.. since the antiwar movement has been effectively blacked out in the media and is rarely visible in the streets, it certainly can’t be rationally blamed for failure in Iraq – which means it almost certainly will be blamed, and not just by Tom Friedman.
Back to Main
June 16, 2005
Looking for a Scapegoat
Comments
To me, this is the issue of our times. Of our lives.
There hasn’t been a day that has gone by since the beginning of the Iraq War when I haven’t grappled with it.
SAteve Gilliard has a powerful post on the same topic, from which I will excerpt this:
The growing amorality of the Republican Party, their utter soullessness, has become a danger to this Republic. Not in the sense of the brownshirts marching down the Mall, but of something deeper. As religion becomes more of a political tool, it’s lessons are forgotten and the soul of this country becomes rotten. Since they have no stake in the war or the courage to fight it, they embrace the morality of the Gestapo and the Allegemine SS, shooting deserters who had grown sick of war while they sat in offices and tortured the unarmed and innocent before shiping them to a death camp. When finally faced with combat, they ran just like the men they condemend to death.
Posted by: Lupin | Jun 16 2005 6:59 utc | 1
How can anybody not in the US government or the military possibly be blamed for the failure that is Iraq? The Team Bush has made clear Iraq is its baby, “The war on Terror” was its plan, and its decision. They demanded elaborate war powers, ridiculously large budgets, the complete revision of all of our alliances. They fought hard for these things cliaming they would be necessary for success. They made extra large efforts to silence and demonize 70% of the American population who had questions who alternate vies as well as large swaths of government professionals and advisers in the analyst and intel business.
Other than a hand full of news editors, and boot licking journalist who are paid to lie, who can possibly be confused about Team Bush’s total responsibility for the whole mess? Now of course there are several thousand republican sycophants out there, and maybe a couple hundred thousand zombiefied free-rublican/Limbaughists. But this is a small minority of the population that is truely deluded. The O’reilly factor has a smaller audience than the Daily Kos. Rush limbaugh is one court decision from time in the penn for his pill poppin. The louder they bark, they weaker they are. You only have to defend when you are under attack.
The bill has come due and will be paid, by those who gambled badly and lied to them selves and their backers. All the Cheney chutzpa in the world will not save them.
The American People are angry at their leaders. Within 72 hours of the administration blaming newsweek for deaths in Iraq, even with the support of Newsweek editors trying to accept the blame, it was realized by the vast majority that the articles had nothing to do with the riots on the ground.
Bush can’t go to ground zero without being booed. The man cant go out in public without busing in pre-screened supporters. Cheney can barely leave DC. Look behind the mouth pieces and you will see a vast empty expanse. Pull bakc the camera to a wide angle and you see that the “crowd” toppling the statue was hardly there.
The fat lady is singing in washington DC and shes singing “Downing Street Memos”! All that is necessary to broadcast that chorus over and over and over again.
Why are your sons and daughters dying? Downing Street Memo
Why are we in Iraq? Downing Street Memo
Can we ever believe anything the President ever says? Downing Street Memo
Posted by: patience | Jun 16 2005 7:21 utc | 2
Stanley Kurtz: ‘ A nation where the political opposition stands against our foreign policy, and even secretly (and not so secretly) hopes for its failure, cannot… ‘
Thomas Friedman : ‘ Liberals don’t want to talk about Iraq because, with a few exceptions, they thought the war was wrong and deep down don’t want the Bush team to succeed. As a result… ‘
How did it go with Tinkerbelle? If we all didn’t wish with all our might the stage light would go out and the fairy would die. We’d be her murderers… lacking faith.
Similarly those of us who knew this war was doomed from the start although we did not know how far it would go before failure, I thought they might manage to take Iraq, are the ones to blame for that failure. Not the ones who initiated the war. The ones who tried to stop it before it began are responsible for its failure.
The “power” behind this preposterous point of view is the rage at being caught out lying. The high priests exposed at the crime scene in the glare of the torch.
The neo-cons in the present regime knew all along that what they were about to do was wrong, dead wrong. They went ahead anyway because, like their Likudnik mentors, they thought they could establish their “facts on the ground” and that those “facts” would stand, rightly or wrongly attained, once the dust of history had settled around them, cemented them in. We were supposed to have fast-forwarded through the “bad patch” to the desired future, wherein the wrongs we’d done to attain the rights to Iraq would be forgotten.
