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Why Are Americans So Blasé About Bombing Iran?

by Elias Isquith on February 6, 2012

Responding to a new poll that shows a clear plurality of Americans are hunky dory with the idea of bombing Iran, Doug Mataconis writes:

[N]otwithstanding the American public’s rather obvious war wariness, making the public case for military action against Iran wouldn’t be all that difficult given the three decades of antipathy between the United States and the Islamic Republic that started with the Iranian Hostage Crisis….

[T]he idea of military action against Iran is already so engrained in the American psyche that it’s unlikely that any future President would have to worry about the legacy of the unpopular wars in Iraq or Afghanistan in making their case to the American public for action in Iran.

I’m sure Mataconis is right that the public support is partially because the state of relations between the US and Iran have as of late been, well, not awesome.

But the other reasons I’d imagine are that people have a false idea that bombing a country isn’t the same as going to war and that it can be done without the negative repercussions associated with warfare (and especially boots-on-the-ground invasion). Also, there’s really been no one in the political mainstream in America who has been arguing against bombing Iran. On the one hand we have the Right which has been singing the above tune for years now. But on the other hand it’s not as if the Democrats are strenuously delineating why bombing Iran would be a bad idea. On the contrary, they’re ostensibly fine with the idea, it’s just that many (not most) of them aren’t in quite as much of a rush to do it as are their Republican counterparts.

The only figure of any prominence, really, who has been making the opposite case is (sigh) Ron Paul. In the aggregate, I think his is the kind of support that hurts just as much as it helps with Mr. John Q.

 

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The Lazy Anti-Politics of the Paulites

by Elias Isquith on December 24, 2011

Paul fans

Here’s how a reader explains to Sully why it is the newsletters don’t impact their support of Paul in 2012:

The reason people are ignoring the 30 year old newsletters written by other people is because they are 30 year old newsletters written by other people.

People don’t care about these things, because they hear Ron Paul talk and they get the message. They get the idea, and they even get that the guy is “just” the carrier of the idea, and not a Newt-aggrandizing ego-maniac. These are very attractive qualities. And his positions – particularly his dedicated anti-war position, in the context of the Obama betrayals – are extremely appealing to huge swathes of the country….

Look at the international situation. Look at Iraq. Look at minorities. Look at the economy. If “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” as B.O. suggested in one of his hollowest campaign speeches, then isn’t Paul the one to give us back to ourselves? Who is left?

Obama hasn’t come through. Romney would at best muddle through for another 4 years of the same. And that’s it. If it’s not Paul, then it’s no one.

This is why I don’t particularly like most Ron Paul supporters. Of course, the online cultists (I call ‘em Paulbots) who buzz throughout the internets, causing bloggers of all stripes to rue the day Google created its alerts system, are self-evidently toxic. But even the sentient and sane fans of Ron Paul (Paulites), are deeply problematic.

Because, like the most childish and irresponsible of the Obama fanatics — the ones who bought into the post-politics pandering and imagined that an Obama Presidency would cease the eternal, natural, and healthy jockeying for power that is politics — the Paulites seem to rather categorically dislike democracy itself. Either they dislike it, or they’re too obtuse to acknowledge democracy as it is rather than as they’d like it to be.

When this reader calls Paul “the one to give us back to ourselves,” who, exactly, does he think we’re currently in the possession of? I like the Occupy Movement plenty and have written about it a lot; I agree with the fundamentals of the Occupy diagnosis of where American democracy has gone astray; so I’m obviously not one to claim, absolutely, that there is no crisis of legitimacy in American democracy.

But there’s a difference between calling for greater transparency and accountability so people can see clearly what other members of the body politic are up to and claiming “we” have been taken and must find someone to “give us back to ourselves.” It’s the difference between reform and fantasy, between a recognition that our problems are systemic — which means we all play our part, consciously or not — and an assertion that our ills are due to some Other that’s in essence kidnapped our sovereignty.

