Many anti-war people wrongly conclude that those of us who support it are somehow unconscious of the consequences of war. That is as wrong as those of us who are for the war who believe that everyone against it is far left and unpatriotic. To be fair, a portion of the anti-war crowd is undeniably far left – not just anti-American but pro-communist. One of the main organizers of anti-war rallies is ANSWER, a well known communist front group. Don’t take my word for that, take David Corn’s.
The truth, as it so often happens, is in between. There are a lot of Americans who genuinely believe a)the Iraq war was wrong to begin with and/or b)it is already lost so we need to just surrender and get it over with. They might not phrase it exactly that way, especially b) but that’s the bottom line as I see it. (I would argue that those people have been misled by a media with goals other than disseminating objective facts.) And again, to be fair, some on the far right have not been especially thoughtful in their support for the war, beyond the desire to “go kick some Ay-rab *ss!” which is not at all helpful, and not people with whom I wish to be associated.
Well, as this must-read post from Villainous company states, for those of us still capable of rational thought, it comes down to a choice: The Heartrending Kaleidoscope of War. On this choice balances the future of our nation, and the consequences will affect generations to come.
Here’s an excerpt:
How many times has it happened to you? You sit at your computer and suddenly, in your Inbox appears one of those slideshows, set to music. The war, in moving pictures.
Moving, in more ways than one. For more often than not before that moving slideshow is over, you find yourself in tears again. The old familiar stinging sensation starting up behind your eyeballs, and then the hot liquid coursing down your cheeks. And there is really nothing you can do anymore because the response has become automatic now. Three years of war have left you like one of Pavlov’s dogs: the mere sight of one of those prize-winning photos is enough to induce a predictable sensation.
And so, more often than not, you close the file hurriedly and open a spreadsheet, or grab your calculator. Because you can’t afford to get choked up during working hours. Not again.
I often wonder how the war will seem, in retrospect. Once it is over, should that blessed day ever arrive, how will it come back to us in memory? I often think it will seem much like one of those slideshows; that we won’t recall entire episodes, but only snapshots frozen in time. Will our memories be distorted, selective? They can’t help but be, I fear. That is partly why I get up and write every morning. In our imperfect way, we are grappling to understand history before it is finished. It is only that some of us want to declare the victor before the final quarter has ended:
“Are you on the road, or in the ditch?” Back when I covered labor negotiations 30 years ago, that was the question reporters would ask to get a sense of how contract talks were going. The phrase came back to me last weekend as I listened to a series of relentlessly negative presentations at a conference here on America’s relations with the Muslim world.We are in the ditch in the Middle East. As bad as you think it is watching TV, it’s worse. It’s not just Iraq, but the whole pattern of America’s dealings with the Arab world. People aren’t just angry at America — they’ve been that way to varying degrees since I first came here 27 years ago. What’s worse is that they’re giving up on us — on our ability to make good decisions, to solve problems, to play the role of honest broker.
My, my. How on earth could anyone get the impression America lacks the ability to prevail, or the good will to be an ‘honest broker’? Could it be articles like this, Mr. Ignatius’ offering from last week, optimistically titled: Expect the worst in Iraq:
Somehow, four years on, the debate about Iraq is still animated by wishful thinking. The White House talks as if a surge of 20,000 troops is going to stop a civil war. Democrats argue that when America withdraws its troops, Iraqis will finally take responsibility for their own security. But we all need to face the likelihood that this story isn’t going to have a happy ending.Oddly, the thought that relentlessly broadcasting our inability to win the war doesn’t exactly encourage fearful Iraqis trying to decide whether to back militias or support an illogical foreign nation that can’t achieve consensus, keep intelligence information secret, or fulfill serious foreign policy commitments never seems to occur to really smart men like David Ignatius. But this is completely understandable. They’re too busy telling the world how short-sighted the administration is.
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