Saturday, June 23, 2007
(12:27 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Stab in the Back
This Kevin Drum post reminds me that I should probably fess up: I really do hope that the US loses in Iraq, or acknowledges the fact that it already has. Pragmatically speaking, I would prefer for Bush to take responsibility, but more generally, I want the US to be gun-shy, I want it to stop taking on these grand world-shaping schemes -- I want everyone to see that US power really isn't limitless, an illusion that it was only possible to maintain when the US hadn't attempted to fully actualize its power. I want a smaller military, so that the US won't be so tempted to go around blowing the shit out of people for no good reason. In the event that we face a major land invasion on American soil, I guess I'll feel stupid, but we all know that the US is not going to face a traditional invader on its own soil in the foreseeable future.The problem with liberal responses to the "stab in the back" narrative is twofold. First, it neglects the fact that a lot of liberals did vote in favor of the Iraq War and propagandize in favor of it, so this retroactive attempt to paint it as a purely Republican problem is just another example of stupid opportunism. Second, it still accepts the logic that the problem is some particular faction, rather than a guiding ideology broadly shared by our governing elites as a whole. Wasn't it the liberal Madeline Albright who called the US an "indispensable nation"? Doesn't everyone accept the basic premise that we're the "sole superpower," and the only area of disagreement is implementation? Don't we have a lot of people who worry that the Iraq War will discredit US military intervention when we really need to go in and do some nation-building? No, everyone -- the whole frame is wrong. The US is not as powerful as we think. Attempting to assert this supposed omnipotence amounts to a useless, nihilist acting-out.
My problem with the "stab in the back" narrative is that war opponents don't have a way to bring the troops home or to undermine the US imperialist project more generally. That is, the problem with right-wing propaganda is that the agent it blames is actually powerless -- the problem is how to make the right-wing propaganda true.