But we’ve never made it out of the “bad patch”. Day in and day out the moral depravity of their plans are more glaringly apparent. They are trapped in the spotlight and furious. No doubt they will try to shift blame. “We’d have made it through the bad patch if only you’d have wished harder!”
This is exactly why I have billmon’s Anglo-American War Tribunals of 2010 at The Hague framed on my wall.
I only care that these bunch are removed from power, then let the wheels of justice grind. It’s up to the courts whether they are hanged or if the quality of mercy is unstrained.
But what’s important is that the fury at having been caught out doing the opposite of what they said they were doing, the moral depravity in the “bad patch”, is exposed and exorcised.
Look at Japan. Still defiant and unrepentent for its atrocities during WWII. Look at China, pointing its finger at Japan, yet unable to face the atrocities committed in its own Cultural Revolution. Then look at Germany.
Gerhardt Schroeder “just said no” to Big Brother’s invitation to walk down that same dark, depraved path again, and the German people with one voice applauded.
Where do you think the hatred and bile embodied by the Swift Boatmen for Truth came from? It festered untreated because we never worked through Vietnam, and Iraq is the result.
The people who voted in this regime will be subject to the same corrosive guilt. We have to find a way for them to exorcise that guilt.
If we don’t work through Iraq it will happen again, and again…
Posted by: John Francis Lee | Jun 16 2005 7:28 utc | 3
Nothing incensed me more than the rewriting of the Viet Nam war we saw last year.
Posted by: Lupin | Jun 16 2005 7:47 utc | 4
“Once we have victory in Baghdad, all the critics will look like fools” — Dick Cheney
Aside from the victory part, I guess Cheney was right.
Contrary to poular belief, it seems that history is written by the losers.
Posted by: Vin Carreo | Jun 16 2005 7:58 utc | 5
(I posted this earlier on the wrong thread);
A house divided against itself cannot stand. A nation where the political opposition stands against our foreign policy, and even secretly (and not so secretly) hopes for its failure, cannot reform a region as recalcitrant as the Middle East.
Billmon cites this sentence, published some two years ago by the National Review, as the gist of an argument being developed (perhaps) by the likes of the risible Friedman, in which the liberal anti-war movement will be scapegoated for the defeat of the American adventure in Iraq. Billmon’s clearly worried about the likelihood a neo-McCarthyite assault, against which a marginalized, and politically innocent (in the sense of “not guilty as charged, because not in a position to act as charged”) group of writers will be targeted by the rather guilty ones, like Friedman, who actually urged our government to fight a pointless and impossible war. Billmon, I say, is clearly worried about this: he cites the treatment of the anti-war movement in Germany after World War I as a precedent, along with the treatment (a lesser instance) of the peace movement in this country in the late seventies and early eighties.
I certainly agree that the likes of Friedman will try to scapegoat the anti-war left. What else can they do, when proven powerless to think honestly and intelligently about politics? But can they actually scapegoat anyone? Really and truly? For example, is there any career diplomat whose career they can destroy, as McCarthy did in the early fifties? Of course not; those diplomats were cut out of the loop long before the war started in earnest.
Going back to that quote at the top of this post, I for one openly hope for, indeed pray for, the failure of American policy in Iraq. If “accused” of wishing this outcome “in secret,” I would have to protest that I have sought it in the open, forthrightly. I want us to fail in Iraq (but I have no means to “reform a region as recalcitrant as the Middle East”). The possibility that this outcome might make Friedman and his ilk look bad is of no great interest to me, because they already look bad. Friedman is risible.
I also think that any attempted scapegoating of the anti-war left at this stage would be very unsatisfying to the pro-war folks, if only because they’ve already done their scapegoating, and done it very successfully. This they did with the trashing of John Kerry’s war record in Viet Nam, the suppression of Bush’s malingering with drugs and booze in the ROTC, and the winning of the election in 2004. You can’t scape the same goat twice. Or you can’t win an argument, and then turn around and say that you lost it, having won it (wrongly and wrongfully) in the first place. The retort, which the war-party can’t refute, is the “pottery barn” argument: you broke it, you own it. Your really do own it, gentleman: you took care to cut out the anti-war folks from the get-go.
