The
LA Times summarizes what we have gotten from the Bush - Cheney efforts to 'protect' America by avoiding direct conflict with al Qaeda and attacking the hapless Iraq as an end run to motivate the reorganization and modernization of the Middle East.
For the United States, the world is now, as a result of the Iraq war, a more dangerous place. At the end of 2002, what is sometimes tagged "Al Qaeda Central" in Afghanistan had been virtually destroyed, and there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq. In 2007, there is an Al Qaeda in Iraq, parts of the old Al Qaeda are creeping back into Afghanistan and there are Al Qaeda emulators spawning elsewhere, notably in Europe.
Osama bin Laden's plan was to get the U.S. to overreact and overreach itself. With the invasion of Iraq, Bush fell slap-bang into that trap. The U.S. government's own latest National Intelligence Estimate, released this week, suggests that Al Qaeda in Iraq is now among the most significant threats to the security of the American homeland.
The U.S. has probably not yet fully woken up to the appalling fact that, after a long period in which the first motto of its military was "no more Vietnams," it faces another Vietnam. There are many important differences, but the basic result is similar: The mightiest military in the world fails to achieve its strategic goals and is, in the end, politically defeated by an economically and technologically inferior adversary.
Even if there are no scenes of helicopters evacuating Americans from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, there will surely be some totemic photographic image of national humiliation as the U.S. struggles to extract its troops.
Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have done terrible damage to the U.S. reputation for being humane; this defeat will convince more people around the world that it is not even that powerful. And Bin Laden, still alive, will claim another victory over the death-fearing weaklings of the West.
This is not written by some unwashed and ignorant media pundit trying to appear smart for a living. This is written by TIMOTHY GARTON ASH, who is a contributing editor to Opinion, a professor of European studies at Oxford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He even has
his own wikipedia entry.Besides that, he is correct. The war in Iraq is a disaster - one that was completely avoidable and which offered no reasonable results worth the easily anticipated risks.
The real question which is going to occupy a lot of us for the next two or three decades is "Why?"
At the moment my best guess is that it stems from an emotional American brand of conservatism that has grownup as a reaction to the major cultural events of the second half of the twentieth century.
Wikipedia offers an interesting view of American conservative movement that rings true to me. Here is a key paragraph:
"In the United States modern conservatism coalesced in the latter half of the 20th century, responding over time to the political and social change associated with events such as the Great Depression, tension with the Soviet Union in the Cold War, the American Civil Rights Movement, the counterculture of the 1960s, the deregulation of the economy in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the overthrow of the New Deal Coalition in the 1980s, and the terrorist threat of the 21st century. Its prominence has been aided, in part, by the emergence of vocal and influential economists, politicians, writers, and media personalities. While conservatives were once significant minorities in both major parties, the conservative wing of the Democratic party has all but died out and most conservatives today identify themselves as Republicans. In 2000 and 2004, about 80% of self-described conservatives voted Republican.[6][7]"
This isn't a surprise. It has been clear to almost everyone, even the conservatives themselves. The sequence of events, such as Nixon's "Southern Strategy" which stripped the Southern Racists White population out of its traditional Democratic Party and used them to create the solid Republican South is only one element, but a major one. Another has been the growth of fundamentalist and evangelist media, led by Pat Roberts and other media preachers, and created the group who became the Christian Coalition wing of the Republican Party. These two groups brought with them a strong desire to return to an older, better way of life, each with a somewhat different image of why there was no conflict in that earlier way of life. Since the public generally bought into the idea that science and history justified the modern world, they rejected much of science, history, and the Universities which harbored them.
The innate irrationality of these two groups is describe (in a general sense) in Paul Berman's interesting book
Terror and Liberalism." His thesis is that the twentieth century forms of authoritarianism - Right-wing, Communist, and religious like the Jihadists - are all based on dysfunctional groups who act irrationally in order to return to some earlier or future ideal state. He calls that state an Ur-state. The social psychology of these groups is described by Bob Altemeyer in his recent book
The Authoritarians. [John Dean excerpted a lot of Dr. Altemeyer's work in his recent book
Conservatives without Conscience." The big difference is that John Dean names names as examples and Dr. Altemeyer discusses theory and research.]
The following is my opinion, and frankly not too well researched. I am not a historian or a researcher. I am just trying to understand what has been happening to America. If I have any credentials at all that lend weight to my opinion they are that I read a great deal and I have lived through this last 60 years. I was old enough during the Korean War to have been reading comic books about an Air Force Captain named Steve Savage, and when I joined the Reserved in the 60's I was there with veterans of both Korea and WW II. Our artillery unit could have dropped into either of those wars and been functional very quickly.
But here is my take on the modern conservative Republican Party.
