Democracy': Iraq, part 2

    Back in 2004-5, I used to post regularly on a UK-based political discussion site named 'Open Democracy'.  (This is the site.) Other than the fact that the site was not particularly open, and anything but democratic, the title was reasonably descriptive. The tenor of the vast majority of the posts was what might be called 'Marxist Triste', i.e, acknowledgment that the Cold War had ended, and - yeah - probably in the right way - but wouldn't it have been nice if . . .? The Iraq War had clearly revived their flagging spirits. To a man and woman, they were convinced that the stated rationales about WMD or regime change was at best secondary, at worst a subterfuge, and that the war was really an exercise in American 'imperialism'.  Resisting the temptation to offer the basic response of an Irish American to British subjects moralizing about empire - 'you oughta know' - I posted back and forth. They were all cynically sure that the various deadlines the US had set for the return of power to the Iraqi people would be postponed or ignored. When they were scrupulously met, one after another, and the cynicism of the comrades remained undented, I lost interest in the site and stopped posting there.

    One striking phrase occurred over and over in the posts. What the United States was doing in its unforgivable empire-building zeal was 'attempting to impose American-style democracy' in Iraq.  The expression  interested me, and particularly the underlined phrases. The connotative sense of the phrase is ominously imperial. 'Impose', of course, means to require someone else do something against their will. The adjectival phrase 'American-style' has a loose relation to the noun phrase 'American life-style'. In the manner of traditional conquerors, the crass Americans insist that the hapless Iraqis adopt their way of life. The crass neocons will not be satisfied until Iraqi girls are walking down the streets of Baghdad in miniskirts, with a pork sausage in one hand and a music video playing on their Ipods. It all sounds as arrogantly smug as Americans are supposed to be, and dreadfully parochial.

    But hold the phone. Let's take the expression apart rationally, before buying into the metaphorical background. The actual phrase is 'American-style democracy''. Just what exactly is 'American-style democracy'? And is there any relevant sense in which such a thing could be imposed? What does the ominous sounding phrase actually mean?

    There is not enough space to analyze 'American-style democracy' in depth, but the Reality Principle produces the salient point instantly. 'American-style democracy' does NOT mean the cloning of American institutions in a foreign culture. Not even the most demented anti-American sloganeers would advance such a contention. In its efforts at nation building, some of which have been more successful than any other in history (Germany, Japan), the United States has never attempted any such thing.

    So what exactly is 'American style democracy' in this context? As noted, too big a topic to do exhaustively. My intuition is that the essence of 'American style democracy' boils down to two central elements - (1) the Jeffersonian notion of egalitarian inalienable right, and (2) the Lincolnian notion of consensual government - in a word, the core of the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, combined. The institutions of government vary radically - the Iraqi Constitution adopted in 2005 on Islamic principles is as different from the German as the Japanese is from the United States, etc. But the essence of individual right and consensual government is common to all.

    So this 'American style democracy' that is supposedly the point of imperial ambition - an insistence on consensual government. Perhaps the notion is not so ominous after all. But let us return to the verb - 'impose'. How on earth is it possible to impose consensual government on any people? 'OK, buddy, back into that polling booth . . . slowly'?' The concept is preposterous. It would be as useful to talk about 'imposing liberty', which is a nonsense phrase that no one would use - unless they were deliberately trying to obscure the difference between liberation and conquest. This of course was exactly what was going on.

    I have discussed the phrase 'imposing American style democracy' in some detail because it illustrates perfectly the conundrums the Demented Left faces on this issue. Like it or not - and the Demented Left does not like it one little bit - deposing a dictator of appalling cruelty, attempting to establish a nation based on consent of the governed is a Good Thing To Do. There is no way around it. Such an undertaking is not 'imperial' by any normal definition of the word. (My British friends implicitly agreed with this, by defining 'empire' in terms of breathtaking absurdity, engaging in the Glass Bead Game with unrepentant zeal.) The objections are political and practical - not the moral question, 'should it be done? (of course it should), but the realistic one, can it be done - with the resources available and without undue human cost'?

    But this reduction of the issue to its actual prosaic elements means that judgment on the war and the Bush Administration must be left to the voice of history, which may deem it wise or foolish, as time unfolds the matter - and for those who want to condemn now, and unequivocally, and with the vehemence of zealots, that will never do. For that reason, bland political language is absolutely out of the question. The issues must be formulated in terms that make it suitable for instant denunciation - moral language, in short. Thus, the commendable objective of deposing a madman oppressor is transformed into 'imposing American style democracy', 'empire' becomes redefined to something that Caesar Augusts, Napoleon, or Stalin would never have recognized, street gangs engaging in random mass murder become 'revolutionaries' or 'freedom fighters', etc.

                                                                                                                - Genuine Realist

   

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'What Elephant?': Iraq, part I

    In 1935 or thereabouts, Billy Rose produced a show on Broadway named 'Jumbo'. Along with a good Rodgers and Hart score, there was one classic visual gag. The show was about an impoverished circus, and Jumbo the name of an elephant that was its star attraction. The elephant had been mortgaged to the hilt. Creditors were closing in to foreclose. The owner (played by Jimmy Durante) tries to escape with the elephant at nightfall. The stage is entirely dark. Durante starts across. Suddenly, a spotlight illuminates him and the elephant on a leash behind him.