And, finally, something else is at stake–the role of AIPAC and the likudites in the war movement. I think that what really bothers Friedman is very simple: he’s not a global visionary, he’s a pro-Likud war-monger who applauded this country’s commitment to a disastrous war. He should be ashamed of himself, and, in the best of circumstances, might stand to profit from his mistakes. In saying this, I don’t scapegoat the man, for the simple reason that I don’t hold writers responsible for the acts of bureaucrats and office-holders, civilian or military. Writers may be wounded to hear this, but they really aren’t powerful. They never were, and that’s why they write (because they lack power, and because they want to lack power). They don’t load guns, point them, and pull triggers. They murmur some of the time, and they rave some of the time, but they don’t make things happen: they merely urge that others do so. Scapegoating cheerleaders is not the rewarding thing: for real satisfaction, you have to go after the coaches, the quarterback, and his team-mates on the field.
Posted by: alabama | Jun 16 2005 8:01 utc | 6
The true proportions of the fiasco are indeed becoming clear to even those who would not see them, but worrying
about scapegoating and backlash seems premature and a bit
narcissistic. For the time being further efforts to bring
the truth to light seem far more valuable: every drip-drop
leak regarding 9/11 “anomalies”, the Downing memo, Sibel Edmonds, Valerie Plame, the AIPAC-Feith-Franklin triangle is worth more than a gusher of elegant epi-phenomenal analysis.
If, as I hope, the present wave of leaks
becomes a tsunami, the political landscape may well become unrecognizable. For now it’s important to realize we no longer depend on the good offices or nihil obstat of the NYTimes, the Washington Post, or the
network broadcasters to bring the emerging facts to public attention, nor even to subject them to editorial
fact-checking. This forum is precious both for the
acuity of the analysis offered, and for the links to
damning documentation supplied by many of our posters.
We may even hope that potential future leakers will choose to exploit the relative anonymity of such fora rather than to share their information with reporters whose stories are subject to extraneous editorial pressures.
Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Jun 16 2005 8:03 utc | 7
Well yeah, this is something we gotta watch out for — even though, at best, its like blaming the incredulous and jaded fans up in the stands for yet another crushing homecomming defeat suffered out on the football field, on an otherwise nice fall evening. But retribution then, is part & parcel of their system if not THE integral part, in that lurking underneath all that idealistic fluff is the simple generic message, “be like me”. And if you’d be so rude to not want to “be like me”, then you must not like me, in fact, you must be against me and therefore my enemy. This kind of culture, pathetic as it is, would be only a marginal problem were it to remain in the trailer park, where it belongs, but now (and once again) elevated to a bona-fide foreign policy in servitude to the engine of expanding capital — we should expect the worse in a failure comparable to none excepting the civil war. It is in this fundamental black hole contradiction in the American soul, this fundamental inversion of individualism whereby the individual is disconnected to collective responsibility — if or until that individualism runs afoul — and then its the collective that must bear responsibitiy for the failure.
Posted by: anna missed | Jun 16 2005 8:59 utc | 8
ha ha alabama, didnt see that football analogy (while i was writing)
Posted by: anna missed | Jun 16 2005 9:09 utc | 9
Billmon is, unfortunately, right on the money again. Take the worst case: helicopters lifting off from the green zone under fire, US$100+ oil, dollar collapse, housing bubble collapse, charges against the US leaders in several EU countries, North Korea issuing inflammatory statements. The right are going to need someone to blame, and it’s ain’t gonna be Bush. The anti-war people are convenient, and are being set-up to take the fall already.
A catastrophic collapse in Iraq combined with economic disaster could very well lead to something very like fascism in the US. Freedom of speech will be the first thing to go.
Colman is 100% right. I think within 5, maybe 10, years tops, the US will be quite unrecognizable from what is today.
Remember: Ukraine wishing to join the EU was beyond any forecast 20 years ago.
Posted by: Lupin | Jun 16 2005 10:54 utc | 11
Billmon’s essay is insightful and depressing. Merely being right won’t spare us from scapegoating. It would, only if the national discourse were closer to a meritocracy of evidence and logic.
The amnesia and denial following Iraq will, if anything, arise more rapidly and thoroughly than after Viet Nam, thanks to advances in the technology of their manufacture.
Posted by: ralphbon | Jun 16 2005 12:16 utc | 12
Friedman describes an America divided into three parts.
* Conservatives in Washington, who think one thing.
* Liberals in Washington, who thought another.
* The rest of the country, where people apparently think not at all.
The America I know is somewhat more multi-faceted than that.
