Teaching Them A Lesson

Conservatism had its window to the soul moment today. I often end up getting exactly to this point in the conversations I have with conservatives. After arguing the facts they invent, after trying to force them to accept reality, it always comes down to something like, "Well, the Arabs attacked us, and you have to destroy them because it's all they know," or "it's an honor/shame culture and they need to be humiliated to comply."

Well, we know have the op-ed version of that bile:

Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.

It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty. This idea had organized the entire world, divided up its resources, imposed the nation-state system across the globe, and delivered the majority of the world's population into servitude and oppression. After World War II, revolutions across the globe, from India to Algeria and from Indonesia to the American civil rights revolution, defeated the authority inherent in white supremacy, if not the idea itself. And this defeat exacted a price: the West was left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West--like Germany after the Nazi defeat--lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority.

Not only is this the kind of argument you would expect to see in some radical Zionist settler magazine, it's remarkably inaccurate to say we are restraining ourselves in this war. As Glenn Greenwald notes, the only thing we're not doing militarily in Iraq is using large-scale carpet bombing to obliterate entire cities, or using nukes. As a coalition, we are doing things like this:

Iraqi, 15, 'drowned after soldiers forced him into canal'

An Iraqi teenager drowned after four British soldiers forced him into a canal at gunpoint to "teach him a lesson" for suspected looting, a court martial heard yesterday.

The soldiers watched as Ahmed Jabar Karheem, 15, who was unable to swim, began to struggle when he was ordered into the Shatt al-Basra canal in May 2003. After the boy disappeared below the surface, the soldiers drove away. His body was recovered two days later.

This was right after the war began, and months before Abu Ghraib, which included electrocution, forced sodomy, rape, and murder in order to extract intelligence. Steele calls Abu Ghraib a mass disinformation campaign, if I'm reading him right.

Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization campaigns.)

We leveled Falluja to the ground. The same in countless other cities. We've increased air power by about 50% in the last six months. This isn't enough. The rhetoric is that of elmination. By attacking America not only the terrorists but all Arabs have forfeited the right to live.

And they say the Left is angry.

Then of course there's the element of white supremacy as a positive. Steele is apparently black. But the argument he's making, which most conservatives make in order to innoculate themselves of any charge of racism, is detailed by the great David Neiwert:

The notion that racism is dead has been a favorite theme of the right for awhile now. It began, probably, with the Thernstroms' America in Black and White, and continued with Dinesh D'Souza's The End of Racism. In a similar vein, the new White House Press Secretary, Tony Snow, suggested awhile back that he thinks racism a dead issue:

"Here's the unmentionable secret: Racism isn't that big a deal any more. No sensible person supports it. Nobody of importance preaches it. It's rapidly becoming an ugly memory."
-- Tony Snow, on an October 2003 edition of Fox News Sunday

What Snow is really doing, of course, is defining racism away. This is only true if "racism" is largely just the purview of the Ku Klux Klans and Silver Shirts, the David Dukes and Hal Turners and the National Socialist Movements of the world. It's also only true if you believe that the only racism of possible significance is that which might be condoned by public officials -- that racist acts by ordinary citizens are of no consequence.

The stark reality, however, is that racism not only continues to thrive in America both in less obvious, institutional ways, but also through the auspices of the conservative movement and its official wing, the Republican Party. The 21st-century American right has proven remarkably content not merely to let the embers of racism smolder away at the roots of our society, but to fan them in ways both subtle and unsubtle.

Neiwert's is a long and highly recommneded post. He spins off into the current immigration debate and recent acts of violence against Hispanics (cheered on by talk radio). But the relationship to Steele's piece is important. Steele surely will use his race as proof that he's not racist. And of course he'll explain away racism as irrelevant. What really needs to happen is for everyone to forget there is such a thing as racism, because that'll make it easier to eliminate entire races from the planet. That's essentially his argument.

And the fact that it's directed at Arabs makes it something even black people can "get behind," as long as they ignore their own history.

At least Steele's being honest with the "bomb them into the Stone Age" rhetoric. He clearly believes in American exceptionalism and infallibility, and thinks that gives us the right to bestride the Earth as a colossus, playing executioner at will. I know the answer to this because I've heard it before; "We didn't start this war, but we'll finish it." And we'll finish it if we have to kill everyone in the Middle East to do it.

I thought that Democrats were the ones being racist when they intimated that "Iraqis can't govern themselves" or don't want to be free. Considering that 95%-plus of the fighters in Iraq are Iraqis, Steele and his supporters are asking for the wholesale slaughter of Iraqis and their cities. They'll cloak it in the language of "we're not doing what we need to do," but clearly this shows that all the talk of having to be impressed with the purple fingers and the defiant voting was a load of crap. It ignores the struggle for hearts and minds, it ignores all the points of how Al Qaeda is causing Iraqi suffering, it ignores it all. As Greenwald puts (similar to how I have done it, but far more succinctly):

To sit and listen to people who have spent the last three years piously lecturing us on the need to stand with "the Iraqi people," who justified our invasion of that country on the ground that we want to give them a better system of government because we must make Muslims like us more, now insist that what we need to do is bomb them with greater force and less precision is really rather vile -- but highly instructive. The masks are coming off. No more poetic tributes to democracy or all that sentimental whining about "hearts and minds." It's time to shed our unwarranted white guilt, really stretch our legs and let our hair down, and just keep bombing and bombing until we kill enough of them and win. Shelby Steele deserves some sort of award for triggering that refreshingly honest outburst.

A-men.