What I learned from the Iraq War, Part 2

War from nothing for nothing

GWB White House archives

Yesterday I talked about the way I was thinking about the Iraq War when it broke out. I was opposed, but much too respectful toward liberal war supporters. (I warned about those same types showing up now for the Iran War and, lo and behold, they’ve begun to materialize.) Today I want to do a little bit of Then And Now.

Today we’ve got a new stupid war — I’m tempted to say “even stupider” but, when you come right down to it, the Iraq War wasn’t any more sensible than this one. In fact so far it seems the main difference between them is the stage management for the Iraq War was slightly more respectable.

Sure, there was some macho flexing back in 2003. For example, Donald Rumsfeld was snotty with the press, though not as brutish and ham-handed as Hegseth has been. But the media, allegedly more independent and muscular then, loved the back of Rummy’s hand. In the years after 9/11, you see, Everything Had Changed, and the reporters all decided they were Ernie Pyle (except with a deep sense of unworthiness because they were not, you know, over there) and went easy on the administration until Abu Ghraib made it too embarrassing.

They took Rummy’s haughtiness as a sign of deep seriousness, and his contemptuous brush-offs as some species of wit. Here’s a Saturday Night Live Sketch basically showing Rumsfeld justifiably sick of their impertinent questions. (The subject was Afghanistan, the Iraq War’s warm-up act.) Also from that same period, here’s Robert Wright jerking him off for the New York Times:

Of course, there is more than wit and charismatic candor at work. Manifest competence — quickly winning the war in Afghanistan — hasn’t exactly hurt Mr. Rumsfeld’s stature, especially in Washington. The secretary of defense and his Pentagon advisers are now riding high, poised to influence policy in the war on terrorism.

Wolf Blitzer, who had his own fame inflated by the Iraq War (and is apparently hoping for a boost from this one), referred to Rumsfeld as “a near rock star early in the Bush administration.” And let us not even speak of Judy Miller.

You might say the press has not been as kind to Hegseth. But that’s immaterial, due to another difference between 2003 and now: The cooperation of the media is no longer necessary or even relevant.

I think that’s a key difference between then and now. Back then, so soon after 9/11, people were cowed into thinking that we had to go in there and straighten shit out, despite America’s track record since the end of the Second World War of just going in there and fucking shit up. The easy glide path of Afghanistan made the Bush administration look competent and the Iraq War almost sane.

Now? Trump’s famous scrambling of the media’s role in political life means he can put an obviously unqualified ignoramus in the chair once held by George Marshall (and, for that matter, Donald Rumsfeld), and the Prestige Press, battered into submission, can’t bring itself to describe his ravings and stunts as what they are; they can only blandly report his words and actions and hope the American people can deduce without prompting that he’s insane.

And though obviously no one really wants this war — not the liberals, and not the MAGA dopes who took Trump’s word for it when he expressly said he wasn’t going to do this — Tubby, as in so many other areas, doesn’t care because as far as he’s concerned he’s the only real person alive, and as long he keeps getting his grift and doesn’t have to hear anymore about the little girls he raped it’s all good.

Thus we’re in a weird stasis. There’s nothing and nobody pushing Americans to accept this war — no 9/11, and nothing in the incoherent and belligerent statements of Trump, Hegseth, and Rubio that are remotely convincing or even meant to convince. Yet because Republicans are too scared of Trump to make him stop, as their recent failure to do so in the Senate shows, it’s got to go on. It’s war out of nowhere for nothing.

And, you know what? So was Iraq — but we had more excuses to pretend it wasn’t.