Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Beware the Iraqi
boomerang By Ira Chernus
war in Iraq itself is, by now,
widely rejected, the basic plot outline embedded
in the president's stories remains largely intact.
In the mainstream media, and around the
US, questions about Iraq are still framed within
the narrative of a grand, though badly executed,
project to bring democracy and stability to a
benighted land (and of the Iraqis' inability to
grasp the United States' gift of
democracy or an American
naivety in believing an Arab land could possibly
be ready for such a gift).
The news
stories and political debate in Washington are
still all about the US somehow being responsible
for protecting the Iraqis from chaos (even if it's
chaos the US in fact created). They're about
fulfilling a responsibility, finishing what the US
started, not to speak of the unquestioned need to
go to distant places to protect Americans' own
homeland from the ever-present threat of
terrorism.
There's good reason to see this
whole line of thinking as bogus, but thoughtful
analysts who explain why can barely get their
voices heard, much less be taken seriously.
Identity crisis in a losing war
By now, in the midst of policy and
military disaster, victory culture has narrowed to
"supporting our troops". Congress cannot de-fund
the war because lawmakers fear the ultimate charge
of betrayal, a congressional "stab in the back"
for failing to "support our troops". The obvious
logical response - "the best way to support our
troops is to bring them home to their loved ones"
- doesn't cut it in today's political climate.
With not a shred of victory in sight, "our troops"
have become the prime symbol of both American
virtue and insecurity, the prime reason to stay in
Iraq now that every other publicly ballyhooed
reason has disappeared.
That's an old
story. Ever since the Minutemen (mid-17th
century), soldiers have often been iconic emblems
of everything that was imagined as pure, innocent
and vulnerable about the United States. There's
even a history of portraying the American fighting
man as a Christ-figure - a staple of Vietnam
movies from Sergeant Elias in Platoon to
Rambo.
Now, who can deny that the United
States' "kids" in Iraq are, by and large, decent
and well-meaning or that they face terrible risks
daily? They are the constant heroes in stories of
virtue, innocence and insecurity that fill the
media, stories usually detached from any political
context, as if Iraq were merely a stage without
much scenery and lacking all plot on which "our
troops" continuously perform their heroic,
sometimes almost mythic, deeds. And those media
stories make the image of a virtuous, innocent and
insecure United States eminently believable - but
only so long as US troops are deployed in harm's
way.
For the broad center of the US
public, "supporting our troops" also means
supporting some version, however attenuated, of
victory culture. By now, vast numbers of Americans
realize that the US surely will win no real
victory in Iraq. Who is even sure what winning
there might mean? But whatever the stumbles, our
war stories are supposed to have some kind of
happy ending. Every generation sent to war is
supposed to be "the greatest".
The
ambivalence lurking in the polls suggests that
many Americans want it both ways. The war should
end quickly, but somehow with victory culture if
not still burning brightly, at least flickering,
as the birthright Americans demand.
Awash
in all this ambiguity, the broad political center
is in a terrible bind when it comes to policy
choices. A prompt phased withdrawal offers the
promise of something like the formula that Nixon
offered in the 1968 election campaign (but never
intended to deliver): "peace with honor" - in
other words, something, anything, that might be
packaged as less than a defeat.
It would,
however, be hard to avoid seeing any kind of
withdrawal from Iraq as a retreat under fire, as a
quitting of the field of battle, as an admission
that the US cannot always save faraway people in
faraway places. That, too, would call into
question all the traditional stories that are
still so widely seen as the bulwark of American
identity.
When a whole nation has to cope
with an identity crisis, when it has to struggle
to believe in narratives that were once
self-evidently meaningful, there is no telling
what might happen.
There's already a hot
debate - a blame game - brewing about who lost
Iraq. The public may well put the blame on the
Bush administration, or even on the whole idea of
aggressive war as the royal path to domestic
security, especially since Iraq can't be easily
written off as a one-time disaster. It is the
second massive US failure in war in a generation.
And it's a lot harder to put two failures behind
you. So there is real reason to hope that
Americans won't be fooled again, that this fiasco
will breed a deep and enduring resistance to the
use of military force abroad.
On the other
hand, the very fact that Iraq is a second
humiliation may make it all the more urgent for
many Americans to put it behind them, to deny the
painful reality. The frustration over not getting
the ending the US deserves remains palpable. And
it's only likely to rise as the situation worsens.
So the public could in the postwar years just as
easily put the blame where Reagan put it after
Vietnam - on "the purveyors of weakness"
(oppositional, incompetent or micromanaging
politicians and bureaucrats, the media, the
anti-war movement) - and turn back to the
Reaganite (and neo-conservative) mantra of "peace
and security through strength".
Then the
US public will be told that Iraq, too, was just an
aberration, a well-intentioned war handled with a
staggering level of incompetence that simply got
out of control. Those who don't want to repeat the
experience, who prefer to try other paths to
global security, will be told they are infected
with the Iraq syndrome. And the prescription for a
cure will inevitably be military buildup, imperial
war and, of course, the possibility of both
"kicking" the Iraq syndrome and welcoming US
troops home in the sort of triumph they so richly
deserve.
Put the history of the Vietnam
syndrome together with the enduring appeal of
America's victory culture, and it's easy to see
how the Iraq syndrome could boomerang too.
Boomerangs can easily catch you unaware and give
you quite a smack. When one might be coming up
behind you, it pays to stay very alert.
Ira Chernus is professor of
religious studies at the University of Colorado at
Boulder and author of Monsters to Destroy: The
Neo-conservative War on Terror and Sin. He can
be contacted at chernus@colorado.edu.
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