"I don't have any problem pouring water on the face of a man who killed 3000 Americans on 9/11," said John Shevlin, a retired federal law enforcement officer.Surely this is nonsensical? The perpetrators of those hijackings all killed themselves in the attacks. Khaled Sheikh Mohammed is in custody, but surely this man is not only suggesting that we waterboard him? And Osama bin Laden is still out there. This is confusing to me, as Democratic presidential candidates, from John Kerry to Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama, have all insisted that capturing bin Laden and bringing him to justice would be a top priority of their prospective terms in office. Republican candidates, on the other hand, have downplayed the importance of capturing bin Laden, to such an extent that Mitt Romney, the Panderer's Panderer, said it wouldn't be worth spending much effort to get the guy. This seems crazy on its face. The GOP has only managed to win elections free and clear on this side of the millennium marker by being aggressive on terrorism, and yet capturing the world's best-known terrorist, and one who most definitely is responsible for the 9/11 attacks, seems to be not anywhere on the GOP's radar.
And why do conservatives so ardently back the Iraq War? Is it just a sense that, unlike Vietnam, they're not going to give into the goddamn hippies this time? It doesn't feel that way to me. Well, maybe a little. But Richard Nixon effectively ran as an anti-war candidate, did he not? He had a secret plan to end the war, right? At the very least he rhetorically was willing to make the point that it wasn't going well and had to end, in order to actually have a chance of winning in the general election, even though he had absolutely no intention of following through with ending it until he had no choice. Compare this with the modern GOP's treatment of rare anti-war members like soon to be former Rep. Wayne Gilchrest and soon to be former Sen. Chuck Hagel, both of whom were challenged in their party's primary by a more pro-war option. And then there's the peculiar case of Rudy Giuliani, a man who received no small amount of establishment backing despite being openly pro-choice, pro-stem cell, pro-gay rights, etc. Yet hardly anybody seemed to be really bothered by this in the Republican party, aside from an eleventh-hour resolution by some religious right leaders not to support Giuliani's nomination that had very little power. As it turned out, it didn't matter, as Giuliani turned out to be a buffoon who destroyed himself in an epic maelstrom of scandal, unpleasantness, and strategic incompetence. Still, that he was not immediately dismissed as a candidate while Senator Hagel is on his way out of office despite a lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union in the high 80's tells us something--namely, that "traditional values" are now a negotiable leg on the Republican stool, but that support for the war is not. And it is not even necessary to pay lip service to the things that have defined conservatism in the past, like small government and balanced budgets. George W. Bush is still a rock star with conservatives, but is loathed by literally nearly everyone else. How did this come to be? The Republican Party has shown itself willing to sacrifice literally everything to keep the war in Iraq going. Why?
Let's return to the aforementioned quote. So does Mr. Shevlin's comment then not make any sense? Well, clearly he said something that resonated with his fellow conservatives, since they applauded his sentiment. It seems rather incongruous, but it is actually quite sensible when one reconsiders the global war on terror as less of a struggle for the future of civilization and more of a vehicle for sating free-floating anger about 9/11. After that day's events, everyone--from liberals to conservatives--felt anger at what had happened and wanted to strike back. And why not? Should there not be justice for the victims? That is why Afghanistan was a logical target for a military incursion--after all, the Taliban were very friendly with al-Qaeda, more so than any other nation in the Middle East. Afghanistan was essentially an al-Qaeda base of operations. The case for taking down their government was a reasonable one, and I suspect that many liberals and moderates (and perhaps even conservatives) would have felt closure if that had been the end of our military adventures in the Mid-East.
It was not long after that, though, when suddenly the "global war on terror" mandated that we attack Iraq, a country in which al-Qaeda had no presence and whose government al-Qaeda despised. Saddam Hussein was an evil man, but he was no terrorist and he could not have cared less about global Jihad, inasmuch as it did not benefit him. Hussein was a prototypical strongman, interested only in perpetuating his own power. For reasons that were never entirely made clear, the decision was made by the Bush Administration to invade Iraq. "Evidence" was provided that Iraq and al-Qaeda had been in cahoots from the beginning. And people believed them. Eventually, the media learned that this was never true and stopped maintaining the argument, but conservative propaganda organs, such as Fox News and right-wing talk radio, continued to insist on a connection. Dick Cheney hedged, Bush continued to insist that Iraq was definitely a battlefield in the war on terror, and even though the facts are now widely known and most Americans disagree with the Bushies' initial assessments, conservatives continue to conflate the two. Indeed, they are nearly the only ones.
