“Lemmings” Would Be a Compliment
(posted by Kevin Carson)
The kind of thinking Jim Henley did in the period before the Iraq war, which he recounted in the excellent piece linked by Mona, is one reason why I find the Republicans’ “But everyone believed the case for war at the time!” defenses so lame. (Not to mention Hillary’s lame “But everyone believed it!” justification for accepting Bush’s case for war.)
No, everyone didn’t believe it. The left-wing, libertarian, and alternative news sites I visited daily before the Iraq war were filled with hundreds of links debunking all the Bush administration’s claims. You could go to Antiwar.Com, Counterpunch, or Alternet, among many other places, in the fall and winter of 2002-2003, and find endless reams of analysis and counter-evidence on things like the aluminum tubes, some of it by technical experts like Scott Ritter.
And much of the evidence they provided at the time was only “discovered” by the Democrats several years later when it became politically convenient: i.e., when it finally became safe and “patriotic” to question the Iraq war.
If Hillary “believed” Bush’s case, it’s because she wanted, no NEEDED to believe it. Like all the Democrats who voted to authorize force, and then rolled over and showed their bellies to the alpha male in the flightsuit during April and May of 2003, she couldn’t afford to risk political capital opposing the war–after all it might turn out to be a success. And because she almost certainly had a run for the presidency in the back of her mind even then, she couldn’t afford to seem “weak on national security.”
See, all those yellow ribbon magnets and flag decals were reappearing on all the SUVs. CNN’s screen was decorated with stars-and-stripes trim, and MSNBC had its “wall of heroes.” The nation was once again succumbing to its periodic madness of war hysteria (those times when Americans, ordinarily the most skeptical people in the world when it comes to government and its claims, think like good Germans), and rallying around the “Commander-in-Chief.” So from the standpoint of their cynical calculations at the time, lifting their tails and presenting their hindquarters to Bush seemed like the prudent move for Democrats to make.
Because you know the ultimate catastrophe, compared to which the murder of tens of thousands seems trivial, is not getting reelected. Getting reelected is the Prime Directive, because eventually, you know, they intend to Do Something Good with their power. Of course they can’t afford to do it quite yet, so long as there’s some danger of being perceived as “soft” on something and maybe losing the next election. But eventually, if not after the next election, then after the next one, or the next one, or the next one, when they’re absolutely safe and there is absolutely no risk whatsoever of not being reelected, they’ll finally be able to actually spend that political capital they’ve been hoarding all these years (at least if there’s anything left to spend it on).Of course non-action sometimes turns out to carry risks of its own. Hillary never dreamed at the time that when “her turn” came around, there’d be a massive shift in public opinion against the war, or that she’d be facing an insurgent primary campaign against her hawkish record. So now she’s having to backtrack and pretend she wasn’t really for the war (just like NAFTA).
If there’d been a Democratic majority in the Reichstag in August 1939, Tom Daschle would have said “there isn’t any daylight between us and Hitler” on our little ethnic German brothers in Danzig. Dan Rather would have said “Tell me where to line up, Herr Reichskanzler!” And Hillary would have stood up at Nuremberg and protested to the bitter end: “But we all believed Poland was a threat!” Actually, given the slavish attitude mainstream Democrats take toward the Executive on “national security” issues, you almost expect them to say “We were only following orders.”
The evidence was out there. It didn’t get picked up by the echo chamber of the two parties’ talking heads, or by their pet establishment journalists. But it was there for anyone who wanted to know. Like the Germans who turned a blind eye to the smoke belching out of those smokestacks, and studiously avoided thinking about what might be going on inside that barbed wire, the Democratic establishment didn’t want to know.
March 23rd, 2008 at 5:06 am
To be fair, at the time, MSNBC did have 2 cable opinion shows, “Buchanan & Press” and “Hardball,” that were dead set against the Iraq War.
March 23rd, 2008 at 11:58 am
Yeah, I remember Buchanan & Press. In the runup to the war, I got most of my cable news from MSNBC because it was so refreshing for a Crossfire-type talking head show to have a conservative who deviated from the standard worship of the National Security State.
March 24th, 2008 at 12:16 am
“counter-evidence on things like the aluminum tubes, some of it by technical experts like Scott Ritter”
And publicly by the IAEA and anonymously by both the CIA and State Department while Ritter was being smeared across the windshield, long before it showed up in the SOTU.