Friedman’s “essay” calls for more troops. That’s its main message. Rumsfeld is the immediate scapegoat. Friedman wants more shleppers in the war zone to create a bizarre kind of guns and butter Arab-American Disney World from which the war against Iran can be launched.
The problem is that this is a fantasy. Absent a casus belli and the draft.
If there is a group of people with a secret wish in the US it is the looney right wishing for another 9/11. How long before the wish begets the act?
Posted by: arbogast | Jun 16 2005 12:53 utc | 14
Billmon scared me because I could see his vision come to life on the editorial pages of the WSJ and the Boob Tube commentariat. My hope is that Americans wise up and refuse to scape the same goat twice.
Posted by: Scott McArthur | Jun 16 2005 13:12 utc | 15
maybe relavent, maybe not, but since the wingnuts stopped by, I have had at least half a dozen emails that were obviously not from the claimed source, with attachments (ie. trojan horses or whatever) informing me my new password was available, my account had been suspended for security reasons, some weird something from somewhere else…anyway, I’ve kept them to allow my service provider to use them to trace.
I’m sure people get these things all the time…I seem to get them whenever the religious right or the goon squad gets its panties in a wad when people discuss the glorious war criminal leader.
fwiw.
Posted by: fauxreal | Jun 16 2005 13:16 utc | 16
Excellent post. But I’m not sure you can hang Reagan jingoism entirely on post-Vietnam hangover. Jimmy Carter’s general malaise and ostensible impotence swept Reagan into power more than anything.
Posted by: nl | Jun 16 2005 13:43 utc | 17
Maybe it’s just me, but if I want real insight on the issues of the day rather than dogged and single minded reporting (talkingpointsmemo) red meat (dailykos) snarky comments (pandagon) or reasoned but suspect political analysis (bull moose) I come to billmon. It seems that the quality of the thinking behind his posts is so far ahead of anything else I read, that even when I disagree I’m left in a state of profound respect. So given the idiocy that both the right and the left find with every new Tom Friedman column, how about a draft Billmon post for NYT op-ed columnist? He seems to write like water off a duck’s back. How hard could it be for him to pump out his brilliance to the millions of times readers on a weekly basis and keep his day job too? Just a thought.
Posted by: varda | Jun 16 2005 14:01 utc | 18
@John Francis Lee,
Thanks for the flowers to the German people. However, if we had had a conservative government at the time (and we will get one in autumn), we would have German soldiers in Iraq now. The seemingly strong anti-war-stance of the Germans and the French was not so strong in the beginning. I am certainly glad about the way it developed, but there was no inevitable outcome. Of course you are right, watching the strong anti-war attitude of the people in both Germany and France was a pleasure.
Posted by: teuton | Jun 16 2005 14:32 utc | 19
I wonder: Does Tom Friedman ever have that problem?
He does not. Like the rest of the punditclass, he sleeps soundly at night. The carnage is all “someone else’s fault.”
And Billmon is correct- they will look for someone to blame and that someone is us. They’ve got more quivers in their arrows than they did in the 70’s.
I hate to say it, but I think the america I grew up in is dying.
Posted by: four legs good | Jun 16 2005 14:42 utc | 20
Billmon — and his readers, too, of course — should look at the cover of this week’s Newsweek. They’re trying to make it up to the right-wingers who they enraged by publishing the truth, and trying to play catch-up with Time. There are two rock-jawed military guys on the cover wearing (tough) berets – the title “Fathers, Sons and War” (Republican politics summed in four words). Subhead “The New Faces of a Noble Tradition.” Billmon could probably have some fun with photoshop on that one, but it parodies itself. Parodies, but also frightens, of course.
I won’t hold my breath waiting to see “Mothers, Daughters and Peace: the new faces of a gentle tradition” cover paged.
Posted by: NickM | Jun 16 2005 14:54 utc | 22
And we’re only one domestic terrorist attack away from the erasure of whatever ignominy the American people are supposed to suffer as a result of this shitty war.
My hunch is we might as well enjoy this minor interlude of indecision and shame now barely perceived by the American public. Truth is, Commander Black Heart has the serendipity of disaster on his side. He only needs the intermittent event to prove America is a victim to vindicate his imperialism.
Posted by: slothrop | Jun 16 2005 15:03 utc | 23
Good point slothrop, but do you think anyone will believe it next time around? Not that they have to of course.
I’m afraid this thing may necessarily become violent before it is over. Bushco will stop at nothing.
