Monday with McKenna: This Week in the WOT

For those of you who may have thought my reference to Tacitus on Friday was a little out of touch, check out Frank Rich's choice of metaphors in his Sunday column for the New York Times:

IF your head hurts from listening to the Washington furor over the latest National Intelligence Estimate, by all means tune it out. The entire debate is meaningless except as a damning election-year indicator of just how madly our leaders are fiddling while Iraq burns.

Incidentally, it should be added, Nero didn't actually play the fiddle (which didn't exist during the Roman Empire). Yet in every other respect, the metaphor holds; and if some of the journalists now crowding the bandwagon (Woodward is mentioned in Rich's piece) had been reading their history, they might not have to answer to history and their own pale consciences as to why they took so long to perceive what the rest of us have been crying out into the cyber-void for over three years now (click the graphic above for an example from two years back).

But that again is a matter to be settled when the objective record of this pitiful era of American and journalistic history is finally written. As Rich observes, if you've been paying attention these past few years, you will know that there is no reason to rush out and buy a book of sudden revelation written by one of Bush's longtime choristers. Nevertheless, any approach toward truth, however belated, is worth noting. This is not a time for sour grapes among those of us who have opposed this insane war from before it ever began. It is a time for rigorously reminding ourselves and our neighbors of the tyranny and decadence that still beset us—in both the White House and on Capitol Hill—and the work that must be done to clear it all out.

As Mr. Rich indicated, it can be pretty tough to keep all this information straight in the brain, such is the overwhelming weight of evidence of impeachable offenses pouring down around us now. For help with that, we have Terry McKenna, who reviews a week in what we must fervently hope to be a tyrant in his last throes.

By the way, our quote for this week is from one of the most celebrated books of the late 20th century, a Pulitzer Prize winner. We'll have the answer and more on our author later in the week. Post your guesses to the Comments. And now, Mr. McKenna:


This was not a good week for the president. Early on, a leaked report revealed that the war in Iraq is making more not fewer terrorists. And then at the end of the week, we had the report of a new book by Bob Woodward – in his account, the Bush Team’s level of denial about the insurgency led to dangerous inaction at the early stages (when it might have been possible to manage it). The president complained about the leaks, and said that whoever leaked it had political motives (well, duh!). The problem with George Bush is that the only way we’ll get to the truth is if someone leaks it. And this is a democracy?

Last week's aftershock (afterglow?) from Bill Clinton’s appearance on FOX NEWS continued to reverberate. Republicans debated whether the outburst was good or bad for Democrats (I think it was good). Conservative William Kristol thinks Clinton planned his outburst – so that must mean it was good! In any case, if you didn’t see it, here it is.

How William Kristol has the gall to interpret anyone else’s behavior is beyond me. He and his crowd got us into Iraq by making optimistic claims about how the Arab world would react – and they were wrong. It’s unlikely that he could guess the thinking of someone so foreign to him as a progressive.

Back to the event itself, I wish that other Democrats would take their cue from Bill Clinton. Getting mad is manly! That’s exactly what was missing from John Kerry’s campaign. He should have given the finger to the Swift Boat folks, and told off the president for his numerous lies. Yes – Lies!

The president continues to deliver the SOS (same old shit) on the WOT (war on terror). If we don’t fight them there, we’ll have to fight them here. The alternative would be to do nothing. And doing nothing only invites more terror. (And makes us look like wusses).

Yet if we look at our history, doing “nothing” works. Of course I don’t mean that we should really do nothing. But we don’t need to place ourselves on a wartime footing – nor give the president the sort of power he could rightly have to fight an invasion or insurrection.

The West (Europe, Japan and North America) has faced a number of serious societal threats over the past century or so. In each case, the US was able to get past the threat with a mix of police work, social changes and simply letting time pass. The threats have ALWAYS disappeared in good time.

Remember anarchism? At one time, anarchists were a genuine threat to western social order. By the way, if you missed the lesson on anarchism in high school, read this article. From the 1880s through the early 1930s, anarchists abounded in America. Coming primarily from immigrant communities, American anarchists drew their strength from those most affected by the brutality of the industrial revolution. At almost the very same time that anarchists chose disorder, progressives elected to push for social reforms that were meant to improve the lot of the downtrodden. Over the next few decades, conditions improved and immigrants prospered. By 1940, the movement was dead.

This incident from my own family may be instructive. My grandmother and her brothers came to the US from Russia in several stages from 1905 to 1909. My grandmother didn’t do so well: her coal miner husband was an alcoholic and before he died in 1922, he expressed the desire to return his family to Russia (and enjoy the fruits of communism). Her brothers were luckier and maybe a bit smarter. By the late 1920’s, they built their own apartment house and started to raise families. Within a few decades, they had realized the American dream.

The Popular Front was the next major problem. In the US, the movement was shepherded by Soviet led communists and fellow travelers – they took their cue from the Comintern. The movement was very strong in the 1930s, but after WW2 it too began to fade. The US used some awful tactics to manage the problem: FBI surveillance, congressional investigations (harassment) and ostracism (blacklisting). The threat was genuine. During WW2, communist sympathizers in both the British and American intelligence and foreign services made corrupted intelligence estimates about eastern Europe (the problem was even worse in Britain). But by and large, the popular front faded as the ills of the Great Depression abated. White Americans of the 1950s moved to the suburbs, prospered and traded their leftist slogans for “I Like Ike.”

Elements of the Popular Front persisted in Academia through the 1970s. Folks like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky are the last gasp of this faded movement.

After WW2, the Western nations reached levels of material prosperity unmatched in history, yet the consequence of prosperity was a widespread alienation of the young. In the US, the 60s was a complicated decade. We had a rich civil rights movement, a campus student movement and after 1968, an anti-war movement. 1968 was a key year internationally, with unrest in West Germany, France, Mexico and Prague. In most cases, the period of violence was brief. But institutional reform followed most of the protests. In the US, colleges gave more flexibility to students in their choice of courses; the 60s also saw genuine civil rights legislation, tailored to stop the abuses of the Jim Crow south. And as the Viet Nam war proceeded, the draft ended.

My point is that in the face of a compelling threat, we need to slow down our thinking – and to include a heavy dose of listening. In the early 20th century, the bombing of Wall Street and the Sacco Venzetti case were every bit as devastating as was the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The race riots of the 60s were as upsetting to the national psyche as September 11. But we got through them all.

In each case, police were involved, but so too were political reformers. And we needed time for conditions to change.

So what can we do about the terrorists? Well, the Republicans are correct in that we need to improve our surveillance methods (how far we should go is another matter). But we also need to find out what the terrorists want. My only slightly informed guess is that they are earnest in wanting to set up Islamic states. I say let them! Iran has an Islamic state – and that’s made Iranians the most pro-western in the region. So, I don’t think the Islamicists will succeed in improving the lot of their citizens, but they need to try and fail. Then they will be ready to listen.

And yes, the notion of allowing so called “terrorists” to establish themselves will upset many – especially those with ties to Israel, but we are out of ideas – the WOT has failed, so we have nothing left to do but try the unimaginable.

My last thought on Iraq is expressed by this old song. It is either a WW1 song, or a Boy scout song – take your pick. Its simple lyrics sum up why we remain in Iraq. Think of it as a campfire song and sing it to the tune of Auld Lang Syne:

We're here because
We're here because
We're here because we're here;
We're here because
We're here because
We're here because we're here

We're here because
We're here because
We're here because we're here;
We're here because
We're here because
We're here because we're here

—T. McKenna