Are Americans Bloodthirsty?

via Battlepanda, Publius at Legal Fiction asks why

To be “credible” on the national level, you had to have supported the invasion. As I noted yesterday, one of the things Hillary has going for her is that she voted pro-war across the board. That's insane - pure psychosis. But true nonetheless.

It is insane. And it's accompanied by a very disturbing other form of insanity - the belief that somehow America could have won in Vietnam, "if only..." Depending on where exactly in the hawkosphere you sit, "if only..." leads to "incompetent Generals", "LBJ", "Nixon", etc, etc. What is missing from the entire debate in Vietnam is that the Americans lost, period. Nixon pulled out before the defeat could be total, but there was no chance of victory.

It is very similar in some respects to the idea prevalent in pre-Nazi, post-WWI Germany: That Germany lost because she was "betrayed" by the Communists, the Jews, etc etc. David Neiwert has been watching this trend for some time, and Josh Marshall found an example relating to the current Iraq war. Karl Rove's recent speech talking about liberals wanting to offer terrorists "therapy" is a similar attempt to point to the left as the "weakness within" that, it logically follows, should be purged.

In reality of course, the German army was beaten in the field by the combination of new tactics and the American entry in to the war - the Germans were outnumbered, outgunned, and (crucially) outfought. The same holds true of Vietnam. By the end of the war, the US Army was so demoralized that withdrawal was the only option. Focusing on the activities of Jane Fonda or other relics of the 1970s simply obscures the fact that America did not have the means to accomplish it's goals. It lost. Period. There is no credible scenario in which the US could have "won" the war, save the near-impossible event that the North would have accepted the existence of a separate (and to the Communist's eyes, still colonial) South.

And yet in both countries - Weimar Germany and modern America - it was/is suicide in national politics to say that the homeland was wrong to go to war. (It's worth remembering that Hitler did not invent Germany's feeling of national victimhood after WWI. Every point on the political spectrum fundamentally agreed that German had been mistreated by the victorious powers.) The only exception might have been Howard Dean, but we saw how he was treated by the press. America, either knowingly or not, has constructed institutions that prevent the uncomfortable facts from actually being spoken where they might do some good. Kerry tried to run on a "kind of, sort of, opposed to the leadership but not the war" campaign, and this really shows just how constrained American leaders (and hopefuls) are when it comes to telling the truth. It was obvious last year that the war was going badly. Yet the American people were (marginally) more supportive of Bush than Kerry, despite the obvious.

So American progressives have to address a simple question. Would Dean (or another candidate who shared Dean's anti-war stance) have done better than Kerry? I don't think so. I think the roots of American militarism go too deep. I think that Iraq could cease to exist as a nation-state (a likely scenario in any coming civil war) and most Americans would not only refuse to see Bush's responsibility, they would refuse to admit that their country has done wrong. I think this is the crucial problem for American progressives. Many Americans still labor under the notion that their country is a Good one. Good, as in morally superior - the "City on the Hill." Even if it's never stated so baldly, it really is impossible for some to admit that their country could sin. But the idea that America did something it shouldn't have - say, start a war in Indochina or Mesopotamia - implies a sin.

I should say that I don't think this is a particularly American trait - most countries would probably react to defeat the same way. The example of Japan is instructive - despite a lot of implicit admissions of Japan's war guilt, it is still extremely difficult for any Japanese leader to come out and say that Japan's role in WWII was wrong. Hell, in Canada the government won't even admit that deporting the Acadians was wrong, for fear of lawsuits. Of course, in the case of America this problem becomes far more important - whatever we did to the Acadians, Canada doesn't have nuclear weapons.

Gwynne Dyer has written before that America needs to lose, and quickly, in Iraq, so they can learn to face reality. If I thought the last step was possible, I'd agree with the first one. Either way, the only thing I can say for now is for American progressive to start thinking of ways to explain to people 1) Why the war was wrong, even if Saddam was a monster, and 2) Why America was wrong, even if the war had been won.