[lbo-talk] Radical Society - Review of Culture & Politics Timothy Don talks with George Packer about Iraq

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Fri May 5 12:29:20 PDT 2006


Michael Pugliese wrote:


>http://www.radicalsociety.com/article_32_01_02.html

In which George Packer says:


>First of all, I never took a stand on the war in public, so that I
>could have actually faked it in my book and said, "In fact, I
>actually decided on that night of March 19 that I was against the
>war." No one would have known the difference because I hadn't come
>out in favor of it. I'm somehow being punished for having told
>readers, long after it became a very unpopular cause, what I was
>thinking. I thought I owed it to the reader because I'm a citizen
>too. But in a way it's irrelevant. That's not the position I'm in.
>That's not my role. My role was to chronicle, to understand, to
>perceive. Remember that the chroniclers of the Vietnam War, like
>Halberstam and Sheehan-the best ones-were pro-war when they went to
>Vietnam, and they'll say that in their books. They then went to see
>and gradually began to feel that the war, whether or not it could
>have been won in the beginning, was not being won, and they began to
>ask why wasn't it being won, and what did that say about us and what
>did it say about Vietnam; and in the end Sheehan believed that it
>couldn't have been won from the beginning because it was a war of
>Vietnamese nationalism. I don't think Iraq is the same in that way,
>but what's interesting is the change in our political culture, where
>someone in my position, who is essentially doing the same thing, is
>required to issue an apology or a mea culpa. That's recent. That's
>about the culture wars and the Clinton wars and the Bush wars. It's
>not about Iraq.

To which I can only say, fuck George Packer. Just before the war started, that little creep made fun of Liza for being a naive leftist for opposing the invasion. He deserves a lot more than being forced to utter a mea culpa.

Doug



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