America has always been a mix of Athens and Sparta.
From the time of our founding, our leaders have been aware of these ancient city-states as representing the contending states of our nature. It's unfair to the reality of those places, yet it came down through history that Athens would represent civilized discourse and Sparta the arts of war.
Many of our greatest words have been penned, as Athenians, reluctantly drawn to the Sparta of war:
- When in the course of human events...
- Four score and seven years ago...
- Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy...
As time has gone by, and the benefits of war have made themselves manifest among us, our paranoia has increased. We have become far less-reluctant to go to war.
We have, in fact, been in a state of almost continuous war for 66 years now -- three score and six, if you're counting at home. World War II was followed almost immediately by the Cold War, and as soon as that conflict ended Dick Cheney and his Merry Men began planning the next chapter, the one which began on September 11, 2001.
America today has the greatest military in the world. Not only can we kick ass against any other nation, we can kick ass against any combination of nations. We sit astride the world like a colossus.
But there is one thing we cannot do, something no power can do. We cannot occupy another nation against its will, save through genocide. The weapons of resistance have gotten too cheap, and too good.
Not long ago Americans loved these stories of resistance. One of my favorites is The Train,
starring Burt Lancaster. The Nazis are taking a nation's treasures
away, one step ahead of the Allies, and Lancaster must find a way to
keep the train carrying those treasures from moving.
I suspect many Iraqis love this film too, but grow wistful on seeing it, knowing they have no Burt Lancaster among them to save their treasures from the occupier.
Neither do we.
I have said this before and it bears repeating. Our leaders continue to fight the Cold War because their ideology demands it, not because they're stupid, or evil. Their ideology demands it. No, check that. Our ideology demands it.
From 1919 until 1941 the Republican Party was the isolationist party, the party of Athens, the home of those who resisted Roosevelt's statements (and his propaganda films) which claimed Hitler's Germany was a threat to us.
Their reaction, once the Great War ended, was to become hyper-patriotic, to see the whole world as a continuing struggle of US vs. THEM, and to cry treason on anyone who questioned that ideology, for any reason. That was what Joe McCarthy was about (and that's the kindest interpretation you'll find outside his acolytes). That was what Vietnam was about. That's what the 1968 election was about, and that's what the Nixon Thesis of Conflict has been about. We are surrounded by enemies, we must strike back -- we must strike first!
During the Great War this was settled fact. I don't question its truth, neither does anyone else. For the next 20 years this was accepted by both political parties. Politics stopped at the water's edge. Vietnam gave Republicans the opportunity to make this a partisan point. Democrats were "weak" on the war. Later, after Republican Presidents abandoned Vietnam (and Cambodia, and Laos) to their fate, it became part of the accepted Thesis that (somehow) Democrats had lost Vietnam -- if it hadn't been for those nasty Democrats we would have won. (This was a titanic lie, but myths don't have to be true in order to be believed.)
The collapse of the Soviet Union, bogged down in Afghanistan and with its own economy collapsing from its own internal contradictions, should have given us a Clue. But it did not. All the architects of the current war worked at PNAC throughout the Clinton years, and this current war was hatched there.
So now we come to another generational crisis, and for the first time in 65 years, the vast majority of the American people understand that Sparta can't win this war, that it will take Athens, and that the war is not against Iraq, but against oil. The threat is not to our national sovereignty, but to the world's very life.
And the most dangerous men in the world walk among us. When ideology
becomes self-fulfilling, when everything becomes politics and the -ism
becomes all, even the greatest nations can collapse. Down with fascism.
Down with communism. (Image from the Pogo fan club.)
And while we're at it, down with Republicanism, down with
conservatism, down with Rovism, down with Bushism. We must do more than vote these people
out of office. We must drive Sparta so completely from our life as a
nation that it will truly take another Adolph Hitler to resurrect it. That party can return to power when it has reformed, not before.
Despite all the hyper-ventilating from the Republican Dead-Enders, Hitler is not a little brown man looking for a job. Hitler is not a madman in a cave. Hitler is not a nationalist Shiite in a suit.
The Hitler who prowls the world today lives among us. He's not in Washington. He's in our hearts, he's in our minds. And it's there where the battle must be fought.
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