Just like in that George Orwell novel we’ve always been at war – and we got the omnipresent government surveillance he predicted too, and public mind control, or at least Fox News and Nike commercials, and a political system under the control of a privileged Inner Party, in our case the One Percent led by the Koch brothers. We just got there late – not 1984 but now. Orwell got one though wrong though – there’s no shadowy Big Brother who may or may not exist. That supposes a nefarious grand plan behind it all, and a controlling intelligence, and Orwell never imagined that there’d be no one in charge. He didn’t account for incompetent megalomania, where those with a lust for power, or a messianic idealism, keep screwing up. It’s hard to maintain a cult of personality when the personality involved turns out to be a buffoon after all – as was the case with George Bush and then Sarah Palin and now Chris Christie – and no, Barack Obama is not the messiah, or the antichrist either. There are also no Thought Police – everyone is now connected to everyone else, and to all of history, told all sorts of different ways, and no one can shut down the internet that links everything to everything else. Governments have tried. There’s always a workaround. Everyone can say what they want, and everyone does, and that means no one is listening. There are too many voices, as often posting videos of cute kittens as calling for revolution. So we didn’t get oppressive tyranny. We got chaos.
We did, however, get perpetual war. In the Orwell novel, the citizens knew they had always been at war with certain bad guys elsewhere, except when alliances shifted, and then the citizens knew they had never been at war with those particular folks. History simply disappeared, even if millions died. The government took care of letting its citizens know that what they knew, from direct experience, wasn’t what they knew at all, as appropriate. That’s a bit disconcerting, so most of the citizens simply stopped thinking. It was just too much trouble.
That happens when there’s perpetual war. In the eighties we sent arms and advice and cold hard cash to Saddam Hussein, because he was fighting Iran, those very bad people who tossed out the Shah we’d installed there with their Islamic Revolution, and then had held our embassy folks hostage for over a year – but the same Reagan administration ended up selling advanced arms to Iran too, which was forbidden by law, to raise money to fund right-wing guerrilla groups in Central America, which was also forbidden by law. That was quite a scandal, but Ronald Reagan apologized to the America people – he said that he had had no idea what had being going on around him. People bought that, given his growing general befuddlement, but still their heads were spinning, and then one of the keys guys behind all the transactions, Oliver North, ended up as a regular on Fox News.
It was hard to keep it all straight, and soon enough Saddam Hussein was the bad guy. We had to toss him out of Kuwait, and then, after the 9/11 attacks, we had to remove him, because… well, that was never clear. Al-Qaeda despised him, for being too secular of all things, and it turned out that he had no weapons of mass destruction after all, and he always did hate Iran as much as we did. We just had to prove something or other in that part of the world, to show bad things happen when you piss off America, or we had to or set up a secular western-style democracy in Iraq, to show everyone in that region how things should be done, or both. We spent eight long years there, at war, for some reason. Supporters said we were fighting for Freedom – and perhaps they meant the general concept. The specifics of what we were fight for kept shifting, until they disappeared.
Now we have nothing to show for it:
At least 61 people were killed and scores wounded Wednesday in the latest wave of attacks in the Iraqi capital and across the country.
Bombings and shootings, aimed at security forces and civilians alike, made it an especially bloody day as sectarian violence flared up.
The United Nations said 2013 was the deadliest year in Iraq since 2008, with almost 8,000 people killed, most of them civilians. Fears of all-out sectarian war have increased since violence broke out in Anbar province in recent days.
Much of the violence recorded Wednesday was in and around Baghdad.
We walked into a sectarian civil war – the Sunnis of Saddam Hussein versus the Shiites who were aligned with our old foe Iran – and let the Shiites win, hoping they get along with Sunnis, maybe, eventually. That was never going to happen. We just left. The surge, sending in twenty-thousand more troops when things were falling apart after our first two years there, didn’t work, and there’s no Ministry of Truth, like in the Orwell book, that can convince us things worked out just as they should have worked out.
