Saturday, October 12, 2002

Remora

On the subject of Iraq, the two major Washington newspapers, and the two major Washington journals of opinion (The Weekly Standard and The New Republic) are all loudly belligerent. While the WP and The New Republic are (reluctantly, inconsistently) "liberal" journals, and the Washington Times and the WS are boldly and bluntly conservative, they are all agreed that we have to go to war right now, and no fooling around.

The Ithaca, New York city council has voted not to go to war with Iraq. That is an entirely appropriate step, since the war is less the U.S. versus Iraq than D.C. vs. Iraq. Rarely has one locale been able, by its own feverish will, to pull a whole country behind it. But D.C. has become a place of fevers; fevers from which the rest of the country suffers. Who wanted the years of impeachment? Who wanted Whitewater? D.C. Watergate, another D.C. fever, at least caught on in the rest of the country, so that by the time it was over, the whole country really cared. This time, the whole country supports the war only insofar as they reluctantly have to pay attention to it. There was no groundswell of revulsion against Saddam Hussein going on out there in Mississippi, or Texas, or even New York.

As I remember the days leading up to the Gulf war, the country was passionately engaged. I was passionately opposed to it, marched against it, and remember the number of people who supported the war. Now, I was in the minority, then, and according to the polls, I'm in the minority now. But those polls are screwy. They record more fluctuation than support. And, talking to people, I don't feel, even among Bush's supporters, any strong feeling about Iraq. This war is not being driven by the popular will, in any shape or form.

Conservative boilerplate, in the days of Nixon, was that Washington was out of touch -- in fact, the very name of the city, rolling off the lips of your average Southern demagogue, was synonymous with Gog -- or is it Magog? In any case, one of those places that one knows the Anti-christ right at home in. This was before the Southern demagogues took the capital. It has been some twenty-two years since the forces of Reagan stormed the place. Although the conservative wind-up sometimes weedily harks back to the good old Washington Babylon routine, conservatives know that they have finally become the Washington establishment. Reagan's issues have become the default issues: welfare, they are against it; a strong defense, they are for it; they want the muscular foreign policy and no weepers, and there is polite tittering when Senator Byrd takes the floor to quaintly talk about the powers of congress.

The sheer lunacy of D.C. -- the way it brands people, immediately, as serious on the strength of one set of conformities, and dubs people fringe for representing any view that isn't moderately conservative to conservative, has been shown by two things recently. One was the reaction to Al Gore's Iraq speech -- there was an almost audible shifting in the seats in D.C., and then the condemnations flowed, until they became the acceptable version of the story -- which became a story about the race for the Democratic presidential nominee, since D.C. had long ago decided that Gore's objections to belligerence were, in themselves, fringe-ish. The other is the blase reaction to such utter lunacy as is expressed in this NYT article about Bush's "plan" for an occupied Iraq.


"U.S. Has a Plan to Occupy Iraq, Officials Report

By DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 � The White House is developing a detailed plan, modeled on the postwar occupation of Japan, to install an American-led military government in Iraq if the United States topples Saddam Hussein, senior administration officials said today.The plan also calls for war-crime trials of Iraqi leaders and a transition to an elected civilian government that could take months or years."

The NYT is expanding on an earlier report in last Sunday's LA Times that goes to the same territory.

LI gets into a sort of stylistic problem with stories like these. We have given a good look around at weblogs, and we've been struck by the pall of insult that hangs over the political ones. Pervasive invective diminishes the shock it aims to convey. Indignation, rather than revenge, is the dish that is best served cold. But LI can't read about the U.S. Army calmly occupying Iraq for a couple of years (like our successful occupation of Vietnam?) distributing the oil wealth, laying down a constitution, and trying Iraqi leaders for war crimes (say what? are the judges then going to try themselves, for aiding and abetting?) without spontaneously switching into insult mode. And this, this is the kind of thing D.C. takes seriously.
I can't think of a worse nightmare than a dream you can't get out of.
This is that nightmare.







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