So, is it just that Fox is full of liars? Well, yeah, but I think it goes deeper than that. I think that, in their guts, most well-informed conservatives realize that Saddam and Osama weren't really hanging out on Saturday nights. But let's return to the immediate aftermath of 9/11. It shouldn't be too controversial to assert that the immediately post-9/11 period was a brief oasis of bipartisan cooperation and productivity. Pretty much everyone agreed on action against the Taliban. This was uncontroversial across the political spectrum--as comedian David Cross noted in his amazing stand-up album Shut Up, You F***ing Baby, even Ralph Nader would have invaded Afghanistan. However, the Republican Party still faced a political reality--they couldn't get their agenda passed because the Senate was controlled by Democrats, and a brand-new, nonpartisan era of cooperation was not going to allow them to pass the sort of initiatives they wanted to pass. This would go double if the Democrats managed to maintain their Senate control. Ultimately, though, the Republicans lacked a really effective wedge issue to use against the Democrats in order to win. So we saw a concerted effort on several fronts to use the terrorism issue against the Democrats. One one hand, George W. Bush's rhetoric took a sharp turn, from insisting immediately after 9/11 that we are not fighting a war against Islam, which he referred to as a religion of peace, to adopting the brash bellicosity of "you're either with us or against us." This is when we started to hear more talk about the "global war on terror," a radical redefinition of a conflict that had been seen, to that point, as a conflict with the specific group of guys in al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Karl Rove's shop began to put together strategies to take down some of the last remaining conservative Southern Democrats, like Max Cleland, that used the senator's perceived weakness on terrorism. The South is, after all, both tribal and conservative, so the strategy was both shrewd and obvious. We started to hear about the grave human rights abuses in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, talked about Hezbollah and Hamas as terrorist organizations, which is both murky and beside the point as those groups are largely uninterested in us. These actions, and others, decoupled the entirely understandable anger that followed 9/11 (and that much of the world shared with us) from the event itself and turned it onto the Muslim world at large. Initially, the public went along with the story, and the Iraq War happened. With time and media coverage of stories such as the 9/11 report, not to mention the disaster in Iraq, most people have fallen away from such views, and think that the Iraq occupation should never have occurred. Polls attesting to these facts are very easy to find, and such thinking has become conventional wisdom for all except conservatives.
But a strange cosmology has enveloped conservatism with respect to Islam of the extreme variety--in particular, the belief that all Arabs can be easily categorized into two groups, one of which loves freedom and America and the other of which hates America and wants to destroy it. Needless to say, while both groups likely exist, there are others as well. Hamas doesn't much like us, to be sure, but they've shown no interest in waging Jihad against us and are really more interested in achieving a two-state solution in Israel than anything else. And there are probably many Arabs that might be more favorably disposed to us but still don't agree with our values and don't want us meddling. Such distinctions are not favored among conservatives. It's us versus them, and the conservatives have cast themselves in the great anticommunist tradition while liberals seem to have been downgraded in their revisionist historical simulacrum--in real life, liberalism was every bit as opposed to communism as was conservatism. Some elements of the left were sympathetic to communism, particularly during the Vietnam War, but the comparison is favorable to the current-day left, from whom there is no vocal support for terrorism. That an opposition to Islamism could be decoupled from a desire to make the terrorists pay, ad infinitum, is simply inconceivable to these conservatives' frame of reference. So, the Democrats want to coddle the terrorists, of course, because it is impossible for conservatives to imagine a good faith disagreement on this issue. As Tom Cruise might say, in another context, either you're on board, or you're not on board.
One mistake that would be easy to make in this department is to overthink this phenomenon. If the statement of the conservative is representative of conservatives across the land--at the very least, it was the sentiment of the other conservatives in the room who applauded him--it is likely less an intellectual response and more one that is felt viscerally. And I'm sure that the person who feels it the least is Karl Rove. Rove is only partially to blame for this, after all. I don't think that, with those first steps, the Bush Administration was trying to stir up a hornet's nest that would eventually lead to majority support for torture of terror suspects among conservatives. In retrospect, though, it was inevitable. By broadening the struggle against al-Qaeda to include the Taliban, it became necessary to neutralize the Taliban to achieve closure for 9/11. By broadening the post-9/11 conflict to Iraq, it would become impossible for to achieve closure with respect to 9/11 until Iraq was under control. By broadening the conflict to the entire Arab world--well, you get the picture. The implications of this progression are startling--seven years after the fact, after the near-decimation of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Iraq and, not coincidentally, after even a single terrorist attack, conservatives still well up with anger at even the thought of 9/11. This is not the bad part--such things should still cause anger. The bad part is that it is beginning to seem that their catharsis can only be achieved by the brutal subjugation of the entire Middle East, and that any action against a Muslim terrorist--any action--should be taken and exalted. As someone who is somewhat familiar with U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War I am ashamed that