Why do we, the scarequote-Left-unscarequote, treat Iraq as such a deal-breaker? Why does Atrios scarequote-do his best to silence-unscarequote people like Thomas Friedman, who is right about everything except that pesky little bloodbath? I mean, for crying out loud, we tolerate all kinds of opinions about everything from 9/11 conspiracy theories to differing views on public health care. Iraq’s just another policy position, right? Another political debate?
After all, high-profile types continuing to beat the drum for the Bush administration’s foreign policy has no relation to other events in the news.
One former CIA case officer who served in the Middle East even suggested that politically framing the Iranians for its own failures in Iraq would allow the Bush administration to avoid accountability, as well as providing a casus belli for an attack.
The Bush Administration “can say it’s [the Iranians’] fault we are losing the war in Iraq and that would be a convenient out for their failed policy,” the officer said Monday.
The Iranians “have declared war against the US by sabotaging the war on terror is how they might sell it. I would not be surprised to next hear of Al Qaeda-Iranian connections because these people don’t know the difference between a Sunni and a Shi’a.”
And things like this are certainly no more or less horrifying than, say, Mike Gravel’s flat tax proposal:
A rumor is circulating among well-connected and formerly high-level Iraqi bureaucrats in exile in places like Damascus that a military coup is being prepared for Iraq. I received the following from a reliable, knowledgeable contact. There is no certitude that this plan can or will be implemented. That it is being discussed at high levels seems highly likely…
When wingers and hawk-y centrists express disbelief that “our” tolerance for the wide range of political expression begins to run out of gas about the time that Thomas Friedman says, in 2007, that
What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?”
You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow?
Well, Suck. On. This…
We could’ve hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.
and that this means that Thomas Friedman is not simply a hawkish liberal, but a raving lunatic, they fail to realize that the current jingoism is a whole new kind of wrong. It’s morally wrong, it’s strategically wrong, it’s wrong about human nature, it’s wrong about Democracy, it’s simply utterly wrong, and it’s the kind of wrong that gets people killed. Lots and lots of people killed. That’s the kind of wrong you don’t “agree to disagree on” and you don’t “respect the opinion.”
Anyone has the right to express any opinion they want. They don’t have the right to expect that borderline-genocidal opinions will be met with anything other than people calling them [pace Atrios] “pretty hideous human being[s], one[s] which all good people should shun.”
Nowhere in the Constitution is it written that we ought to be polite to defenders of empire.
15 Responses to “Deal-breaker”
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I always thought the reason Iraq was such a deal-breaker was because it was such an obviously stupid and misplaced response to the 9/11 attacks. Not just a moral issue, but just flat-out dumb. And anyone who couldn’t see that it was dumb was just too stupid to engage with.
[Anyone has the right to express any opinion they want.]
SINCE WHEN??? You’re kidding, right? Please tell me your pain meds just haven’t kicked in yet- I respect your writings FAR too much to rip into this statement.
That aside, Iraq was contrived and it was PERSONAL. It was because “They tried to kill my daddy”, to quote W. (I nearly fell over when I first saw that video- my husband and I exchanged shocked looks as we realized George was insane) It had NOTHING to do with 9/11, with terrorism, with oil or with money. It was because W wanted to punish Saddam for the assasination attempt on 41- plain and simple. This was classic playground bully retribution.
That so many lives have been destroyed and will continue in future generations to be destroyed is vile beyond words.
Anyone does have the right to express any opinion they want. Whether they are afforded an audience, on the other hand, is another matter altogether.
(I was really just throwing a bone to the “quit trying to muzzle us” crowd by pointing out that calling someone a fuckwad is not muzzling.)
Maybe it’s the trillion dollars, maybe it’s the destruction of a military we might actually need sometime, maybe it’s the half-million-plus dead people, essentially none of whom deserved to die this way. Or maybe, as you point out when quoting Friedman, it’s just the star-hot burning stupid. In any other decade of the past half-century or so, someone who talked about invading countries just because we could would be pasting their mimeographed screeds up on lamp post and living in a car or someone’s basement where they belonged.
No, wait, so… what does it look like when we can’t do something?
I have to go with the violation of a sacred trust thing. The bastards were either massively deluded, or they actually did this thing deliberately, because it would make money for their friends.
In either case, the lives of people who had volunteered to serve without question or reservation were thrown away for nothing.
Perhaps I have trouble tracking the mainstream mind, being so far out of it myself. But my impression is that the real dealbreaker was Katrina; until then the realization that Bush and company were completely out to lunch was the property of a minority–a large minority, to be sure, but we were dismissed as though we were just a few infiltrators hopelessly out of step with real Americans (and since I personally am and have been for 20 years now, that was hard for me to argue against.) When it was pyrotechnic mayhem against dusky-skinned folks far overseas, it was for most people apparently an interesting show (unless you happened to be closely connected to someone being shipped over there). When it happened here, to Americans–even black Americans–it hit below the belt.
But now it seems that many Americans who were deeply shocked by Katrina and Teh Shrub’s appalling response have sent that down the memory hole, but they have at last seen the same foul absurdity at work in Iraq, and fastened on to that.
