Are we ready to grapple with the truth?
by digby
If you read nothing else today, read this piece by Matt Stoller about the untold history of our foreign policy in the Middle East. Since we seem to have finally been reduced to an almost cartoon-like campaign leading into this latest round, it’s vital that at least some people start looking at this from another angle and grapple with what we’re really involved in. (I flagged this piece in the New Yorker the other day about the still classified 28 pages of the 9/11 report. Somebody needs to leak those pages.)
We are facing a real existential crisis with climate change. And it’s being driven by greenhouse gasses and our addiction to oil. So is our foreign policy and the 23 year war we’ve been involved in in Iraq. This is all of a piece. Stoller says that we must discount the propaganda and stop the censorship (which is the right word to describe our insane classification system.) He concludes his piece on an optimistic note:
Adopting a realistic policy on ISIS means a mass understanding who our allies actually are and what they want, as well as their leverage points against us and our leverage points on them. I believe Americans are ready for an adult conversation about our role in the world and the nature of the fraying American order, rather than more absurd and hollow bromides about American exceptionalism.
Until that happens, Americans will not be willing to pay any price for a foreign policy, and rightfully so. Fool me once, shame on you. And so forth.
Unwinding the classified state, and beginning the adult conversation put off for seventy years about the nature of American power, is the predicate for building a global order that can drain the swampy brutal corners of the world that allow groups like ISIS to grow and thrive. To make that unwinding happen, we need to start demanding the truth, not what ‘national security’ tells us we need to know. The Constitution does not mention the words ‘national security’, it says ‘common defense.’ And that means that Americans should be getting accurate information about what exactly we are defending.
I couldn’t agree more. Earlier in the piece, Matt references Rick Perlstein’s observation in Invisible Bridge that we were at that moment in the mid-70s and lost our nerve. We succumbed to the cheery delusions offered up by Ronald Reagan in order to feel better and avoid facing the hard work of reckoning with our power and responsibility. I hope he’s right that people are ready now to grapple with it. We’d better be.
Update: Also too, this