Review of A Tragic Legacy by Glenn Greenwald

Glenn Greenwald's A Tragic Legacy (2007) is an informed and well-documented polemic about Bush's foreign policy and the torture policy with emphasis on the administration's moralistic, Good-vs.-Evil, "Manichean" posturing. He uses the administration's Good-vs.-Evil framework as a meta-explanation of the failure of the Cheney-Bush Presidency.

Greenwald practiced as a Constitutional attorney, and his professional background is put to fruitful use in this book, as it is in his Salon blog.

A Tragic Legacy is especially good in describing the marketing strategy Bush and Cheney used both to generate support for the Iraq War and to generate Karl Rove's 50%+1 majority by polarizing the country against the "Islamofascist" foe.

But Greenwald sometimes seems so intent on "making the sale of the moment" on particular points that his overall narrative theme suffers. As I've noted before, he seems to be eager to find "principled" conservatives with whom he can contrast Bush as a radical or phony. Whether his quest for the fabled principled conservative is an argumentive strategy or the triumph of hope over experience is hard to say. But this line of argument in particular confuses his larger contention. It's also difficult at times to tell whether his argument about the "Manichean" position is meant to describe Bush himself, his Christian Right base or the Karl Rove marketing approach.

War, oil and propaganda

The best chapter by far is his examination of the administration's war propaganda against Iran. This chapter can be read as a primer on how to apply critical thinking to war propaganda. This is an extremely important skill, especially since our all-too-human inclination to rally to "our side" when threatened by "outsiders" is so good at overriding critical thinking.

The evidence strongly indicates that Dick Cheney and some of his allies of the neoconservative and just-plain-warmongering varieties want to start a war with Iran. And Greenwald lays out the statements in the public that lead one to think so. We know that there are good arguments against going to war with Iran, including the overstretch of the Army's ground combat capabilities. But because of the many indications that Greenwald describes that Cheney and Bush want to attack Iran, I'm still very concerned that their aggressive inclinations will override practical good sense on the issue.

Greenwald does a particularly good job describing the varied motives and interests that have combined to produce the Iraq War and the real possibility of its expansion into Iraq. We don't have to assume an all-powerful oil conspiracy to understand that US policy in the Middle East has oil resources as a major factor:

Such oil-related objectives would likely motivate most mainstream American political leaders, let alone ones such as George Bush and Dick Cheney, who share a background in the oil industry and who retain substantial ties of every type to that industry. There are multiple reasons why the United States continues to sacrifice so much of its resources, its attention, and many of its lives to continued influence and even domination of the Middle East (versus other regions of the world where we appear more or less indifferent). Those who seek to deny that ensuring our influence over the oil supply is a significant factor in why we have made the Middle East our predominant national priority are either incredibly naive or indescribably dishonest.

Fair enough. He also makes a meaningful distinction between raw militarists like Cheney, neoconservatives like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, and the Christian Right leaders like James Dobson who support a war-oriented foreign policy. He also makes a plea for more frank public discussion of Israel's role in encouraging such policies. And he emphasizes the point that the mass base in the Republican Party for policies supporting the viewpoint of hard-right Israelis is the Christian Right, largely fundamentalist Protestants who embrace an apocalyptic outlook that tells them escalating warfare in the Middle East is a good thing.

Greenwald is on solid ground in saying that no matter how much the US supports Israel, that American policymakers have to recognize that Israel's national interests are not always identical to those of the United States. In particular related to US policy on Iran, known Iranian support for "international terrorism" in the past decade has been to Lebanese Hizbullah (Shi'a) and Hamas (Sunni), whose terrorist acts have been directed at Israel, not at the US.

So Israel's leaders understandably see Iran as a particular threat. American policymakers can't and shouldn't ignore that. But they should also recognize that American actions that would be most desirable from the particular viewpoint of Israeli leaders at a given moment aren't necessarily the best choices for the United States. As Greenwald explains, some Bush administration officials, leading neoconservatives outside of government, and (most explicitly of all) the "Christian Zionists" among white Christian fundamentalists regard American interests in relation to Iran as identical or nearly identical to Israeli interests.

His chapter "The Manichean Road to Baghdad" is a good account of the marketing of the Iraq War, both before the invasion and in the continuing conflict. Having followed this subject closely all along, including on Greenwald's blog the last couple of years, it's hard for me to judge how much of it would be new to a more general reader. His focus is less on the historical reconstruction of events than on the marketing strategy used. He also gives due credit to the appalling performance of the Establishment press in assisting in the marketing effort. For instance, he discusses Howard Dean's prewar opposition to the invasion and how the prowar propagandists and the at-best-lazy mainstream media conveyed it:

Because of his questioning of the president's assertions and his opposition to Bush's insistence that we attack Iraq - and because his candidacy was consequently opposed to the entire war-supporting Beltway political and media establishment - Dean was immediately depicted as a wild-eyed, fringe radical who was so far "to the left" that he was even outside the mainstream ideological spectrum. Almost overnight, this moderate, completely nonideological figure became demonized - by Republicans, prowar Democrats, and the mindlessly Bush-adoring press - as some sort of unholy, unhinged mix of Ward Churchill, Joan Baez, and Fidel Castro. Dean was the new Abbie Hoffman, a freakish creature whose insanity and emotional instability were matched only by his rabid affection for socialism, Saddam Hussein, and Islamic terrorism. That vilification project proved so potent that even now when Dean has been proven right about virtually every geopolitical issue with respect to Iraq, the stigma persists today and will likely never be expunged from many minds.

