Last night I watched Patton (1970) for, I don’t know, the sixth time? In any case, it was the first time I’d watched the movie since George W. Bush became President. For those of you that don’t know, the movie chronicles the exploits of General George Patton during World War Two. The story is told largely through the eyes of the G.I.s general, Omar Bradley. Bradley is alternately admiring of Patton’s virtuosity and disgusted by his willingness to sacrifice men to his quest for glory. I’ve known men that served under Patton, and they were equally ambivalent. They hated the man, but serving under him was their proudest achievement. Even in a war where the cause is indisputably just, war is a moral quagmire.
Patton spoke as a man that knew our cause was just.
Men, all this stuff you’ve heard about America not wanting to fight – wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of horse dung. Americans traditionally love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, big league ball players, the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost and never will lose a war, because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.
We’ve lost that sense of indomitability, moral surety, and can-do optimism. For right wingers and Straussians, the cause lies in the breakdown of social cohesion and moral values. For the left, the cause lies in a maturity that sees beyond narrow parochialism and jingoistic nationalism.
Both the left and the right attempt to form a world view based on the lessons of history. The right sees the signal event of the 20th-Century as Neville Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich. In a noble attempt to avoid a world war that would take tens of millions of lives, Chamberlain only delayed and exacerbated the task of eliminating fascism. The decision to end the war in Europe with the defeat of the axis powers only delayed and exacerbated the task of stamping out communist driven totalitarianism. The lesson is one of preemption. But, this preemption presumes that America always has right on its side, and it assumes all problems can be best solved militarily (or, at least, all problems must eventually be solved militarily).
The left has chosen different lessons. For the left, the signal event of the 20th-Century was the failure of collective security. The League of Nations was the right idea, implemented the wrong way. After World War Two, the left pursued a reinvigorated multilateralism, founding the United Nations, implementing the Marshall Plan, establishing NATO, SEATO, etc. The idea was to create a number of societies based on the same liberal principles of free enterprise and representative government. Those societies would bind together through shared values, and collectively would act to defend liberty against tyranny and totalitarianism.
In practice, neither model was ever truly accurate, nor were they truly implemented. By the early fifties, the threat of communism was being used to justify the unfettered reach of mulitnational corporations. Any third world country that sought to control their own resources, or to negotiate favorable terms for their the extraction of their national resources, was deemed ‘communist’. Today, the enemy is no longer communism. Today, the enemy is terrorism. But the same abuse continues. In the name of combating terrorism, we find the excuse to field over 150 military bases throughout the world. Those bases serve to protect American interests and access to the mineral wealth of Africa and Asia.
The right does not see this as a problem. The left sees it as not only a naked brand of imperialism, but as rejection and betrayal of the lessons of World War Two. But this did begin to become clear until the Bush presidency. So long as America worked within the framework of the United Nations and in cooperation with our European and East Asian allies, our approach was multilateral…and that multilateralism prevented the conflict of major powers, thus minimizing the prospects for catastrophic war.
There were still problems, hypocrisy, and inconsistencies. The multilateral consensus still pitted the First World liberal democratic nations against the Third World mineral rich nations. Principles of liberal democracy were overlooked in Latin America, Africa, and Central Asia, in the interests of stability and access. Yet, as the nineties wore on, Latin America turned to democracy, as did the former Soviet Union and many of its satellites. History, it seemed, was moving in the right direction…if only slowly.
It was the rise of the neo-conservatives, especially post-9/11, that broke the existing model. Utilizing nativist hostility to the United Nations, and fanning fear of terrorism, the neo-cons brought forth the Munich Plan. By acting alone and preemptively, in defiance of international opinion and law, the Bush administration attempted to implement their alternate vision. But they made one really grievous error. They did not make sure that right was indisputably on our side. They went to war with half the country in opposition. They hyped the threat, manipulated the intelligence, ignored the opposition, alienated erstwhile allies. And then, worst of all, they didn’t win.
Patton said:
the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.
That is still true. Yet, there is something worse than losing. Being on the wrong side of history…being in the wrong…fighting for bankrupt principles…that is worse than losing.
Patton was not a good man. He was a dangerous man. He was vain. He trifled with his soldiers’ lives. He is admired almost exclusively because his cause was just. Had his cause been compromised, his excesses and moral failings would have been magnified.
This is also true of George W. Bush and, under his leadership, it is now true of America. By launching a war of choice based on bad and doctored intelligence, by resorting to torture, by defying international law, by offending our nation’s civil liberties…the Bush administration has exposed our national hypocrisy, and badly eroded our national credibility. Whatever good will we built up through our victory in World War Two and our development of a system of collective security, is now gone.
Our national myth is shattered, as is our self-confidence, our moral surety, and our can-do attitude. From these ashes may come some positives. It has certainly exposed some of the latent hypocrisy to the bright lights. Perhaps the most glaring hypocrisy staring us in the face is seen in our lonely efforts to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Before Bush, we could have relied on the anti-Soviet bloc to work with us to deter Iran. The neo-cons destroyed the framework within which a consensus could function.
Perhaps this unhappy result could be redeemed if it were accompanied by the Democratic reforms in the Third World that Bush gives lip-service to. But that is a pipe dream. We have bought a dangerous future where Third World countries have more dangerous weapons, but do not have the political reforms that make their use against the First World unlikely.
No country can accomplish its goals if it doesn’t believe in the righteousness of those goals. It is not moral laxity that undermined our nation’s cohesiveness and unity of purpose, but the repeated misuse of power…in Vietnam, in Panama, in Grenada, and in Iraq…that has eroded our confidence. The final straw has been the unilateralism, dishonesty, immorality, and (ultimately) incompetence of the neo-conservatives.
