America Right or Wrong: how wrong?…

Posted on Sunday 7 February 2010

I’m beginning to feel like there might be something wrong with me that I’m transfixed by the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War currently underway in the UK. Am I an anglophile, secretly envying their formality, their tweeds, their historic Monarchy? Did I never get over the "British Invasion" Rock and Roll? Am I starstruck by names like Sir Roderic Lyne or Jack Straw? Has everyone else just accepted that we bundled ourselves off to war based on flotsam and jetsom masquerading as intelligence and got countless thousands killed in the process?

Says Ralph, "It’s a tendency to chalk that up to the media being ‘owned’ [in more ways than one] by corporate American — and maybe they think it’s not good for business to remind the American people of this tawdry piece of our recent history." And Joy, "I wonder what will happen if real heads roll after this inquiry is completed. What does it take to have our own inquiry? Lying us into war sounds good enough to me, but what do I know. My Dad use to say on a regular basis ‘don’t saw sawdust." I’ll have to admit that ‘"don’t saw sawdust" is a pretty wonderful saying I’d never heard, and it may be the explanation for the silence after all.

I might chalk it up to the general self-preoccupied [and mildly psychotic mood] of the country right now – tea baggers, Beck, Limbaugh, Palin, Senator Shelby from Alabama, etc. But it feels more specific than that. My best guess is that Sadam Hussein was kind of horrible and no one minds him being out of the picture; the feelings for the UN are weak in these post Cold War days; but the biggest force is the memory in our collective unconscious about the Viet Nam War era. It was the time of the Hawks and the Doves, the Draft, the protests, the Hippies, the Yippies, the mistreatment of returning veterans, My Lai, P.T.S.D., the helicopter evacuations, drugs-sex-and-rock-and-roll. It was a period of great disillusionment.

 

My guess is that we don’t want to go through another great disillusionment, particularly with our troops still there. And I think there may be a positive motive – respect for our troops – not making our soldiers feel as bad as many Viet Nam veterans still feel. So to my title America Right or Wrong: how wrong?… The Iraq War was way too wrong for me, but I’m not sure it was wrong enough for most people. To me, Viet Nam was a mistake in the context of a policy [containment of communism]. Iraq was an arrogant, impatient, illegal assertion of a crazy idea – American Exceptionalism. But maybe right now, people actually want to hold onto American Exceptionalism in this era when we’re feeling bruised by 9/11, the recession, and two semi-failed wars. Maybe that’s why a lunatic like Sarah Palin holds such wide appeal…

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