And yet, as Greenwald rightly observes, "To review Dean's speeches against the war is to read, in essence, an almost exact roadmap of what has happened, a predictive list of the now-realized consequences of invading Iraq that have made it one of the worst strategic disasters in our nation's history."

In its marketing aspects, and therefore its effects in polarizing the public, Greenwald's argument is convincing. His use of the Manichean-dualist framework as an explanatory tool is less convincing when it comes to Presidential decision-making for several reasons. He does explain some of the evidence in the public record, such as Bush's fortysomething religious conversion and this struggles with alcohol, that argue in favor of Bush actually taking such a dichotomous, Manichean view of the world. But, as even Sigmund Freud experienced, diagnosing psychological peculiarities from afar is an exceptionally tricky business. There is also plenty of evidence that Bush grew up as an arrogant rich kid in a family with an exceptional sense of entitlement, which likely also contributes to a sense that what he wants is particularly righteous.

Then there is also the empirical question of how much clout other administration officials like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove have over Bush's outlook, the information he receives about policy options and marketing strategies. We know that Cheney does have a large influence over foreign policy. And the publicly-known aspects of this exceptionally secretive politician's biography make John Dean's judgment that Cheney may just lack a conscience highly credible.

I was reminded of this in Greenwald's book in the chapter in which he describes the Cheney-Bush torture program and their international gulag system, which may contain as many as 35,000 inmates being held indefinitely without charges. On the one hand, he's right that some of the most horrible outrages against humanity can be committed in the name of defending the Good. The Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition are two classic examples that are well known, thanks in part to Protestant polemics that denounce them as specifically Catholic outrages - which they were, but they were also committed in the name of Catholic Christianity. But in the case of torture, that framework just doesn't suffice. We're also talking about sadism, people drunk with their own sense of power, and malfunctioning (or non-existent) consciences.

Anecdotal but common evidence suggests that even most torture defenders prefer to defend only abstractions like "getting a little rough", or something non-violent like interrogators standing on a Qu'ran, or even the television series 24, where torture is a staple tool of the heroes. Few are willing to specifically defend mock execution by partial drowning ("waterboarding") or drugging a prisoner and shoving foreign objects into his anus, or the many other gruesome cruelties that are common elements in the Cheney-Bush torture program. This reluctance among rank-and-file Republican torture defenders to defend such specific acts is an indication that most of them realize that what they are defending is deeply sick and wrong. And yet they defend it anyway. Getting excessive in defending the Good as they understand it is certainly part of the issue. But there's also something darker and more primitive at work that can't be adequately explained by the Manichean mindset.

Where are the True Conservatives?

The biggest weakness of A Tragic Legacy is its quixotic quest for the principled, true-blue conservatives who value personal liberty, balanced budgets and Constitutional precedents and restraint. The kind of conservatives who want to "make haste slowly" and enforce the law without the President using his commutation power to spring someone who has the dirt on him to keep him from talking.

There are a couple of problems with Greenwald's search for these Principled Conservatives, who are only slightly more abundant than unicorns. One is highlighted by Greenwald himself in a surprising way. His first chapter gives considerable attention to how phony it is for the so-called movement conservatives and Republican pundits and politicians to argue that the Cheney-Bush Presidency doesn't represent conservatism at all. Because most of those same conservatives worshipped him as the country's Dear Leader when his popularity was high. And his policies, from his git-tough foreign policy that scorns allies and treaties, to his push to phase out Social Security, are very much approaches straight out of the Goldwater/Reagan "movement conservative" playbook.

But then the following chapter goes a long way toward making the Republicans' argument that the Cheney-Bush policies were not that Holy Grail called True Conservatism. And this presents the second problem with his quest for those rare beings, which is his selective and abstract definition of real conservatism (if you want to use a philosophical term we could call it an "idealist" definition):

Political conservatism in the United States, however, has two meanings. In one sense, it is an abstract theory of government that - in its pure, academic form - advocates various political principles. In this academic formulation, conservatism is defined by a belief in (a) restrained federal government power, (b) minimal federal taxes and responsible and limited spending, (c) a generalized distrust of the federal government and its attempts to intervene into the private lives of citizens, (d) reliance on the private sector rather than the federal government to achieve "Good" ends, (e) a preference for state and local autonomy over federalized and centralized control, (f) trusting in individuals rather than government officials to make decisions, and (g) an overarching belief in the supremacy of the rule of law.

