The other day, Andrew Sullivan posted a letter from a passionately anti-war correspondent, a steaming load of self-serving horseshit, that I have tried to put it behind me, to forget that I ever read, to ignore.
But I can’t. Because it reeks. When a self-loving, self-idealizing, self-righteous, moralizing cretin like this gets a pass from someone as smart as Sullivan, it’s more than irritating.
First, Sullivan’s correspondent claims that he knew from the get-go that the war was a mistake:
I opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning. It smelled. It smelled to high heaven. This was no action in response to 9/11. This was something else. Some grand design for restructuring the Middle East, for “draining the swamp”. A war of revenge against Unfinished business. Oil.
Oil. Revenge. Imperialism. Check. But it gets better:
I could have supported intervention in Iraq. Saddam was a monster. But not Bush’s intervention. If his Dad, and Powell, had put together a true global coalition, with a real commitment to pay the high price in money, manpower and years necessary to free Iraq, secure the peace and rebuild the country, yes, I could have supported it. But I knew GWB and his team would never accomplish those ends, because those ends were not his ends. His ends, and his means, speak for themselves. [emphasis mine]
George Packer has rightly referred to such anti-war critics as pacifists–they never met a war they could endorse, unless it was a hypothetical war.
The thing that sticks in my craw, however, is the degree of self-love inherent in statements like this from Sullivan’s correspondent:
had we prosecuted the action in Afganistan competently, and to the end, by securing the peace and rebuilding the country, we might have come out of the war on terror with our heads held high and with the world’s respect and even admiration….
The war in Iraq has been our tragedy…
We are still in the midst of the horror, unable to look away from the mirror….
Like the “Not in Our Name” crowd, this letter writer weeps for himself and for his country and about his shame. You see, the war is all about him.
Here’s a clue: the war in Iraq is not about how it reflects on us. It’s about defeating jihadism away from our shores. In that respect, the worse it reflects on us, the better it may be for our national security.
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[...] It is looking for enemies to take down. It takes no prisoners. It is out for blood. It demands repentance. Above all, it demands that “liberal hawks” admit that they were wrong about the war–not just the miserably inept prosecution of the war but the decision to go to war itself. (I have written about this seemingly ad nauseam: here, here, and here, for starters.) There will be no such admission from me. I embraced my inner Neanderthal on 9/11, when nihilist Neanderthals drew my country into an internecine struggle and forced my country to choose sides, and to act, or to lose its own hard-won freedoms. [...]
[...] This is a “Not in Our Name” argument. Whether it is offered as a rationale against an American invasion of Iraq or against uncomfortable-to-watch Israeli aggression in defense of its national security, “Not in Our Name” is, as I wrote here, the argument of narcissists, though they call themselves “progressives”). They care about how endorsing a given political party or foreign policy makes them look. It’s a status-anxiety thing. But I digress. [...]
[...] And, eerily, he echoes something I wrote about here (the moral bankruptcy of “not in our name” arguments): As well as punishing Israelis, the boycott has the added bonus of exonerating ‘us’. It is a ‘not in my name’ policy. It appeals to people who have an impossible need to feel themselves to be morally pure even though they live in a dirty world of complexity, conflict and injustice. They want to be able to feel that the corruption of the existing world is not their responsibility. Choosing to punish Israeli academics does not commit them to doing the hard work of changing the world, of building bridges, of making links; it does not take up any time or effort; it saves them from a feeling of complicity in the bad things that go on in the world. The fact that it does worse than nothing for Palestine is neither here nor there. [emphases added] [...]
[...] I promised I would fade away for a while and leave you to your Festivus and/or Lefitvus activities. But I can’t resist making one gratifying (in a Schadenfreude kind of way) observation—that in the wake of the Iraq Study Group’s report, the mewling “not in our name” narcissists, pacifists, and isolationists of both the left and the right (an alliance of very uncomfortable convenience) now find themselves squeezed between their twin enemies: evil neocons and old school realist WASPs. [...]
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