in today's NY Times is so powerful and necessary, while Obama's
speech too forgettable to be long of interest or scrutiny. -Ed
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/opinion/05rich.html?th&emc=th
Freedom's Just Another Word
By Frank Rich
NY Times Op-Ed: September 5, 2010
AMONG the few scraps of news to emerge from Barack Obama's vacation was the
anecdote of a Martha's Vineyard bookseller handing him an advance copy of
Jonathan Franzen's new novel, "Freedom." The book has since rocketed up the
Amazon best-seller list, powered by reviews even more ecstatic than those
for Franzen's last novel, "The Corrections." But I doubt that the president,
a fine writer who draws sustenance from great American writers, has read
"Freedom" yet. If he had, he never would have delivered that bloodless
speech on Tuesday night.
What was so grievously missing from Obama's address was any feeling for what
has happened to our country during the seven-and-a-half-year war whose "end"
he was marking. That legacy of anger and grief is what "Freedom" mainlines
to its readers. In chronicling one Midwestern family as it migrates from St.
Paul to Washington during the 9/11 decade, Franzen does for our traumatic
time what Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities" did for the cartoonish
go-go 1980s. Or perhaps, more pertinently, what "The Great Gatsby" did for
the ominous boom of the 1920s. The heady intoxication of freedom is
everywhere in "Freedom," from extramarital sexual couplings to the consumer
nirvana of the iPod to Operation Iraqi Freedom itself. Yet most everyone,
regardless of age or calling or politics, is at war - not with terrorists,
but with depression, with their consciences and with one another.
This mood has not lifted and may be thickening as we trudge toward Year 10
in Afghanistan. But Obama only paid it lip service. It's a mystery why a
candidate so attuned to the nation's pulse, most especially on the matter of
war, has grown tone deaf in office. On Tuesday, Obama asked the country to
turn the page on Iraq as if that were as easy as, say, voting for him in
2008. His brief rhetorical pivot from the war to the economy only raised the
question of why the crisis of joblessness has not merited a prime-time Oval
Office speech of its own.
That Obama did consider Iraq worthy of that distinction - one heretofore
shared only by the BP oil spill - was hardly justified by his tepid
pronouncements of progress ("credible elections that drew a strong turnout")
or his tidy homilies about the war's impact. "Our unity at home was tested,"
he said, as if all those bygones were now bygones and all the toxins
unleashed by this fiasco had miraculously evaporated once we drew down to
50,000 theoretically non-combat troops.
Americans are less forgiving. In recent polls, 60 percent of those surveyed
thought the war in Iraq was a mistake, 70 percent thought it wasn't worth
American lives, and only a quarter believed it made us safer from terrorism.
This sour judgment is entirely reality-based. The war failed in all its
stated missions except the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
While we were distracted searching for Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass
destruction, Iran began revving up its actual nuclear program and Osama bin
Laden and his fanatics ran free to regroup in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We
handed Al Qaeda a propaganda coup by sacrificing America's signature values
on the waterboard. We disseminated untold billions of taxpayers' dollars
from Baghdad's Green Zone, much of it cycled corruptly through
well-connected American companies on no-bid contracts, yet Iraq still
doesn't
have reliable electricity or trustworthy security. Iraq's "example of
freedom," as President Bush referred to his project in nation building and
democracy promotion, did not inspire other states in the Middle East to
emulate it. It only perpetuated the Israeli-Palestinian logjam it was
supposed to help relieve.
For this sad record, more than 4,400 Americans and some 100,000 Iraqis (a
conservative estimate) paid with their lives. Some 32,000 Americans were
wounded, and at least two million Iraqis, representing much of the nation's
most valuable human capital, went into exile. The war's official cost to
U.S. taxpayers is now at $750 billion.
Of all the commentators on the debacle, few speak with more eloquence or
credibility than Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and international
relations at Boston University who as a West Point-trained officer served in
Vietnam and the first gulf war and whose son, also an Army officer, was
killed in Iraq in 2007. Writing in The New Republic after Obama's speech, he
decimated many of the war's lingering myths, starting with the fallacy,
reignited by the hawks taking a preposterous victory lap last week, that
"the surge" did anything other than stanch the bleeding from the
catastrophic American blundering that preceded it. As Bacevich concluded:
"The surge, now remembered as an epic feat of arms, functions chiefly as a
smokescreen, obscuring a vast panorama of recklessness, miscalculation and
waste that politicians, generals, and sundry warmongers are keen to forget."
