Imperial Hacks: Right and Left

"Corrupted by wealth and power, your government is like a restaurant with only one dish. They've got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side. But no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen."

Huey Long

Regular readers of these musings might suspect that we have been rather hard on our anointed Zeus and the pantheon of lesser gods he commands, namely, the President and the Republican Party. In truth, criticizing the GOP is like dynamite fishing: hardly sporting, but appealing nevertheless when one is in a certain mood.

Certainly, the Party of Lincoln provides rich material for humor of a rather sarcastic kind: a war on Iraq that may be the greatest strategic disaster in our history; doubling the national debt in fewer than five years; the tomfoolery of Freedom Fries [1]; a tragic-comic ineptitude at protecting U.S. citizens from the mere vicissitudes of weather while simultaneously claiming the divine power to coerce all mankind into an earthly utopia; the nomination to the Supreme Court of Miss Harriet Miers.

Indeed, the planned investiture of Miss Miers in the robe of Hammurabi promises further entertainment for those who cherish an obscene sense of humor. Her confirmation hearing is sure to produce a Vesuvius-like outpouring of quackery from the Robertsons, Falwells, Dobsons, and LaHayes which has rarely been matched in our history. One has to go back to the solemn asininities of William Jennings Bryan, Billy Sunday, and Aimee Semple McPherson to find their equal. Under the GOP, America has truly entered a second Golden Age of politico-religious kitsch.

But after savoring the ludicrous aspects of the current Republican hegemony, one sobers up and returns to the mundane. Perpetual war, Argentine levels of debt, and rampant corruption are hardly conducive to national survival, let alone prosperity. Isn't it time to turn the fat hogs out and give the lean hogs a shot?

When the party in power behaves like Peronists without the extravagant wardrobe, one is tempted to believe that those who nominally oppose that party would be more rational and public spirited. That is one of the cherished myths of the National Story, at any rate.

A glance at this morning's Washington Post op-ed page, the bulletin board of America's nomenklatura, quickly brings one back to earth. In a piece entitled "Using Our Leverage: The Troops," Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), a presumed scourge of the Bush administration, argues that a subtle threat to pull out U.S. troops would be the inducement ­ or sub rosa extortion ­ to get the Iraqi politicians to settle their differences and ultimately defeat the insurgency. [2]

On one level, this is an outburst of unbelievable naiveté. One can only imagine that Senator Levin has been brainwashed [3] by his various Potemkin tours of the Green Zone so as to believe that the U.S. military occupation is actually popular. It is not. On the other hand, we can assume that the minority of Iraqis who have battened on to the occupation for their own position or profit already have their visas in order should the plug ever be pulled. Prospectively, they are just one more émigré group poised to drive up rents in Arlington, Virginia. The idea that the "threat" to pull out U.S. military forces leverages anything is an exercise in delusion. This is what Democrats concoct when desperation forces them to devise an alternative Iraq policy.

At a deeper, moral level, Senator Levin's thesis is even more dispiriting. Our troops, you must understand, are "leverage." Flesh and blood Americans are dying every day, but they are leverage: counters, pawns, bargaining chips in a game of Realpolitik. If the Democrats want to prove they are "tough enough for the job," i.e., as coldly cynical as the other party, they are off to a promising start.
Further clues as to the Democrats' thinking on Iraq can be gleaned from their reaction to the President's recent address to the National Endowment for Democracy. Enough criticism has been leveled at this address ­ for its high-school Wilsonianism, Chautauqua tent revivalism, and geo-strategic mumbo-jumbo ­ that further analysis here would merely be cruel.

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