The racists and social conservatives are both primarily representative of the American South. Trent Lott is an example of both, but he is cleaned up for TV. The 50's and 60's versions of that movement joined up with the western conservative Libertarians, represented by Barry Goldwater, whose Ur-state was a libertarian fantasy strongly influenced by Ayn Rand Libertarians and by the traditional Wall Street bankers and wealthy men (represented by the "father of Conservatism" William Buckley) who had lost their power to control America when (as a group) they caused the Great Depression and couldn't solve the social and economic problems the Depression represented or created.
The Nixonites seem to me to have come out of the 1930's radical right-wing. Many like them became American Nazis or similar right-wing extremists, but Nixon himself simply went with being a pure anti-communist. He was similar to (but much more capable than) Joe McCarthy and depended on many of the people who became John Birchers. They were a lower middle class anti-Communist movement, associated with the Wall Street Republicans but not quite in their league. Their ability to get elected to office and their general understanding of how government functioned was their strong point. The Nixonites are represented by Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and the dirty trickster, Lee Atwater (who taught Karl Rove how to do what Karl does so very well - steal elections.) Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld remain as modern representatives of this group.
The modern NeoCons are also representatives of this group, but are obsessively and narrowly focused on using American power to defend Israel from the Muslims who want to see Israel destroyed. The Neocons have had a power over foreign affairs because of their association with Dick Cheney (who placed his adherents throughout the federal government) and because the social conservatives who are Bush's big power base within the Republican Party have no real interest in foreign affairs at all.
Ronald Reagan was also a member of the lower middle class anti-Communist Republicans. He started as a New Deal Democrat but as a union leader who fought against Communists he drifted over (or was dragged by Nancy) to join the Nixonites. When his movie career dried up he worked as a propaganda spokesman for GE (the Wall Street Republicans), then the California Nixonite back-office technicians used Reagan as a front man to put a pretty face on their otherwise quite authoritarian and militaristic policies.
The Goldwaterites, Buckleyites and Nixonites all came out of WW II and were relatively rational in their approach to solving problems. It was what they each considered to be problems that they were more emotional about. But Nixon's Southern strategy brought the irrational racist and social conservatives into the the Republican Party (after the Democrats rejected them over Civil Rights) and created the current total anti-intellectualism that dominates so much of the conservative Republican movement. Goldwater's libertarianism provided the central thrust towards smaller government, which the southerners bought into because a smaller federal government could not enforce Civil Rights laws.
But modern government itself is based on the teachings transmitted through public education. This same public education teaches a reliance on scientific understanding of the world, which the social conservatives see as being very much in conflict with their literal interpretation of the Bible. Since their loss to the forces of Evolution in the Scopes trial, the social conservatives have been building their own separate society in America. This is why they have created their own TV and radio networks and their own system of educational institutions which ape real Universities. The growth of acceptance of the social conservatives by the Republican Party in the 90's and especially by George W. Bush has led them to expand their goals to taking over the courts, the government, and the American educational institutions.
I find it interesting that America was largely dominated by religious leaders and by large businesses and Wall Street Bankers. The general acceptance of Darwin's theory of Evolution totally discredited Biblically-based government, while the Great Depression totally discredited government run by and for big business. Today's Conservative Republican Party is largely based on the objections of these two groups to rule by modern scientific ideas and scientifically trained people.
These are more the general causes. The particular form today's conservatism has taken has depended on the central people who have made it up.
Digby has a post today about the key individuals who came out of the "College Republicans" in the 70's and during the Reagan era. These include Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, and Jack Abramoff. These are three people whose mistakes are only exceeded by their greed.
They met Tom Delay, who came out of Texas and was elected by an electorate which was based on fundamentalist religion and also was infused by Libertarianism by Delay's neighbor, Ron Paul. Delay was originally a p.o.ed Libertarian who bought into Fundamentalist Christianity when his alcohol use threatened his career in Congress. He then used his Congressional power to set up the K-Street Project which opened a massive flow of money into the Congressional political process.
The greed of Abramoff and Randy "Duke" Cunningham provides the legal threads which are taking this entire machine down. But it is a slow process, and the Department of Justice is fighting this at every step, replacing overly aggressive prosecutors, slow-walking investigations so that statute of limitations times run out when they cannot kill the investigations outright. The right-wingers are losing at the moment, but they have lost before and come back even stronger. Where is Buffy the Vampire Slayer with her slaying-stakes when we
really need her? Perhaps the Bush administration is giving us the tools with which to finally kill the Undead.
There is a lot more, of course. The change of the national media into largely right-wing propaganda outlets is as yet not definitively explained. The social conservative take-over of the state Republican Party (and entire states) such as Texas and Missouri has yet to be documented and widely distributed.
But this is much too long already. I'll quit now, but I am sure that I will return to this theme.
