Does America need a good therapist?
Over at TPM Cafe, an excellent new group blog where I occasionally cross-post some of my writing for The Reaction, Josh Marshall (Mr. TPM himself) recently brought up the old (and seemingly forgotten) question of how the U.S. got into Iraq in the first place. "[O]n this question," he says, "the country is in an eerie state of national denial." Well, his post provoked many, many comments from readers, including two by me. I reprint the more significant one here. I wrote it quickly, and, reading it over now, there are obviously parts of it that seem undeveloped and that I'd like to flesh out a bit. But I'll leave it more or less as is, and, needless to say, I'd certainly like to know what you all think about America's state of denial:
In this context (Iraq and what got us there), I liken America (and, sorry, I say this as a Canadian) to an individual who just won't go to therapy lest he or she discover shocking truths about his or her past. Even if we suspect we know the truth, not many of us are strong enough to handle the truth, to deal with what makes us who we are. We prefer to live under the cover of some self-made mask, a thin veneer of self-protection that allows us to lead relatively "normal" lives.
It seems to me that Americans have begrudgingly come to accept that Iraq is a reality. The enthusiasm of the invasion quickly gave way to the drudgery of occupation. That may have been interesting at first, but it's given way to a certain, well, numbing of the American mind, where even the most grotesque violence seems banal (18 killed in a mosque, 40 others injured -- what does this even mean anymore?). It's sort of like Darfur: even if we could get our head around it, many of us just don't want to, lest we lose whatever shred of sanity keeps us going from day to day.
All this is to say that any understanding of America in Iraq will require psychohistory if the story is to be told in any meaningful way in terms of the homefront. That may be the case with any war, but there does seem to be an unusually high amount of self-denial here. Maybe because the spectre of Vietnam looms ever present in the background. Or maybe because the incessant coverage in the media leads to an equal counter-reaction of detachment. All this is speculation. We need therapy to get at the answers.
It's easy to see why the Bush Administration is doing what it can to suppress the history of the lead-up to war. Whether they knew what they were doing or whether they just got it wrong (and I suspect it was quite a bit of both), the urgency is to spin a different yarn, lest Bush's approval rating fall ever lower. For all the rhetoric, they know that things haven't gone according to plan (whatever plan there was), but, no, the truth can't come out so blatantly.
But I wonder why Americans themselves aren't more outraged by this. Is it because they, too, can't handle the truth? Or because they don't want to know what they already know but are pretending not to care much about? Thousands died in Vietnam, after all, and for what? The pain of that war lingers so profoundly in the American psyche. Can it take yet more meaningless death? Thousands have died in Iraq, both American forces and even greater numbers of civilians -- and how many more (do we even know?) have been severely, even irreparably, wounded? Do we really want to find out that it was for a lie? Or a mistake? For some utopian neocon vision? Or Bush's Freudian efforts to overcome his father? Or for the sake of -- gasp -- politics? (Note: In my last post, I wrote that there were legitimate moral and humanitarian reasons to intervene in Iraq. Still, questions linger.)
Admittedly, some of it may also have to do with the fact that American attention spans have dwindled into obscurity. What was it Bart Simpson said when he learned that Homer had been a member of the B-Sharps? I can't even remember what happened eight minutes ago. And they all laugh. Some of that must be going on here. We're too busy with the Michael Jackson verdict or Rob and Amber's wedding to care much about the nuances of intelligence gathering and political manipulation. That's not a good thing, but it's the unfortunate truth.
I wonder, too, what the history books will say. I suppose it depends on how Iraq turns out. But it will also come down to who writes the history books. Right now, I'd even take Dr. Phil. A dose of therapy is what America needs most. Otherwise, Iraq, like Vietnam, will seep ever further into America's subconscious, forever to wreak havoc with her more noble ambitions.