The latter is the kind of juvenile and facile paranoia that, in-between the copious tangential forays into homophobia, racism, and anti-semitism, defines the newsletters. The e-mailer’s implication that we voters ourselves are not in large part responsible for the policies of our country, that we didn’t reelect one man who decided to wage two wars simultaneously before electing another that promised along with ending the one to escalate the other, is a massive shedding of responsibility.

If people aren’t happy with their range of options, the answer is not to skip from one messiah to another (a process that is quite clearly delivering diminishing returns) and assume that what They do is entirely separated from Us. Recognize that there’s a reason the new boss is the same as the old boss. Do the work of self-educating, organizing, challenging, fighting. Grow up.

And stop kidding yourself about what a vote for Ron Paul represents. It is, at best, a superficial and fleeting gesture. An embellishment, symbolic through and through. Nothing more.

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Note to David Axelrod: there’s more to being President than ordering the killing of people

by Elias Isquith on October 18, 2011

We’re only two days in, but David Axelrod is not having a banner week when it comes to his life-long goal, earning my approval:

Critics of President Barack Obama who say he wasn’t prepared for the White House should look to Osama bin Laden’s killing, David Axelrod said Tuesday.

“When you say [Obama] wasn’t prepared, maybe you should go ask Osama bin Laden if he thought he was,” the president’s senior campaign strategist said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“If it went badly, not only would a lot of lives been lost, but [Obama’s] career probably would’ve been over, but he did it because it was the right thing to do.”

Axelrod continued the campaign’s positioning of the president as the underdog in the 2012 election, saying the race will be tough “by definition” because Obama took office during tough economic times while fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Forgive me for misplacing my pocket Constitution; but I’m of the opinion that the President’s job is a bit more complicated and significant than telling other people to carry out plans they’ve devised for killing an individual far, far away.

I understand that—the contentious issue of healthcare reform aside—nearly all of Obama’s achievements in office thus far have involved foreign policy (and most of those have involved successfully killing one person or another). But perhaps the Obama team’s belief that all the President needs to do to prove his worthiness for the highest office is to point to the check-marks on the national security state’s To Kill list may speak to the fundamental shallowness and naiveté many consider to have been defining characteristics of Obama’s tenure.

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The lingering effects of 2004 on the Democratic psyche

by Elias Isquith on October 14, 2011

I know a lot of Democrats who aren’t scared of Mitt Romney because they think his flip-flopping will undo him just as John Kerry’s flip-flopping undid him. I’ve never found this argument especially persuasive because I just don’t see any evidence that voters particularly care about flip-flopping, provided that the candidate’s flop has landed him on the side of the issue they’d prefer. The electorate is famously cynical and contemptuous of politicians, after all; could one more “letting them down” really be so impactful?

Matt Yglesias is with me on this one, it appears, and he’s got some cold, hard numbers (kind of—exit polling is infamously unreliable) to back us up:

Perhaps the best way to get at what I think is wrong with the character assassination theory of the 2004 campaign is that it explains something that doesn’t need explaining. Consider this exit poll result:

Kerry actually did a better job of persuading people who approved of Bush’s job performance to vote for the challenger anyway than Bush did of persuading people who disapproved of his job performance to vote for the incumbent anyway. This is, I think, strong evidence that anti-Kerry sentiments played little explanatory role in the election. You had an incumbent president and a majority of the voters liked his job performance. Under the circumstances, re-election follows naturally. Many Democrats seem to have persuaded themselves that Bush got re-elected despite being unpopular, but I see little evidence for this.

This last point is most certainly true. I’m not sure if this is always the case when one side loses a hard-fought election, but it seems to me as if there was something almost traumatizing about 2004 for many Democrats. From flip-flopping to swift-boating, a lot of the Democratic Party’s philosophy as concerns electioneering seems to have been formed in the crucible that was Bush’s reelection campaign.

