Dictators and Pundits
Yesterday I was going to pose the question, "who will be the first to suggest that things in Iraq were better under Saddam Hussein?" Really, I was. LA Times: "Jonathan Chait: Bring back Saddam Hussein." Chait is a liberal hawk who supported the Iraq invasion from the beginning. He's also been inconsistent on why he supported the war. I don't really want to get into the details of that (the above link does) but I find it so bizzare that someone can feel so strongly about something as serious as war but not ground it in any kind of solid, unchanging rationale. When Bill O'Reilly was on David Letterman a couple weeks ago, Letterman said something to the effect that "after 9/11 I felt like we needed to do something" which is the sort of thinking that got us into Iraq. I sympathize with those most directly affected by 9/11 but I don't understand why people were so willing to shut their brains off and support the invasion of a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and ignore the fact that the President of the United States was deliberately misleading the American people to support it. I really don't understand. It boggles my mind. Chait is an example of this mentality but he is also more. He is (though hopefully not much longer) an opinion maker in this country. The problem is that opinion makers talk amongst themselves and form an idea consensus and then push it on everyone else. In this case the consensus was that Bush was right to advocate war with Iraq. Reasonable people who disagreed were described as traitors, hippies, fools, and Frenchmen. The hippies were right. The elite pundits were wrong. The pundits have blood on their hands, as I have said. The best they can do is acknowledge their error in judgment and advocate extracting ourselves from this mess. Most of them do not and dodge the issue of why they so badly wanted to invade a foreign country. My pet theory is that these men are very insecure about their masculinity and thus embrace ridiculous positions like being "at war" with terrorism. For them it seems masculinity is all about appearing tough and shutting off one's brain. Advocating the return of Saddam is the same thing: "these Iraqis can't handle democracy, they only understand the strength of a dictator." Before the war I argued that Saddam was the only thing holding Iraq together. That is not quite the same thing as saying "put Saddam back in power." I was acknowledging the reality of preinvasion Iraq. Chait is trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together the only way he knows how: brute, unthinking force.