Tuesday, May 29, 2007
(6:08 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
America, America
The latest blog post at N+1 (in honor of Memorial Day) is interesting. It discusses the high number of suicides among Vietnam veterans and the efforts to provide more support for suicide-prevention among Iraq veterans now. Then it ventures into what seems to me to be somewhat questionable territory:Confronted with low poll numbers on the Iraq war, President Bush has called for “a national discussion” on the consequences of withdrawal. Presumably, this would be the discussion that his administration avoided in the lead-up to the invasion, just as the Johnson administration did over 40 years ago.On the one hand, this appeals to me -- it views the present moment as an opportunity to redeem the defeated potentials of Vietnam. (This fits with the broadly Benjaminian or Agambenian tone of N+1 as a whole.)
But what exactly would a national discussion look like? The President, we can safely assume, means a “policy” discussion, conducted among “experts” whose job it is to hand down judgments and courses of action. The self-regarding discourse of expertise is largely to blame for the insistently vacuous talk about the Iraq war, in which the worst judgment leveled is that it’s a “foreign policy disaster.”
The Vietnam anti-war movement was a revolutionary attempt to create the conditions for an alternative kind of discussion, one that took place constantly among non-expert people, with everyday vigilance – the same kind of effort that produced the American constitution. It was an attempt to give a new meaning to “Vietnam” – to say the word, as John Kerry had hoped, and “not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped in the turning.” This turn never took place, unfortunately, and so the need and opportunity to make such a turn continues to arise, most recently with regard to Iraq. Once again duty requires us to organize ourselves, to form a “public” that makes demands and demands acknowledgment. Nothing would be more astonishing than to give the President the national discussion he calls for. It would be exactly what he never wanted – democracy – and the surest sign of our moving on from Vietnam, “in unity and resolve.”
But looking at it from the level of our ruling elites, doesn't the Iraq War indicate the active choice of the America that Vietnam revealed? We have a kind of "first time as tragedy, second time as farce" structure here -- the supposed miscalculation of the "best and brightest" sincerely following through on a strategy that basically everyone in the cultural elites agrees was fundamentally sound and in the best interests of the world (i.e., "containment"), followed by the neo-cons' heroic determination to make a mistake among in their pursuit of a policy of naked aggression and domination (the Project for a New American Century). Iraq is like a Vietnam stripped of idealism and realism.
Iraq also fits the pattern of the post-Vietnam American style of war -- that is, fighting a war in which the actual target is irrelevant. It's not that America wanted to directly conquer and subjugate Vietnam -- it was a proxy war against the Soviet Union, and the Vietnamese happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now we get "proxy wars" increasingly deprived of a concrete "real" target. Iraq is a proxy war against a fantasy on three levels:
- Against the fantasy of a unified "terrorism"
- Against the fantasy of some other nation that would try to challenge the USA's role as the Unprecedentedly Great Super-Hegemon of All Existence (a position that, incidentally, the US doesn't even really hold presently)
- Against the fantasy of Iraq itself, conceived as a threat
Both Iraq and Vietnam give us an image of America as the worst of all possible hegemons: both ruthlessly self-serving and wilfully blind to reality, both convinced of its own omnipotence and willing to destroy whole countries based on the most distant perceived future threat (whether we think in terms of WMDs or in terms of preventing China from gaining control over Mideast oil reserves). Our leaders sell policies with a web of lies -- but there's no reality underneath! It's just a sheer nihilism.
We're left speculating that we might attack Iran, even with nuclear weapons -- apparently just for the sheer unadulterated hell of it. I sincerely hope that it doesn't happen, but I, for one, don't trust the Democrats to do anything to stop it if it does. You'd hate to set the dangerous precedent of constraining the president's discretion in choosing when to go to war. You'd hate to set the dangerous precedent of in any way trying to contain the destructive fury that America has chosen to be.
