The New Republic's Spencer Ackerman has an excellent article in the current issue about the conservative tendency to blame opponents of misguided wars for US failure, which leads to the demonization of dissent that I've documented so often since 9/11. Here's how his piece begins:
At the beginning of August, President Bush introduced a war-weary American public to an old conservative slander disguised as a new approach to the Iraq war. Shifting from his earlier rhetoric of optimism, he gave a series of election-timed speeches that were noticeably grim. Bush no longer emphasized the prospects of success; rather, he spoke of the danger of defeat. "Some politicians look at our efforts in Iraq and see a diversion from the war on terror," he said in a speech late last month. "If America were to pull out before Iraq can defend itself, the consequences would be absolutely predictable--and absolutely disastrous." The villains responsible for such a disaster, his surrogates pointed out, wouldn't be the insurgents in Baghdad or Falluja, but rather the Democrats in Washington, D.C., whom House Majority Leader John Boehner helpfully described as "more interested in protecting the terrorists than protecting the American people."
This latest political tactic has captured the conservative mood perfectly. In June 2005, The Wall Street Journal editorial page declared that "where the terrorists are gaining ground is in Washington." Recently, this tune has become a chorus. In August, The Weekly Standard portrayed Connecticut Senate candidate Ned Lamont as the perfect embodiment of a fanatical antiwar sentiment sweeping the left. Its September 4 cover story, written by Harvard's William J. Stuntz (who is also a tnr contributor) asked "will we choose to win in iraq?" as if a mere preference for victory could win a war. National Review, for its part, hosted a symposium on Iraq in its September 11 issue, in which not a single contributor recommended withdrawal. Instead, Robert D. Kaplan noted that the essential questions on Iraq were "homefront perceptions and a willingness to win"; Michael Rubin, a former Bush Pentagon analyst, seconded the notion, declaring, "The U.S. is losing in Iraq because American politicians and the general public have not decided they want or need to win." Somehow, conservatives have come to believe that the main impediment to America's battlefield fortunes exists not in Iraq, but in Cambridge, Berkeley, and the Upper West Side.
On the right, the latter half of 2006 is feeling a lot like 1968, the year that the American public finally lost faith in the Vietnam war. And, just as they did then, conservatives are turning causality on its head: People aren't growing disillusioned with the war because we're not winning it; we're not winning because people have grown disillusioned. After Vietnam, this analysis enabled the right to avoid the agonizing reappraisal of U.S. foreign policy that has been that war's legacy for liberalism and the Democratic Party.
But avoidance has its consequences as well. It's true enough that, for more than 30 years, the left has not infrequently suffered from "Vietnam syndrome"--the assumption that any military engagement will be a moral disaster and a potential quagmire. But, though it has been less examined, the lesson the right took from Vietnam--that the true danger to national security is not misguided wars, but overzealous opposition to misguided wars--is, if anything, more dangerous. Call it the Other Vietnam Syndrome.
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