Nowhere Man’s Land

Posted on May 18, 2006 in Commons Theft Occupation of Iraq Reading

What has really robbed the conspiracy theorists of their effectiveness is how the war in Iraq has been conducted. Bush and his advisers have sought to use the war not only to punish their enemies but also to reward their supporters, a bit of political juggling that led them to demand nothing from the American public as a whole. Those of us who are not actively fighting in Iraq, or who do not have close friends and family members who are doing so, have not been asked to sacrifice in any way. The richest among us have even been showered with tax cuts.

Yet in demanding so little, Bush has finally uncoupled the state from its heroic status. It is not a coincidence that modern nationalism dates from the advent of mass democracy — and mass citizen armies — that the American and French revolutions ushered in at the end of the eighteenth century. Bush’s refusal to mobilizethe nation for war in Iraq has sevred that immediate identification with our army’s fortunes. Nor did it begin withthe Bush Administration. The wartime tax cuts and the all-volunteer, wartime army are simply the latest manifestations of a trend that is now decades old and that has been promulgated through peace as well as war, by Democrats as well as Republicans. It cannot truly be a surprise that a society that has steadily dismantled or diminished the most basic access to health care, relief for the poor and the aged, and decent education; a society that has allowed the gap between its richest and poorest citizens to grow to unprecedented size; a society that has paid obeisance to the ideology of globalization to the point of giving away both its jobs and its debt to foreign nations, and which has just allowed one of its poorer cities to quietly drown, should choose to largely opt out of its own defense.

Kevin Baker, “Stabbed in the Back: The Past and Future of a Right Wing Myth”
Harpers, June 2006

Bush reminds me of the Nowhere Man with a mean streak.