Via Atrios, this article about the "stab-in-the-back" myth is now available online: Stabbed in the Back! The past and future of a right-wing myth by Kevin Baker Harper's (07/14/06; from June 2006 edition).
We saw it after the Vietnam War. We already can see the outlines of it for the Iraq War. In the latter case, it goes something like this (this is me, not Kevin Baker):
"We were winning the war. After seven years of fighting, Ahmad Chalabi's Neo-Baathist Unity government was on the verge of establishing peace. The Green Zone was finally secure, and there were at least two, three days per month when there was no mass-casualty bombings in Baghdad. Turkish and Iranian troops were on the verge of withdrawing from the areas of Iraq they were occupying. The Syrian-Lebanese-Israeli war that began in 2006 was becoming less intense. Egypt was unlikely to re-enter the conflict at that point. Everything was going great!
"Then The Liberals spoiled everything! First they whined about the bombing. Then they whined about the casualties. They'd say, 'Somebody got killed somebody got wounded, somebody lost a leg'. Well, boo-hoo-hoo. They whined about the torture. They whined because the Army raised the recruiting age to 62 and started taking in 16-year-old olds from mental institutions. They whined because there was 90% turnover per year in the officer corps and they were making 25-year-olds into colonels. They whined because the entire Iraqi parliament we installed joined guerrilla groups and started fighting against us. They whined because China dumped all their dollars and the dollar value was going down 15% per year.
"Finally, these terrorist-loving sissies got their way and the US withdrew. And now even the ten countries that still have diplomatic relations with us think we're all a bunch of wusses who run away from a fight even when we're winning it! It was The Liberals that did this to us, I tell you, the Islamic-fundamentalist Taliban-loving Liberals!! And every day, you'd see The Liberals go up to soldiers walking around the streets in their uniforms and spit on them. Mostly anorexic feminist Liberals doing the spitting."
By the way, I adapted one line of that from one of my man Rummy's most bizarre statements:
There have always been people who say it's not worth it. And indeed, if you watch in any conflict in our history, there have always been people who said, "Why? Why should we do that? Another loss of life. Another person wounded. Another limb off."
It's unbelievable that we have a Secretary of Defense who carries on this way. He managed to catch himself before he went off ranting about wusses and whiny women and so forth.
Baker writes in his article:
Every state must have its enemies. Great powers must have especially monstrous foes. Above all, these foes must arise from within, for national pride does not admit that a great nation can be defeated by any outside force. That is why, though its origins are elsewhere, the stab in the back has become the sustaining myth of modern American nationalism. Since the end of World War II it has been the device by which the American right wing has both revitalized itself and repeatedly avoided responsibility for its own worst blunders. Indeed, the right has distilled its tale of betrayal into a formula: Advocate some momentarily popular but reckless policy. Deny culpability when that policy is exposed as disastrous. Blame the disaster on internal enemies who hate America. Repeat, always making sure to increase the number of internal enemies.
As the United States staggers past the third anniversary of its misadventure in Iraq, the dagger is already poised, the myth is already being perpetuated.
Toward the end of the article, he criticizes Bush for his historical revisionism about the Yalta Agreements:
And yet, a convincing national narrative, though it may be the sheerest, most vicious fiction, can have incredible staying power - can perhaps outlast even the nation that it was meant to serve. It is ironic that, even as support for his war was starting to unravel in May of 2005, George W. Bush was in the Latvian capital of Riga, describing the Yalta agreement as “one of the greatest wrongs of history.” The President placed it in the “unjust tradition” of the 1938 Munich Pact and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which together paved the way for the start of World War II in 1939. Bush’s words echoed his statements of three previous trips to Eastern Europe, dating back to 2001, during which he had pledged, “no more Munichs, no more Yaltas,” and called Yalta an “attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability,” a “bitter legacy,” and a “constant source of injustice and fear” that had “divided a living civilization.”
Longtime readers of Old Hickory's Weblog may recall this from my posts of May 2005:
Bush rewrites the history of the Second World War 05/08/05
Steve Gilliard on Bush's anti-Yalta stance 05/08/05
Yalta get it straight 05/11/05
Bush does history the Ann Coulter way 05/12/05
More on Bush channeling Ann Coulter on Yalta 05/12/05
Axis Pat on George W. Bush and the Second World War 05/14/05
More on Remembering Yalta 05/17/05
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