The Warbloggers Get Their Next War

As I've written earlier, World War III has broken out, in a region of the world far more strategically significant than the impetus for WWI, the Balkans. Israel is fighting a two-front war, responding with as much force as possible because their untested leader needs to show strength. And reports are that the Hizbollah militants are spiriting the kidnapped soldiers into Iran. This report comes from Foreign Ministry Spokesman Mark Regev, who spent 5 years as the spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington. How convenient that someone who's been in the US that long agitates about Iranian involvement, making justified a rocket attack on Tehran's nuclear facilities.

And this all comes as fantastic news to the warbloggers. For a while there it seemed like they were out of business. Iraq is in chaos, Afghanistan faces a Taliban surge 5 years after the start of fighting, and the American public appears to be turning away from war as a problem-solving tool. This was anathema to the warbloggers. They simply had to have another war.

This begs the question of why. It's clear that the warbloggers, many of whom I read today cheerleading for Israel's hits on Lebanese facilities, wanted to jettison the failures in Iraq as soon as humanly possible, and another war offers them the perfect opportunity to demagogue, demonize, and celebrate the carnage. Iraq is SO last season. Afghanistan is positively ANCIENT. They've moved on from those wars, which weren't successful because the US was too restrained, anyway. It's the familiar reason for dropping George Bush - he wasn't ever a real conservative, anyway. Conservatism hasn't failed, it's never BEEN TRIED. And the wars of the 21st century weren't lost, they haven't been prosecuted with enough force. Same argument. Same argument as Trotskyites who aver that true Communism hasn't been attempted either. Well, neocons all spring from that tradition, anyway.

So shirking responsibility for one of the most disastrous foreign policy blunders in modern history, one that harmed US credibility the world over, is certainly on the agenda. But there's something else. I think that the warbloggers in general legitimately believe that overriding force is the only way to stop the threat they perceive from radical Islam. I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with people of this ilk that before long descend into the definitive statement "you have to hit them hard in the mouth because that's all they know." In so many ways that's what drove this initial neocon foray into Iraq. It's what motivates the original PNAC document. If you project massive American military might globally, nobody will fuck with you. It's the "king of the hill" bullyboy doctrine writ large.

Nobody's saying that Israel has no right to retaliate for incursions into their territory. But cheering it on, with spittle dropping from the corners of mouths, is the kind of bloodthirsty mania that the world could do without. "We didn't ask for this war, but we will finish it," they say. Bullshit. You've been asking for war since our greatest threat was the CCCP. You think war is a tool to solve problems. And as there will always be problems in the world, you will always want war. You won't want to GO to war, mind you, but you'll want to whoop and holler from the sidelines.

John Dean's study of the authoritarian impulse in what has become the conservative movement is very revealing:

JOHN DEAN: I ran into a massive study that has really been going on 50 years now by academics. They’ve never really shared this with the general public. It’s a remarkable analysis of the authoritarian personality. Both those who are inclined to follow leaders and those who jump in front and want to be the leaders. It was not the opinion of social scientists. It was information they drew by questioning large numbers of people — hundreds of thousands of people — in anonymous testing where [the subjects] conceded their innermost feelings and reactions to things. And it came out that most of these people were pre-qualified to be conservatives and this, did indeed, fit with the authoritarian personality.

[...]

OLBERMANN: And the idea of leaders and followers going down this path or perhaps taking a country down this path requires — this whole edifice requires an enemy. Communism, al Qaeda, Democrats, me… whoever for the two-minutes hate. I overuse the Orwellian analogies to nauseating proportions. But it really was, in reading what you wrote about, especially what the academics talked about. There was that two-minutes hate. There has to be an opponent, an enemy, to coalesce around or the whole thing falls apart. Is that the gist of it?

DEAN: It is one of the things, believe it or not, that still holds conservatism together. There is many factions in conservatism and their dislike or hatred of those they betray as liberal, who will basically be anybody who disagrees with them, is one of the cohesive factors. There are a few others but that’s certainly one of the basics. There’s no question that, particularly the followers, they’re very aggressive in their effort to pursue and help their authority figure out or authority beliefs out. They will do what ever needs to be done in many regards. They will blindly follow. They stay loyal too long and this is the frightening part of it.

We know that the enemy must be destroyed because we're told their the enemy and all enemies must be destroyed. And the footsoldiers in this movement are those warbloggers who glorify any act of war, who roar with approval at suffering and carnage, who fail to take foreign policy seriously but view it as a game where their team must utterly devastate the other side. Meanwhile, those in power take advantage of the simple-mindedness of this approach by amping up the rhetoric, providing fresh meat for the warbloggers to blog, and giving some sort of approval to madness.