It Could be Worse

by digby

Tristero calls the bonafides of this foreign affairs roundtable into question in the post below. I’m not sure I can wholly endorse his criticisms as long as great thinkers like Newt Gingrich and Jonah Goldberg are out there pontificating to larger audiences and with much greater influence. Gingrich, you’ll recall, is a great intimate of Donald Rumsfeld and worked hand in glove with him on the military strategy for Iraq. He is considered a leading conservative intellectual:

James Wolcott leads us through Newties latest foreign policy advice:

‘This is World War III,’ Gingrich said. And once that’s accepted, he said calls for restraint would fall away:

“‘Israel wouldn’t leave southern Lebanon as long as there was a single missile there. I would go in and clean them all out and I would announce that any Iranian airplane trying to bring missiles to re-supply them would be shot down. This idea that we have this one-sided war where the other team gets to plan how to kill us and we get to talk, is nuts.’

“There is a public relations value, too. Gingrich said that public opinion can change “the minute you use the language of World War III. The message then, he said, is ‘OK, if we’re in the third world war, which side do you think should win?'”

So Gingrich wants to roll out World War III as a bugle call to give Republicans a Viagra injection and force Democrats to slink behind the cavalry in mealy-mouthed agreement, for fear of being called appeasers and peaceniks by useful fools like Michael Goodwin.

But I don’t know about this. It might have worked as a portentous sales device in the immediate aftershock of 9/11, but we’re nearly five years on and the US stature has shrunk. If a majority of Americans want us to withdraw from Iraq, how eager are they going to be to sign on to a declaration of world war against a stateless enemy?

They’ll only do it notionally, as long as nothing is actually required of them.

President Bush speaks to the camera: “We’re going to call it World War III, but there’ll be no draft of your precious darling geniuses, no tax increases, no sacrifice demanded, and I promise not to preempt your favorite programs, such as American Idol.”

Fred and Wilma Flintstone, feet propped up on baby dinosaur: “Er, okay; fine; whatever.”

Gingrich of course is thinking tactically–he probably flosses tactically, imagining the most ingenious angle a vanguard thinker like himself should employ in a flossing opportunity–but there’s also a strong component of nostalgia in this world war talk. You see in the writings of Victor Davis Hanson, the constant references to Neville Chamberlain and Patton, the primping of Blair and Bush for the role of Churchillian stalwart. It’s as if Gingrich, Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and the whole gang have fallen for their own romantic bluster and fantasize that the Winds of War are going to sweep them through History like Robert Mitchum in Herman Wouk’s epic, where they will feel the spray of the North Atlantic, the stinging sands of North Africa, and enjoy the passionate embrace of a USO entertainer after a heavy night in the canteen. They want to believe that inspired and educated with the right words–their words–Americans will once again rise and meet the mortal challenge.

This has been the case from the beginning and it infects not only the crazed neocon right, but liberal hawks and certainly the media, who all don their fabulous Prada safari jackets and head out on the first plane to whatever desert is exploding to do their bad Walter Cronkite impressions. (I blame Tom Brokaw and Stephen Spielberg for all this, btw.)

When you have this level of “intellectual” discourse being taken very seriously in newspapers and on television, I look at this foreign affairs panel and just breathe a sign of relief that Newt Gingrich wasn’t on it. This is, of course, the problem. The spectrum of opinion is always restricted by the fact that the right blasts the atmosphere with gaseous rhetoric so inane and outrageous that they define the perimeter of the debate.

Seriously, when Jonah Goldberg is actually paid to pontificate on serious topics, you know that something has gone terribly awry. Here’s Wolcott again:

Let the learning curve begin, advises Jonah Goldberg, taking a break from playing with his action figures: “…the advantage of calling all this World War Three is that it’s easier to understand and takes less explanation. Most people don’t think of the Cold War as a war so much as an effort to avoid one.”

The post also provides a helpful glimpse of Goldberg’s thought processes at work, which resemble Horton trying to hatch an egg:

“Domino theory and public diplomacy had fairly minor roles in World War II. But such considerations are central to our understanding of today’s challenges. Of course, tthe Cold War analogy fails in some important respects as it was mostly a contest between states. But all analogies fail in important respects, that’s why they’re analogies.”

He sure makes that Foreign Affairs panel look better, doesn’t he?

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