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Title: The war everyone forgot
Author: Noam Chomsky
Date: February 29, 2008
Language: en
Topics: Iraq War
Source: Retrieved on 19th February 2022 from https://chomsky.info/20080229/
Notes: Published in the Khaleej Times.

Noam Chomsky

The war everyone forgot

Iraq remains a significant concern for the population, but that is a

matter of little moment in a modern democracy. Not long ago, it was

taken for granted that the Iraq war would be the central issue in the

presidential campaign, as it was in the midterm election of 2006. But it

has virtually disappeared, eliciting some puzzlement. There should be

none.

The Wall Street Journal came close to the point in a front-page article

on Super Tuesday, the day of many primaries: “Issues Recede in ’08

Contest As Voters Focus on Character.” To put it more accurately, issues

recede as candidates, party managers and their public relations agencies

focus on character. As usual. And for sound reasons. Apart from the

irrelevance of the population, they can be dangerous.

Progressive democratic theory holds that the population — “ignorant and

meddlesome outsiders” — should be “spectators,” not “participants” in

action, as Walter Lippmann wrote.

The participants in action are surely aware that on a host of major

issues, both political parties are well to the right of the general

population, and that public opinion is quite consistent over time, a

matter reviewed in the useful study, “The Foreign Policy Disconnect,” by

Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton. It is important, then, for the

attention of the people to be diverted elsewhere.

The real work of the world is the domain of an enlightened leadership.

The common understanding is revealed more in practice than in words,

though some do articulate it: President Woodrow Wilson, for example,

held that an elite of gentlemen with “elevated ideals” must be empowered

to preserve “stability and righteousness,” essentially the perspective

of the Founding Fathers. In more recent years the gentlemen are

transmuted into the “technocratic elite” and “action intellectuals” of

Camelot, “Straussian” neocons of Bush II or other configurations.

For the vanguard who uphold the elevated ideals and are charged with

managing the society and the world, the reasons for Iraq’s drift off the

radar screen should not be obscure. They were cogently explained by the

distinguished historian Arthur M Schlesinger, articulating the position

of the doves 40 years ago when the US invasion of South Vietnam was in

its fourth year and Washington was preparing to add another 100,000

troops to the 175,000 already tearing South Vietnam to shreds.

By then the invasion launched by President Kennedy was facing

difficulties and imposing difficult costs on the United States, so

Schlesinger and other Kennedy liberals were reluctantly beginning to

shift from hawks to doves.

– In 1966, Schlesinger wrote that of course “we all pray” that the hawks

are right in thinking that the surge of the day will be able to

“suppress the resistance,” and if it does, “we may all be saluting the

wisdom and statesmanship of the American government” in winning victory

while leaving “the tragic country gutted and devastated by bombs, burned

by napalm, turned into a wasteland by chemical defoliation, a land of

ruin and wreck,” with its “political and institutional fabric”

pulverised. But escalation probably won’t succeed, and will prove to be

too costly for ourselves, so perhaps strategy should be rethought.

As the costs to ourselves began to mount severely, it soon turned out

that everyone had always been a strong opponent of the war (in deep

silence).

Elite reasoning, and the accompanying attitudes, carry over with little

change to commentary on the US invasion of Iraq today. And although

criticism of the Iraq war is far greater and far-reaching than in the

case of Vietnam at any comparable stage, nevertheless the principles

that Schlesinger articulated remain in force in media and commentary.

It is of some interest that Schlesinger himself took a very different

position on the Iraq invasion, virtually alone in his circles. When the

bombs began to fall on Baghdad, he wrote that Bush’s policies are

“alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl

Harbor, on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would,

lives in infamy. Franklin D Roosevelt was right, but today it is we

Americans who live in infamy.”

That Iraq is “a land of ruin and wreck” is not in question. Recently the

British polling agency Oxford Research Business updated its estimate of

extra deaths resulting from the war to 1.03 million — excluding Karbala

and Anbar provinces, two of the worst regions. Whether that estimate is

correct, or much overstated as some claim, there is no doubt that the

toll is horrendous. Several million people are internally displaced.

Thanks to the generosity of Jordan and Syria, the millions of refugees

fleeing the wreckage of Iraq, including most of the professional

classes, have not been simply wiped out.

But that welcome is fading, for one reason because Jordan and Syria

receive no meaningful support from the perpetrators of the crimes in

Washington and London; the idea that they might admit these victims,

beyond a trickle, is too outlandish to consider.

– Sectarian warfare has devastated Iraq. Baghdad and other areas have

been subjected to brutal ethnic cleansing and left in the hands of

warlords and militias, the primary thrust of the current

counterinsurgency strategy developed by General Petraeus, who won his

fame by pacifying Mosul, now the scene of some of the most extreme

violence.

One of the most dedicated and informed journalists who have been

immersed in the shocking tragedy, Nir Rosen, recently published an

epitaph, “The Death of Iraq,” in Current History.

“Iraq has been killed, never to rise again,” Rosen writes. “The American

occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols, who sacked

Baghdad in the 13^(th) century” — a common perception of Iraqis as well.

“Only fools talk of ‘solutions’ now. There is no solution. The only hope

is that perhaps the damage can be contained.”

Catastrophe notwithstanding, Iraq remains a marginal issue in the

presidential campaign. That is natural, given the spectrum of hawk-dove

elite opinion. The liberal doves adhere to their traditional reasoning

and attitudes, praying that the hawks will be right and that the United

States will win a victory in the land of ruin and wreck, establishing

“stability,” a code word for subordination to Washington’s will. By and

large hawks are encouraged, and doves silenced, by the upbeat post-surge

reports of reduced casualties.

In December, the Pentagon released “good news” from Iraq, a study of

focus groups from all over the country that found that Iraqis have

“shared beliefs,” so that reconciliation should be possible, contrary to

claims of critics of the invasion. The shared beliefs were two. First,

the US invasion is the cause of the sectarian violence that has torn

Iraq to shreds. Second, the invaders should withdraw and leave Iraq to

its people.

A few weeks after the Pentagon report, New York Times military-Iraq

expert Michael R Gordon wrote a reasoned and comprehensive review of the

options on Iraq policy facing the candidates for the presidential

election. One voice is missing in the debate: Iraqis. Their preference

is not rejected. Rather, it is not worthy of mention. And it seems that

there is no notice of the fact. That makes sense on the usual tacit

assumption of almost all discourse on international affairs: We own the

world, so what does it matter what others think? They are “unpeople,” to

borrow the term used by British diplomatic historian Mark Curtis in his

work on Britain’s crimes of empire.

Routinely, Americans join Iraqis in un-peoplehood. Their preferences too

provide no options.