Posted by: rapt | Jun 16 2005 15:28 utc | 24
I think there is another possible outcome to this scenario, and another possible scapegoat. The corporate media’s belated discovery of the DSM comes at exactly the same time as its belated discovery of Bush’s unpopularity and at the same time that GOP politicians have realized they better back away from the Bush grenade fast if they want to survive in 2006. The DSM is a great opportunity, not only for the left to push through the wall of denial and make the point that the war in Iraq was undertaken for wholly cynical reasons, ibut also for those in the center and somewhat rightward to grab some deniability for themselves. In short, the easist path for them to take is not necessarily to blame the left, but to scream “We was scammed!” The story is the lies Bushco told, and the wholly innocent patriots who were misled. If we on the left will allow the Friedmans of the world this face saving measure when they come upon it (and I think they are coming upon it now), then the natural scapegoat is not the left, but our increasingly unpopular Dear Leader himself.
Posted by: mamayaga | Jun 16 2005 16:11 utc | 25
This morning driving to work I heard Brit Hume going after Senator Durbin for reading the FBI report on Gitmo. Depressing. Hume flat out lied. Billmon, Lupin, Colman are all right. The coming collapse of the economy and the end of the grand adventure overseas will bring out the long knives. The USA’s trip into the dark night of facism will not be pleasant.
Posted by: Jim S | Jun 16 2005 16:22 utc | 27
I won’t hold my breath waiting to see “Mothers, Daughters and Peace: the new faces of a gentle tradition” cover paged.
I don’t know why not: it’d make a great cover for the “breed a soldier for the Homeland” edition.
For those young’un’s who think Iraq is the sine que non of American political folly, let’s take you on a trip down memory lane….
It was the early 1970’s, and we were fresh off the highs of protesting illegal war in Cambodia and the Chicago convention, probably over two million bearded and patchouli’d clowns, storming the streets in a national parade towards Onanism.
Oh, what memories, and what high’s! Then we won! Tet, helicopters on rooftops, I am not a crook, oh, could the world be any sweeter?
I was working at a Fed agency then, a new one actually, and witnessed first-hand the postwar aftermath. First, my job description as head of the department was rewritten, and a new middle management layer was created. A returning Nam lieutenant assumed that position over me, a nice enough guy, for someone with no education or credentials for the job.
I was directed by the new manager, no, actually ordered by him, and by the former captains and majors who had fluffed out that new tier of middle management, to hire a platoon of field staff. And who were these folks? Returning Nam vets, every one. Each had paid some alderman or congressional aide for the position. Again, they were nice enough, for drug addicts and wackos, but it gritted my teeth to see the new agency become a post-war military welfare program.
As the Pentagon itself has become since Nam, just a gigantic corporate welfare program for white male deadwoods in aerospace science-fiction. You can run the numbers, our military-military and veterans programs are less than 45% of the total the Pentagon snorts up its nose. The rest, the bulk, goes towards civilian-academic looting.
Google “AF 2025” if you still don’t believe me:
http://www.fas.org/spp/military/docops/usaf/2025/
And the political aftermath of Nam? Well, like the aftermath of GW I, when it’s over, it’s over, baby. You couldn’t find a job to save your life when the veterans returned. All those millions of hippies ended up in deep-country, hard-scrabble dirt farms, work camps, communes and prisons. The inner city folks were simply entombed in place.
The Left? Vaporized, except for those Eastern Establishment elites that kept on the fringe of policy-speak through Ford, then destroyed Carter, and then were destroyed themselves by Reagan.
Can anyone remember the Ford era, and the gas lines under Carter, during the oil depression?
Of course, that was then, and this is now. It’s a much, much smaller war, although a much bigger war budget, much, much bigger, and it will not go away. There will not be a rebirth of democracy, there will not be golden light and dappled shade.
There will be a massive Corporate restructuring.
Things are going to get really f–ked up, real fast. Some poor consensual sap will serve four years of incredibly ineffectual libertarianism, and then we’ll suffer through eight years of an Anti-Christian Right that will make Ronald Reagan and George Bush look like nubile cheerleaders.
And unlike Nam, where the world was “our oyster”, and many of my friends escaped afterward on unending backpack tours of Nepal, Tibet, India, Afghanistan, The Med, South America, Africa… this time, this time, the world will eat US alive, those who can still afford to travel. The rest of US will have to work sub-minimum 1099’s.
Something to look forward to as war winds down.