In this context (Iraq and what got us there), I liken America (and, sorry, I say this as a Canadian) to an individual who just won't go to therapy lest he or she discover shocking truths about his or her past. Even if we suspect we know the truth, not many of us are strong enough to handle the truth, to deal with what makes us who we are. We prefer to live under the cover of some self-made mask, a thin veneer of self-protection that allows us to lead relatively "normal" lives.
It seems to me that Americans have begrudgingly come to accept that Iraq is a reality. The enthusiasm of the invasion quickly gave way to the drudgery of occupation. That may have been interesting at first, but it's given way to a certain, well, numbing of the American mind, where even the most grotesque violence seems banal (18 killed in a mosque, 40 others injured -- what does this even mean anymore?). It's sort of like Darfur: even if we could get our head around it, many of us just don't want to, lest we lose whatever shred of sanity keeps us going from day to day.
All this is to say that any understanding of America in Iraq will require psychohistory if the story is to be told in any meaningful way in terms of the homefront. That may be the case with any war, but there does seem to be an unusually high amount of self-denial here. Maybe because the spectre of Vietnam looms ever present in the background. Or maybe because the incessant coverage in the media leads to an equal counter-reaction of detachment. All this is speculation. We need therapy to get at the answers.
It's easy to see why the Bush Administration is doing what it can to suppress the history of the lead-up to war. Whether they knew what they were doing or whether they just got it wrong (and I suspect it was quite a bit of both), the urgency is to spin a different yarn, lest Bush's approval rating fall ever lower. For all the rhetoric, they know that things haven't gone according to plan (whatever plan there was), but, no, the truth can't come out so blatantly.
But I wonder why Americans themselves aren't more outraged by this. Is it because they, too, can't handle the truth? Or because they don't want to know what they already know but are pretending not to care much about? Thousands died in Vietnam, after all, and for what? The pain of that war lingers so profoundly in the American psyche. Can it take yet more meaningless death? Thousands have died in Iraq, both American forces and even greater numbers of civilians -- and how many more (do we even know?) have been severely, even irreparably, wounded? Do we really want to find out that it was for a lie? Or a mistake? For some utopian neocon vision? Or Bush's Freudian efforts to overcome his father? Or for the sake of -- gasp -- politics? (Note: In my last post, I wrote that there were legitimate moral and humanitarian reasons to intervene in Iraq. Still, questions linger.)
Admittedly, some of it may also have to do with the fact that American attention spans have dwindled into obscurity. What was it Bart Simpson said when he learned that Homer had been a member of the B-Sharps? I can't even remember what happened eight minutes ago. And they all laugh. Some of that must be going on here. We're too busy with the Michael Jackson verdict or Rob and Amber's wedding to care much about the nuances of intelligence gathering and political manipulation. That's not a good thing, but it's the unfortunate truth.
I wonder, too, what the history books will say. I suppose it depends on how Iraq turns out. But it will also come down to who writes the history books. Right now, I'd even take Dr. Phil. A dose of therapy is what America needs most. Otherwise, Iraq, like Vietnam, will seep ever further into America's subconscious, forever to wreak havoc with her more noble ambitions.
posted by Michael J.W. Stickings at
1:54 AM
9 Comments:
Michael,
I think there are a couple of quick anwswers and, then, some more basic issues. I think there are two reasons why Americans are not treating Iraq with the same seriousness that we did Viet Nam. First, there is no draft. As sad as it is to say, most people aren't affected by this war because their kids are not going to be sent to fight it. And the casualties, as tragic as they are, are not close to those in Viet Nam. So, Iraq simply has less direct impact on most people's lives. Second, regardless of your view of the war, it obviously was, in some sense, a response to September 11. I think many people have a vague notion that, even if they don't agree with the specifics of the war or how it was sold, that somehow it is part of the war against terrorism. Plus, Saddam Hussein was such a bastard that there is some lingering feeling that getting rid of Saddam was a benefit.
