When I got to the gym this morning, my preferred elliptical machine was occupied, so instead of spending the first hour of my day with ESPN, I spent it with Fox News. The topic of discussion this morning was President Obama's impending address on the end of the American "combat mission" in Iraq.
Specifically, the anchors and their guests were discussing whether or not President Obama would "give credit where credit is due". The "credit" in this case, according to Fox News, is "due" to George W. Bush.
Since George W. Bush endorsed the strategy of the "surge" in Iraq in 2007 and since then-Senator Obama opposed said strategy, now-President Obama should focus his speech tonight on giving credit to George W. Bush and, presumably, asking all citizens for their forgiveness for his own lack of appreciation for the strategic genius of his predecessor.
To say that George W. Bush is due any credit vis a vis Iraq is to say that an arsonist deserves credit for pissing on a fire he has set.
It is also to fundamentally misunderstand what the Surge was and what it accomplished. The Surge was intended to mitigate the raging Sunni insurgency against American soldiers as well as the incipient civil war between Sunni and Shia.
The Surge did, indeed, halt the worst levels of violence in Iraq. But it did not do so by military victory or by changing hearts and minds. It did so by distributing pallets of shrink-wrapped 100 dollar bills to the people who had been killing American soldiers for 4 years.
The Surge was about buying loyalty from the enemy, simply bribing the enemy to behave a bit better. This is nothing new in the history of warfare, and in my mind its infinitely preferable to killing. But genius it ain't.
Mr. Bush does not deserve credit for ordering the surge, because the surge was simply a last-ditch effort to salvage the train wreck that Mr. Bush had unleashed. Again, if an arsonist pisses on his own fire in an attempt to put it out after it has already killed a few thousand people, that doesn't make him a hero.
If anyone deserves credit it is Mr. Obama, because he spoke out forcefully about the folly of the original invasion. But even Mr. Obama does not deserve much credit. Because he still won't speak the truth about Iraq.
We all know that at some point during his speech tonight our president will say something along these lines: "regardless of how we felt about the wisdom of invading Iraq, all Americans can agree that we owe a great debt to our military for protecting our freedoms".
And therein lies the lie. Our military certainly made enormous sacrifices. But none of us were made more free because of them. That is the ultimate tragedy. And until we can be honest about that, we haven't learned a thing.
When the Nazis' bombing blitz of London began to ease during the middle of World War II, Winston Churchill took to the airwaves and told his people that "this is not the end. Nor is it the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
The end of the beginning in the Iraq War came just 3 weeks after the invasion, when Saddam's statue was pulled down in what was a profoundly radical and inspiring moment, regardless of how one may feel about the war itself.
Many at that time said that the pulling down of the statue was the end, but it quickly became evident that it was simply the end of the beginning. What followed were years of insurgency and civil war which claimed the lives of 4,500 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
This week we witnessed the beginning of the end. The last combat troops left Iraq this week under cover of darkness, but also under the protection of the Iraqi Army. What the actual end will look like is anyone's guess. My personal guess is that it will never come, at least not in any guise distinguishable to our western eyes.
But what came in the 7 years in between the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end is the real story of the Iraq War. Many of the combat soldiers who left Iraq this week had not reached puberty when we invaded that country. So much time has elapsed that it is easy to forget the beginning.
And in the beginning was deception. The midwife of America's war in Iraq was all manner of lies and propaganda, followed by new lies to cover the old, the entire insidious architecture supported by torture, willful blindness, and credit cards.
Unfortunately, the war in Iraq was not unique to American history. Perhaps the most unique thing about it was George W. Bush.
In all previous American wars, there was a war party. The presidents who led America into its previous wars were not indispensable to the project. To give a few examples, the Civil War did not happen because of Lincoln; the Spanish-American War did not happen because of McKinley; the Korean War did not happen because of Truman.
It is easy to imagine other presidents making the same decisions that Lincoln, McKinley, and Truman made. But the Iraq War was different. No American president, historical or theoretical, would have invaded Iraq in 2003. Only George W. Bush would have done it.
This war was uniquely personal, uniquely non-democratic, bizarrely conceived, and shamefully executed. It was inseparable from the person and mind of George W. Bush; nobody else could have come up with it.
Bush, of course, acknowledged this dimension repeatedly, although perhaps subconsciously. "After all, this is the guy who tried to kill my dad". Remember that one?
The assassination plot against Bush's dad was purely mythical, invented by the vengeful and venal government of Kuwait after the first Iraq War. But we all know that this fact, even if Mr. Bush had it explained and proven to him, would have had precisely zero impact on him.
Perhaps this is why the war seemed to die and fall from orbit due to its own oppressive gravity as soon as Bush vacated the presidency. Mr. Bush was the alpha and omega of that war; without him the fire was deprived of all oxygen or, to be more precise, of all hot air.
The tragedy of this war is that the only person alive who could tell us why it happened is George W. Bush. But even he could never explain it. He was held hostage by his fantasies, neuroses, and delusions, and he still is. And so are we all.
A better writer than myself wrote of Bismarck: "the great leader, like the great artist, is the most inspired fantasist: he sees the object not only as it is, but as it can be, and persuades others to submit to his hallucination".
Perhaps the most poisonous legacy of the Iraq War was that Mr. Bush did not need to persuade others to submit to his hallucination; he needed only to convince himself. And the rest of us were just along for the ride.
The recent statements by several politicians (the founders would have been horrified to learn that "politician" is a job description) about the ambition-killing evils of unemployment insurance reminds me how ignorant most people are about what said insurance actually is.