    Voice off-stage: "Hey, bub! Where ya goin' with that elephant?"

    Durante (hands up in bewilderment): "What. . . elephant?"

    I can hardly start a weblog as ambitious as I intend this to be, and not deal with the elephant, in this case, the war in Iraq, which has been the central topic of political and moral discussion for the last five years (beginning a year before the war began). There have been few if any issues in my lifetime that have generated as much heat and as little light. It has become next to impossible to discuss the matter calmly, let alone rationally. There are reasons for that, that have directly to do with the nature of the language that the opponents of the war have utilized at the outset. But before exploring that fascinating subject, simple integrity requires I set forth my own position(s) on the matter.

    I don't want to go too heavy duty here, but I try to analyze even situations as complex as this in strict Kantian terms. On that basis, I opposed the war in 2002-2003. The specific reason was that there seemed to me a real possibility would expand in a way that would create a huge human catastrophe. Although I accepted the premise that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, I saw that nation as too beleaguered and beset to make any use of them. At the same time, I viewed the threat of Islamic terrorism as a very real one, as to which some response had to be made. So the issue to me turned entirely on the calculations of the Bush Administration as to the human cost of the war. If that cost was clearly less than what would be incurred by Hussein remaining in power, then the war was justified, for his ogrish regime was universally regarded as tyrannical and illegitimate - there was certainly no moral issue raised by its overthrow in and of itself. But I was not at all sure that that military assessment was accurate, and so opposed the war. I did not stand on a hill holding a candle about the prospect, but I respected those who did, and hoped they were in error.

    As it turned out, they were in error, and the Hussein regime was toppled without anything like the grim disaster that had been feared, Allah be praised. If ethical logic had anything to do with it, that should have been that. However much opponents of the war may have mistrusted the tactical calculations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, surely there couldn't be serious disagreement that the best interest of the Iraqi people (not to mention the West) lay in the creation of a modern, secular Iraqi state. The nation building efforts of the Administration and those considerable numbers of persons of good will in Iraq who could see where their collective future lay were owed unqualified support. This seemed to me to be a no brainer - in theory.

    Theory was exactly where this happy thought remained. It never got close to practice. I can say I was disappointed. I can't say what I was surprised. All along, the opposition to the war had seemed to me suspiciously impassioned, far more emotional than a rational disagreement about the correctness of a military judgment. The quick success of the military campaign was not greeted with shouts to high heaven, but glum, sullen silence.

    So there should have been rejoicing. Yet there was none at all. I think the reason for this phenomenon is common knowledge. During the long decades after the Russian Revolution, during the Depression, the Cold War, and particularly in the late 60's with the Vietnam Resistance, the notion that ANY exercise of American power in ANY cause was inherently unjust and immoral - regardless of cause, regardless of effect. War is not healthy for children or other living things. It isn't pleasant. It isn't nice. The characterization of American power as suspect, even evil, is a pure, undifferentiated, fundamental value judgment. No reasons need be given, no evidence cited. That concept has become a master token in the great Glass Bead Game that substitutes for actual hard thought in Western intellectual circles.

    I have to make something quite clear at this point. I am not at all blithe about the actual human cost involved in these glib discussions of policy alternatives. Quite the contrary - I am terrifically squeamish about these things, and it is necessary to be squeamish about these things.  History may record a great military triumph with 'minor casualties'. But the 'minor casualties' is a real human being screaming his lungs out beneath an unforgiving sun, or a mother mourning the loss of her only son, or some mid level executive who comes to work on an ordinary September morning and ends up leaping to his death to avoid being burned alive. There are no minor casualties. There is no such thing as collateral damage.

    Which brings me (finally!) to the point. War is indeed dangerous to children, and other living things. But so is peace, in places like Rwanda, Cambodia, Sebrecina, Auschwitz.  The decision to go to war in Iraq may have been a disaster. The decision NOT to go to war might also have been a disaster. There are negatives in both cases. These are decisions, and evaluations, that can only be made case by case, on the basis of the reality principle, the actual effect of the use of force on living, breathing human beings. It is not possible even to talk coherently about these issues on the basis of some pre-conceived judgment.

    But that is exactly what the opposition has been doing since 2003. It reasons backwards to the its pre-ordained conclusion. Any exercise of American power is immoral - this is the fixed point around which everything revolves - it only needs to determine why. The result has been incredibly inept and flimsy reasoning, indifferent to contrary facts, often tautological, superficial to the point of cynicism, the sort of smug wink-and-nod reflex (not thought) by which members of the same club avoid real issues.  When I spoke in the Introduction of "constant strident reiteration of value judgments masquerading as thoughtful analysis", this  is what I meant.