so many of the democratic regimes overthrown by my government were replaced with corrupt American-backed stooges who brutally repressed their people (e.g. Pinochet or Suharto), but I can also appreciate that these actions might well have been necessary at the time. This is called utilitarianism--Communist expansion would have made just as many people suffer, if not more, so such undemocratic actions might have been permissible if more people wound up being made happy by these actions. The opposite of utilitarianism is deontology, which holds that in immoral act is an immoral act, regardless of who benefits. Conservatives seem to hold a sort of inverted deontology on the subject of terrorists, and couple this with the notion that the "terror war" is a zero-sum game in which any action taken against a terrorist is noble, even (and perhaps especially) illegal ones. This is a very relativistic attitude, morally speaking, and it is ironic that those who used to inveigh so deeply against moral relativism (with regard to cultural matters) are now its practitioners. It bothers these conservatives not a whit that few prisoners at, say, Guantanamo Bay are actually believed to have actually perpetrated terrorist acts. Let's not forget Mitt Romney's notorious promise to "double Guantanamo," which proves the point clearly. What else can this be other than a call to lock up more shady Muslim types, regardless of whether they ought to be there? After all, there have got to be more terroristy people out there, no? Romney's comment was not exactly booed, and the calculus for just locking up more Muslims makes sense. If they're there, after all, there has got to be some reason why. Maybe they didn't do something wrong, but they're associated with people who would, and they've probably done something bad, or they might if they weren't in jail. This thinking is reminiscent of nothing less than the Sacco and Vanzetti affair, in which the two men weren't believed to be guilty of the specific crime of which they stood accused, but were executed nonetheless because they were Italians (not a popular thing to be at the time) and because they were probably guilty of something. That trial, of course, is one of the darkest points in our nation's history.
I apologize if the tone of this essay seems a bit too much like psychoanalysis, but I present this theory as one possible way of thinking about why conservatives have acted the way they have in recent years. In essence, my claim is that conservative leaders' broad redefinition of the post-9/11 conflict against Islamic terrorism has created a situation in which the deaths of September 11, 2001, must be avenged, and they must be avenged by striking at the amorphous menace of "terrorism." Until terrorism is defeated, vengeance cannot be fulfilled, and yet the victory over terrorism is simply not possible in practical terms--at least, not in the short term. Initially the public bought into this line of argument, but no longer, and only these conservatives still hold the essential truth of this narrative. Indeed, everything from preemptive military action to torture is acceptable, even noble, if undertaken against terrorists. Because of conservatives' trust in their leaders and their consumption of media organs designed to supplement their leaders' message, they have continued to cling to these views even after the rest of the country has moved on, and there is no sign of abatement, although many polls show that around a quarter of Republicans want to leave Iraq. The unpopularity of their views has served not as a deterrent but as a test of faith for conservatives, and their elevation of this issue, the war issue, in particular above all others is necessarily tied into 9/11. Why else would the laughingstock Giuliani have ever been taken as a serious contender? The buffoon struck on something powerful by accident--he linked September 11th with aggressive action against the terrorists overtly and forcefully with his campaign, which should by all rights have been dead on arrival. At this point, it seems fair to say that conservatives will never, ever yield on this particular issue, and should a Democrat be elected president in 2008 and proceed to narrow the scope of the "war on terror" to focus more on al-Qaeda and end the Iraq War, such a president will become an unbelievably intense object of hatred by the right that their feelings toward Bill Clinton will seem positively giddy, even if that president should be Barack Obama. The situation is far from hopeless, as it is conceivable that conservatives might eventually find some way to salve the wounds of 9/11, or perhaps these feelings will fall away with time. Ultimately, the bitterness will have to end, with the last resort being because their bitterness over these issues will consume them for the better part of a generation and will not abate until a new generation of post-9/11 Republican lawmakers is ushered into power after the Republican Party has been powerless for ages. The Republicans are on the holy crusade that George W. Bush infamously promised them, with the attendant religious (and it is religious) fervor of a tent revival. And since their conquest of the Middle East cannot possibly succeed, their anger simply cannot be relieved in the way they want it to be. The age of empire has long passed us up--it ended as soon as a poor insurgent could buy an AK-47 on the street for a couple of bucks. So, eventually, they'll have to give up their anger. The only question is: when? Will it be before 2012, after four years of Democratic control? Or will it take a lot longer? In any event, it is highly unlikely that an angry, embittered party obsessed with fighting yesterday's battles will hold power anytime soon, nor should they.
I recall House Republican Leader John Boehner saying in June that Iraq could lead to the collapse of the Republican Party. In the literal sense, this is perhaps untrue. However, in the sense of the GOP spending a generation in the wilderness because the public has moved on from the issues they are still obsessed with--he is absolutely right. To be fair, I'm sure there are many conservatives who are deeply upset with the direction the Republican Party has taken and want to bring their party into the mainstream, but they have their work cut out for them if they want to retake their party.