Or…not! Maybe this time the aliens will really land, and we’ll be mercilessly resurrected and go into everlasting life sentences, and receive that fullness of joy and glory with everlasting reward in the presence of Der OverLords.
Now drink your Kool-Aid, and get back to work.
Posted by: tante aime | Jun 16 2005 16:42 utc | 29
faux, after posting a diatribe about Bushie, I get virus loaded e-mails. I believe your right, the insidious right and I also believe our own govt is more than willing to send anything to disrupt.
I agree with Billmon that the right and neo-clowns will try to scapegoat. The media elite will also. Limblowhard came right out and said the other day that if Iraq is lost its the democrats and liberals fault. The talking points and ass covering has started. And with control of the major media in so few hands, it will be easy for all the war enablers to get on the same page and smear anti-war bloggers and citizens.
But they can be fought, the bloggers have become a powerfull force. Kos, TPM, atrios, and many others. We need the blogs to be active. More hits on the blogs is needed than even the massive amount now. I would like to see Billmon and his exellent word craft in a more open forum, but he may have restraints that we don’t know.
The wingers are losing it, and lies are the only way to stop the bleeding. The Shiavo autopsy is being covered extensively in the papers. The Hannitys and all of their “culture of life” bullshit looks like a big fat wart on the end of his nose. If they don’t apologize for their bullshit, the Shaivo case should be rubbed in their faces.
We can fight, because on all arguments we are right, and they must lie. The talking heads and Freidmans are ass covering and like anything; you know how it was when you were a kid and lied to your parents ! in the end your lies are usually found out.
Posted by: jdp | Jun 16 2005 17:00 utc | 30
four legs good, I’m afraid, is right in that they have more arrows in their quivers this time around.
I admire anyone who still reads Friedman, even if only for early morning blogging purposes. I can’t force myself all the way through one of his pieces anymore, so I usually don’t even start. But after reading Billmon‘s two pieces on Friedman’s latest, I slogged in.
Billmon does not, I think, give enough credit. Tom not only repeats the old canard, but comes up with an inventive new corollary to the Dolchstoss theory.
We pre-critics of the war wanted 1700 American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians to die, Iraq to be looted by local thugs and multinational corporations, American foreign policy to be a shame and a shambles, terrorists to be emboldened and our military weakened solely so we could say “we told you so.”
And, just like the original Dolchstoss theorists and their post-Vietnam successors, the war can be won, says Friedman, by sending more troops.
After ’75 came the Vietnam Syndrome, which columnist William Safire once defined disgustedly as the “revulsion at the use of military power that afflicted our national psyche for decades after our defeat.” He concluded: “Are there no voices left, after that costly loss of life, to reject the Syndrome’s humiliating accusation of national arrogance – and to recall a noble motive?”
September 11 gave the NeoImps the excuse they needed to crush the Vietnam Syndrome forever with a fine show of U.S. force in their Iraq Attack. The last thing they wanted is now emerging: the Iraq Syndrome.
Posted by: Meteor Blades | Jun 16 2005 17:12 utc | 31
Great post by Billmon and all around.
As offensive as he is, Friedman is merely a simple minded cheerleader for the interests of military/corporate America. When he says “We can still win this” one wishes him to specify what he means by “we” and “win”. And what is “lose” in this context?
IMOP, compared to Iraq, Vietnam was extremely small potatoes. After all, our way of life was not at stake – only, what the Times would call, our “prestige”.
With Iraq, as the peak oil people and others have argued, we are in the first battle of a resource war that may well continue for decades. It is the beginning of the end game of the fossil-fuel era, in which the elites are fighting for their near term survival. In this context, 1700 casualities is literally nothing. As we were clearly told, this is going to be a “long war”.
As tante aime points out above “Things are going to get really f–ked up, real fast”. But when they do everything is in place to come down with the iron boot.
When our leaders tell us that “losing is not an option”, it is not just bluster. Take them at their word, because they want to “win this thing” even if they have to destroy civilization in the process. From their point of view, as Keynes said, “we are all dead”.
Posted by: tgs | Jun 16 2005 17:25 utc | 32
Billmon:
“I don’t know why Friedman is flirting with Ann Coulter’s world view.”
Perish the thought!
The right are building the ramparts and defences now; a new terror threat/incident is needed and I think the Likudnukes have a work in progress. Scott Ritter predicted an air attack on Iran this month. The reason will unfold soon.
