Friday, November 14, 2003
The Chickenhawks Come Home to Roost
Josh Marshall has a trenchant post up about the corner we've backed ourselves into in Iraq. He points out that in many ways this winter is a replay of last, with an isolated U.S. trying to persuade a skeptical world to share the burden of its imperial adventure, only this time the need is real, not theoretical. Unfortunately, we pretty much burned all our diplomatic bridges in between, and not just over Iraq: South Korea's reluctance to get involved is in no small measure the result of our high-handedness towards North Korea/South Korean rapprochement, for example. The Bushies, Marshall notes pungently, mistook "preeminence as omnipotence"; now we're all paying the price.
I'd like to add one more thread to Marshall's. First, the obvious: from the beginning, the hallmark of Bushism in all its forms has been a contempt for institutions, an impatience with process, a disregard for dissent. At one level, of course, it's because they are radicals, and show a radical's hostility to the system that they seek to destroy.
But even radicals can be competent; such radicals would recognize that the art of statecraft is one that applies to all governments, just like the law of gravity applies to all planets. The Bushies, it's been clear since at least 1990, disdained any such recognition that the world is a complicated place, and that the interlocking set of relationships that define world politics, however amoral and expedient, form an ecology that we tinker with, let alone break, at our peril.
This attitude is hardly surprising. These were, after all, people who, almost without exception, avoided any direct contact with the consequences of their own ideas, a character flaw most notoriously symbolized by their eagerness to have other people fight wars they supported, but also in their subsidized, think-tank backgrounds, and paradoxically anti-intellectual, ideologically driven outlooks.
Clinton, an intellectual, recognized the complexities of governance, and governed accordingly, to the frustration of even his supporters; so, too, did veteran and ex-CIA bureaucrat, George HW Bush. So while Shirk's future brain trust silently fumed under the latter, and openly loathed the former, they were held in check by the very institutions they despised.
In Shirk, however, the chickenhawks found their own useful idiot. Shirk not only lacked any appreciation of nuance in diplomacy, he was uninterested in acquiring it. Marinated in privilege, his class prejudices and intellectual sloth reinforced by the simplistic moral nostrums of philistine right-wing evangelism, Shirk's success in business and politics derived instead solely from his ability to keep his sponsors happy and get everybody out before the roof caved in (a talent the Bush family in general seem preternaturally blessed with). Self-reflection and humility are not marketable commodities among hucksters. In this, his cheerleading past was a pretty good prologue.
Shirk's deficiencies were abundantly clear to anyone who paid attention during Campaign 2000, yet, as Bob Somerby and Gene Lyons and a few others have pointed out, Shirk's very liabilities were transmuted by a puerile press corps into something approaching virtues. Drunk with utopian fantasies about the business cycle, enslaved to the cult of celebrity, and deranged by years of sexual McCarthyism and pseudo-scandal politics generally, the Fifth Estate pretty much decided that the Most Powerful Office on Earth could be run on autopilot--indeed would run better on autopilot, or at least in a manner congenial to the thumbs-up/thumbs-down, nuance-free media culture. Thus, what mattered in the new millennium was finding the right cheerleader to occupy this now largely ceremonial post. That the cerebral, technocratic Al Gore still managed to actually get 600,000 more votes than the cheerleader probably only confirmed his backers in their contempt for the popular intelligence.
Now, a year away from a referendum on this experiment in slash-and-burn governance, we are staring a bottomless fiscal hole, a steady stream of "transport tubes," near-complete international isolation, a bureaucratic revolt at CIA and State, deteroriating infrastructure, and the first net loss of jobs since Hoover, all amid a steady worsening of the conditions that preceded 9/11.
If this is success, I don't how much more of it we can stand.
I'd like to add one more thread to Marshall's. First, the obvious: from the beginning, the hallmark of Bushism in all its forms has been a contempt for institutions, an impatience with process, a disregard for dissent. At one level, of course, it's because they are radicals, and show a radical's hostility to the system that they seek to destroy.
But even radicals can be competent; such radicals would recognize that the art of statecraft is one that applies to all governments, just like the law of gravity applies to all planets. The Bushies, it's been clear since at least 1990, disdained any such recognition that the world is a complicated place, and that the interlocking set of relationships that define world politics, however amoral and expedient, form an ecology that we tinker with, let alone break, at our peril.
This attitude is hardly surprising. These were, after all, people who, almost without exception, avoided any direct contact with the consequences of their own ideas, a character flaw most notoriously symbolized by their eagerness to have other people fight wars they supported, but also in their subsidized, think-tank backgrounds, and paradoxically anti-intellectual, ideologically driven outlooks.
Clinton, an intellectual, recognized the complexities of governance, and governed accordingly, to the frustration of even his supporters; so, too, did veteran and ex-CIA bureaucrat, George HW Bush. So while Shirk's future brain trust silently fumed under the latter, and openly loathed the former, they were held in check by the very institutions they despised.
In Shirk, however, the chickenhawks found their own useful idiot. Shirk not only lacked any appreciation of nuance in diplomacy, he was uninterested in acquiring it. Marinated in privilege, his class prejudices and intellectual sloth reinforced by the simplistic moral nostrums of philistine right-wing evangelism, Shirk's success in business and politics derived instead solely from his ability to keep his sponsors happy and get everybody out before the roof caved in (a talent the Bush family in general seem preternaturally blessed with). Self-reflection and humility are not marketable commodities among hucksters. In this, his cheerleading past was a pretty good prologue.
Shirk's deficiencies were abundantly clear to anyone who paid attention during Campaign 2000, yet, as Bob Somerby and Gene Lyons and a few others have pointed out, Shirk's very liabilities were transmuted by a puerile press corps into something approaching virtues. Drunk with utopian fantasies about the business cycle, enslaved to the cult of celebrity, and deranged by years of sexual McCarthyism and pseudo-scandal politics generally, the Fifth Estate pretty much decided that the Most Powerful Office on Earth could be run on autopilot--indeed would run better on autopilot, or at least in a manner congenial to the thumbs-up/thumbs-down, nuance-free media culture. Thus, what mattered in the new millennium was finding the right cheerleader to occupy this now largely ceremonial post. That the cerebral, technocratic Al Gore still managed to actually get 600,000 more votes than the cheerleader probably only confirmed his backers in their contempt for the popular intelligence.
Now, a year away from a referendum on this experiment in slash-and-burn governance, we are staring a bottomless fiscal hole, a steady stream of "transport tubes," near-complete international isolation, a bureaucratic revolt at CIA and State, deteroriating infrastructure, and the first net loss of jobs since Hoover, all amid a steady worsening of the conditions that preceded 9/11.
If this is success, I don't how much more of it we can stand.
