One of the weirder spectacles of the past few years has been the enthusiasm for psychotic displays of violence shown by middle-aged pundits with no personal military experience. Here, for instance, is Tom Friedman, the tremendously influential New York Times columnist, explaining the Iraq war in 2003:
I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing
[…]
We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big state right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it.
[…]
What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?” You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow?
Well. Suck. On. This.
Okay.
That … was what this war was about. We could’ve hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.
It was a reiteration of a meme popular in the first half of the Bush years, a slightly more florid rendition of what right-wing pundit Jonah Goldberg admiringly called the “Ledeen Doctrine”. That is, Michael Ledeen, one of the key intellectuals behind the Bush administration, supposedly explained to the American Enterprise Institute that: “Every 10 years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”
In both versions, the theory’s explicitly gangsterish, the mindset of a mafia don breaking the leg of some hapless grocer. Yes, the poor schmuck might be behind on his protection money, but you do him over less to recoup those specific payments than because a good beating communicates something to the rest of the neighbourhood.
Sociopathic? Utterly. But leaving aside the politics of urging the sole superpower to run the world like a standover racket, there’s something utterly creepy about Friedman, p-rn star moustache abristle, taking such obvious pleasure in telling Iraqis to suck on things at gunpoint.
In that, however, Tom of Washington’s not alone.
This morning in The Australian , Greg Sheridan explains Obama’s key task as only Sheridan can. The President must, it transpires, make the world fear him.
“At some point,” he tells us, “Obama is going to have to do something seriously unpleasant to someone.”
Already, you can sense a lascivious tingle working its way up Sheridan’s leg as he imagines the world leader abandoning girlish concerns about climate change for the real business of dishing out punishments.
And that’s before our columnist starts imagining a President all dressed in leather.
Yes, leather. You see, for Sheridan, US politics should be understood in terms of the crappy ’50s sitcom Happy Days . Naturally, Obama’s the twink Richie Cunningham: he is, Sheridan says, “clean-cut, wholesome, an absolute goody-goody”. That’s a bad thing, obviously. Who wants goody-goody Richie when you can have the Fonz!
“Greased-back hair, always astride his outlaw motorbike, decked out in Marlon Brando T-shirt, Fonzie inspired fear and envy in men, and swoons among the gals.”
Be still, oh beating heart!
But, Sheridan explains, Fonzie’s not just the best President ever because he looks as good on his Harley as George Bush did on that aircraft carrier. No, “Fonzie” Fonzarelli understands what Obama Cunningham doesn’t — the importance of hitting people.
“You cannot imagine a deeper strategic insight,” says Sheridan.
Well, one supposes, it’s a progression, of a sort: if it was “suck on it” in 2003, we’ve moved to “sit on it” in 2009.
But, really: is this funny, sad or scary?
Everything that’s happened over the past six years — the mounds of corpses, the wars raging without end — and the manifold crises we face now, yet the foreign editor of our sole national paper still dreams of a President who’s a leather-clad bad boy.
It gets harder and harder to mourn the imminent death of print journalism.
“Tom of Washington”
Oh, eeeuw.
You forgot to put intellectual in quotes and follow it with a (sic), thus:
“Michael Ledeen, one of the key ‘intellectuals’ (sic) behind the Bush administration…”
Greg Sheridan tells us, “Obama is going to have to do something seriously unpleasant to someone.”
Perhaps Greg would like to volunteer to have something seriously unpleasant happen to him at the hands of Obama? Since it doesn’t seem to matter to whom the unpleasant thing happens. Seems very fair to me. Let’s bankrupt him, destroy his reputation, and prevent him from ever working again, all at the hands of a capricious state. Why not.
The right wing of course as described in this article simply are not interested in observing ‘the Golden Rule’ in the ethics of international relations. This was the kind of thinking that lead to WWI and WWII, and prompted a huge amount of analysis post-WWII in philosophical circles to try to understand what was going wrong, and to form a new ethics of international and indeed interpersonal relations, with work by people such as Hannah Arendt and Seyla Benhabib on the Habermasian ethics of communicative discourse.
