Iraq War: Is it really this bad?

I've quoted Chris Hedges' book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning probably more often than any other single source on this blog.  Hedges is a long-time war correspondent who seems to have adopted a "survivor's mission" of his own to try to rip the sentimental face off of war.

He has a long essay in the current New York Review of Books (On War 12/16/04 issue) reviewing two volumes by correspondents from the Iraq War (Generation Kill by Evan Wright and The Fall of Baghdad by Jon Lee Anderson).  The article is very insightful, as his book is.

His concluding paragraph is what my title for this post references.  I wouldn't have expressed it exactly this way.  But he's describing a process that am also seeing, I see and feel it, and I'm more afraid that he's right than I am confident that we can avoid the consequences he describes in any kind of short-run time frame:

We are losing the war in Iraq. There has been a steady increase in the assaults carried out by the insurgents against coalition forces. The attacks over the past year have risen from about twenty a day to approximately 120. We are an isolated and reviled nation. We are tyrants to others weaker than ourselves. We have lost sight of our democratic ideals. Thucydides wrote of Athens' expanding empire and how this empire led it to become a tyrant abroad and then a tyrant at home. The tyranny Athens imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. If we do not confront our hubris and the lies told to justify the killing and mask the destruction carried out in our name in Iraq, if we do not grasp the moral corrosiveness of empire and occupation, if we continue to allow force and violence to be our primary form of communication, we will not so much defeat dictators like Saddam Hussein as become them.

But it's part of the nature of things in our current situation that the Foxists who cheer the war and believe whatever version of it is pleasant for them at the moment won't read stuff like this.  Or they will only read it in a context (like rightwing blogs) that frames it as "anti-American" or some similarly ridiculous characterization.  Or they will see only brief excerpts that rework it into thin propaganda like "Chris Hedges says that Bush is just like  Saddam Hussein."  It's the process that Tom Tomorrow captured succintly in his pre-election Channel Surfing cartoon.

It's not as though the US has never had experiences before that are relevant to the current situation.  But with an administration that has made preventive war the national policy and embraces torture of military prisoners now openly and crassly, in some ways we're in uncharted waters here.

Chris Hedges won't win any fans among the blowhard-white-guy set for writing like that.  But he's dead right about the sentimentalization of war and the damage that comes from it.  Those who see foreign affairs as "Team America" versus the opposing sports team can only process his observations as cheering for the Other Side.  It's not that, and those of us in the coalition of the reality-based are trying to understand the consequences of the current US foreign policy.  It goes pretty well if you watch it on Fox News, as radical cleric Jerry Falwell says.

Then again, in 1980 it was the accepted wisdom among Democrats and Republicans that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was not only a serious threat to Western interests, but presented a great opportunity to stick it to the Russians by backing the Muslim fundamentalist Mujahideen, aka, brave freedom fighters.  It's now a quarter century since the USSR invaded Afghanistan.  The jihadist movement that grew out of our noble endeavor to help the brave freedom fighters in Afghanistan - something respectable people in the 1980s accepted as a matter of course was the right thing to do - is now the official face of The Enemy for us.

Reality does have an ugly way of imposing itself eventually even against the most pervasive propaganda and wishful thinking.  But a lot of damage may occur before that happens.