It’s enough to make your head spin, or worse. William McNulty in this item blames the high suicide rate among young veterans on the “amorphous nature” of the wars they fought in:
No amount of counseling can dispel the gnawing sense that one sacrificed for a bogus cause. From this stems despair – from a sense that so much of one’s life was given for so little purpose. Today’s vets do not see themselves as saviors, they cannot identify whom they defeated, they are not certain that they truly liberated anyone, and they fought, at best, a holding action against an ill-defined threat. Progress has been absent.
Time’s Joe Klein seconds that:
McNulty makes an important distinction: between depression and despair. Depression is one of the prevalent symptoms of post-traumatic stress. It is a natural reaction to the unimaginable terror that comes with combat, the survivor’s guilt that comes with the loss of friends, with the frustration that comes with the loss of a limb or a traumatic brain injury. Despair is more profound: it comes when you’ve experienced any or all of those things – and you come to the conclusion that it was all in vain, that there was no earthly reason to have invaded Iraq in the first place or extended the war in Afghanistan beyond the counter-terrorist effort to snuff out Al Qaeda.
Those of us with family members who have done their many tours of Iraq and Afghanistan, at higher and higher levels, know all too well not to ask whether it was worth it. The response is a stony stare. It’s too hard to talk about that. One does one’s duty, with honor and courage, and without regret. That should be enough – to do otherwise leads to some very dark places. Let it rest.
That won’t work in politics, because we have no Orwellian Ministry of Truth explaining that Oceana has always been at war with these particular folks, whoever they are at the moment, for very good reason. It’s not that easy. There are too many voices, and Jeremy Lott argues here that all the Republican presidential hopefuls had better face reality:
Any Republican seeking nomination for the 2016 presidential election should at a minimum be willing to admit Iraq was a mistake. It was an error that cost us upwards of $1.5 trillion, thousands of U.S. lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, while seriously hindering our efforts to track down the real culprits of September 11. (The war, incidentally, helped pave the way for a Nancy Pelosi-controlled House and a Barack Obama-controlled White House, as well.)
No Orwellian Ministry of Truth, even one owned by Rupert Murdoch and managed by Roger Ailes, can change the facts here, although, at the American Conservative, Daniel Larison sees a problem here:
There are some obstacles to what Lott proposes. Chief among them is the difficulty that many hawks in the party still truly don’t accept that the Iraq war was a mistake. Despite the fact that by virtually any measurable standard the Iraq war was a senseless waste of lives and resources, they don’t consider this to be the truth, so they won’t greet it with relief. At best, many hawks will agree that there were flaws in the execution, but they remain convinced that the original idea was sound.
Orwell knew about such folks, the dupes in his novel, or the second-level fools in charge, but Andrew Sullivan is still outraged:
Listening to what passes for “debate” about the continued sectarian warfare in Iraq – which never ended, and was never resolved by the surge, and is the core reason why Iraq as a country remains a democratic impossibility – has been a sobering moment. Men like John McCain have obviously not internalized for a millisecond the awful error they made. Their response has been either utter denialism or silence – which was roughly their position throughout the entire, horrifying experience.
And that helps explain a little the total bafflement of these old warriors at the possibility of a rapprochement with Iran. Because they haven’t yet absorbed the uselessness of military force to advance our interests in the region – indeed, its capacity to make our position measurably worse – they still see warfare as the natural response to a country now so crushed by sanctions it has allowed a relative moderate to take control. They cannot even see that the only real option to advance some kind of peace in Iraq is through Tehran, a natural ally against Sunni extremists in that “country”. And they cannot see that further polarization between the Muslim world (especially its mostly pro-American population in Iran) and the West does nothing but hurt us, and our standing in the world at large.
Yep, Iran is next, for some reason. But at Time’s Swampland site, Michael Crowley looks to the future:
If Clinton runs for president in 2016, she’s likely to emphasize the more dovish aspects of her record – including her public diplomacy to repair America’s international image, her focus on building ties in Asia, and her attention to women’s rights and development issues.
