VDH Watch 1: VDH explains why Americans should love war

Since this is the first VDH Watch post, I'll do this one as kind of a stream-of-consciousness approach. In this one, we'll be looking at his column: Our Strange War National Review Online 06/03/05.

Hanson opens this column by offering us the grand vision of what he calls our "three-year-plus war" against "Islamic fascism."

He's apparently getting impatient with the pace of things, even though I suspect "three-year-plus" means for him an unending excuse for spending more on the military than all other countries of the world combined. There has been more time passed between the 9/11 attacks and now than the time between the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 and V-J Day in 1945. So "three-years-plus" is a modest description.

Then he draws on one of those grand historical analogies of which Bush fans are so fond:

Imagine that a weak Hitler in the mid-1930s never planned conventional war with the democracies. Instead, he stealthily would fund and train thousands of SS fanatics on neutral ground to permeate European society, convinced of its decadence and the need to return to a mythical time when a purer Aryan Volk reigned supreme. Such terrorists would bomb, assassinate, promulgate fascistic hatred in the media, and whine about Versailles, hoping insidiously to gain concessions from wearied liberal societies that would make ever more excuses as they looked inward and blamed themselves for the presence of such inexplicable evil. All the while, Nazi Germany would deny any connections to these "indigenous movements" and "deplore" such "terrorism," even as the German people got a certain buzz from seeing the victors of World War I squirm in their discomfort. A triangulating Mussolini or Franco would use their good graces to "bridge the gap," and seek a "peaceful resolution," while we sought to "liberate" rather than defeat the German nation.

At this point, I find myself thinking, okay, let's walk thought it real slow and easy, Victor. (As I picture him saying that stuff aloud and making the little quotation mark gestures with his hands at the indicated points.) If Hitler had relied only on terrorists and saboteurs to annoy his neighbors, he wouldn't have built up a huge army instead. Which means he wouldn't have been in a position to snatch Czechoslovakia by threatening war. Or to march into Vienna. Or to attack Poland. Or invade the Soviet Union.

Then, the dizzy sensation in my head warns me that I'm on the wrong track. So I continue reading:

So to recap: The real enemy is an Islamic fascist ideology that is promulgated by a few thousand. They wear no uniforms and are deeply embedded within and protected by Muslim society.

Muslims bad. Muslims are kinda like Hitler. Real Amurcans don't like Muslims. I get the drift, I think.

Now, VDH, with his Hoover Institute scholarship, tells us that these America-hating Muslims are also sneaky. Because lots of them admire the jihadists but don't want to say so out loud. Or maybe they insist on saying so only in Arabic, and, heck, who can understand that? And with a "leap of faith" (I can make the quote-mark gesture, too, just like Condi-Condi always does) that only true believers can manage - or columnists pandering to true believers - VDH explains that these same character flaws are what make Muslims want to emigrate:

This passive-aggressive sense of inferiority explains why millions of Muslims flock to Europe to enjoy its freedom and prosperity, even as they recreate there an Islamist identity to reconcile their longing and desire for what they profess to hate.

Follow that? That peculiar feeling around your temples as you ponder it could be mistaken for the feeling of one's mind expanding. And if you just let it go at that, you can probably avoid the impending headache that it really is warning you about. If you want to turn it into a migrane, start pondering it next to the thought, "But I thought they hated us for our freedoms."

Fortunately, we wise Americans can step back and understand the failings of inferior peoples:

Consequently, the United States has not been able to bring its full arsenal of military assets to the fray. It is nearly impossible to extract the killers from the midst of civilian society. Too much force causes collateral damage and incites religious and nationalist anti-American fervor. Too little power emboldens the fascists and suggests America (e.g., Nixon's "pitiful, helpless giant") cannot or will not win the war.

Like a parent with a naughty child, a maddening forbearance is the order of the day: They burn American flags, behead, murder, and promise death and ruin to Americans; we ignore it and instead find new ways of displaying our sensitivity to Islam.

