I hadn’t actually believed the Bush administration would be so stupid as to invade Iraq; an idiot could perceive that when you have a fundamentalist terror groups at war with you, attacking one of Arab world’s more secular governments (however distasteful) is a bad idea. I was wrong; I had failed to appreciate the degree to which Bush found his calling in the notion of himself as a Christian warrior avenger, the extent to which he heeded the neocons in his administration as opposed to the “realists” from his father’s, how much Cheney and Rumsfeld had bought into the world view of Paul Wolfowitz and Michael Ledeen. The Bush administration, which may initially have seemed the most conventionally Waspish group to hold the presidency in decades, was ripe for conversion to Weekly Standard radicalism.
And now we must face the fact that he’s getting away with it. No, not winning in Iraq, of course; Arabs are pretty good at resisting occupation. But getting away with it in American domestic politics. There is no antiwar movement to speak of on the campuses, in the streets, or in Congress—this for a war far more misguided than Vietnam. Howard Dean–who has hardly smoothed his rough edges—now never speaks about the war, perhaps a testament to its popularity among his party’s major donors. To hear an antiwar voice in the Senate, we had to import George Galloway!
I pray to be proven wrong—yearn for 300 antiwar candidates of Right and Left to mount primary campaigns against incumbents in both parties next year, yearn for a more sensible version of 1968 in the streets. (What chance of that when I can’t roust my own daughters away from “Gilmore Girls”?)
Without an antiwar movement, Bush will keep pushing. He’s in his own bubble of righteousness, and the skeptics in his cabinet and the military have been purged. Apart from the blogosphere and few magazines, there is no antiwar movement. There are no Christians speaking from the venerable Just War tradition. The fiery and eloquent radical Jews of yore are the other side. This has got to change. Without a peace movement as a brake, we will soon be attacking Syria and Iran and the chance to avoid a real war of civilizations will be gone. Bush will go down in history as the forever war president, and Americans will be big losers.