And if you talk to regular, non-professional politico Democrats, you’re likely to find that, when they’re feeling their most despondent about the nation and getting closest to mouthing that hoary cliché about moving somewhere else, they point to ’04 as proof-positive that America is full of Bible-thumping crazies, yadda yadda yadda.

Go ahead and try to remind them that the election happened before Iraq really fell into chaos, andbefore Hurricane Katrina—the two things that nuked Bush’s second-term—and you might get somewhere, but, more likely, you’ll be looked at with some skepticism or outright incredulity. It’s simply obvious to a lot of Democrats that Bush was done-for in 2004 and that his reelection is explicable only by pointing to a nefarious fate or, for a few, the machinations of Ohio’s Attorney General.

Obviously a big part of the explanation for this blinkered view is the partisan echo-chamber and the increasing polarization of American politics. I’m sure right-wingers on the whole believe that Obama is similarly doomed, and as widely loathed among the electorate entire, just as lefties believed Bush couldn’t get reelected. I wonder whether this pattern will continue to repeat itself until this era’s political system folds into the next’s.

I will say that having nearly half the country suffer from a gut-punch shock upon learning that their candidate lost the election doesn’t seem to me to be a great status quo insofar as maintaining democratic legitimacy is concerned…

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The national anthem

by Elias Isquith on September 29, 2011

The Reactionary Mind Robin Corey 97801997937472

I don’t know my Gramsci especially well, but I know what might be called the simplistic, short-hand version of his theory of cultural hegemony. I understand the theory to be basically as follows: when the conventional wisdom of a society becomes so ingrained that people stop being cognizant of the fact that what they believe is not, in fact, objective truth but rather contestable ideology. Overwhelmingly, of course, it is the powerful within a society who support and enforce this conventional wisdom which, not coincidentally, leads to rather beneficial results for them and theirs. In general, when a political movement has gotten to the point where its assumptions and beliefs about the world are embraced unconsciously by everyone else, that’s when it’s really won.

By this standard, the famed military-industrial complex’s real victory is not found in its army of lobbyists or its stranglehold on DC policy. Instead, it’s found in two simple words: national security.

That’s a way to describe Corey Robin’s argument in an essay originally published in the London Review of Books and now featured in his latest book, The Reactionary Mind. Here’s the thread that ties—rather tightly—one of America’s greatest crimes of the modern era to this seemingly anodyne phrase:

There are fewer than six degrees of separation between the idea of national security and the lurid crimes of Abu Ghraib. First, each of the reasons the Bush administration gave for going to war against Iraq – the threat of WMD, Saddam’s alleged links to al-Qaida, even the promotion of democracy in the Middle East – referred in some way to protecting America. Second, everyone agrees that getting good intelligence from Iraqi informers is a critical element in defeating the insurgency. Third, US military intelligence believes that sexual humiliation is an especially forceful instrument for extracting information from recalcitrant Muslim prisoners.

The same dynamic possibly explains former Vice President Cheney’s relative lack of censure of any kind for ordering, and to this day defending, the use of torture. It’s certainly a key element of the excuses offered by the Obama Administration as to why it chose not to prosecute anyone for that crime—all involved were not only following orders, we’re told, but following orders given by men who felt the nation to be imperiled. Those were chaotic, scary days; who could have known another attack wasn’t imminent?

As should be clear to any American who has followed politics over the past 10 years, an open society that accepts the tenets of the national security ideology is unlikely to remain open for long. In general, the paranoid, anxious style of such a political culture is not conducive towards unfettered discourse and tolerance—if your life and the life of everyone you care for is potentially hanging by a thread, what patience can you really muster for democratic niceties? But the cult of national security isn’t simply corrosive towards civil society. It’s incompatible with the democratic form of government, whatever its iteration.