But at a time when fewer Americans support an active U.S. role in foreign affairs, Clinton’s comfort with the harder side of American power could be a vulnerability. A liberal primary challenger might well reprise Barack Obama’s 2007 line that Hillary’s record amounts to “Bush-Cheney lite.” One potential contender, Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, has already been zinging her over her 2002 Iraq vote. “When George Bush got a bunch of [Democrats] to vote for that war, I was just shaking my head in Montana,” he said recently. Whether such attacks will hold even a fraction of the valence they did at the Iraq war’s peak remains to be seen.
The libertarian conservative Conor Friedersdorf adds this:
There is next to no chance I’d vote for a Republican who thought the Iraq War was prudent, or showed an eagerness for more military interventions. But neither is it enough for a Democratic candidate to claim that the problem with the Iraq was the way that the Bush Administration executed it. Habitual hawks like Clinton have to clear a particularly high hurdle. And no one should be elected president without showing, beyond any doubt, that they understand why the war was a mistake and how to avoid like mistakes in the future.
Bully for him, but he’ll have no one to vote for, because war with Iran is next:
Under pressure from the Obama administration, Senate Democrats who favor a new batch of sanctions on Iran signaled a willingness to hold off on levying penalties to give diplomatic negotiations a chance.
Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., made clear that a vote on a package of penalties pushed by Sens. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and Mark Kirk, R-Ill., wouldn’t occur anytime soon despite a call for a vote from Republican leader Mitch McConnell and a daunting number of backers for the legislation – 59.
Reid is delaying the inevitable – every single Republican in the Senate wants to blow up Obama’s peace deal, to embarrass the guy even if it means war, and a good number of Democrats still want to prove that they’re “tough on defense” – just like Hilary Clinton did back in 2008 – or they have Jewish constituencies. The current Israeli government does want us to nuke Iran after all, to keep Israel safe. The votes are there, and there will probably be enough votes to override any veto of these sanctions from Obama. There will be no peace. The peace deal is now in place. They’ll blow it up.
Andrew Sullivan is appalled by this:
I note a few remarkable members of the war chorus: Michael Bennet of Colorado – a key Obama supporter; Cory Booker of New Jersey (ditto); Mark Warner of Virginia; Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut; Ben Cardin of Maryland; and, of course, Chuck Schumer of New York. All of these Democrats are in favor of humiliating the president of the United States and refusing to allow him to pursue negotiations without being trumped by deliberate, pre-meditated sabotage.
I wonder how many of their Democratic constituents really want them to sabotage their own president’s negotiations to avoid what would otherwise be a relentless march toward another war in the Middle East. Do these Democrats seriously want war as the only option with Iran’s newly emergent moderate government? Do they want to do to Obama what no Republicans did with Reagan over his rapprochement with the Soviet Union? Do they really want to sabotage a negotiation years in the making, created by crippling sanctions, and now possibly about to bear fruit? Why on earth can they not wait until the final deal is done, if it is?
Steve Benen adds this:
Congress passed sanctions to entice Iran to come to the table, and Iran came to the table. Pressure from sanctions was intended to encourage Iran to reach a deal, and Iran reached a deal. If Congress could resist the urge to destroy its own success – new sanctions would derail all talks, force Iran from the table, and tell the world the United States isn’t serious about peaceful solutions – real progress could move forward.
Ryan Cooper thinks Cory Booker and these others are making a big mistake:
It may seem to Booker et al. that dynamiting sanctions is the smart political play, given the strength of AIPAC and other neoconservative groups. Or it could be that he really believes this stuff: Booker has long been strongly pro-Israel, and has key rabbinical allies with similar views. Or perhaps he hasn’t grasped the danger yet. As Peter Beinart has pointed out, the anti-war left has never been very good at teaching politicians to head off conflicts in the making, as opposed to punishing them for it after the fact.
Regardless of the reason, Booker and company are making a serious error if they think that the anti-war left is dead forever, or that they’ll pay no price if they manage to successfully sabotage these negotiations.
At Roll Call, Trita Parsi looks at this from the other end of the telescope:
Khamenei supports Rouhani’s diplomacy not because he agrees with it, but because he has turned it into a win-win for himself. As long as he patiently waits till the talks either succeed or collapse due to American foul play – courtesy of senators Menendez and Kirk – he will strengthen his position both internationally and domestically.