Although he qualifies this as the "pure, academic form" of conservatism, this is the standard he uses for that elusive True Conservatism. But real existing conservatives in the US have also adhered to various other goals since the days of Calvin Coolidge and before. Such as Silent Cal's most famous maxim, "The Business of American is business." And the related devout hostility to labor unions. And hostility to the minimum wage, safety regulations, employment antidiscrimination laws, job programs, consumer protection legislation.

Conservatives in 1954 opposed the unanimous Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling that mandated the racial integration of schools, and conservatives today support the Roberts Four in the appalling 4-1-4 pro-racial-discrimination decision in the Community Schools case. And conservatives from Edmund Burke on have revered the importance of tradition, religion and reverence for authority. In what alternative universe have conservatives sided with labor unions in legal organizing drives on the grounds of "an overarching belief in the supremacy of the rule of law" against union-busting corporations who don't mind breaking laws (or even heads) to stop the union? Please.

Greenwald is correct that the Cheney-Bush administration is producing political realignment at the moment. But it's not because loyal Pat Buchanan followers are going to vote Democratic just because they're angry that, in their view, the Iraq War is a big ole Jewish plot. They're "isolationist" because they're jingoistic and nativistic. And they hate the dirty stinking hippies at least as much as the Christian Right does. How many Pat Buchanan devotees do you think oppose the Roberts Four on the school resegregation decision? (Hint: "None" would be very close to the precise number.) Are these people going to be so outraged by the Iraq War and the torture policy, the latter of which they would mostly support anyway, that they are going to flock to what they call the "Democrat Party", the party of "Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton" (to use the current favorite Republican phrase for Bad Black People)? Again, maybe in some alternative universe.

The possibilities of a significant political realignment lie instead in the phenomenon John Kenneth Galbraith described a decade and a half ago in his much-neglected 1992 book, The Culture of Contentment. In America, the two parties both make it their primary goal to comfort the comfortable. The Republicans distinguish themselves by trying to provide maximum comfort to the most comfortable.

Galbraith speculated that only an economic crisis or a protracted war would be enough to cause voters to force changes in the economic and military policies that were and still are the dominant features of government in the "the culture of contentment". Today, we have the disasters known as Katrina and the Iraq War. And the more general disaster we know as the Cheney-Bush administration.

Sidney Blumenthal made a more meaningful distinction between movement conservatives and traditional Republicans in The Rise of the Counter-Establishment (1986):

The story of Republicanism in the contemporary age is a story of decline, hastened by the conservatives. During the Eisenhower years, a pudding without a theme was whipped up and packaged as "Modern Republicanism." Nelson Rockefeller and his innumerable panels of brain-trusters served it deluxe. Although the principal ingredient in "Modern Republicanism" was air, it did contain a dollop of old-fashioned Progressive protein. Meanwhile, the Taftite Republicans lumbered to the elephants' graveyard. [The reference was to Ohio Senator Robert Taft, an isolationist conservative.] The new guard of ideological conservatives, whose resources consisted of little more than the word, went virtually unmentioned. By the mid-1980s, however, the institutional force and momentum was on their side. "Modern Republicanism" was as much a relic as the Taftite orthodoxy. The sudden appearance of a messiah like Rockefeller or Willkie was as remote as the possibility that George Bush would criticize the conservatives. Even a political career like that of the twice-nominated Thomas Dewey, Taft's nemesis, was now implausible. Only a few congressmen and outriders traveling under the banner of "Republican Mainstream" attempted to do combat with the movement. Although echoes of the traditional "Mainstream" could be heard in the Senate chamber, it was easily muffled at the 1984 convention.

There are hopeful signs today that a serious political realignment is happening. But it's not because nativist, anti-union, government-hating libertarians are going to become militant Democrats. And the fight to end the Iraq War reminds us that more fundamental policy shifts (not just partisan realignments) face serious obstacles. With overwhelming public opposition to the Iraq War, it requires continuing "street heat" from party activists, the netroots and the antiwar movement to keep the Congressional Democrats focused on meaningful measures to end the war.

Conclusion

I'm going to talk in a separate post about some issues related to the Second World War that come up in A Tragic Legacy.

Although the book fails to fully establish the Good-vs.-Evil mentality as the primary explanation for the failure of the Cheney-Bush Presidency, it does provide an excellent look at the way this administration's "Manichean" posturing has affected the political climate in the US. And his descriptions of the campaign to justify the Iraq War and possibly an attack on Iran are powerful reminders of the need for citizens in a democracy to take a genuinely critical attitude toward such campaigns.

Tags: a tragic legacy, glenn greenwald