perform[ing] a chest-beating war dance over Afghanistan of the type he and his tough guy comrades perfected in the run-up to the Iraq War. It's filled with self-glorifying "war-is-hell" neocon platitudes that make the speaker feel tough and strong. No more hiding like cowards in our bases. It's time to send "small groups of American men and women [] outside the wire in dangerous places." Those opposing escalation are succumbing to the "illusion of the easy path." Chomping on a cigar in his war room, he roars: "all out or all in." The central question: will we "surrender the place to the Taliban?," etc. etc.Indeed, in his remarkable piece of propaganda Brooks's appraisal of the political and military situation is selective and slanted in its relationship with facts and irresponsible and, frankly, comical in its use of rhetoric. But, as I pointed out yesterday, what's truly sinister and galling is the piece's attempt to bend recent history to its own political ends. I mean, basically, it conflates statements of unambiguous fact with statements evincing a heterodox conception of political and military historiography. To call it heterodox is maybe too nice: It is nothing less than a neoconservative wet dream of blood-lust, self-righteousness, pedantry and calls to the cause of freedom and destiny!!!, pitting the United States (unambiguously good, honorable, honest, free, saintly) against...
Well, let's pause there. Against who, exactly? Who is it that we are fighting, and what is it that makes our enemies so damned evil, Dave Brooks?
Since 1979, we have been involved in a long, complex conflict against Islamic extremism. We’ve fought this ideology in many ways in many places, and we shouldn’t pretend we understand how this conflict will evolve. But we should understand that the conflict is unavoidable and that when extremism pushes, it’s in our long-term interests to push back — and that eventually, if we do so, extremism will wither..*
We've been, for 30 years now!, engaged in a "long" conflict (i.e.: we're already knee-deep in this conflict, so giving up now would mean that the brave sacrifices of those who have gone before us will have been in vain!, a dishonor done to their memories!!!), a "complex" conflict (i.e.: a chess-like series of highly technical maneuvers, tactics, strategies, intelligence-gathering measures by way of "data-mining," spying, "harsh interrogations," computers and machines and all sorts of stealth, jargony technical and technological and academic and bookish stuff that you could never hope to understand in a million years, so just back off and leave it to us experts).
And the conflict has been with "Islamic extremism." But, wait, I thought it was a conflict with Al Quaeda? Or, wait: no!, it's a War On Terror, right? Or was it the Taliban in Afghanistan? Or was it in Pakistan? Or was it against Osama bin Laden? Or, wait: against Saddam Hussein? Or wait, what about Omar Kadafi? Or...uh...what about those mean-looking dudes in Iran? Hold on! I think I'm sensing a pattern here..... Don't tell me!
Okay: the idea of a "long, complex conflict against Islamic extremism" is so inexcusably hamfisted, willfully ignorant, so transparently calculated to render as ambiguous as possible the identity of our putative enemy, American aims in the putative conflict, its theater of action, and its putative moral authority, and moreover it's so classically, paradigmatically Orwellian (remember how the government kept switching the war enemy between Eurasia and Eastasia?: the point is that the more ambiguous the nature of the enemy/terms of conflict, the more potentially sinister, totalitarian and just plain dangerous it becomes for people like Brooks to issue absurd calls to arms in the name of empty, cynical and dishonest conceptions of quote-patriotism-unquote!!!).
I leave you with a side-by-side comparison of my own which I hope will illustrate in no uncertain terms why it's so very dangerous when asshole pseudo-intellectuals like David Brooks write like chest-thumping, fist-pounding neanderthals, particularly when they are saying War Is Hell, But We Americans Had Better Tough It Out To Preserve Our Honor And To Protect Our Way Of Live Against A Threat Posed By AN IDEOLOGY THAT'S INCOMPATIBLE WITH OUR OWN, This Is, If You're A Decent Honest Non-Terrorist American!!!!
