By way of cheap entertainment, I propose to spotlight some of the zanier bits of advice offered the American public since 9/11. These items stretch from Bangor all the way to mighty Maine, to steal a line from Firesign Theater, or at least from slightly left of center all the way over to slightly right of center. In other words, my samples come from the broad spectrum of Neo-Con opinion, and it is not my fault if Left Neo-Cons differ from Right Neo-Cons only on a few points of little interest.
Now in the spirit of fairness, decency, and the best traditions of Western Civilization – the public having come to expect such from LewRockwell.com – I must concede that some of the emotional language to be quoted below might be ascribed to the understandably tense aftermath of 9/11. Some leeway must be given, after all, to natural anger in the wake of the terrible events of that day.
That said, I have to add that Neo-Cons were up for a war – any war – long before that day, and that their literary productions since have simply gilded the warlike lily with a certain amount of high-toned "strategic" reasoning.
It was about a year and half ago, after all, that Serjeant-Major Derbyshire of Her Majesty's Too-Late American Dragoons was calling for all-out war with China, from the poop deck of NRO, because a US spy plane was forced down with no casualties. The difference between the Neo-Cons at the beginning of 2001 and the Neo-Cons from 9/11 forward is just the difference between the Neo-Cons sober and the Neo-Cons drunk. The indignation they felt in the first months after 9/11was not wholly without art, nor was it entirely lacking in the wisdom of the serpent.
We may usefully file the advice we have been getting from NRO, the Wall Street Journal, and other low joints under several headings. We can think of the whole thing as a contest with suitable awards to be given to the best entry across the categories. The envelope, please.
Category #1. Mental War Crimes
Here we meet with thought-experiments in Total War. One of the very best comes to us from the redoubtable David Brooks. On November 5, 2001, he informed us in the Weekly Standard, that "The next few years will be defined by conflict…. We will destroy innocent villages by accident, shrug our shoulders and continue fighting. In an age of conflict, bourgeois virtues like compassion, tolerance, and industriousness are valued less than the classical virtues of courage, steadfastness, and a ruthless desire for victory."
I'm sure glad that "we" will only destroy the villages "by accident," before "we" go off shrugging like some militarized Atlas. It is bracing to think that the brave lads at the Weekly Standard are not mere bourgeois, making and selling useful things. How vulgar. Teddy and Franklin would never stand for it.
The next entry in this category comes from Michael (Permanent Revolution) Ledeen. Writing in NRO, on August 6, 2002, as a critic of Brent Scowcroft's imperial moderation, Ledeen goes to bat for "the desperately- needed and long overdue war against Saddam Hussein and the rest of the terror masters." I suppose he is referring to terror masters who have dropped off the US payroll and forfeited their medical benefits.
Scowcroft has warned that for the US to go to war with Iraq "would turn the whole region into a cauldron." Ledeen, unimpressed, takes the bait, saying, "One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today."
This is a strong entry. Ledeen's skillful wielding of the subjunctive very nearly offsets his barbarous coinage, "cauldronize."
Further, Ledeen gains points by demanding that the US bring down "the terror regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria," and throws in Saudi Arabia, if they don't mend their wicked ways. Three (or four) "regime changes" for the price of one. Whoopee!
But you just can't stay ahead of these fellows, much less keep up with ’em. A few months back, LewRockwell.com ran one of Tiglath-Pileser's bloody-minded inscriptions as his "State of the Union Address." It seemed funny at the time. But now comes the post-libertarian James S. Robbins to spoil our fun by ending his column of August 14, 2002, on NRO with this – "A final note: In 695 B.C. the Assyrian king, Sennacherib, diverted the Euphrates to flood the vanquished city of Babylon. Food for thought."
Food for thought, indeed.
Well, why not? This is how the world wags. Bad precedents pile up over time, until the pile becomes so massive and odorous as to constitute, in the minds of some folks at least, a standing argument in favor of Total War. Blight makes right.
Mr. Robbins should know, too. After all, he was one of the original inventors of liberventionism, or interventionist libertarianism, back in 1991 in the columns of the oddly named Liberty magazine. If he hasn't said much about liberty lately, well that too is understandable. Cheering the empire on is full-time work, they tell me.
At the risk of stating the obvious, flooding a city, vanquished or not, is generally thought to be a war crime. It doesn't seem all that valorous, either. Happily, Mr. Robbins has only done it on paper.
Category #2. Clever comparisons put forward on the assumption (apparently) that white Southerners can't read, don't read, don't care if their ancestors are vilified, and will continue enlisting in the present-day equivalents of Mr. Lincoln's armed forces in disproportionate numbers no matter what Northern exo-philanthropists say or write.
This category is a personal favorite of mine. Back when LBJ was trying to prove that he had more going on in his Y-fronts than Ho Chi Minh did, it dawned on me that, whatever the vastly different circumstances of the two wars, US strategy and tactics in Vietnam bore a certain resemblance to those pioneered between 1861 and 1865. It seemed like a package deal: endorse the burning of Atlanta and Columbia and embrace LBJ's and Nixon's bombing sorties. There were at least two ways to react to that choice.
National Review famously ordered us to endorse Sherman's march through Georgia as the appropriate predecessor of the War on Vietnam.
That should have led someone to form Southern Nationalists for Peace in Indo-China, I suppose, but the nearest analogue was SSOC, which was better than nothing. On the down side, George Wallace was led, somehow, to add the mad bomber, General Curtis LeMay, to his ticket. This was doubtless the meanest thing old George ever did, but as we felt our way out of our post-Goldwater hangover towards a proper pro-peace position, some of us didn't know this at the time.
