The Bush Administration Plans to Blame You for Iraq
By William Astore, Tomdispatch.com. Posted November 9, 2007.
After holding so few high-level government and military officials
accountable for failures in Iraq, Bush needs a scapegoat.
The world's finest military launches a highly coordinated
shock-and-awe attack that shows enormous initial progress. There's
talk of the victorious troops being home for Christmas. But the war
unexpectedly drags on. As fighting persists into a third, and then a
fourth year, voices are heard calling for negotiations, even "peace
without victory." Dismissing such peaceniks and critics as defeatists,
a conservative and expansionist regime -- led by a figurehead who
often resorts to simplistic slogans and his Machiavellian sidekick who
is considered the brains behind the throne -- calls for one last surge
to victory. Unbeknownst to the people on the home front, however, this
duo has already prepared a seductive and self-exculpatory myth in case
the surge fails.
The United States in 2007? No, Wilhelmine Germany in 1917 and 1918, as
its military dictators, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and his
loyal second, General Erich Ludendorff, pushed Germany toward defeat
and revolution in a relentless pursuit of victory in World War I.
Having failed with their surge strategy on the Western Front in 1918,
they nevertheless succeeded in deploying a stab-in-the-back myth, or
Dolchstoßlegende, that shifted blame for defeat from themselves and
Rightist politicians to Social Democrats and others allegedly
responsible for losing the war by their failure to support the troops
at home.
The German Army knew it was militarily defeated in 1918. But this was
an inconvenient truth for Hindenburg and the Right, so they crafted a
new "truth": that the troops were "unvanquished in the field." So
powerful did these words become that they would be engraved in stone
on many a German war memorial.
It's a myth we ourselves are familiar with. As South Vietnam was
collapsing in 1975, Army Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr., speaking to a
North Vietnamese counterpart, claimed the U.S. military had never lost
a battle in Vietnam. Perhaps so, the NVA colonel replied, "but it is
also irrelevant." Summers recounts his conversation approvingly,
without irony, in his book On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the
Vietnam War. For him, even if we lost the war, our Army proved itself
"unbeatable."
Though Summers' premise was -- and remains -- dangerously misleading,
it reassured the true believers who ran, and continue to run, our
military. Those military men who were less convinced of our
"unbeatable" stature tended to keep their own counsel. Their
self-censorship, coupled with wider institutional self-deception,
effectively opened the door to exculpatory myths.
A New American Stab-in-the-Back?
Warnings about a new stab-in-the-back myth may seem premature or
overheated at this moment in the Iraq War. Yet, if the history of the
original version of this myth is any guide, the opposite is true. They
are timely precisely because the Dolchstoßlegende was not a post-war
concoction, but an explanation cunningly, even cynically, hatched by
Rightists in Germany before the failure of the desperate, final
"victory offensive" of 1918 became fully apparent. Although
Hindenburg's dramatic testimony in November 1919 -- a full year after
the armistice that ended the war -- popularized the myth in Germany,
it caught fire precisely because the tinder had been laid to dry two
years earlier.
It may seem farfetched to compare a Prussian military dictatorship and
its self-serving lies to the current Bush administration. Yet I'm not
the first person to express concern about the emergence of our very
own Iraqi Dolchstoßlegende. Back in 2004, Matthew Yglesias first
brought up the possibility. Last year, in Harper's Magazine, Kevin
Baker detailed the history of the stab-in-the-back, suggesting that
Bush's Iraqi version was already beginning to germinate early in 2005,
when news from Iraq turned definitively sour. And this October, in The
Nation, Eric Alterman warned that the Bush administration was already
busily sowing the seeds of this myth. Other Iraqi myth-trackers have
included Gary Kamiya at Salon.com, and Jeremy Brecher and Brendan
Smith at Commondreams.org. Just this August, Thomas Ricks, Washington
Post columnist and author of the bestselling book, Fiasco, worried
publicly about whether the military itself wasn't already embracing
elements of the myth whose specific betrayers would include "weasely
politicians" (are there any other kind?) and a "media who undercut us
by focusing on the negative."
There's more: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/67354/
William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), now teaches at
the Pennsylvania College of Technology. His books and articles focus
primarily on military history and include Hindenburg: Icon of German
Militarism (Potomac Press, 2005). He may be reached at
wastore@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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