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Not Really

Not long ago I talked to a right-wing hardnosed fellow in a conservative central California town about the need to stay and finish the task of stabilizing the democracy in Iraq and rectifying the disastrous aftermath of 1991. He wasn’t buying. Instead he kept ranting about the war in the ‘more rubble, less trouble’ vein. And […]

Not long ago I talked to a right-wing hardnosed fellow in a conservative central California town about the need to stay and finish the task of stabilizing the democracy in Iraq and rectifying the disastrous aftermath of 1991. He wasn’t buying. Instead he kept ranting about the war in the ‘more rubble, less trouble’ vein. And his anger wasn’t only over our costs in lives and treasure.  So I finally asked him exactly why the venom over Iraq. He shouted, “I don’t like them sons of bitches over there — any of ’em.” His was a sort of echo of Bismarck’s oft-quoted “The whole of the Balkans is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.” ~Victor Davis Hanson

It’s very likely true that Bismarck didn’t much care for people who lived in the Balkans, since they were Slavs and he was a junker from East Prussia, but I would suggest that there is a world of difference between Bismarckian calculation about the strategic value of the Balkans to Germany and the heated remarks of Hanson’s interlocutor.  There are those of us, including myself, who have held that Iraq was never worth the life of a single American, but the people who tend to hold this view also have a funny way of not despising the Iraqis as “them sons of bitches.”  On the other hand, those who take this latter view seem to be the folks who cheer for Mr. Bush and continue to (grudgingly) support the war and whose support for the war is only undermined to the extent that Mr. Bush does not order the Air Force to level the entire place and be done with it. 

It seems to me that Hanson’s “hardnosed fellow” is precisely the sort of unfortunate Republican voter we have in spades in this country, for whom “them sons of bitches” are equally deserving of aggressive war, carpet bombing and the odd tactical nuke (“more rubble”) as they are of dismissive contempt and impatient frustration.  I would hazard a guess that Hanson’s “hardnosed fellow” was perfectly happy to back the Iraq war to show “them” who was in charge and he probably belongs to the school of “thought” that holds that Vietnam should have been won by the indiscriminate use of H-bombs. 

I cannot think of a mentality less likely to understand, much less share, Bismarck’s view of national strategic interests.  One is born of an understanding of the national interest and the realities of the region; the other is the angry tantrum of someone who understands neither, but knows that he doesn’t like “them.”  It is a mentality that is not at all averse to meddling in the affairs of other nations that have nothing to do with us, provided that the casualties are mainly on other side.  It is a mentality that does not consider whether or not a war is actually in the vital interests of America, but whether it will crush some uppity band of foreigners about whom these “hardnosed fellows” know nothing and care less.  None of this should surprise Hanson, since it has been the endless burbling about Islamofascism-this and 1938-that by Hanson and company that have helped to inculcate an arrogant contempt for “them sons of bitches over there,” since it has been the more or less explicit purpose of inventing the phantom of Islamofascism to lump together every possible political tendency in the Near East that hegemonists find offensive (which is basically all of them) and to reduce every question of policy in western Asia to one of whether you are an “appeaser” of the rampaging Islamofascist juggernaut or one of the few, the proud, the Hansonian 300.

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