And that’s because, as Robin points out, the national security is such a vague concept—as all such euphemisms tend to be—that it’s almost impossible for anyone to say with any certainty what, exactly, it is. What’s more, the emphasis on the nation’s security immediately takes us into that historically dangerous realm of reducing millions of individuals into a single mass with a unifying principle. The principle can differ—sometimes it’s liberty, fraternity and equality; sometimes the dictatorship of the proletariat; sometimes lebensraum. More often than not, however, the principle is inextricably bound-up with survival itself and, crucially, can only be deigned by a tiny coterie, capable of floating above the masses and interpreting their will:

Analysts who assume that America has a discernible national interest whose defence should determine its relations with other nations are unable to explain the failure to achieve domestic consensus on international objectives.’ And this makes a good deal of sense: if an individual finds it difficult to determine her own interest, why should we expect a mass of individuals to do any better? But if a people cannot decide on its collective interest, how can it know when that interest is threatened? Faced with such confusion, leaders often fall back on what seems the most obvious definition of a threat: imminent, violent assault from an enemy, promising to end the independent life of the nation.

In America today, the concept of national security is so wholly accepted, so fundamentally unchallenged, that it’s increasingly being woven into the government’s institutional structure. How else to explain the amazing degree of consistency on this issue between the policies of Bush and Obama? It’s been widely recognized that President Obama’s greatest divergence from candidate Obama is on the issue of civil rights. Many have recognized how, on issues ranging from indefinite detention to the prosecution of torture, Obama is arguably just as bad as his predecessor. What’s gone slightly less noticed, though, is the degree to which the entire ideological framework through which Obama inevitably reaches these policy conclusions is basically the same as Bush’s.

During Bush and still today under Obama, terrorism remains an omnipresent and existential threat, one that requires the United States to act preemptively and without regard to national borders or international law. Once, Bush was our clear-eyed leader. Once, he was the one who could see—like so many throughout the rest of the world never could—how the seemingly broken and doomed Iraqi regime posed a long-term threat to our national security. The disaster that followed his decision to invade Iraq has led to the creation of a mistaken narrative in which Obama, in no small part due to his opposing the Iraq war, was elected President as a repudiation of the Bush worldview.

But rather than a reject the ideology, Obama simply questioned its practitioner. Bush wasn’t wrong; he was just doing it wrong. There was still a long-term threat to our national security; we still needed to break the pervious era’s chains of law and order to preserve our very survival. But it was the threat emanating from Afghanistan and Pakistan that necessitated such radical actions, not Iraq. We still needed masses of troops alongside drone strikes. It was merely the balance between the two that was off.And we still needed to hold people without charges for as long as we liked—just somewhere less noticeable than Guantanamo, like Colorado. The list goes on.

And as long as we continue to unthinkingly accept that there is such a thing as national security, that it requires extraordinary action and that it’s best determined by our political leaders—elected and otherwise—it’ll no doubt go on longer still. Bush, Obama, Romney; it hardly makes a difference.

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The Washington Post’s shameless editorial on the anniversary of September 11

by Elias Isquith on September 10, 2011

Screen Shot 2011 09 10 at 4 49 27 PMEveryone is engaging in acts of reflection and remembrance this weekend to mark the 10 years since September, 11. For some, that has inspired a lot of handwringing, a recognition that the past decade has not been a good one for the United States, neither economically nor spiritually. Others have pointed out how the past ten years have in large part been an elaborate and almost grotesque exercise in denial and distraction—we obsessed over a small band of stateless, reactionary, ideological extremists while a greater threat loomed ever closer. Many have lamented how in significant ways, 9/11 never really ended at all.

The Washington Post‘s editorial board, on the other hand, has taken the opportunity to engage in a rather poorly-veiled and very weakly-argued defense of most of our government’s most controversial actions in response to the tragedy, all of which the Post itself heartily endorsed. In case you had any doubts, the piece makes it very clear that, at the very least, these men and women learned nothing:

ON THE 10TH anniversary of al-Qaeda’s attack on New York and Washington, the conventional wisdom seems to be evolving from “We will be hit again” to “Osama bin Laden won by provoking us into a decade of overreaction.”