To be sure, this does show a sense of priority–as awful and as personal as Bush-era fraud, waste and abuse in domestic matters is, trying to veer away from the Bush policy of systematically pissing off the rest of the globe and spreading chaos and misery in our wake overseas is overridingly important. The task of cleaning up our mess at home will be much harder the more we raise up foreign enmity and resentment.
Well, I personally have always been inclined to be a foreign policy wonk anyway–I think it stems partially from being an Air Force brat, meaning that in the family/social environments I grew up in, foreign policy was domestic–people I knew personally might be from foreign countries, or sent to go kill or die there; careers and hence our daily lives turned on our national alliances and adventures. No one explained this to me literally; I just sort of soaked it up from classmates who had lived in Saudi Arabia or the Philippines, and the stories, slides, stuff, and visiting friends Dad brought back from places like Thailand or South Korea.
From way out here in left field of course, there never was a deal to break; absolutely everything aWol has ever done or proposed to do always looked wrongheaded if not downright evil to me, and my judgements generally veer toward to the “evil” end of the spectrum.
Mark Foxwell, I agree that the mismanagement of Katrina (before, during and after)was horrific- but I think the deal was already broken by that point. Katrina served as a litmus test; that a large area of the country and its people could be discarded or dismissed by the WH is a sad and deadly lesson to ALL Americans.
Oh- unless your governor is brother of the Prez, that is. Then you’re good to go!
Hopefully in ‘08, people will remember how easily they could end up in a similar plight and vote accordingly.
louise:
I’m not sure if you mean that Bush had in fact shown his true colors by then already and therefore any “deal” that someone much more willing to give him the benefit of the doubt than I have ever been would have reasonably been forfeit, or if you mean that a substantial majority of Americans had already seen the light before then.
To the former, there never was any good reason to think he wouldn’t be a disasterous President though hope springs eternal I guess; lots of people were fervently hoping (foolishly, I thought) after 9/11. To the latter, I actually think they already had wised up enough to vote him out of office in ‘04, but not in sufficient numbers and degree of conviction to overcome fraud, and officially defeated at the polls, a substantial number wavered back to the “winning” side.
Then again, in the original post Auguste isn’t talking about public opinion either, but the cluelessness of So-Called “MSM” aka Corporate Media shills who pretend not to get, or maybe in their honest doublethinking teeny little minds, actually don’t get, why we “keep making a big deal” out of Iraq, even as they try to get us to get in line for the compounded stupidity and evil of trying again with Iran while still being bogged down in both the previous regional misadventures. So it’s kind of in the space of Platonic ideals and not so much a question of fluctuating opinion, I guess.
Actually while I never cut Bush slack in the sense that I never supposed he’d be a decent President, I did think his handlers might have passed him off as another Reagan, by cutting (and keeping) shrewd deals with sectors of the populace other than the corporatacracy. (Not with me or anyone I cared about especially of course.) And then when he appeared to be bungling that badly in his first half-year in office, I had some hope we could endure him as a pathetic drunk-uncle President and wise up about elections and the seriousness of politics in general by 2002.
So for me, the thing that broke this pathetic live-and-let-live “deal” was 9/11. “What’s he gonna do for a Reichstag fire?” I wondered from time to time, until the question was answered.
Mark…As usual worth the read. Forgot the convenience of the Reichstag.
But v.’a v. Auguste, Friedman..and me…
I am SO-o ashamed to have been -
until what seems very recently- the veriest gull for
that whole crew - including the very persuasive Friedman -
all of whom are unscrubably sullied jingo-shills.
It was, I think, that I *trusted* the few whom I saw
as truth tellers…NYT, CNN et al.
And they have so let us believers so down.
“Most especially since I am reasonably intelligent and reasonably informed..”,
he whimpered, more than a bit chagrined.
Some sort of f*cking scotoma, I guess.
Ashamed.
Sorry
Forgot to include the AIPAC connection
I’m just sure is in the mix.
Mark Foxwell, the first I’m afraid. As W was re-elected in ‘04 showed that many Americans still bought into the WH propaganda and frankly, I think MSM bears blame. Thinking he would go down in history as a mostly harmless 1 term schmuck, I quickly revised my opinion when the WH trotted out the Dept of Homeland Security and Patriot Act. When they used Colin Powell’s credibility to sell this war, I saw nothing was off the table when it came to the ends justifying the means for this crowd.
Alot of the reason I started to turn to reading as many blogs as I do on a daily basis was as much because of MSM as the WH itself. Daily (as time permits) I read over a dozen different blogs, newspapers and MSM sites, as well as check out C-SPAN and the usual TV fare. It’s really amazing how one portayal of a news story can vary from another.
This was first pointed out to me in 1990 when the first Gulf War broke out by my now husband, who was an ex-TV/newsman previously stationed at Ft Hood- every single story he trotted out had to be approved, even if the sources were AP, Reuters, etc. MSM is no different than the military- it has to be approved first. Bloggers have much more freedom in that regard.
Wait, that Friedman thing is from 2007??? I thought it was file footage from like June 2003 or something.
I generally agree with this blog post and I can’t stand Friedman. However, Friedman’s “suck on this” statement is from May 2003, recently reposted on Atrios’ blog.
Sorry, did someone just write “Thomas Friedman” and “right about everything” in the same sentence?