On a deeper level, I think Americans are reluctant to acknowledge that terrorism and other international problems are complex and not amenable to "solutions." Whereas Europeans seem to be more comfortable living with ambiguity (both moral and physical), the American psyche--both right and left--requires that all problems must have a solution and that solution must be one that we can find with enough effort. In Iraq, we are finding that there aren't necessarily solutions, but we are uncomfortable with the implications of that, so we turn away. The idea that we have to live with vulnerability to some degree and that we can never return to "normalcy" is not something that Americans can easily face.
Another factor, I believe, is the structure of the American political system that has given disproportionate power to the South. Walter Russell Mead has written about the southern "Jacksonian" mentality which embraces a "don't mess with us" mentality and thus, supports military solutions to terrorism. This southern base gives Bush the ability to pursue military policies (some of which I agreed with such as Afghanistan) with relative impunity. Whereas during Viet Nam, the south was in the process of breaking away from the Democratic Party, today the South is solidly Republican and, basically, politically homogenous--this provides a base of support that, to some extent, has stifled real discussion of Iraq or of America's place in the world. As we saw during the election, it is very difficult to talk about "nuance" and I believe this is, in part, a reflecton of southern dominance of Republican politics.
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Anonymous, at 11:10 AM
If therapy is good enough for A-Rod, then it's good enough for America.
Still, I assume you're talking about an an actual therapist, and not the Sean Connery Celebrity Jeopardy! pronounciation. In that case, I would say no, America does not need therapists.
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Chas, at 3:51 PM
Nate,
I did not intend my comments to be condescending or derisive about my fellow citizens. In fact, I have complained about the liberal tendency to do this. I concede you point that my comment reflected a presumptiousness in psychoanalyzing the American public. I am by no means opposed to force or the use of power.
Nor do I fail to recognize the very real dilemmas and threats we face with respect to terrorism. I recognize that many Americans see Bush's policies, in particular, the war in Iraq as a realistic response.
There is no point in discussing my differences with Bush's policies. We obviously have to agree to disagree.
But I do believe there has been an unwillingness to challenge the assumptions behind Bush's policy, especially with respect to the war. Your reference to "realism" is a case in point. I believe realism has two components; first, an understanding of the importance of power, including military power, in the conduct of foreign relations; and second, an understanding of the limits to the use of that power. IMO, Americans have generally accepted the former but have ignored the latter.
I'm not going to repeat the arguments made in my previous post. But my point was that Americans have been unwilling to accept that the use of power in response to threats is sometimes counterproductive and that not all problems are amenable to immediate solutions. I think this has been true throughout American history and is one of the things that has made our foreign policy unpredictable over the years.
With respect to my first point, about the lack of a draft, I think it's hard to realistically argue that Americans' response to the war is not different than it would be if there was a draft. Obviously, casualties have been much lower in Iraq than in Viet Nam; nevertheless, it's hard for me to believe that people would not be more skeptical about the war if their kids were being drafted.
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Anonymous, at 4:32 PM
Actually, Nate, I love your rants. No, seriously, I've come to respect you immensely through your comments on my blog (and I've linked to yours, by the way), and I think it's good to have some disagreement here. The last thing I want is for this to become sort sort of echo chamber for some narrow part of the political spectrum. So your comments here are well-taken, and your passion is evident.
I can't speak for Marc, but I'm not sure you and I are all that far apart. The question that Josh raised at TPM Cafe, and that I respond to in my post, is why there isn't more attention being given to why the U.S. went to war in Iraq in the first place. I think he's right to call it "denial". But this is isn't necessarily meant as a political attack against the right, just a sociological observation. What I think is true is that nations as well as individuals contruct meanings partially by reconstructing the past -- and that often means suppression of painful memories. That was largely the point of my post: that, to an extent, we (if I may include myself along with Americans) have forgotten, collectively, why we went to war in the first place.
