The assembled columnists of the New York Times are known for their maudlin self-import. Think Thomas Friedman as freelance sloganeer of empire (while living off his wife's millions). But every now and then, one of these courtiers hits the nail on the head. David Brooks, who is something of a translator for the hard right to the urbane middle classes and generic barometer of the establishment, wrote a piece called The Iraq Syndrome, R.I.P. One of the comments in the discussion on the January 27 antiwar protests brought it to my attention – and I'm glad. Leave it to the Right to cut to the chase, after all: what are we fighting about in the first place?
Today, Americans are
disillusioned with the war in Iraq, and many around the world predict
that an exhausted America will turn inward again. Some see a nation in
permanent decline and an end to American hegemony. At Davos, some
Europeans apparently envisioned a post-American world.
Forget
about it. Americans are having a debate about how to proceed in Iraq,
but we are not having a strategic debate about retracting American
power and influence. What’s most important about this debate is what
doesn’t need to be said. No major American leader doubts that America
must remain, as Dean Acheson put it, the locomotive of the world.....
The U.S. has no
cultural need to retrench. Vietnam sparked a broad cultural revolution,
a shift in values and a loss of confidence. Iraq has not had the same
effect. Many Americans have lost faith in the Bush administration and
in this particular venture, but there has been no generalized loss of
faith in the American system or in American goodness....
In short, the
U.S. has taken its share of blows over the past few years, but the
isolationist dog is not barking. The hegemon will change. The hegemon
will do more negotiating. But the hegemon will live.
Well, to quote that great American poet of national "confusion" — you have no faith to lose, and you know it.
The argument that's been bubbling among antiwar forces is about whether the issue is "this war", narrowly defined as the occupation of Iraq (forget the occupation of Kuwait going on 16 years, forget Palestine, forget the dozens of other countries with "entanglements") – or whether the Bush Agenda of the imperial presidency with its triple whammy of fear, repression and war is the target.
This is one of the ways where we can see the danger of narrowing the focus on "Republican mistakes" and the need to generate a culture of resistance that leads to definitive repudiation of the fascist direction Bush (and Hil) have taken the country. Read Brooks to see inside the mind of the collossus, look around to trip those clay feet.
Full commentary follows.