[posted on Pen-L by Leigh Meyers, quoting a link from Juan Cole's blog]:
At U.S. Naval War College, Scholar Likens Iraq to Plague
The last one to speak was the one who had used the word "folly" in the program: John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. Mearsheimer is 58. He told the audience that when he was a teenager, he had enlisted in the Army. Then he'd spent 1966-1970 at West Point. Then he said this:
I remember once in English class we read Albert Camus's book The Plague. I didn't know what The Plague was about or why we were reading it. But afterwards the instructor explained to us that The Plague was being read because of the Vietnam War. What Camus was saying in The Plague was that the plague came and went of its own accord. All sorts of minions ran around trying to deal with the plague, and they operated under the illusion that they could affect the plague one way or another. But the plague operated on its own schedule. That is what we were told was going on in Vietnam. Every time I look at the situation in Iraq today, I think of Vietnam, and I think of The Plague, and I just don't think there's very much we can do at this point. It is just out of our hands. There are forces that we don't have control over that are at play, and will determine the outcome of this one. I understand that's very hard for Americans to understand, because Americans believe that they can shape the world in their interests.
But I learned during the Vietnam years when I was a kid at West Point, that there are some things in the world that you just don't control, and I think that's where we're at in Iraq.
(from MondoWeiss, Phillip Weiss) -------------
What's interesting to me about this quote from Mearsheimer and his memory of Vietnam is that it's a wrong reading of The Plague, a wrong reading of Vietnam, the intended analogy, and finally a wrong reading of Iraq.
The US military academies believed they were wiping out Communist insurgents in Vietnam with enlightened, innovative, humane, and well improvised strategies and programs, much like the citizens of the quarantined city in the novel who banned together to stop the plague. But in the novel the intended analogue was the French underground banning together to improvise resistance to the German military occupation of France and by extension the quarantine of Europe under the Nazi plague.
So then the mistake was that the US military believed they were the underdogs under siege and bravely improvised un-orthodox and innovative methods (counter-insurgency) to meet and overcome the desperate challenge of Communism gone to ground.
It would never occur to any of these people their role in the novel's analogy was in fact the Wehrmacht, that is the plague, the very disease against which all humane and innovative forces rallied to contain and defeat.
John Mearsheimer, judging from his bio on wikipedia, is an example of an anti-war ally of a very problematic sort who were common during the Vietnam era. In other words he sounds like a neo-liberal Democrat who buys the basic outline of well intentioned US power that has somehow gone wrong. Indeed, mistakes were made.
I read his essay with Stephan Walt, The Israeli Lobby and US Foreign Policy, and was not impressed. It failed to outline the underlying rightwing view of US-Israeli identification, which I think is based on a shared state pathology of victimhood, i.e. we're all victims pitted against the forces of evil. Once that pathological view for the justification of abusive state power is understood, then there is little need for a quasi-conspiracy theory to explain why the US indulges Israel. The inner circle power connections and lobbying outlined in the essay would have little effect if there was no shared view of the world.
In any event, the US-Israel relationship strikes me as a large scale analogue to a psychology of co-dependency usually associated with drug addicts, alcoholics, and abusive families. Accordingly, everybody is a victim and hence nobody is responsible. Thus, mysterious forces beyond control--drugs, alcohol, cycles of violence--carry their own moment and conveniently obscure responsibility which otherwise would be completely illuminated by the glaring light of a rational world.
The universal evil threat of Communism and the domino theory was the justification for the US invasion and war in Vietnam. It was always a difficult selling job since the last domino would splash down some five thousand miles across the Pacific Ocean. Most people back then couldn't find Vietnam on a map if they had a gun held to their head. Never mind where, a threat was a threat and it had to met with the same resolute, life and death force that all righteous victims eventually muster when they are up against the wall.
But, as the history of defeat by the forces of evil would have it, that valiant underdog of legend, the United States of America, won back the right to universal victimhood in its own ignominious defeat. And then too, the US tragedy of Vietnam was, we tried changing the democratic government of South Vietnam four or five times. We tried Catholics, we tried Buddhists, we tried fat ones, we tried thin ones, but nothing was ever good enough for the picky little bastards. Obviously they weren't ready for democracy.
Dot, dot, dot. Oh finally, finally, finally, thank god almighty, on 9/11 we got to be victims again!
The US political establishment, neo-conservatives and neo-liberals alike climaxed in delicious agony as they stuck their finger up each other's ass and screamed rape in unison.
Ahhh, the cycle of state victimhood and violence could continue after all. Only this time it was even better. We could fabricate our enemies at will since there was no state target, but a mere a hand full of nasty malcontents spread over half the Muslim world.
What a feast we're having.
CG