Speech after Long Silence...

Now that the breast-beating of the disillusioned neo-con fellow travelers has assumed massive proportions, it’s time to take a look at what they’re actually saying, and not saying. The new mantra is that “mistakes were made” (aren’t they always?). The tragic hero of the new revisionists–George Packer, Kenneth Pollack, Tom Friedman, Charles Ferguson, Michael Ignatieff, et al.–is Jay Garner; the black-hatted villain is Paul Bremer along with his commanding Svengali, Donald Rumsfeld.

They still don’t get it, nor do their unrepentant partners in crime–Hitchens, Berman, Geras, etc. What is it they don’t get? That there was no mistake. They would like to think that there could have been a rationally conducted War and a rationally conducted occupation. Only a pacifist can deny this tout court, so let’s leave pacifism aside and tentatively acknowledge that maybe in some hypothetical world they’re right, even; we can never be dogmatic about “what might have been” (“Of all sad words of tongue and pen/The saddest are, “It might have been.”) Perhaps FDR and George Marshall could have done it; or Abraham Lincoln. But the world is what it is, and it was impossible that George W. Bush and his morally deprived crew could have done it; not because they couldn’t know how, but because they didn’t want to. No, let’s go further than that. They were absolutely opposed to creating and implementing a rational or constructive or positive military policy, because that would have contradicted their whole ideological purpose: to weaken and ultimately destroy the state and so enrich themselves and their friends. To drown it or suffocate it or crush it or whatever their metaphor of the moment happens to be. Thus the initial “mistake” was appointing Jay Garner; that mistake was rectified by his firing and replacement with Paul Bremer. Bremer, puppet of the plutocracy, could be and was an instrument of that purpose in Iraq. Garner, the military professional, couldn’t be; he had to go.

Now the one-Party apostles–William Kristol and his ilk–will say condescendingly that we unpatriotic Leftists don’t understand that they do believe in a strong state, an imperial state, a state armed to the teeth, a state that can govern the world. With Randolph Bourne, but from the shore of Imperial madness rather than of anti-Imperialism, the lunatic Right of today believes that “War is the health of the State.” But he was wrong, and so are they.

In truth, it’s a little more complicated than that. War may be one of the activities of a healthy state, but usually it isn’t. Rather, the health of the State is strength. Not military strength–Germany today is a stronger state than it was under Hitler or the Communists; so too is Finland, which as far as we know doesn’t depend on the military-industrial complex for its health. The best exposition of what states are for, in theory if not always or even mostly in actual practice, is given in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution: “to insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty...” A healthy state is one that works–those who staff it work–to accomplish those ends; that can call on the resources and organizational supports needed to accomplish them; and that will be supported by at least a firm majority of citizens when it makes that call. It is “strong” when it can succeed in doing what needs to be done, and conversely, it can only succeed if it is strong. Therefore, no matter how bloated its military, a State that does not seek, e.g., to establish justice and promote the general welfare cannot be strong, it can only be weak, mal-adapted, irrational: like the American state under the radical Republicans of today. And a weak state cannot conduct a successful war or any other type of policy that must engage its true energies. Above all, only a truly strong, well adapted, well-rationalized state can possibly engage in nation-building, probably the most difficult task any polity can try to engage in (as Machiavelli first pointed out).

Well before the invasion of 2003, the American State under George W. Bush and his neo-totalitarian supporters was dedicated to institutionalizing injustice, subverting the general welfare at every turn, and trampling on the blessings of liberty: and to making certain that those benign purposes can never be resurrected. All departments of government were deliberately corrupted, or if relatively incorruptible (i.e., the State Department) were inundated with lies and relegated to the sidelines. In other words, this was a State devoted to its own self-destruction except as naked Force. That is its leaders’ goal. The power of its military–not “our military”--was no more a sign of strength than the unregulated power of a police force is a sign of the strength of a city. The American state of 2003 existed, and still exists, solely to increase the wealth and power of the already wealthy and powerful, and to abolish all those parts of itself that might prevent that from happening. Since a great deal of its support comes from Christian sociopaths (and Jewish monomaniacs), it also works to increase the purchase on social life of their particular form of sociopathy: again at the expense of rational thought and action. All of this was perfectly self-evident by 2003. And yet this is the State that the fellow-travelers of the Radical Right called on to bring “democracy” to Iraq: not necessarily an ignoble ideal, yet how could anyone possibly have thought that a group of conspirators dedicated to destroying every vestige of democratic self-government at home could somehow implant it abroad? That disbelievers in effective governance could establish it in the world’s most inhospitable environment?

In God Is Not Great, his recent book attacking organized religion, Christopher Hitchens does a nice (albeit unoriginal) job of discrediting creationists, and demonstrating their sheer irrationality. They refuse to look squarely at the reality of the material world. Yet in March 2003 he (and his cohort) looked the reality of the United States squarely in the eye: and flinched. To flinch in the face of reality: that is the definition of worldly irrationality. Calling what they did a “mistake” bred by “dogmatic”idealism, as Ignatieff does in his New York Times Magazine mea culpa, is to let them all off the hook upon which History has forever impaled them.