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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Finding home-grown
back-stabbers By William J
Astore
The world's finest military
launches a highly coordinated shock-and-awe attack
that shows enormous initial progress. There's talk
of the victorious troops being home for Christmas.
But the war unexpectedly drags on. As fighting
persists into a third, and then a fourth year,
voices are heard calling for negotiations, even
"peace without victory". Dismissing such peaceniks
and critics as defeatists, a conservative and
expansionist regime - led by a
figurehead who often resorts
to simplistic slogans and his Machiavellian
sidekick who is considered the brains behind the
throne - calls for one last surge to victory.
Unbeknownst to the people on the home front,
however, this duo has already prepared a seductive
and self-exculpatory myth in case the surge fails.
The United States in 2007? No, Wilhelmine
Germany in 1917 and 1918, as its military
dictators, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and
his loyal second, General Erich Ludendorff, pushed
Germany toward defeat and revolution in a
relentless pursuit of victory in World War I.
Having failed with their surge strategy on the
Western Front in 1918, they nevertheless succeeded
in deploying a stab-in-the-back myth, or
Dolchstosslegende, that shifted blame for
defeat from themselves and Rightist politicians to
Social Democrats and others allegedly responsible
for losing the war by their failure to support the
troops at home.
The German Army knew it
was militarily defeated in 1918. But this was an
inconvenient truth for Hindenburg and the Right,
so they crafted a new "truth": that the troops
were "unvanquished in the field". So powerful did
these words become that they would be engraved in
stone on many a German war memorial.
It's
a myth we ourselves are familiar with. As South
Vietnam was collapsing in 1975, Army Colonel Harry
G Summers, Jr, speaking to a North Vietnamese
counterpart, claimed the US military had never
lost a battle in Vietnam. Perhaps so, the NVA
colonel replied, "but it is also irrelevant".
Summers recounts his conversation approvingly,
without irony, in his book On Strategy: A
Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War. For him,
even if we lost the war, our Army proved itself
"unbeatable".
Though Summers' premise was
- and remains - dangerously misleading, it
reassured the true believers who ran, and continue
to run, our military. Those military men who were
less convinced of our "unbeatable" stature tended
to keep their own counsel. Their self-censorship,
coupled with wider institutional self-deception,
effectively opened the door to exculpatory myths.
A new American stab-in-the-back?
Warnings about a new stab-in-the-back myth
may seem premature or overheated at this moment in
the Iraq War. Yet, if the history of the original
version of this myth is any guide, the opposite is
true. They are timely precisely because the
Dolchstosslegende was not a post-war
concoction, but an explanation cunningly, even
cynically, hatched by Rightists in Germany before
the failure of the desperate, final "victory
offensive" of 1918 became fully apparent. Although
Hindenburg's dramatic testimony in November 1919 -
a full year after the armistice that ended the war
- popularized the myth in Germany, it caught fire
precisely because the tinder had been laid to dry
two years earlier.
It may seem farfetched
to compare a Prussian military dictatorship and
its self-serving lies to the current Bush
administration. Yet I'm not the first person to
express concern about the emergence of our very
own Iraqi Dolchstosslegende. Back in 2004,
Matthew Yglesias first brought up the possibility.
Last year, in Harper's Magazine, Kevin Baker
detailed the history of the stab-in-the-back,
suggesting that Bush's Iraqi version was already
beginning to germinate early in 2005, when news
from Iraq turned definitively sour. And this
October, in The Nation, Eric Alterman warned that
the Bush administration was already busily sowing
the seeds of this myth. Other Iraqi myth-trackers
have included Gary Kamiya at Salon.com, and Jeremy
Brecher and Brendan Smith at Commondreams.org.
Just this August, Thomas Ricks, Washington Post
columnist and author of the bestselling book,
Fiasco, worried publicly about whether the
military itself wasn't already embracing elements
of the myth whose specific betrayers would include
"weasely politicians" (are there any other kind?)
and a "media who undercut us by focusing on the
negative".
Is an American version of this
myth really emerging then? Let's listen in on a
recent Jim Lehrer interview with Senator John
McCain, who, while officially convinced that the
President's surge plan in Iraq was working,
couldn't seem to help talking about how we might
yet lose. His remarks quickly took a disturbing
turn as he pointed out that our Achilles' heel in
Iraq is … well, we the people of the United States
and our growing impatience with the war. And the
historical analogy he employed was Vietnam, the
catalyst for the deployment of the previous
American Dolchstosslegende.
While
the Vietnam War was disastrous, McCain conceded,
our military had - he argued - turned the tide
after the enemy's Tet Offensive in 1968 and the
replacement of General William Westmoreland with
General Creighton Abrams as commander of our
forces there. Precisely at that tipping-point
moment, he insisted, the American people, their
patience exhausted, had lost their will to win.
For McCain, there really was a light at the end of
that Vietnamese tunnel - the military saw it, yet
the American people, blinded by bad news, never
did.
In today's Iraq - again the McCain
version - General David Petraeus is the new
Abrams, finally the right general for the job. And
his new tactic of protecting the Iraqi people,
thereby winning their hearts and minds, is
working. Victory beckons at the end of the "long,
hard path" (that evidently has replaced the
Vietnamese tunnel), unless the American people run
out of patience, as they did back in the late
1960s.
McCain is no Hindenburg. Yet his
almost automatic displacement of ultimate
responsibility from the Bush administration and
the military to the American people indicates the
traction the stab-in-the-back myth has already
gained in mainstream politics. For the moment,
with hope for some kind of victory, however
defined, not quite vanquished in official circles,
our latest dagger-myth remains sheathed, its
murderous power as yet unwielded.
Then
again, perhaps that's not quite the case, even
now. In The Empire Strikes Back, young Luke
Skywalker asks Yoda, his wizened Jedi Master,
whether the dark side of the Force is stronger
than the good. No, Yoda replies, just "easier,
quicker, more seductive" - an accurate description
of the dark power of the stab-in-the-back myth.
Politicians sense its future power and alter their
positions accordingly. For example, no leading
presidential
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