The feeling is understandable but incorrect, and it would be dangerous if it took hold. Yes, the nation made big mistakes over the past decade. When has America ever geared up without excess and error? But the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon alerted Americans to genuine dangers that only a relative few had previously noticed. We have lived safely for the decade since not because we misread those dangers but because we responded to them in a manner in which, on balance, Americans can take pride.

The overreaction argument holds that al-Qaeda goaded the nation to curtail civil liberties and construct a monstrous homeland security apparatus while bungling into adventures abroad that birthed new enemies, sapped the American economy and distracted the nation from bigger problems. There is some truth to each element of the critique. The nation stained itself with its treatment of foreign detainees and particularly its use of interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, that had long been recognized as torture. By refusing to raise taxes to face the new reality, it endangered its fiscal health. The United States went to war in Iraq on the basis of faulty intelligence and was arrogantly ill-prepared for the responsibilities of occupation once Saddam Hussein fell. After initial successes in Afghanistan, it paid insufficient attention as the Taliban attempted a comeback. There’s a danger now that the nation will, once again, withdraw too soon from the challenges.

But al-Qaeda was a well-organized, capable organization intent on causing America mortal harm. It embodied an ideology that repelled most Muslims but was nonetheless attractive enough to permit continuous recruitment. And it was operating in an era when new technologies — nuclear, biological, chemical and cyber — allow small numbers of people to envision doing enormous harm to advanced and open democracies.

Well, I’ll tell you, it took nearly 10 years, but now I find such hysterical, disproportionate, and thickheaded descriptions of the latest Great Enemy, al Qaeda, to be quite persuasive indeed. After all, it was an ideology that, in a world with billions of Muslims, was potent enough to “attract enough to permit continuous recruitment.” Bear in mind that, in Afghanistan, where we are fighting a war against this titanic evil that The Washington Post fervently urges us never to end, the government itself estimates there to be well below 50 al Qaeda members. Yes, these dozens of fanatics are a testament to how grave and epoch-defining is the threat of al Qaeda.

And in response to charges that the United States has, in its shirking of habeas corpus, international treaties and norms (which it once championed) against torture, laws against surveillance, and countless other measures that limit what government may be able to do to us in the name of our own security, the Post reminds us that, well, y’know, it could’ve been worse:

There was in fact no large-scale assault on personal freedoms — no equivalent to the Supreme Court-sanctioned roundup of Japanese Americans, no repeat of the Red Scare infringements on freedom of speech and association. The Patriot Act enabled a modest, mostly court-supervised expansion of law enforcement vigilance. When there were excesses in the earliest, most panicked years, there was self-correction, with pushes from within the system (the Justice Department inspector general, for example), from members of Congress of both parties and from unfettered media and public interest groups. There have been hateful acts against Muslim Americans, but overall Americans accepted President Bush’s early insistence that the U.S. war was not against Islam. And though it took too long, Congress and a new administration eventually made clear that torture is not acceptable.

There was never any doubt, however, whether or not torture was “acceptable”; I’d remind the Post that the sickening, lie-ridden, and bad faith discussion we had in the past decade was over whether or not waterboarding was itself torture to begin with. For the time being, we have a President who says it is. But on this issue, as is the case with so many others, he does not stan in agreement with the vast majority of his partners on the other side of the aisle. Just ask Marc Thiessen, currently an op-ed contributor to The Washington Post.

It goes on, of course. You’re welcome to click over and read the whole thing—the artless conflation of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan with the Arab Spring is a particularly inspired bit of sophistry—but I promise you it’s nothing you haven’t confronted innumerable times before. Tomorrow will be 9/11/2011 for most of us, but for The Washington Post, it’s always 9/12/2001 and there always remains much more fighting left to be done.

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