The print version last week, of course, was a recycled version of something first appearing in this space, a depressed/depressing assessment of the undeniable fact that no matter what happens in Iraq, whether the “surge” is actually working or not, we are going to keep on surging, we are going to stay the course, regardless.
Oh, and that report from Gen. Petraeus? It’s scheduled for - wait for it - Sept. 11.
Glenn Greenwald, in the midst of a blogwar with Gideon Rose, eventually gets around to exactly why this will be the case:
The Foreign Policy Community — a term which excludes those in primarily academic positions — is not some apolitical pool of dispassionate experts examining objective evidence and engaging in academic debates. Rather, it is a highly ideological and politicized establishment, and its dominant bipartisan ideology is defined by extreme hawkishness, the casual use of military force as a foreign policy tool, the belief that war is justified not only in self-defense but for any “good result,” and most of all, the view that the U.S. is inherently good and therefore ought to rule the world through superior military force. …
Whatever else is true, the U.S. — over the last six years — commenced and continues to wage the most disastrous (and possibly most unjust) war in its history and has adopted policies that have fundamentally eroded our national character and violated everything we claimed to have stood for. As a matter of undeniable, empirical fact, our standing in the world has completely collapsed. Our vaunted Foreign Policy establishment has voiced little resistance to any of this and offered much support, indispensable support, and continues to do so. It has learned nothing. Its orthodoxies are the same, its leaders unchanged, and virtually nothing has been re-evaluated.
A refusal, in other words, to learn from recent history.
It was suggested to me after last week’s recycled bit that I sometimes get ahead of myself and might do better to explain the terminology more thoroughly. Case in point would be my use of the term “American exceptionalism” to describe the popular attitude about our country.
In a nutshell, and in particular as it pertains to this war, Greenwald defines it for me:
the belief that war is justified not only in self-defense but for any “good result,” and most of all, the view that the U.S. is inherently good and therefore ought to rule the world through superior military force.
Now, the public on the whole may not go that far. There certainly is a belief in our inherent goodness; that the United States is the most virtuous and benign nation ever to grace the planet. That does not necessarily always lead to war-mongering; but as Greenwald argues, amongst those who are piloting this ship, it often does.
For if you believe that our position in the world is not due to our geographic isolation (making us one of the few developed countries to be relatively unscathed in a physical sense by World War II), if you believe that we are atop the global trash heap because we deserve to be because we’re so wonderful - and if you believe it is beneficial not just to those in the United States but beneficial to all mankind for us to remain there - then you must support an always-hawkish worldview. Whatever has happened in the four years since we invaded Iraq, you cannot take any lessons from it - because those lessons would run counter to that which you believe. That we can remake the world in our image via our will and indomidable military force. That everyone on the planet is yearning for the very type of democracy we have; and that it is our evangelic mission to bestow it upon them.
That Pax Americana is so necessary, so good, that we must pursue it, for there is no other viable option.
There are, of course - but to suggest so is to be deemed traitorious by the far right and “unserious” by those who consider themselves “moderates.”
And so we stay the course. And so we will ultimately engage Iran militarily no matter how the “surge” is working, for that is where this course leads. It can only lead there. For it to lead somewhere else would require a rethinking at the macro level; it requires a reassessment of our core belief in our own exceptionalism, it requires the American public and its foreign policy agenda-setters to say, You know what? Maybe we don’t have a right “to run around using military force against other countries whenever we perceive that our vaguely defined “national interests” are served by doing so.”
And that is simply something that is not going to happen. A sort of national humility will never merely be adopted; it can only be instilled. And it may yet be as a result of our ill-thought-out decision to rip the lid off the Mideast Pandora’s Box.