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Jun 16 2005 17:44 utc | 33
Pay attention, folks. It’s time to start making sure you have clean paperwork and a network you can trust. When they start blaming the “liberals” for their setbacks in military recruiting, it will be too late to start putting all that together.
You think *I’m* being hyperbolic? Go read Billmon’s post again.
Posted by: s9 | Jun 16 2005 18:21 utc | 35
Incidentally, click here to read the ultimate take-down of Friedman and his flat-earth tome.
Posted by: ralphbon | Jun 16 2005 18:38 utc | 36
faux,jdp.
i only use my e-mail link to the blogs (use another for all other stuff) and i get nothing……mmmmm kind of insulting really.
Posted by: anna missed | Jun 16 2005 18:50 utc | 37
Drop in public support for operations in Iraq being felt at Pentagon
PENTAGON Officials at the Pentagon are acknowleging concern over recent polls that show waning support for military operations in Iraq.
Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita says “public support for these kinds of operations is critical.” And he has one theory on why some of that support has melted: news coverage……
Posted by: Nugget | Jun 16 2005 19:07 utc | 38
Ralphbon,
glad to see you around here again – and thank you for that excellent link.
In a Friedman book, the reader naturally seizes up in dread the instant a suggestive word like “Windows” is introduced; you wince, knowing what’s coming, the same way you do when Leslie Nielsen orders a Black Russian. And Friedman doesn’t disappoint.
now that’s education
Posted by: citizen | Jun 16 2005 19:22 utc | 39
Great post Billmon! Both mamayaga and arbogast make me hopeful that the anti-war left might have a few trick left. For now, it seems that mamayaga’s alternative scapegoat is playing out, and I suspect that not much will be heard from the would-be demonizers at this time. However, in the likely event that Bush’s actions are acquitted in the public eye, the anti-war left (or Democrats in general) might do well to insist on the reinstatement of the draft, as a necessary step to terminating the war in Iraq. If the draft were to be re-instated, the anti-war left’s ranks would swell; if the right prevents a draft – then the anti-war left may have insulated themselves from blame. Unfortunately, I do not think the US can afford to continue this war, regardless where the blame falls.
Posted by: aschweig | Jun 16 2005 19:30 utc | 40
mamayaga @ June 16, 2005 12:11:
I think there is another possible outcome to this scenario, and another possible scapegoat. The corporate media’s belated discovery of the DSM comes at exactly the same time as its belated discovery of Bush’s unpopularity and at the same time that GOP politicians have realized they better back away from the Bush grenade fast if they want to survive in 2006.
(at risk of being redundant: did I get this link here?)… it seems Hillary and Bill are schmoozing w/Rupert Murdoch. How deviously Clintonian. If true, I’m not sure if it’s political brilliance or simply the dark side stage left. Just the thought of headline…
FOX NEWS Endorses Hillary …
sends my brain off into frightening uncertainties.
re: “White House crafting new scapegoat” & “one more 9/11 away from justified imperialism”:
AP is reporting Bush’s Problems Has GOP Worried…
“There’s just a general angst right now,” said Rep. Tom Cole (news, bio, voting record), R-Okla. “He’s paying for his Iraq policy more now than he was before the election. People know we have to win, but they’re not very happy about it. So he has a lot of problems and, frankly, nobody to blame them on.
Repub lawmakers are as complicit as Junior in crimes. But when it’s all said and done, saving their own ass is the deciding factor. So who knows, maybe they’ll make W’ their sacrificial chimp…////????
Posted by: JDMcKay | Jun 16 2005 20:13 utc | 41
it seems Hillary and Bill are schmoozing w/Rupert Murdoch.
The Romanians have a saying for it: “Kiss the hand you cannot bite.”
Posted by: Billmon | Jun 16 2005 20:17 utc | 42
The Romanians have a saying for it: “Kiss the hand you cannot bite.”
ya, and look where it got them. 🙁
Posted by: JDMcKay | Jun 16 2005 20:25 utc | 43
I’ve been expecting that for a year or so now, the sacrificial chimp deal. Mama Barbara has been in the way, but perhaps she can’t contain the forces forever.
Anyway, nearly impossible that the puppet boy can be jettisoned without dragging a lot of smelly shit up from the dregs as he goes. No way dickie could assume the presidency if the chimp is dumped…no I now think they must hang on whatever the cost; destroy the country, which has been the objective from the beginning, in the opinion of many of us lurkers.
