There seems to be a consensus, especially among liberal hawks, that we shouldn’t play the blame game about Iraq, but instead should dedicate ourselves to efforts to solve the problem facing us.
My opinion is the opposite. The most important thing is to find and punish the guilty parties (including media people, conservative ideologues, and liberal hawks) by ending their political careers. We must have recriminations.
Outside politics, the “blame game” is called accountability. Achieving accountability will be extremely difficult in the present case, since the culprits include not only most Republicans, but also many Democratic leaders and almost all of the media. But unless a large number of careers end, there’s no hope for this country.
The demand for a solution to the Iraq problem is deluded. Nobody knows what to do next –- engineering the fait accompli has been Bush’s game all along (“facts on the ground”), and he’s made sure that Humpty Dumpty will never be put together again. Despite the failure of Bush’s non-plan in Iraq, however, the Democrats actually are in a very tight spot. The American people (bless their optimistic little hearts) hate naysayers and truth-tellers, and the Bush team may very well parlay their failure in Iraq into permanent domination of American politics.
Within the media, special attention should be given to Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., and Donald Graham — the unjustly-respected individuals who ruined the Times and the Post. Because of this planned media failure, ambient political opinion (the opinion of the semi-informed voter) is now reflexively anti-liberal, and this has led us one more time to a failure of democracy. Like Nixon and Reagan, Dubya was elected to a second term; only the efforts of prosecutors kept the first two somewhat under control, and right now we’re waiting for Fitzpatrick to save us from our stupidity again.
The politicians and opinion leaders who got us into this mess, including the liberal hawks, must be blamed, and their careers must be ended. The only other alternative is for them to destroy us, which is what they plan to do. The “stabbed in the back” smear is already on the table, and the movement conservatives haven’t lost any of their enthusiasm for the culture war. Terrorism has never been their primary enemy –- their primary enemy has always been liberals (us). They’ve been calling us traitors for over a decade, and for them 9/11 is just another stick to use to beat us with.
(Parenthetically, people should lay off the “chickenhawk” meme. It’s indeed a fact that most strategic planners and foreign policy spokesmen, for both parties, are non-veteran wonks, but the military is not on our side. Angry veterans coming back from Iraq right now might mostly be liberals or Democrats, but if the military as a whole turns against Bush — and that might happen –- most of them will become rightwing ultranationalists and superhawks. Check out the post-WWI German Freikorps if you wonder what I’m talking about).
Since 1941 the United States has been in a permanent state of mobilization, and the interventionist war party has controlled both parties during that whole period. Within the Democratic Party, arguments about foreign policy are usually ended with the simple invocation of the words “McGovern” and “isolationist”. The Democratic Party foreign policy can be summed up with the words “You can’t be a dove”. This makes the intelligent proposal of alternatives impossible and makes it easy for the Republicans to win every time by outhawking us. A genuine demagogic militarist will defeat an opportunistic one every time.
The Bush plan is especially hard to argue against because no one really knows what it is. A big chunk of factually-misinformed voters supports Bush because they trust him personally as a good Christian gentleman, and another better-informed “insider” chunk supports Bush because they think that they know what his “real” plan is (as opposed to any of his various publicly expressed plans). The cult-of-personality and liberal-hatred aspects of Bush’s support far outstrip informed support for any intelligible program.
Do I really think that it will be possible for us to politically destroy Bush, Cheney, Rove, Norquist, DeLay, and the Revs. Moon and Robertson?
Not really, but I think that that’s what we need to do. If we don’t get them, they’ll get us. No matter what happens in Iraq, we can expect a savage counterattack. It’s them or us.
(If you’re wondering why I quit blogging politics, this post helps explain things. I sound like a Chomskyite now, so of course no good Democrat is going to listen.)
