The reason I am and have been so angry at this administration is because I believe we had an astonishing chance to turn around the Arab-Muslim world with a serious effort to transform Iraq, and Bush didn’t trust the American people enough to do it. I regard that as a betrayal of his 9/11 promise. And so we have the worst of all worlds: an ineffective intervention that weakens and divides us, while strengthening and emboldening the enemy. Why could he not have urged a major expansion of the military, a gas tax to pay for the war, and an intervention with enough troops and enough of the right kind to succeed? I expect Vietnam-crippled Democrats to do what the Bush administration has done. Instead, we got Vietnam-crippled Republicans. —Andrew Sullivan
Both Rumsfeld and Cheney have wanted to be president. Both of them actually conducted short-lived presidential campaigns in their own time. In effect, the Bush presidency is, for each of them, their presidencies. And they believe, above all, in unaccountable, unfettered power, particularly for themselves. They’re abstract Straussians, people who engage in political philosophizing, like a few of the neo-cons. They use the neo-cons for their own purposes, and they may believe some of the things that the neo-cons come up with. The neo-cons have proved to be incredibly useful to Rumsfeld and Cheney for their purposes. Sidney Blumenthal
I don’t know. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but I still find the combination of arrogance and naivete in Sullivan’s thinking astonishing. Does he really still believe that such a grandiose project ever had a chance of success? Does he still believe that the underlying dynamic that led us to invade Iraq had to do with this kind of naive neo-Wilsonian missionary zeal. I know that such a rationale has been continuously promoted by the neocons and parroted by the media, but do these neocons and fellow travelers like Sullivan really believe that Cheney and Rumsfeld are driven by the desire to spread democracy and western values? Intellectuals like Sullivan, and maybe even Wolfowitz, are sincere, but they are being used. (Bush is in a bizarre religious la-la land all his own.) They are front men for the powerful, and they give the powerful the patina of decency and idealism that obscures the deeper, bare-knuckled power agenda.
Do they all these idealistic neocons really believe their own propaganda? Some do. Sullivan is one of them. But in my opinion guys like Bill Kristol know exactly what they’re doing in this brutal power game. He is both front man and backroom manipulator. He understands the propaganda value of naifs like Sullivan to develop popular suppport, and he unlike Sullivan knows the difference between the real agenda and its idealistic justification. Sullivan is almost as clueless as George Bush. Maybe someday he’ll figure it out and write a post about how shocked and disappointed he was to discover that these people he trusted could be so perfidious.
The problem remains that until they wake up, people like Sullivan will continue to have influence in shaping "moderate" conservative public opinion, and rather than repudiating the militarism that is at the heart of our national soul sickness, they will continue to promote military-first solutions in the future–but insist that we do it "right." They’ll argue to send 300K or 500K or a million troops rather than 150K. The cost? Who cares? Who can put a price tag on American security? Small-government conservatives like Sullivan never seem to have a problem with the out-of-control costs of warmaking, and they don’t seem to realize how warmaking concentrates power in the executive in ways that undermine everything their restrained-government conservative principles supposedly stand for.
Sullivan is bright, but he is not a thinker; he’s a political chatterbox like Chris Matthews. He doesn’t really understand the contradictions implicit in what he’s saying. It’s just so much palaver that reinforces his more enthusiastic readers in their media, conventional wisdom bubble world which disconnects them from the world as it is really works. And their doing so helps to nurture the militarism which has become this uncontrolled, invasive weed that is destroying everything wholesome growing the garden. Nobody in the mainstream media wants to probe into the profoundly disproportionate influences civilian military interests have in driving American policy.
American militarism must be repudiated. It’s not the military per se that’s the problem–most of the men and women in uniform seem to be pretty sensible. It’s in the mentality of the civilian leadership that the the problem lies–and guys like Cheney and Rumsfeld are exemplars of this sickness. Why have so many decent, thoughtful Americans bought into this kind of mentality that enables the Rumsfelds and the Cheneys to have so much influence? Is it because 9/11 changed everything? Well if that seems right to you, you’re thinking with your adrenal glands, not your brain.
Leave a Reply