You tell 'em, Vic! Spare the rod and spoil the fascist child, I always say.

Okay, by now I feel the need to get to the end of this thing, to avoid headache and nausea. So, as we continue, we find that all the Muslim governments are to blame when some Muslim attacks Americans, that Muslims have a lot of oil but are still really backward - those Muslim natives just don't know how to handle their blessings, because they're like children, you know. And then "the West" has gone soft, with all this worrying about minorities and such, and fretting about the possible negative effects of bombing the beejeesus out of any country we feel like attacking. Too little power emboldens the fascists, VDH says.

Oh, and calling the network of torture chambers that the Bush administration has established at Guantanamo, Abu Ghruaib, Bagram and elsewhere a "Gulag" (actually, I prefer Al Gore's term "the Bush Gulag," myself) is evidence that "there is a deep, deep sickness in the West." What's the solution?

Well, VDH tells us, we have to stop thinking small. We have to kill the "Islamic fascists" and stop being so timid in the Middle East. Stabilize Iraq? Only wimps would be content with that! No, we have wage wars of liberation against Iran and Syria, too, to bring them the march of freedom that the Iraqi people are currently enjoying.

All right, I can't stand it any more! Let's break this mess down into its not-very-obscure ideological subtext. And it is ideological hackery from beginning to end. You could "fisk" every line, it's full of so many propaganda buzzwords. First, the Second World War and Hitler references are entirely frivolous in terms of analysis. They serve two main purposes: (1) to lend the positive image that the Second World War has in the minds of most Americans to Bush's wars; and, (2) to cast the battle against jihadists as a matter of conventional warfare between states. Also, terms like "Islamic fascist" or "Islamofascist" (with or without the Condi-Condi quote-sign gestures) are pretty much totally devoid of content. They're also conservative propaganda terms to identify their Dear Leader Bush' foreign policy with the Second World War.

If I were to pretend for a second that his "what-if" game about Nazi Germany had any substance, I would say that its so counter-factual as to be totally absurd. To imagine a Hitler and a Nazi Party that wasn't fundamentally committed to conventional wars of conquest is to imagine a Hitler and a Nazi Party fundamentally different from the ones that actually existed.

Now that Bush himself has publicly embraced the John Birch Society notion that Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were scheming to hand over all of eastern Europe to Stalin and the Commies, you might think the rightwingers would ease up on the Second World War references.

VDH's piece that I've quoted here seems to be nothing but ideological fluff to be "fixed around" the following notions:

1. Americans shouldn't worry about civilian casualities in Iraq or any other country the US invades. Why worry about Muslim mommas and their Muslim babies being killed if they are only going to raise those Muslim babies to be anti-American jihad-lovers? (If you don't think there are "respectable" white folks who make such arguments, you need to get out more.)

2. Invading pretty much any Muslim country we choose is okay, because they're all to blame for the 9/11 attacks.

3. Why fret about overt American attempts to control other countries' oil resources? The Muslims are too primitive and backward to manage them responsibly anyway.

4. The "war against terrorism" is a matter of invading and conquering Muslim countries of our choice.

5. When everyone is more-or-less forced to face the fact that the US has lost the Iraq War, don't blame staunch Republican rightwingers like VDH: look, he was saying we need to be tougher! It's those wimpy Democrats and whoever that undercut our grand crusade there.

Just for a glimpse at the heart of the ideology that VDH is really pushing let's go back to this sentence: "So there is a deep, deep sickness in the West." This sense of the Western democracies being decadent, weak and contemptible is far more widespread among today's Halliburton Republicans than most of them would like to admit. And not just among the religious ones, either.

If there were a Pulitzer Prize for hackery, Victor Davis Hanson would be an annual contender.

(See also the Index to the VDH Watch.)

Tags: global war on terror, long war, potsdam conference, second world war, vdh watch, victor davis hanson, war on terror