    I have to state my own views. I think the war was the correct response to the social forces that produced 9/11, the lesser of two evils (for war is never desirable, definitely unhealthy for children and other living things). In posts to come, I'll state the reasons. But that is not what I am after here. I could easily be wrong. The point is that the question is a QUESTION, still open, one that will not be resolved for decades if not generations.

    The reason why the opposition adopted moral language, why it insists on the unquestioned validity of its  value judgment, is precisely to avoid acknowledging  the  reality - that the the question is very much open, still subject to the final evaluation of history. It wants its condemnation NOW, unequivocal and final.

    Sorry. It just ain't that simple.

    More of this anon.

                                                                                                - Genuine Realist

Introduction

    Hello, and welcome to Word Play. The ongoing subject of this weblog will be political language, its varieties, its nuances, its hidden meanings, and its subtext. By virtue of philosophical training, personal inclination, and maybe plain persnicketiness, I am one of those people who are far more interested in the language in which an issue is discussed than the issue itself. The political landscape of the United States is plagued by the constant strident reiteration of value judgments masquerading as thoughtful analysis. The op-ed piece may seem thoughtful. The tone may appear moderate. Examine it a little more closely and it turns out to be one long scream. Terrific jokes come along all the time.  Some are absolutely to the point, and profound. Others are equally terrific, but don't mean a damn thing. Cleverness is one thing, wisdom quite another. So it is not a bad idea to peek behind the punch line before you buy into the whole message. Trust me, you can still enjoy the joke, no matter how off-base it turns out to be.

    This manner of looking at the world, and at the language of the world, makes me sound conservative. I'm not. In fact, that label annoys me enormously. The reason why I am stuck with the tag is painfully obvious.  As the whole world knows, the values of the Main Stream Media in the United States and the West are skewed radically to the left. The upshot is that the value judgments of conservative opinion makers (or wannabee opinion makers) are subject to a constant merciless barrage of scathing criticism. The woods teem with smug media critics itching to take pot shots at them. No need for another recruit to that army.

    It's in the fields on the Left that the sacred cows graze - and their mooing sounds like the Hallelujah Chorus to far too many bright people who should know better. There is an entire canon of shared values, constantly reiterated, and seldom (if ever) examined. The word 'subversive' shows up in a lot of mainstream movie and theater reviews, always in a positive sense.  But what's being subverted are almost invariably values and attitudes that the critic doesn't share. Eating beef barbecued from someone else's sanctified meat on the hoof is always an enormous treat. When it is your own brand that's being rounded up for slaughter, it's another story.  Then the cheerful word 'subversive' becomes the rather more ominous 'blasphemous'.

    With all this prating about other people's values, I believe I am obligated to state what mine are. I consider myself a Populist, in the old fashioned late Nineteenth Century sense of the word. What I mean by this is that I believe that the public in the mass, ordinary people in their every day lives, is ultimately the best judge and arbiter of most major issues. The Great Beast, I call it, a phrase that will reappear here constantly - the Great Beast, possessing no intelligence, but infinite wisdom. The Great Beast, that never knows best, but always knows better. I actually do believe in democracy, the rule of the people. That puts me in a teeny-tiny minority, I have learned - for while the whole world gives lip service to the word, almost no one actually believes in it. Sooner or later, nearly everyone succumbs to an elite - a king, a proletarian vanguard, the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. There is probably one clanking around in my attic somewhere, but I do my best.

    I also believe in popular values, and thereby hangs a tale - namely, figuring out what they actually are.  I freely acknowledge the impossibility of the task. We all have a general notion of their content - a belief in freedom, moderation, civility, sweet reason, respect for the individual, equality under the law, loyalty to family, friends, neighborhood and country (in that order), and so on. These values are not only inconsistent, but sometimes flat our contradictory. We demand that every person be equal before the law, but that the uniqueness of each individual be respected. Think for a second about how that actually plays out.

    It's always easy to describe values in abstract terms, in high concept. Plato had it exactly backwards.  What's difficult to do is determine how they signify in the hurly-burly of the moment, before the battle's lost and won, before the end of the day, before the issue has frozen into history, when alternatives exist and choice is still possible. Strategy is always easy, tactics are always hard. Even the dumbest mouse can see that all their problems would be solved if they could just get a bell around the cat's neck. But even the smartest mouse doesn't know how to do it.  Pretty much the same thing applies to politics and ethics.

    The application of these easy-to-grasp, difficult-to define-precisely values to real day-to-day life - that's the hard trick. I don't have the temerity to say I've mastered it - there is no mastering. But I do know what the object of the exercise is. In any case, that is the exercise that will be going on continuously on this weblog.

    And with that, this introduction is done. You might not have noticed, but we have slipped a bit more into high concept than I'd like. We have snuck into something of a paradox here. A discussion in which high concept, strategical thinking is described as too facile in comparison with low concept, tactical thought is itself high concept and strategical. So I think it is best to quit here, and let the theme of this weblog evolve in its day to day creation. The doing is everything, be it the belling of the cat, the tasting of the pudding, or exploring what political and social language actually means, and yes, the metaphors have been deliberately mixed.

    Stick around and mix your own. Any contribution is welcome. That's all for now.

                                                                                    - Genuine Realist