Neocons Still Pushing for Third War: Claim Bush Is with Them

This post is mainly in response to Glenn Greenwald's fine post, "The Increasing Extremism of Bush's Followers," or rather, an amplification of some of his points. Let me begin by pointing out that my wife listened to Bush's press conference and confessed to being fascinated by his incoherence and the bewildered looks on some of the faces of reporters listening to the president. On various websites and blogs, I caught snippets of Bush's mind at work. It's disturbing that some of Bush's followers are less interested in what Bush is saying that in the fact that he is angry and supposedly 'resolute.' Apparently, that is important to them. No one should pretend that coherence matters to some of Bush's supporters. These are indeed strange times.

In his blog, Unclaimed Territory, Glenn Greenwald started off by giving us the good news:

Even after being subjected to a relentless, month-long, 9/11-exploiting fearmongering campaign from the White House, a majority of Americans (50-43), according to the latest Pew poll, still believe that it is not "necessary to give up some civil liberties to curb terrorism."

I hope the percentage of those who reject Bush's vision of how to deal with terrorism continues to grow. I have heard people on talk radio who still stumble over some principles Bush's supporters keep pushing. I worry that too many Americans fail to see the difference between fantasy and reality. Fantasy is when Charles Bronson of the Death Wish movies or Kiefer Sutherland of '24' know exactly who is good and who is bad, who deserves a beating and who doesn't, and who exactly can be killed without bothering to ask questions. In real life, no one's intuition is that good. That's why in a nation of laws we have rules for dealing with difficult situations. The following is my simple-minded explanation for what many of us understand but I'm a believer that sometimes even the obvious needs to be laid out. So bear with me. A lot of this is taken from my memory of Arthur Koestler.

In dictatorships, there are no rules, only the illusion of rules. But many dictatorships over the last two hundred years have begun the same way. Initially, attention is paid to the rules, but as the rules get in the way of a president's or general's 'gut feelings,' the rules are bent, and as the number of rules are bent, they begin to be reinterpreted so they are bent even further, and there may be a period when the rules are simply broken but that's followed by the new condition that the rules are whatever the top man says they are and they can change at any moment.

One of the first areas where rules break down is in the area of investigations. Often, there is a real attack or challenge of some kind. People are brought in for questioning but the investigation gets nowhere. There is anger and frustration and that's understandable. Maybe more people are brought in and they are told lies about each other to make them talk. Or maybe someone begins to rough up suspects or even witnesses, and higher ups begin to look the other way.

Maybe the word come down to take off the kid gloves and if anyone resists the change in rules they no longer are a part of the investigation. It only takes a little more to get to torture. Somebody roughs up somebody and they get a name. That person is brought in but doesn't talk. The interrogation gets rougher and more names are given. More people are brought in and it sometimes get deadly, and perhaps people are killed in front of those who are next to be questioned. And their friends, acquaintances and relatives are brought in.

In a dictatorship, paranoia begins to take off for the simple reason that torture and broad sweeps begin to generate so many names—maybe thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, maybe millions. Soon, everyone is under threat of being rounded up and everyone becomes an enemy of the state. That's how the worst of dictatorships function and feed off themselves. In the meantime, a large apparatus is built to chase down all the tips and all the new supposed 'conspiracies,' except that most of the tips and most of the new information are garbage because people are telling their questioners what they want to hear. Maybe newspapers and other news outlets are filled with stories about these conspiracies; a handful of the stories may even be true or at least half true and a climate of fear is spread. Again, paranoia feeds on itself and the cycle is constantly renewed and the list of enemies continues to grow until there are no friends, no citizens, no allies. All are suspect. Eventually, even the interrogators are suspect. Perhaps even the interrogators begin to join those who are resisting the madness.

It's a slippery road we're on when we begin to resemble our enemies.