Now, many of the bloggers over at TPM Cafe are well to the left of me, and it's obvious that most of them oppose the Iraq War altogether. I would stress here that I supported the Iraq War at the beginning. (I get into this a bit in my recent post on Tony Blair, whom I admire immensely on this.) What worries me is that Iraq could become another Vietnam for the American psyche, which is why I think we all need to do some refreshing on the origins of the war. To an extent, Bush is to blame for this, given how he has refused to think through obvious intelligence failures and likely political manipulation of the facts. But the left and its anti-Bush extremism is also to blame. In short, my concern is generally non-partisan. I'm opposed to both Hitchens and Moveon.org. To me, they represent nothing but extremism, and we in the middle, from the center-left to the center-right, need to retake some control of American political discourse and American political life generally. You yourself, Nate, make an impassioned plea for moderation between these liberal and conservative extremes, and for that I am grateful.
The story of your mother is equally compelling, and, to me, she very much represents that largely forgotten middle of American life -- Nixon's silent majority, if you will -- those whose voices have been drowned out by the all partisan rhetoric, bickering, and downright loathing.
I don't think that Marc, another moderate, would disagree. After all, he recognizes here that Saddam was a bastard. But I would agree with him that, on the whole, Americans are less comfortable with ambiguity than are, say, the Europeans. (And I would say that this has something to do both with America's history of isolation, given its geography, with its constitutionalism rooted in absolute philosophical principles (as opposed to history or custom), and with the evangelical nature of American religion.) It's a double-edged sword, though. Their ambiguity may mean greater appreciation of nuance and the complexities of phenomena like terrorism, but it also degenerates, at times, into moral relativism, illiberalism, and an inability to stand for anything at all. Witness the current problems trying to put together a European Constitution. Or Europe's complete inability to deal with the genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo. On this, I am very much an American in spirit, and when I think about America's greatest accomplishments, whether on the beaches of Normandy or Iwo Jima or venturing to the moon, I have nothing but pride for what is, truly, a great nation -- maybe not the last, best hope, but close enough. I should add, too, that my mother is American. Born in Sheffield, Alabama, to a purple-hearted veteran of D-Day. I'm even distantly related, by marriage, to Davy Crockett. I still have a lot of family down there, and I do not, I think, condescend to them, even if I occasionally disagree with their politics.
All three of us, I think, are somewhere in the middle, fighting against the extremes that have hijacked American politics in recent years. Again, I can't speak for Marc, but if I tend to be more liberal in terms of directing my ire at Bush, it's only because the right's in power. Back in college, at Tufts (where I wrote a political column for The Tufts Daily called The Reaction), I spent much of my time railing against the academic left.
Finally, I would refer you back to my post on how the Democrats can win. I certainly disagree with those who would take the party to the left. On the contrary, I would like to see the party stake out ground in the middle -- and I say this in part because the Republicans have increasingly abandoned the middle under Bush. I would be far more sympathetic to the GOP if it really were the party of Giuliani, Schwarzenegger, McCain, Hagel, and the like. At the national level, though, and in many non-coastal states, it's not. On this, I guess I'm with The New Republic and commentators like E.J. Dionne. After all, as I mention in that post, Democrats have done very well at the state level in reaching out to people like your mother. Here's how I put it, in terms of questions Democrats should be asking themselves: "What do Democrats stand for? What does liberalism mean? Is it possible to re-inject a moral purpose into progressivism -- or at least to redefine morality in more progressive terms? How do Democrats reach out to moderate Republicans distressed at the rightward shift of their party, at the grassroots evangelicalism that has come to dominate it? How do Democrats reach out to "values" voters, regain the confidence of Americans in terms of national security, show that they're capable of dealing with grave domestic and foreign threats? I agree with you, Nate, on this: Many Democrats (and liberals) do have nothing but scorn and contempt for "regular" Americans, whom they think have been hoodwinked by an evil administration. Although I do worry about the general levels of public education, and although I think that Bush has purposely tried to keep Americans from paying too much attention to his foreign policy (except as it is spun to them), I don't hold them in such contempt, and I do think that Democrats (and liberals) would do well to treat their concerns with respect and to offer a compelling alternative, both in terms of domestic and foreign policy, to the Republicans.