What it is is insurance. It's right there in the name. Unemployment insurance. Certain politicians are claiming that the unemployed would rather collect benefits than find a job. They term these benefits "welfare". They paint a picture of people who would rather have other people pay for their upkeep than work for themselves.
Insurance, of course, is not welfare. Insurance is.....well, its insurance. You pay IN. And if the worst happens, the insurance company pays OUT.
With car insurance, you pay in. If your car crashes, the insurance company pays out. When an insured motorist has their car fixed after an accident, does anyone term that "welfare"?
With health insurance, you pay in. If your health crashes, the insurance company (in theory) pays out. When an insured mother gets to stay in the hospital for 2 days after giving birth, does anyone term that "welfare"?
With unemployment insurance, you pay in. If your job crashes, the insurance pays out. By what logic would anyone term that "welfare"?
This is not an argument against welfare; it's simply a statement of fact: unemployment insurance is NOT welfare. It's insurance. If you've never paid IN, you do not collect. Every person currently collecting unemployment is only doing so because they have already paid IN.
What is the logical conclusion of those who call unemployment insurance "welfare"? It is this: people should pay into the unemployment insurance pool, but they should never draw insurance payments FROM that pool.
So people should pay their car insurance, but when they're in an accident, they should pay for the damages from their own pocket. And presumably, they should keep paying into the pool as well.
To argue that people collecting unemployment are on welfare and have no incentive to work is like saying that people who have their car crashes covered by insurance are on welfare and have an incentive to keep getting in car accidents.
It is also equivalent to saying that health insurance is an incentive for people to get cancer. If health insurance pays out when people get sick, then presumably people will WANT to be sick. Does anyone believe that? Yes. Politicians.
It's bad enough that the United States has a shredded welfare system. It's bad enough that we force ourselves to pay protection money to private companies to guard against car crashes, diseases, or lost jobs.
What makes it even worse is when politicians castigate us for having the audacity to actually demand protection when the worst happens to us. They tell us that paying protection money is an incentive for us to crash our cars, break our bones, and lose our jobs.
By this logic, any person who buys life insurance is given an incentive to kill themselves....if that's the case, I can only hope that these venal politicians have life insurance.
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In a reminder that the past is never truly past, several U.S. senators this week debated the merits of re-evaluating the 14th amendment to our Constitution. In addition, a federal judge also revisited the 14th amendment for entirely different purposes.
The intention of the 14th amendment (before corporate lawyers sunk their claws into it) was to replace the law of blood with the law of the land.
Before the Civil War, the law of blood trumped the law of the land. The law of blood was dominant for far longer in other countries (Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia, etc). The law of blood basically holds that regardless of how long you have lived on the land, your liberties are based on your blood.
After the 14th amendment, the Constitution was (in theory) the law of the land. The 14th amendment aimed to destroy the law of blood by stating that any person born in the United States was inherently born with a non-negotiable array of rights, protections, and liberties, regardless of what genes did or did not flow through their blood.
Now, certain of our "leaders" are proposing that we remove this protection. Their intent is to deprive the American-born children of "illegals" of American citizenship. So, in other words, the law of blood would once again be paramount. The law of the land would not apply to people unless they passed the law of blood.
The 14th ammendment also came into play this week regarding gay marriage. A federal judge ruled that it was unconstitutional for the voters of California to vote to deprive gay people the right to marry.
This judge reminded us that democracy does mean majority rule, but it does NOT mean that the majority can vote to deprive any minority of equal protection under the law. When people vote to deprive gay people the same rights as heterosexuals, that is not democracy; that is mob rule.
Those who oppose giving citizenship to the native-born children of immigrants and those who oppose equal rights for gays are wrong twice-over.
Firstly, they are wrong morally. And secondly, they are wrong logically.
If we are to create whole classes of people who were born in the United States but who are not protected by the law of the land by virtue of having failed the law of blood, we are then creating whole classes of people who are non-citizens.
And if we are to create whole classes of non-citizens, why would we expect them to follow the laws of a land whose laws do not protect them? It cuts both ways; our government protects certain rights and in return demands certain loyalties.
If we do not extend protection and citizenship to certain people, what moral or legal or logical right do we have to demand their loyalty to the laws and government which exclude them?
Such bigotry does not make any of us more secure. It merely divides us against each other, castigating millions of us into a purgatorical limbo in which the government does not grant us its protection and does not deserve our loyalty.
Perhaps Jay-Z put it best. "This ain't black vs. white, my people, we off that / Please tell Bill O'Reilly to fall back / Tell Rush Limbaugh to get off my balls / This is 2010, not 1864."
People who know me know (hopefully) that I try not to be a pretentious person, and that I have no time for material or monetary measures of a person's worth. My car, my clothes, and my diet attest to this. But there is one area in which I am something of a snob.
I'm a snob when it comes to writing, in the sense that I use big and rare words to convey my thoughts rather than the far more conventional recourse to monosyllabic tripe and CAPITAL letters (if you didn't understand me the first time, LET ME YELL!)
I have been and remain inspired to appreciate language because of George Orwell, among others of course. I consider Orwell to have been the greatest English-language writer of the 20th century. His best writings, I have found, are not "1984" or "Animal Farm", but rather his nonfiction and journalism.
At any rate, I ran across this quote by Orwell today that sums up my attitude in this regard far more succinctly than I ever could. And keep in mind that this was written in 1946:
"A man may take to drink because he feels himself a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."
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