Here's Brooks, giving it his best, really throwing the full strength of of his will into his appeal, the purity -- uncontaminated by 'foreign, un-American ideologies' -- of his thick-skinned, ideologically correct moral righteousness, his steadfast refusal to fall victim to the illusions of weaker men!!!!:
Always there is the illusion of the easy path. Always there is the illusion, which gripped Donald Rumsfeld and now grips many Democrats, that you can fight a counterinsurgency war with a light footprint, with cruise missiles, with special forces operations and unmanned drones. Always there is the illusion, deep in the bones of the Pentagon’s Old Guard, that you can fight a force like the Taliban by keeping your troops mostly in bases, and then sending them out in well-armored convoys to kill bad guys.
[...]
We have tried to fight the Afghan war the easy way, and it hasn’t worked. Switching now to the McChrystal strategy is a difficult choice, and President Obama is right to take his time. But Obama was also right a few months ago when he declared, “This will not be quick, nor easy. But we must never forget: This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. ... This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”
I can just hear the John Phillip Sousa march emanating from the speaker system of Brook's swanky corner office in The New York Times building. But the United States has not monopolized the use of careless bombast in attempts to justify not just warfare but ideological warfare, The same holds for ideological warfare in which the homeland's Weltanschauung or way of life or values or blood is cast as incompatible with another.
Who else was fond of saying, This planet ain't big enough for the both of us! and, It will take a long, possibly thousand-year struggle, but we must always be willing to attack in the most unrelenting and steadfast way, including the use of 'extraordinary measures, which will require a decisive break from the old, outdated philosophies, practices and values of the old, feeble-minded military hierarchy...?
I know who! A propagandist, political leader and military leader all rolled into one, who had the following to say to the German generals at a meeting in early March, 1941, before their glorious, hard-willed march into Russia and, as we all know, their eventual doom:
The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. All officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies. I know that the necessity for such means of waging war is beyond the the comprehension of you generals but...I insist absolutely that my orders be executed without contradiction. The commissars are the bearers of ideologies directly opposed to National Socialism. Therefore the commissars will be liquidated. German soldiers guilty of breaking international law...will be excused. Russia has not participated in the Hague Convention and therefore has no rights under it. [Adolf Hitler, as quoted in William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich]
Phew! I don't need to point out all of the parallels explicitly, do I? And the last couple of quoted sentences provide illuminating comparisons with not only Brooks's article but with the justifications used by Bush and Cheney, et al. for their (once-) secret approval of the use of torture in various "national security"-related interrogations.
Finally, just to really make everyone even more sick to their stomachs, let us consider what one Heinrich Himmler had to say to his S.S. generals on October 4, 1943:
...I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter. Among yourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly...Of course I'm not comparing Brooks to these two dudes. Like I said, I'd happily have a beer with Dave Brooks, should the opportunity arise. He's a decent fellow, etc.
I mean...the extermination of the Jewish race....Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time -- apart from exceptions caused by human weakness -- to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written... [quoted in William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich]
I mean merely to illustrate that the coupling of elegant/pretentious ideological certitudes -- and grand abstract principles generally -- with windy, high-minded rhetoric and fist-pounding putatively patriotic fervor is dangerous. Especially when this combination is used to advocate long, violent, multi-front wars against an enemy whose identity is ambiguous, whose goals are completely abstract and easily doctored both in the framing of present and future debates but in rewriting our collective/cultural consciousness retrospectively. The latter is at the heart of any decent definition of Orwellian governance.
Last of all, don't let Brooks and his friends get away with convincing the American population that we must violate our own values, principles and ethics in order to stave off an enemy with which we are supposedly engaged in a never-ending existential conflict. That's the worst kind of bullying in the world: It doesn't make sense, it isn't an argument but a exercise in rhetorical and symbolic power, and we must fight back against it.
I know, I sound like Bono or something, but this stuff is just so unbelievably sleazy and unjust....
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* All quoted passages that appear in bold typeface were chosen for emphasis by the present blogger.
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