Lets face it, this civilization can never regain the starry-eyed optimism of the last century.
Posted by: rapt | Jun 16 2005 20:30 utc | 44
For globalism to work, America can’t be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is….The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist — McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.
— Thomas Friedman, What the World Needs Now, New York Times, March 28, 1999. Quoted from Backing Up Globalization with Military Might
rapt @ June 16, 2005 04:30 PM;
I’ve been expecting that for a year or so now, the sacrificial chimp deal.
I say sentence him to 30yrs hard labor bending bananas.(***)
*** asthetics of straight bananas offend true primates.
Posted by: JDMcKay | Jun 16 2005 22:00 utc | 46
How safe can we be?
Senate Republicans are calling on the Bush administration to reassess U.S. financial support for the International Committee of the Red Cross, charging that the group is using American funds to lobby against U.S. interests.
The Senate Republican Policy Committee, which advances the views of the GOP Senate majority, said in a report that the international humanitarian organization had “lost its way” and veered from the impartiality on which its reputation was based. The Republican policy group titled its report: “Are American Interests Being Disserved by the International Committee of the Red Cross?”
I think it depends on what the meaning of our are.
Posted by: JDMcKay | Jun 16 2005 22:05 utc | 47
I was expecting a lot more comments on this great piece.
Billmon, between you and me, that was one of your best pieces. A foreboding analysis of what is in store for this country. You bring home the reality that soulsearching and change from same is not an American characteristic. There will be repercussions domestically for our Iraq folly, but, and I agree with you, in the mid-long term such repercussions will not be what we on the anti-war left were hopnig for. Nevertheless, just as Durbin put himself out there with the unbridled truth and will take a lashing for it, the anti-war movement was compelled to act.
To quote Sam Kinison, “I like the way you think … I’ll be watching you” to see if you are right. I am betting you will be, but hoping you are not.
Posted by: jg | Jun 17 2005 0:00 utc | 48
The thought police. Thinking evil thoughts can bring down the nation. Exterminate them, or expect to be exterminated.
The logic of the right wing of the Republican Party has been evident to anyone who follows these things since 911. It was there before, but in the paranoic editions of Oliver North and Company, whom we never really took seriously.
Bilmon is dead right. The central political struggle of our next few years will be fighting the theory of the dolchstoss — the stab in the back — perpetrated by persons with ‘impure thoughts’. It isn’t made easier by the complicity of the press in this disaster. The big difference between us and Weimar Germany (and there are a lot of similarities in the parochialism of the American people) is that there is no identifiable ethnic group to blame. The ‘liberals’ aren’t an identifiable group. University professors are an obvious target, but tough to break if we hang together. It’s too late now for the slime machine to break us. They were making their move in late winter last year, but got de-railed by Abu Ghraib and the election campaign.
I have held for a long time that the first task of the Democratic is to assign blame; worry about the mess in Iraq afterwards, since there’s no cure for it. We are defeated. Some one has to pay; we should try to insist that for once it is the guilty and not the innocent who take the fall.
.
Posted by: Knut Wicksell | Jun 17 2005 2:11 utc | 49
“I have held for a long time that the first task of the Democratic is to assign blame…”
Absolutely! I, for one, have no intention of standing around bleating like a goat to be scaped.
Posted by: Max | Jun 17 2005 3:31 utc | 50
Mamayaga’s alternative scapegoat will only happen if WE MAKE it happen, and we’ve got to start now before it’s too late. A “stab in the back” explanation will end up triumphant. No doubt. So we have to identify the stabbers. We have to start talking incessantly about Bush and the neocons not just as liars and incompetents, but as traitors. We have to underscore how the Iraq war was a) pursued for partisan purposes that had nothing to do with US national security and b) has objectively weakened the US militarily and made it more vulnerable. The truth of those two propositions gives us a case that is the very definition of treason. (And although this is less palatable to many, including me, we may have to give the “neocon=israeli likud agent” meme a little free reign here, if we want it to stick and resonate).
The good news is that laying blame at Bush’s feet may not be impossible. When Argentina lost the Falklands war, people blamed the military regime, not the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. But the bad news is that an Argentina scenario is highly unlikely, in part because I don’t see US troops surrendering to Iraqi insurgents on US soil. Billmon’s scenario is far more likely, unless we start NOW to prevent it from happening.
Posted by: the exile | Jun 17 2005 4:56 utc | 51