If diplomacy succeeds, he will take credit for it. If diplomacy fails as a result of American sabotage, he will claim vindication. His mistrust of the West will have proven correct, as will his line that Iran’s interest is best served by resisting rather than collaborating with the West. Iran’s moderates and pragmatists will once again be pushed to the margins of Iranian politics. Rouhani will be weakened and momentum will shift back to Khamenei and the hardliners.
Yep, we could make things far worse, but embarrass Obama – if that’s worth it.
At the Washington Monthly, Ed Kilgore says that’s not exactly it:
You will hear some Democrats and even a few Republicans claim they are trying to strengthen the administration’s hand in their negotiations, but that’s a shuck. The whole idea is to torpedo the talks because Bibi Netanyahu believes they are aimed at the wrong goal: keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons, as opposed to Bibi’s demand that Iran lose its capability of developing nuclear weapons. If that means war, so be it. This time around, of course, those in the Democratic Party opposing a drift into war have the White House on their side, and the precedent of what happened when a lot of Democrats supported a similarly avoidable war with Iraq. But if antiwar Democrats don’t start making some real noise, the configuration of forces in Congress will continue to deteriorate, and we could be looking at a war foisted on an unwilling commander-in-chief.
It’s enough to make your head spin, and the Daniel Larison adds this:
When it came to the questions of bombing Libya and Syria, the House leadership was perfectly happy to defer to the executive, but when it comes to the conduct of diplomacy that is properly part of the executive’s responsibility they are only too ready to butt in and meddle where they aren’t wanted or needed. The one constant in this behavior is that most members of Congress find a way to take whichever side makes conflict with other states more likely. If the executive wants to launch a war on its own, Congress will stay out of the way, but if it wants to strike a deal that makes a future war less likely to happen they are suddenly very concerned to make their views known.
In short, we’ve always been at war and we always will be – Orwell got that part right – and the quite conservative Ron Fournier adds this:
Obama dithered and stumbled on Syria, but his instincts were right: Avoid bloodshed if at all possible. He is acting prudently on Iran. He is the commander in chief, and you’d expect fellow Democrats to give him the benefit of the doubt. Is the Democratic opposition to Obama based on the merits or born of political calculation? If it’s the former, wayward Democrats had better be right, because the stakes are high. If it’s the latter, shame on them and their “antiwar” party.
And there’s Jeffrey Goldberg:
It would be quite an achievement to allow Iran, the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism, to play the role of injured party in this drama. But the Senate is poised to do just that.
He thinks the vote for massive new sanctions is nuts:
While it could set back (though not destroy) Iran’s nuclear program, it could also lead to the complete collapse of whatever sanctions remained in place. In addition, it could unify the Iranian people behind their country’s unelected leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — a particularly perverse outcome. And in some ways, an attack would justify Iran’s paranoia and pursuit of nuclear weapons: After all, the regime could somewhat plausibly argue, post-attack, that it needs to defend itself against further aggression. A military campaign should be considered only when everything else has failed, and Iran is at the very cusp of gaining a deliverable nuclear weapon. …
So why support negotiations? First: They just might work. I haven’t met many experts who put the chance of success at zero. Second: If the U.S. decides one day that it must destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, it must do so with broad international support. The only way to build that support is to absolutely exhaust all other options – which means pursuing, in a time-limited, sober-minded, but earnest and assiduous way, a peaceful settlement.
Kevin Drum is fine with that:
As it happens, I doubt that we’ll be able to reach a final deal with the Iranians. In the end, I think Iran’s hawks have too much influence and just won’t be willing to give up their nuclear ambitions. What we’ll do then is anyone’s guess. But as Goldberg says, even if you’re a hawk who favors a military strike, surely you’re also in favor of demonstrating to the world that we did everything humanly possible to avoid it. What possible reason could you have for feeling differently?
Some questions cannot be answered, but at least this isn’t Orwell’s 1984, so they can be asked. We’ve always been at war with [fill in the blank] – and lately all that has led to is nothing but despair. There’s no Ministry of Truth however, so we can think this through all on our own. It’s just that we won’t. That’s why Orwell wrote that novel.