Greenwald goes on to talk about Charles Krauthammer, one of a number of neocons actively promoting what would be the third war of Bush's presidency, this one on Iran:

Trying to show that he learned his lesson with Iraq, Krauthammer cursorily acknowledges that "the costs will be terrible," and then -- almost with a palpable yawn -- runs through what he thinks those "costs" will be: skyrocketing oil prices; a "worldwide recession"; an Iranian naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz (which the U.S. Navy will have to break up, presumably in direct military confrontation with Iran's Navy); and a violent uprising by the Shiite militias in Iraq whereby Iraq will be further destabilized and (yawn) "many Iraqis and coalition soldiers are likely to die as well." Revealingly, Krauthammer makes no mention -- at all -- of the deaths of Iranian civilians when listing the "costs" which "we" will have to incur.

Among what Krauthammer calls "the lesser dangers" are the possibility that "Iran might activate terrorist cells around the world," and the likelihood that "there will be massive criticism of America from around the world" -- but only from the usual, irrelevant leftist European circles and the "Arab street." But needless to say, the costs of starting this new war are dwarfed by the costs of not starting the war, and after describing all the terrible things that are going to happen once Iran has nuclear weapons, Krauthammer declares, without explanation: "These are the questions. These are the calculations. The decision is no more than a year away."

Democrats really should make this a more prominent issue. The warmongering against Iran is boxing us into a corner...

I should make one quick note about Krauthammer's article; he mentions diplomacy with Iran but what was heralded as diplomacy last May has to be recognized as largely a four-month long charade that was only intended to give the impression of diplomacy, though that may well change if Bush loses control of at least part of Congress and the American people begin to demand a real foreign policy.

Now to Krauthammer. Soft-pedaling a war in Iran after all the blunders the neocons made in the run up to Iraq is mind-boggling. Krauthammer is too old for video games so I have to assume he's read too many Cold War spy thrillers. The record of most of the neocons over the last thirty years is pathetic. Most of them predicted decades of continued conflicted with the Soviet Union and derisively dismissed predictions in the late 70s that the Soviet Union was beginning to crumble. They swallowed line, hook and sinker nearly everything that Ahmed Chalabi of the INC told them. They saw WMDs in Iraq and when none were found, they quickly rerationalized the reasons for war. How many chances should these incompetents be given? How many times should they be taken seriously? Nuclear proliferation is a serious issue that deserves more than the unserious arguments of the neocons. They have cried wolf far too often. They have damaged our national security to such an extent that facts now have a hard time reaching the table for discussion.

Unfortunately, through whatever convoluted process is involved, our president takes the neocons seriously. He takes torture seriously. He takes domestic spying seriously. He takes his overreaching powers seriously.

In a post about Dick Armery's skepticism about Bush's case for war in late 2002, I quoted an article the other day from Newsweek; here's the relevant excerpt (the first two paragraphs are mine):

...the 'evidence' they had was worthless but they were always promising to show more, a promise they never kept.

Many Americans still wonder why we went to war in Iraq. None of the reasons have ever held up. But maybe there's something to Armery's 'he-man macho psychosis' theory. Here's one more excerpt from the Newsweek article; the incident took place at a Congressional breakfast that Bush spoke at:

Saddam had shown his contempt for the United States, he told the legislators. There was no use in talking to him. “Do you want to know what the foreign policy of Iraq is to the United States is?” Bush asked angrily. The president then answered his own question by raising his middle finger and thrusting it inches in front of Senator Daschle's face, according to a witness. “F--k the United States!" Bush continued. "That’s what it is—and that’s why we’re going to get him!"

Why after all his blunders and all his bluster are 37% of Americans still taking George W. Bush seriously?

Given all that our nation can lose, given all the problems that continue to be ignored by Bush, given the fiasco in Iraq and the fiasco during and after Katrina, where is that greatness the 37% of Americans who approve of Bush see? The 37% forgets that Roosevelt saw progress after the first six months of World War Two and they ooh and aah because Bush has the audacity to compare himself to Roosevelt?

Millions of Americans see at most a back bencher of the House, a guy who hangs around for a few terms and is defeated after putting his foot in his mouth for the umpteenth time. Somehow, 'nuke 'em' Bob Dornan in the person of George W. Bush made it to the White House.

If Americans want a third war with Bush in charge, they know what they have to do this fall. That's the issue the Democrats need to hammer. That's the crisis that faces our nation.