Bacevich also wrote that "common decency demands that we reflect on all that
has occurred in bringing us to this moment." Americans' common future
demands it too. The war's corrosive effect on the home front is no less
egregious than its undermining of our image and national security interests
abroad. As the Pentagon rebrands Operation Iraqi Freedom as Operation New
Dawn - a "name suggesting a skin cream or dishwashing liquid," Bacevich
aptly writes - the whitewashing of our recent history is well under way. The
price will be to keep repeating it.
We can't afford to forget now that the single biggest legacy of the Iraq war
at home was to codify the illusion that Americans can have it all at no
cost. We willed ourselves to believe Paul Wolfowitz when he made the absurd
prediction that Iraq's oil wealth would foot America's post-invasion bills.
We were delighted to accept tax cuts, borrow other countries' money, and run
up the federal deficit long after the lure of a self-financing war was
unmasked as a hoax. The cultural synergy between the heedless
irresponsibility we practiced in Iraq and our economic collapse at home
could not be more naked. The housing bubble, inflated by no-money-down
mortgage holders on Main Street and high-risk gamblers on Wall Street, was
fueled by the same greedy disregard for the laws of fiscal gravity that
governed the fight-now-pay-later war.
Our attitude toward the war's human cost was no less cavalier. We were all
too content to let a volunteer army fight our battles out of sight and out
of mind, on a fictional pretext yoked to a military strategy premised on a
cakewalk. For too long we looked the other way as the coffins arrived in
Dover off camera in the shroud of night, as the maimed endured inhumane
treatment in military hospitals at home, and as the Iraqi refugees who aided
Operation Iraqi Freedom at their own peril were denied the freedom to seek a
safe haven in our country.
Both President Obama and Glenn Beck, in his "Restoring Honor" rally in
Washington last weekend, were fulsome in their praise of the troops, as well
they should have been. But the disconnect between the civilian public,
including the war's die-hard advocates on the right, and those doing the
fighting remains as large today as ever. As one Iraq war vet e-mailed to me
after hearing Beck's patriotic sermons: "What does gathering in D.C. do for
the troops?" He was appalled at the self-regard of those who thought their
jingoistic rally would help returning troops abandoned by the military's
"criminally poor mental health care" or save any soldier who was "two
seconds away from getting his leg blown off by an I.E.D."
The other American casualties of Iraq include the credibility of both
political parties, neither of which strenuously questioned the rush to war
and both of which are still haunted by that failure, and of the news media,
which barely challenged the White House's propaganda about Saddam's imminent
mushroom clouds. Many pundits, quite a few of them liberals, stoked the war
fever as well. Some eventually acknowledged getting it wrong, though in most
cases they stopped short of apologizing for their failures of judgment and
their abdication of journalistic skepticism about the government's case for
war.
Even now those think-tank types who kept seeing light at the end of the
Iraqi tunnel are ubiquitous on television and op-ed pages making similar
stay-the-course prognostications about Afghanistan. Their embarrassing track
records may have temporarily vanished into the great American memory hole,
but actions do have consequences, and there must be an accounting. America
does have a soul, and, as Franzen so powerfully dramatizes in "Freedom,"
when that soul is violated, we are paralyzed until we set it right.
And yet here we are, slouching toward yet another 9/11 anniversary, still
waiting for a correction, with even our president, an eloquent Iraq war
opponent, slipping into denial. Of all the pro forma passages in Obama's
speech, perhaps the most jarring was his entreaty that Iraq's leaders "move
forward with a sense of urgency to form an inclusive government that is
just, representative and accountable." He might as well have been talking
about the poisonous political deadlock in Washington. At that moment, there
was no escaping the tragic fact that instead of bringing American-style
democracy and freedom to Iraq, the costly war we fought there has, if
anything, brought the bitter taste of Iraq's dysfunction to America.
No comments:
Post a Comment