Legions Of Strawmen
Posted on November 22nd, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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No nation has ever benefitted from military defeat, and I draw a bright line between (a) the I-told-you-so recriminations of those who wisely opposed the invasion before it began, and (b) the dishonorable glee of those who don’t even bother to disguise their desire for American defeat. ~Robert Stacy McCain
All right. Now if McCain can just show us an American who doesn’t even bother to disguise his desire for American defeat and expresses such glee, we might be getting somewhere. Preferably, he could show us more than one, and ideally he would find people of some consequence who hold this view. At least then we might be able to judge whether he is simply defining opposition to the war as desire for defeat, or if he has a more specific sort of argument in mind. Otherwise, drawing this bright line is not very remarkable, since pretty much everyone stays on the right side of that line. Of course, if he is equating mere opposition with defeatism–and therefore with a kind of treachery–that would be an indefensible position.
This statement implies that there is some significant group of American war opponents who actually hold this view, and it also assumes that the only alternative to such recriminations is longing for the U.S. to be defeated. I don’t think either is true, and one of my frustrations with war supporters–particularly with war supporters who recognize the blunder for what it is but insist on persevering in the blunder anyway–is their tendency to argue against antiwar positions that do not exist. It would be interesting to hear what McCain thinks victory would look like. Whenever someone says something to the effect of, “Victory is our exit strategy,” I await the list of obtainable objectives that we have not yet reached that distinguish some rational pursuit of a definable victory from an open-ended commitment to keeping well over a hundred thousand American soldiers in a foreign country. I have been waiting for more than five years.
McCain continues:
America is too big, too rich and too powerful to safely disarm. We cannot assume the sort of inert, cowardly pacifism that dominated England in the 1920s and ’30s without inviting aggression. The alternative to American strength is not “world peace,” but rather the removal of any meaningful constraint on the imperial appetites of America’s enemies.
Too big to disarm? Is that the imperialist version of “too big to fail”? Ahem. Then again, who is talking about disarming? Disarmament would entail not simply ending foreign deployments or reducing the size of the armed forces, both of which are advisable and ought to be among our goals, but actually scrapping some huge part of the military. Again, if you can find someone arguing for this (and I’m not sure that even Kucinich would go this far), that would be worth knowing. Who said anything about pacifism? There simply aren’t that many pacifists, and there is hardly anyone alive in the West today making the case for actual pacifism. (For that matter, pacifism did not dominate interwar England, either, but why get caught up in detail?) McCain has erected here not just one strawman, but an entire gang of them.
Whose aggression will we be inviting? Where? Against whom? Unless McCain wants to defend the proposition that it is the business of the United States government to provide security for the entire globe, I have no idea what he’s talking about. Here’s a better question: who are our enemies, and what “imperial appetites” do they have? Arguably, Al Qaeda has the grandest objectives of all and also the fewest resources to reach them. Those states that have the means to pursue “imperial appetites” have shown little or no inclination to sate such appetites, assuming that they have them at all, and it is not a given that they are our enemies in any case. Of course, virtually no one who calls for ending foreign deployments, whether in Iraq, elsewhere in Asia or in Europe, assumes that an era of world peace is going to dawn. What we do expect, or at least what I expect, is that Americans will not be sent to fight in conflicts except when it is actually in our national interest to do, and we will have a much more constrained and sane understanding of what that national interest is. Our allies either already can defend themselves against their neighbors, or they will acquire the means to do so.
More bogus charges follow–war opponents apparently wish ill to their own nation, want to celebrate American defeat, and so on. I won’t dwell on the obvious point that it is the war that has done great harm to our nation, our military and the reputation of our country in the world. We have incurred losses that cannot be undone, and each day we remain there our security erodes, but I do not assume that war supporters actually wanted these things to happen. However, that is apparently what McCain thinks of the six out of ten Americans who oppose the war–that they wish harm to America. If that is not the case, some specific examples of these nation-harming, defeat-celebrating, failure-loving pacifists would be helpful.
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
Well, it’s used to be that the wingnuts would trot out Ward Churchill to prove their point about the nation-harming, defeat-celebrating, failure-loving pacifists. To which I would answer, “OK, that’s one so far.”
That was as high as they could count.
The trouble is, as Nate Silver pointed out after his interview with John Ziegler, the wingnuts don’t even understand that the rest of the world doesn’t view things as they do. They truly were gobsmacked that the country could go for Obama in a near-landslide. The idea that everyone who opposed the war is a nation-harming, defeat-celebrating, failure-loving pacifist is utterly obvious to them, like saying the sky is blue. They don’t try to actually *argue* their points, because they feel they don’t have to do any persuading or offer any evidence. Therefore, if you don’t agree with them already, you’re an idiot, and now the majority of the country - to them - are idiots.
Therefore, if you don’t agree with them already, you’re an idiot, and now the majority of the country - to them - are idiots.
But there are, at this point, more of “us” than “them” - and the numbers over here in reality are growing.
Of course, it will take a single terrorist attack, or attempt, to prove them “right.” But about what? That the U.S. has enemies? That has never been the issue; the issue all along has been how we pursue those enemies “wisely.” In quotes because the likes of McCain think the only “wise” choice is sustained belligerence until… I dunno, we somehow cow or kill everyone who would dare look cross-eyed at us.
BTW, I also love the argument about if only the cowardly Brits (and French! he forgot the French!) had shown some neoconserative manliness, they might have stopped Hitler in his tracks. Not as if either country had just come through a war to end all wars or anything, resulting in an understandable reluctance to do it all again.
Daniel, I suppose I should thank you for reading McCain, because I wouldn’t be able to stand it (for all that there are other writers in the Spectator who are sometimes worth reading), and he is a useful epitome for a wide swath of the Right.
No nation has ever benefitted from military defeat
Examples that even McCain might be hard put to refute (not that I care to have him try):
Argentina 1982
Cambodia 1978/79
Germany 1945
If we want to limit “nation” to more or less liberal democratic nation states, I will propose the following examples of benefitting from military defeat:
France, taking several colonial wars (especially Algeria) as ending in military defeat. If someone were to argue that France was not militarily defeated in Algeria, I would say no more than the UK in the American Rebellion).
The Southerners, whose mid-19th C polemicists at least considered themselves a nation. I realize that many readers here, including probably you, Daniel, would not agree that the Southern nation “benefitted from military defeat”, and I recognize that 1) we don’t really know what path the CSA would have followed if the secession had been successful, and even if we did we probably couldn’t agree on what constituted a net benefit. I consider not keeping 40% of the population as slaves to be a substantial benefit, even if, pace Sam Francis, the slaves and their descendants spent the next hundred years as serfs.
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if mccain is looking for his strawman, he can start with me. the following is from a comment i made at daily kos back in july:
of course, my comment is somewhat lacking in the “glee” department, and i’ve yet to hear anyone describe me as a person “of some consequence”, but one out of three is as good as it will get.