Clearly the ‘intellectuals’ have never studied or considered this stuff, or choose to ignore it. If they have not studied it, and never considered this school of ethics, then they are clearly not intellectual by any definition of the word, just self-proclaimed token geniuses by the right, presumably.
In this light, the work of characters such as Tom Friedman is just a ‘feel good’ justification for performing acts and atrocities that, if we were children and the act scaled back to cruelty to a kitten or some other innocent animal, would have us soundly punished and sinbinned by our parents, acting ethically and justly. When we are adults, we can construct any manner of justification for bullyboy activities of the most shamefully geostrategic kind. The true history of the West’s and particularly US support for Saddam Hussein’s regime over a protracted period doesn’t seem to ever come out in these convenient revisionist short-term memory analyses. That Iraq of course had little or nothing to do with any acts of terror toward the US simply does not factor into the justificatory discourse. The hypocrisy of America’s longterm dealings with the Middle East for energy resources and turning a blind eye to Shariah law, patriarchy, barbaric cruelty of punishments, etc etc conveniently never gets a mention, nor the sale of biological, chemical and conventional weapons to selected clients around the world to help settle local disputes in line with America’s own interests in the regions and conveniently help settle the balance of payments against energy imports.
The questionable spirit of Anglosphere colonialism that caused the creation of the US over centuries appears to have sunk into the consciousness of the people as a permanent frontier society, including an acceptance of rough justice, occasionally getting the wrong guy, and the ends justifying the means.
In short, the right of the US and various News Ltd right wing journalists in its fraternal Anglo client states such as Australia are power-mad and morally insane. Remarks such as these really ought, as they are in present day Germany following the defeat and moral upbraiding of the Third Reich in WWII, to result in prosecution and sanctions for public incitement and the promotion of warfare, of attempting to brainwash the public into accepting morally unacceptable actions by repeating them often enough in print.
The original sentiments refracted in this piece are of course by no means the sentiments held in international relations academic circles — it’s just News Ltd-quality pablum for the masses. Dozens of easily obtained journal articles by true intellectuals and scholars say otherwise.
Further reading:
http://www.allbusiness.com/public-administration/national-security-international/1085847-1.html
http://www.meforum.org/37/the-wacky-world-of-french-intellectuals
Good article, as long as we support the sociopaths, under the guise of the American alliance, we are the same as them. I only hope that Obama can stop his hounds of war from crushing Venezuela, next on the list. There is some really good stuff happening there which is providing hope to all of us lefties that Socialism can work when power is given to the bottom rung of the ladder. The USA cannot allow this to continue as it the destroys the primacy of the market, capitalist economy. I urge you all to go and have a look while its still there.
Mmm, I heard $20 trillion has been spent rescuing the market based developed economies recently. More than the cost of virtually anything in modern history to date. Really. That’s not much of an example Mr USA to be proud of Mr USA.
Oh on the Fonz metaphor I remember the episode when he went back to school just for a bit, and was totally neurotic about just getting a pass thinking he’d failed a test, while studious Richie, Ralph and Potsy all had a doddle. The fragile tough guy with the ego issues. Yes he was tough but all he really wanted was a 50 pass grade. Also he could do special things like make the music box play with a tap. There’s nothing novel or special about slaughtering people, it’s as old as humanity.
By the way Obama already has via military drones killed many people in his name.
This quote from Leeden always amuses me:
“Every 10 years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”
Someone needs to remind them that every time they try to do this – they lose BADLY, EVERY TIME.
Seriously, think about it and rattle them off:
Korea – never actually ended and exists in a continuing stalemate
Cuba -Bay of Pigs, Nuff said
VietNam – Lost and still suffering the consequences of a misadventure that ended in 1973
Iraq – Lost
Afghanistan – In the process of losing.
The US has not actually won a conflict on their terms since the end of WWII (I dont count Grenada).