Again, though, I greatly appreciate your contributions to this blog, and I hope you continue to honor it with your passion. And I want to thank both you again for such thoughtful comments. The time and effort you spend here is greatly appreciated.
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Michael J.W. Stickings, at 4:55 PM
Well said Michael. That's how I feel. My point was that American history suggests that Americans are unwilling to accept "muddling through" and sometimes that is the best solution. Although I should point out that many people thought Cold War containment was an amoral policy that allowed repressive communist regimes to stay in power. It ended up working out pretty well.
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Anonymous, at 9:20 AM
Yes, the Cold War policy of containment was certainly an example of muddling through, although American anti-communism generally (as distinct from actual policy) has taken on rather evangelical (if I may use that term) tones: McCarthyism, the "evil empire". Contrast this with the Europeans' unwillingness to engage in such moralistic distinctions (even in Western Europe during the Cold War).
Again, though, although a phenomenon like McCarthyism was reprehensible in its finger-pointing simplicities, this ideological evangelicalism is both a strength and a weakness. A weakness in its reduction of complex phenomena (like terrorism) to simplistic moral categories, but a strengh in terms of its moral commitments to just causes. Europe may be all nuance, but that hasn't always helped much.
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Michael J.W. Stickings, at 12:50 PM
Nate,
I agree with much of what you said, especially about the simplifying assumptions of pacifism and the black and whiteness of Europeans. While we try to pretend we are objective, I guess what it ultimately comes down to is how we each feel about the particular policy.
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Anonymous, at 12:58 PM
Above all, I think it's important that we learn from each other even as we express our opinions. And I hope that that's what's going on here.
Nate, you and I may not necessarily agree on this point, but I respect your opinions and they prompt me to reconsider my own. In particular, your take on the narrow-mindedness of Europeans and their view of war. In this sense, I think you're absolutely right.
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Michael J.W. Stickings, at 6:46 PM
You're exactly right, Nate. The standard response to Bush since 2000 has been "Not ___________". Which is all part of the anyone-but-Bush mentality.
I acknowledge that the 2000 election stirred up some pretty bad feelings among Democrats, and it may be that many Democrats still consider Bush an illegitimate president, but, well, get over it already. He's in the White House and the Republicans control Congress and the federal judiciary is moving to the right. So what are you going to do about it? Bitch, moan, complain, whine?
It's like that great Seinfeld episode where George does the exact opposite over what his instincts tell him to do -- and he ends up successful for the only time in his life. Well, the Democrats (many of them, anyway) are taking the same line, siding against Bush on anything and everything not out of genuine conviction but because anything and everything Bush is for must, ipso facto, be bad. Which is why it's so easy to go after them on Iraq, terrorism, and national security (and the effort to spread freedom and democracy in the Middle East). Democrats need to offer a viable alternative to Bush (and the Republicans in general). In the meantime, they'll continue to let Bush set the terms of debate and discussion, reducing themselves to a party of nay-sayers.
And you're right about Gitmo. Rarely would I side with O'Reilly, but it's too easy to say, shut it down. Okay, fine. That might be good for p.r. But he's right. Where do you put them? Although there have been serious charges of abuse -- and these need to be addressed thoroughly! -- we mustn't lose sight of the fact that many of those prisoners are, well, bad. Huffington is right that Gitmo is doing harm to America's image abroad, and for that reason alone it might be a good idea to shut it down, but the problem will just emerge somewhere else if nothing is done about it. It's too easy to go after Bush on this one without offering a viable plan in response. This is one reason I haven't called for Gitmo to be closed. I don't know where to send the prisoners either. And, let's face it, they're not about to be released.
If you have a response, Nate (or anyone else), please comment on a more recent post. It's worthwhile, I think, to keep this going, but this post will soon be archived for good.
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Michael J.W. Stickings, at 3:19 PM
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