ACME Anti-War Protest Co.
An almost readable exercise in the polemics of indignation by the sockpuppet also known as Glenn Greenwald, who rattles on at some length about reaction to the news of McCrystal’s Afghanistan report, declaring “the vague case for continuing to occupy that country is virtually identical to every instance where America’s war-loving Foreign Policy Community advocates the need for new and continued wars. It’s nothing more than America’s standard, generic ‘war-is-necessary’ rationale.”
Naturally the ensuing discussion takes place on a high moral plain, and though Greenwald immediately bolts off the cliff, he manages to stay aloft in Wile E. Coyote-like defiance of gravity above the gaping void …
… that represents the amount of attention paid to the singular facts of the Sept. 11 and pre-Sept. 11 al Qaeda attacks; the threat Saddam Hussein’s regime not only posed but acted on; the long history of murderous meddling by Iran, to include a long list of both overt and covert hostile acts against the United States; plus, if you really want to get into it, 45 years of hot and cold hostility by communist states that resulted in the deaths and enslavement of millions upon millions of people. Likewise the hundreds of millions of people who are free thanks to those nations, the United States and its allies, that stood up to tyranny.
Never mind all that. Like Mr. Coyote, Greenwald floats, and even manages to gain some rhetorical altitude … without even the aid of a single crate of ACME Co. explosives … precisely because he ignores it all. Largely avoiding the encumbrance of fact works better for Greenwald that abuse of same, as he slogs from denouncing efforts to prevail in the war in Afghanistan to denouncing efforts to contain Iran. But also, because Greenwald is right, if not exactly in the way he means.
(Hang on, did I really write “almost readable” up there? Well, I guess I “almost” read the thing, maybe half, possibly even two thirds before eyes glazed over and I was forced to bail.)
War is necessary, and fortunately there are enough people in this country as yet who recognize this terrible reality. No more effective means of combating vile, cynical, murderous despots and terrorist organizations has yet been devised, unless it is simply the credible threat of war, which has worked in some cases, but which by definition must rest on the enemy’s well-founded belief that actions will have consequences. Even buying them off or squeezing their money doesn’t work.
Some finetuning has softened the blow over the years. We don’t have to do full-on bloody 20th-century style onslaughts any more, or at least haven’t lately, thank God and the atom bomb. We don’t lose sons, brothers, uncles and fathers at the terrible rate we once did, nor do civilian populations suffer between opposing armies at the appalling rate they once did. Our own military is becoming increasingly, at longlast, sophisticated at the delicate exercise of counterinsurgency … a marvelous strategy wherein the goal is not death and destruction but the exact opposite, the assurance of security and betterment in order to undermine an insidious enemy who cannot be combated by conventional means. It does, tragically, still involve some degree of killing and the expenditure of friendly lives in furtherance of the local stability that our nation and the world demonstrably benefit from, even at a distance of thousands of miles.
Diplomacy has been sometimes, even often useful as well, in conveying the credible threat of war and then in helping to amass forces when the threat itself proved insufficently persuasive. Also, on occasion, in extricating nations from states of war. But highly moralistic anti-war philosophy that produces appeasement, surrender and abandonment has not worked once. Not a single time. It didn’t work in Asia in 1931. It didn’t Europe in 1938. It didn’t work in Southeast Asia in 1972, especially once Congress pulled the plug on funding for the South Vietnamese. It didn’t work with Iran in 1979. The lesser evil of ceasefire in Korea didn’t work too well in 1953, either, except toward the short-term goal of stopping the slaughter. The death, torture and enslavement of North Korea, and the threat that regime poses to its neighbors are enduring facts 66 years later.
Also notably absent from Greenwald’s discussion is the fact that surrender and abandonment failed in Iraq. In a positive sense. They really tried, they gave it their all, and they failed. George Bush and the military’s counterinsurgency strategy succeeded instead. And now, as if that never happened, they want to surrender again. In fact, they want to surrender in the once-quiet Afghan war they insisted was the one that ought to be fought when they needed an excuse to get out of Iraq. In this way, the post-Iraq anti-war position has become a parody of itself in much the way the slightly mournful-looking Gumby-like sockpuppet also known as Greenwald has over the years become a self-parody, and also looks like Wile E. Coyote, maybe the slightly surprised and woeful blast-blackened Coyote who immediately goes back to work with the latest ACME product line.
OK, you get the point. I gotta get out of this thing now, quick, before I turn into a Greenwald parody myself. Damn, too late.
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Topics: Afghanistan,moronocy
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:33 pm Comments (5) on Monday, September 21, 2009
5 Responses to “ACME Anti-War Protest Co.”
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September 22nd, 2009 at 2:26 am
LOL. I was surprised by “almost readable” but you corrected it later.
I enjoyed reading this. Thank you.
September 22nd, 2009 at 12:33 pm
On the contrary, I think the Wile E. Coyote metaphor works for the entire anti-war left.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:32 pm
[...] ACME Anti-War Protest Co. [...]
September 22nd, 2009 at 10:40 pm
Dude, you read that incoherent drivel?
September 23rd, 2009 at 12:02 am
Yeah. It’s a dirty job but … hey, wait a minute, no one has to do it …