What an awesome achievement. David Brooks' column today in the NY Times today may be the most demented piece ever to appear in that paper. His comments are nothing less than an attempt to justify the US committing war crimes...
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Undeniably, there is bloodmindedness on display in this Brooks piece. There is also an accidental guide to the way of seeing of administration loyalists, neo-imperialists and 'terrorists must be destroyed' hawks of both the left and right wing type.
Excerpts from the column can be parsed to illustrate key ideas.
1.) Only terrorists oppose US actions. There is no popular resistance (how could there be against such virtue?) and there never will be be.
Brooks writes:
These are the people we are still fighting in Iraq. These are the people who blow up Red Cross headquarters and U.N. buildings and fight against democracy and freedom. They are the scum of the earth. And they are being joined in their lairs by the flotsam and jetsam of the terrorist world.
Their scumminess is our great advantage. People like this will never lead a popular insurgency. They have nothing positive to offer normal, decent people. They survive only by cruelty and the power of intimidation.
2.) Americans are inherently innocent and peace loving. Only foreign despots (and their sinister, un-American henchmen) commit crimes against humanity.
Brooks writes:
The shooting down of the Chinook helicopter near Fallujah over the weekend was a shock to the body politic. The fact is, we Americans do not like staring into the face of evil. It is in our progressive and optimistic nature to believe that human beings are basically good, or at least rational. When we stare into a cave of horrors, whether it is in Somalia, Beirut or Tikrit, we see a tangled morass we don't understand. Our instinct is to get out as quickly as possible.
3.) Iraq is important because there, the final battle, a sort of terrorist götterdämmerung, is unfolding.
Brooks writes:
Somehow, over the next six months, until the Iraqis are capable of their own defense, the Bush administration is going to have to remind us again and again that Iraq is the Battle of Midway in the war on terror, the crucial turning point where either we will crush the terrorists' spirit or they will crush ours.
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This is not merely wrong, it is fantastic in the classic sense of the word.
The extent to which the actual managers of this occupation believe such things, as opposed to merely well paid 'public intellectual' shills such as Brooks, is a measure of the depth of their failure as imperialists.
DRM
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