Lunacy!
White Guilt and the Western Past
Why is America so delicate with the enemy? BY SHELBY STEELE
Tuesday, May 2, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II.
For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along--if admirably--in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one--including, very likely, the insurgents themselves--believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an insurgency.
Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.
Snip...
The collapse of white supremacy--and the resulting white guilt--introduced a new mechanism of power into the world: stigmatization with the evil of the Western past. And this stigmatization is power because it affects the terms of legitimacy for Western nations and for their actions in the world. In Iraq, America is fighting as much for the legitimacy of its war effort as for victory in war. In fact, legitimacy may be the more important goal. If a military victory makes us look like an imperialist nation bent on occupying and raping the resources of a poor brown nation, then victory would mean less because it would have no legitimacy. Europe would scorn. Conversely, if America suffered a military loss in Iraq but in so doing dispelled the imperialist stigma, the loss would be seen as a necessary sacrifice made to restore our nation's legitimacy. Europe's halls of internationalism would suddenly open to us.
Because dissociation from the racist and imperialist stigma is so tied to legitimacy in this age of white guilt, America's act of going to war can have legitimacy only if it seems to be an act of social work--something that uplifts and transforms the poor brown nation (thus dissociating us from the white exploitations of old). So our war effort in Iraq is shrouded in a new language of social work in which democracy is cast as an instrument of social transformation bringing new institutions, new relations between men and women, new ideas of individual autonomy, new and more open forms of education, new ways of overcoming poverty--war as the Great Society.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008318Rebuttal!
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Time to stop feeling guilty and start really bombing
(updated below)
The Wall St. Journal's Opinion Journal today published an Op-Ed by Shelby Steele that advances one of the most truly incoherent and just plain inane arguments I have read in a long time. And in response, many pro-war Bush defenders are drooling with reverence and praise, and for some reason, are viewing Steele's piece as some sort of license to unleash some of the truly ugly impulses which they usually have the decency, or at least political sense, to hide.
The crux of Steele's argument is that ever since World War II, the United States just doesn't fight wars the way we used to, and ought to. We don't use enough force because we suffer from excess restraint. And the reason we are too restrained is because we are laboring under an unwarranted sense of "white guilt," whereby we are too eager and desperate to escape from our distant racist past and prove that we aren't trying to subjugate the "brown people" anymore. As a result, when we fight wars against countries predominantly composed of other races, we are too nice and don't use enough military force, and as a result, we don't win anymore. If you think I'm unfairly summarizing Steele's argument, just marvel at these excerpts:
Snip...
In other words, the reason we failed to win in Korea, lost in Vietnam, and are bogged down in Iraq is because we are too afraid to do the right thing -- use all-out military force against our Enemies. We are too timid in our wars because we are afraid of people accusing of us of being racist, of inflaming our white guilt, of provoking criticism from Europeans. So instead, we leave the kid gloves on and don't use our full military might the way we should.
Snip...
To sit and listen to people who have spent the last three years piously lecturing us on the need to stand with "the Iraqi people," who justified our invasion of that country on the ground that we want to give them a better system of government because we must make Muslims like us more, now insist that what we need to do is bomb them with greater force and less precision is really rather vile -- but highly instructive. The masks are coming off. No more poetic tributes to democracy or all that sentimental whining about "hearts and minds." It's time to shed our unwarranted white guilt, really stretch our legs and let our hair down, and just keep bombing and bombing until we kill enough of them and win. Shelby Steele deserves some sort of award for triggering that refreshingly honest outburst.
We are not there to conquer territory or drive the Iraqi government into forced surrender and submission. The Iraqi government isn't our enemy. Although it may be helpful to achieve one's objectives in a traditional war, large-scale destruction would achieve the very opposite effect of what we are supposedly trying to accomplish. The only choice we have is highly precise and targeted warfare against actual terrorists and insurgents. Any attacks that are more sweeping, destructive and indiscriminate will kill large numbers of innocent Iraqis -- the very people we claim we are there to help -- and will breed even more intense and widespread hatred towards the U.S. in the region, which would be the precise opposite of the goal we say we are trying to accomplish.
Escalating the use of military force in Iraq by indiscriminately killing civilians and eradicating whole cities would contradict every single statement we have made about why we are there, what we want to achieve, and what our plan is in that region. We're not refraining from those acts because of white guilt or a fear of what European diplomats will say about us. We're refraining from them because the wholesale indiscriminate slaughter of thousands or tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis -- all because we have grown impatient and annoyed with our pet little democracy-building project and just want to bomb the whole place into submission -- would be both morally reprehensible and, from the perspective of our own interests, an indescribably stupid thing to do.
more...
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/05/time-to-stop-feeling-guilty-and-start.html#links
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