Patriotism: Love of Country or the last Refuge of Scoundrels?

In simple terms, patriotism means loving and revering one’s country. Patriotism can take many forms. During the Vietnam War, for instance, John McCain found it preferable to endure torture and captivity rather than dishonor the uniform he wore and the ideals he lived by.

The Vietnam War, of course, was controversial. Many of those who protested against America’s involvement in South East Asia were motivated by patriotism too since they believed the war was a betrayal of America’s values. Forty years later, the arrogance and folly of that ill-fated war seem apparent even to its architects (such as Robert McNamara). Criticizing one’s country, too, can be a profound act of patriotism, particularly when a mob of pundits, politicians, and the hoi palloi threaten to stampede the lonely dissenters who have only truth on their side.

One of the solitary dissenters who was trampled in the run up to the Iraq war was weapons inspector Scott Ritter. I remember vividly watching a talk Ritter gave on the eve of the invasion as he emphatically insisted there were no WMD in Iraq. Though I remained agnostic on the question of WMD I opposed the war against Iraq for three reasons: 1) I believed the Bush administration was pursuing an imperial agenda that would prove tragic for the United States. 2) Unless the international community had a stake in the outcome I believed the venture would be more likely to fail than succeed. And 3) I believed the Bush administration did not appreciate the sectarian divisions in Iraq.

The demagoguery used to sell “Operation Iraqi Freedom” was nauseating. Pundits like William Kristol impugned the patriotism of those who questioned the war. Like Cassandra, I felt I sense of foreboding as the Pollyannaish cheerleaders bashed opponents of the war as appeasers and defeatists.

An axis-of-obtuseness (Fox News, the Weekly Standard, the Bush administration) drowned out the few lonely voices of reason that attempted to warn the public. The Shakespearean scholar Harold Bloom recognized in Bush – our “boy emperor” – a figure at once tragic and farcical. Al Gore, a Renaissance (man especially compared to mediocrities that mocked him) spelled out with prescient lucidity the case against launching a preemptive war with Iraq. And Barrack Obama, an up and coming state senator from Illinois, had the wisdom to recognize a bad idea when he saw it.

There were others, of course, such as General Anthony Zinni, who believed Iraq was the “wrong war at the wrong time.” But by and large, those with the greatest zeal and least understanding pitched their case to the lowest common denominator and carried the day: Mission Accomplished.

If only morality (and patriotism) was as simple as the president determined to vanquish evil by spreading liberty to the Four Corners of the Middle East. History, Bush believes, is a Manachean contest between the forces of freedom and tyranny. Bush is a man without a tragic sense. He envisions himself as the man in the white hat in a B western, but he is blissfully unaware that he inhabits a Shakespearean universe where noble intentions can breed moral catastrophes complete with torture chambers and precipitous national declines.

To put it charitably, Bush has about as much business being president as Dan Quayle would have competing in a spelling bee. Watching the Bush administration govern is about as cringe producing as imagining the cast of Hee Haw performing Rigolletto. The discerning reader, incidentally, will note that the dramatic irony in Verdi’s great opera is that the jester kills the very thing he loves most – his daughter – just as Bush has single-handedly destroyed the country he no doubt loves. The ruinous debt, the 7.6% inflation rate, stagflation, the plummeting dollar, the ill-advised and ineptly managed war in Iraq, the botched handling of Katrina, and the numerous torture, abuse, and lawbreaking scandals that have sullied America’s reputation precipitated one of the most precipitous national declines ever witnessed.

I don’t doubt Bush’s patriotism, or Donald Rumsfeld’s, or Alberto Gonazales’ . . . But there is ample evidence to doubt their character and their competence. The philosopher Hannah Arendt observed that the first thing the Nazis did as they consolidated power was to question patriotism of their political opponents. The would-be masters of the universe at Enron pursued a similar tack; anyone who raised doubts about the company’s accounting or business practices was branded as disloyal. Not surprisingly, both Herman Goering and Ken Lay insisted they would be vindicated in the end. To be a fool and rogue at the same time, their countries and companies may crumble, but their unique wisdom allows them to discern what others cannot: thirty, nay fifty years hence History will celebrate the choices and accomplishments they alone could make. It is all about them.

Sphere: Related Content

William Kristol and Fairy Tales

William Kristol is to serious political commentary what Liberace is to classical music; sure, he's got some talent, but the closer you listen to him the worse he sounds. Kristol, of course, has been one of the most indefatigable cheerleaders for the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. Recently, he has taken to chastising leading Democrats for opposing the so-called surge, contending that Bush’s decision to increase the number of troops in Baghdad was an act of great political courage that has turned the tide in Iraq.

As someone who opposed the war – but after much agonizing reluctantly concluded that the surge was probably the best of our really bad options – I am deeply skeptical of Kristol’s glib assessment that the surge is in the process of being vindicated. Put simply, the surge has bought the Bush administration some valuable time, but the underlying conditions in Iraq remain anything but conducive to a national reconciliation.

The inherently limited duration of the surge has brought a short-term reduction in violence, but there are numerous reasons to believe the tactical momentum General Petraeus has achieved will prove to be something of a mirage. For one thing, nearly every force allied against the United States – from Sadr’s militia to al-Qaeda in Iraq – has an incentive to lay low before the U.S. is forced to reduce troop levels sometime later in 2008. Second, The Sunni militias we are arming to fight al-Qaeda now may turn their weapons against the Iraqi government later. And third, so long as corruption remains rampant, and the disbursement of political power and Iraqi oil revenues is based on tribal affiliations, then Iraq is likely to remain a dysfunctional state. U.S. troops, in short, are likely to be tied down in Iraq for decades in order to prevent the country from disintegrating into a Hobbesian nightmare.

Kristol chides Democrats for failing to "celebrate" progress in Iraq. I have to say I find Kristol’s snide obtuseness here morally repugnant. Four million Iraqis have been displaced from their homes, between 160,000 and 600,000 Iraqis have been killed, and "success" has been defined down so much that achieving it may mean little more than mitigating the threats unleashed by the invasion and botched occupation itself. Put simply, Kristol resembles nothing so much as an analyst who hyped Enron’s stock and then cleared his conscience by recommending investors could recoup their losses by selling their certificates on e-Bay.

Here, it is worth remembering that invading and occupying Iraq has not advanced America’s strategic interests. On the contrary, morally, fiscally, and militarily the occupation has been a catastrophe that has isolated, drained, divided, and diverted the United States in ways that have diminished its capacity to respond to other vital challenges. For instance, it has impeded our efforts to capture or kill bin Laden, which would have been a surefire way of delivering a knockout blow to al-Qaeda. Instead, the Bush administration led America astray with its quixotic fairly tale of turning Iraq into a beacon of democracy that would supposedly inspire a regional transformation in the Middle East).

Bush has bet not only his legacy on succeeding in Iraq, but also America’s future. The emergence of democracy, however, takes at minimum a generation, but by that time the nuclear genie may be out of the bottle as Islamic extremists based in Pakistan, Europe, or even the United States may have already detonated a WMD in a major American city. The enormous resources in blood and treasure America invested in Iraq may easily come to naught overnight. The historian Arnold Toynbee would have recognized the folly of the Bush administration’s faith-based foreign policy. After all, as he observed societies that reform themselves are more apt to succeed than societies that attempt to reform the rest of the world. If the past is prologue, Cassandra’s pessimism will prove more prophetic than the Pollyannaish fairy tale that that the Neocons like Kristol sold Bush on.

Sphere: Related Content