Should we tune out Iraq?

Though I supported the invasion of Iraq as a necessity of national defense, and argued in favor of the invasion in epic-length discussions at this website, I said before the invasion, and have felt painfully ever since, that the entire business is a huge distraction from more important domestic matters. This problem is infinitely exacerbated by the likelihood that, as I have noted so often with regard to President Bush’s misbegotten democratization policy, we will have to keep our forces in Iraq forever in order to keep its new government afloat. Which means that the absorbing challenges and problems of building an Iraqi democracy—a fool’s quest that will not help our country by one iota—will continue to distract and drain us for the rest of our lives, while our own country continues to go downhill. Indeed, such mass distraction perfectly fits the neoconservative agenda. The neocons want us to forget about our own country (which they themselves don’t care about) and lose ourselves in their global quest for power. Perhaps it’s time then to take the lesson of my own warning, stop paying so much attention to Iraq, and focus on issues closer to home, on our true and enduring concerns as Americans, even as the Iraq debate continues obsessively all around us. The real Iraq issue at this point is not whether Bush’s democratization policy can succeed, since it cannot, but rather how that policy is filling us with false ideas and making us lose ourselves.

A reader wrote: “Please don’t tune out…just take a break! We need you.”

My reply:

Thank you.

However, by the end of that item, you can see that I’m not talking about literally tuning out the whole Iraq issue, but about putting it in a different perspective.

Let me explain it this way. I cannot convey to you, since even before the war began, how much I hated the necessity of the invasion and all the ills I saw it bringing, even as I argued for it as a necessity. That feeling of loathing the whole situation grew as the post-invasion morphed into this Wilsonianism to the nth degree madness that Bush has pursued. I feel it has literally robbed the conservative half of the country of its former mind. (The left is literally irrational, so they’re not even worth talking about.)

I think I have analyzed from a conservative angle the irrationalities and contradictions of the Bush position, and the whole evolving “neo-neoconservative” paradigm, as much as anyone in the country. But all this reaction against what I see as irrational and harmful tends to keep me in a reactive mode, and I become in effect a permanent creature of the Bush/neocon craziness, rather than trying to build something positive that goes beyond it. So what I’m suggesting here is that my own and others’ criticisms of the Bush policy need to be subsumed within a larger framework, where instead of the wrongness of the Bush policy being the main focus, we start from the assumption that the Bush policy is wrong and that it will not last, and then asking, beyond the inevitable end of the Bush policy, what do we need to do? That way we can concentrate on building understandings for a new politics that can replace the Bush/neocon ideology when it burns out. I did something like that in my two-part article, “The Search for Moderate Islam,” where in the first part I critiqued the current conventional wisdom about Islam, and in the second part laid out a radically different approach.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 24, 2005 10:14 AM | Send