The first entry here comes from the ineffable George F. Will in the Washington Post of December 27, 2001. He notes that "America's Civil War provides many analogies by which we measure – and sometimes misunderstand – today's military developments, and American ways of waging war." You said a mouthful there, George. That war is indeed a clue to "American ways of waging war," even if some of us "measure" them a little differently down here.
And thanks for reminding us that you nice folks up North define the meaning of American. We forget sometimes.
Rather than quote any more of Mr. Wills's sterling prose, I shall stipulate that the column is a running comparison of Confederates and al-Qaeda, and that the moral seems to be that General Sherman should come back and kill off the terrorists with the same fervor with which he killed off the best and brightest of the Old South. Who can blame Will for this? After all, he concedes that not everyone will like the comparison, but such things are of little weight when it is necessary to spread the gospel of Total War.
Total War – a US tradition since 1862 or so. We should be proud. Mr. Will is.
Even I can only stand so much of this material. Rather than summarize the views of everyone who entered the "Abe did it, therefore we must do the same" sweepstakes, I shall merely list them. Honorable mention in this category goes to Jay Winik, "Security Comes Before Liberty," Wall Street Journal, October 24, 2001; Tony Blankley, "Trade civil liberties for better security," Washington Times, September 26, 2001; David S. Broder, "Echoes of Lincoln," Washington Post, September 23, 2001; and Ronald Radosh, "Learning from Mr. Lincoln," FrontPage Magazine, October 3, 2001.
Abe did what an Abe's gotta do, and these gentlemen want the Proper Authorities to do all those same things now.
Category #3. Ideological Clarity Department
Here we have all the writers who have clarified the "fascist" nature of the Islamic Menace for us. Very honorable mention goes to Christopher Hitchens, who has too many essays on this theme to cite here. A strong entry from Mr. Adam Wolfson, "More Like Nazis than Commies," the Weekly Standard, November 12, 2001, seems likely to sweep all before it. This sample will justify the claim: "Nazism was irrationalist and anti-Enlightenment to its core, while, as an outgrowth of the Enlightenment – an extreme outgrowth, to be sure – Soviet communism was amenable to the persuasion of the carrot and the stick."
It is odd, then, that on the numbers Soviet communists murdered many more class enemies than the Nazis murdered racial enemies. Taking other communist regimes into account, the totals are even further apart. I mean, I can see how the poor commies were just "an extreme outgrowth" of the Enlightenment and all, but there still seems to be a problem here worth looking into.
No matter. The enemy must always be "fascist." High-minded people just won't sign up for a crusade if that is not the case.
Other entries in the ideological clarity section, if time and space allowed, would include Alan (Sterilized Needles) Dershowitz and several others who discovered the virtues of torture in the current crisis. Honorable mention goes to them all, if not by name, perhaps by name, rank, and serial number.
This Just In… A late entry has just come to my attention, an entry which could easily compete in Category #3 and possibly #1. I refer to Gabriel Erem's "Dinner with Prince Goebbels," World Net Daily, August 27, 2002. The writer of this item is incensed that W should receive Prince Bandar and make nice with him at the ranch, etc., etc.
For Mr. Erem, the Saudi rulers are all rich sleazebags over whom all the "Arabists" in the State Department make a fuss – for some reason. What might that reason be?
It's oil, brother! Wealthy oilmen like the Prez and his cronies care so deeply about this commodity that they wish to control and cartelize the market for it. On the other hand, it happens that a lot of other people care about it, too. I'd suspect that many more Americans care about having oil than care deeply about the theological property deed to a small (but growing) section of flaming desert.
Mr. Erem would no doubt assume the worst about people who just want their cars to work and want the industrial machinery to keep running. Perhaps I can simplify the issue. It isn't about liking anybody. Outside of NYC, Washington, DC, and a few other places, I strongly suspect that most Americans would just as soon never hear again in any detail about territorial disputes in the Near East.
Of course the US government, as against the people it allegedly protects, has managed to play two or three sides against the middle in the Near East, leaving them all irritable, but that is another matter. Mr. Erem makes a couple of good points on this front, even if these raise more questions than he has asked. He can't tarry over such matters and is soon demanding World War II against the Saudi regime, although he couches the demand a bit.
"Our enemies," he says, are eating dinner with the Prez. Maybe yes and maybe no. Most of us would rather find our own enemies, thank you very much. That is hard doctrine, I suppose, but if we let the US government, the press, and various interested parties find enemies for us, we will have many more enemies than we actually need or want. The process has already gone a lot farther than it ever should have.
Despite these mild criticisms, I have to allow that Mr. Erem's essay wins points for adding the Saudis to the target list and for sticking to the party line that the enemy is always "fascist," points on which Messrs. Ledeen and Wolfson, respectively, have already anticipated him. Give it a five.
I have neglected "libertarian" interventionists for the most part, but they will certainly have their day in the sun as the Greatest-Ever War unfolds. Meanwhile, I suggest that the best minds of our generation collaborate on finding an appropriate name for the pending conflagration. For my part, I have to finish judging the present contest and designing appropriate medals and ribbons for all the candidates. Why not start now? If this excitement is really to last for forty years, and if we really have to offer up "the whole of our lives" to it, it would be cruel to postpone the honors roll.
Honoring interventionists for their achievements should be as ongoing and perpetual as the war itself, and the war should be as perpetual as the empire that wages it.
August 28, 2002
