"And The War Came"

This month marks the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War. Remember the Iraq War? No? Well, it happened. Anyway, in observance of the aluminum jubilee, former pro-war hardliner Andrew Sullivan has been doing a retrospective, featuring reflections on the legacy of the war and an examination of his own evolved views regarding it.

Among the more trenchant portions of the thread is the focus on the war's opposition. "Opposition" here, of course, means the protestors; all the important Washington honchos of the time were behind the invasion, as Sullivan's thread notes repeatedly. As a result, visible opposition was generally limited to the street kind, which included a decent number of sensible people... and several less-sensible people. And, as we re-learn from time to time, those less-sensible people are more media-friendly (they're loud, they're colorful, they're easy to strawman, and thus end up on Fox News as the self-defeating faces of their own movement).

A lot of this is to be expected. If the question is what does an effective antiwar movement look like, the answer is that it doesn't. A pro-peace position is hard to shove into a powerful soundbite, even in clear-headed times. In the culture of swirling fear and anger that had persisted since 9/11, it was impossible. The only difference between pro-war emotionalism and anti-war emotionalism at times seemed to be that one side did its hyperventilating while wearing a suit. 

Of course it turns out that the poorly dressed anti-war loonies were, well, right. Yeah, awkward. There were no WMD's, Iraq was spiraling out of anyone's control, war crimes mounted, and it turned out we had no idea what we were doing because freedom can't be planned, apparently. The good news was that, by then, no one cared about the war and we were so entrenched in a country we had so thoroughly shattered that no one could really suggest that we should just leave. The bad news was that the war remained a really bad fucking idea.

I was about sixteen/seventeen at the time. And I was then living in a fairly backwoods part of Virginia that was firm Bush territory. Tractor Pulls were significant social events. The Confederate flag was on my high school's logo. One of the government teachers at that high school insisted totally straight-faced that socialism and communism were basically synonyms and he wouldn't hear any different because he had a bachelor's degree in Political Science and we didn't (I do now, and he's still wrong). So, being seventeen and a natural contrarian living in what I saw as a Faulknerian hellscape, you can see how I approached the various issues of the day.

In the end, I was right about the war by default; I chose to be against the side that was wrong. There were many sober, adult-type people who stood firm in their opposition based on the facts and have every right to gloat. But I wasn't one of them. I thought of myself as a part of the more respectable crew, but probably looked and sounded, by most standards, like the drum circlers and other white guys with dreadlocks. I just despised the man that had pushed for the thing.

I never understood Bush's appeal--even discounting the swagger and privilege. I shouldn't want to have a beer with the president. I know the people I drink with: I don't want them being president. Then there was the dichotomy of a Manichean-headed executive promoting vague goals built on abstract concepts. "War On Terror." "Freedom Agenda." Meaningless, borderline Orwellian phrases aimed at "the gut," because that was the decision-making organ in those years. In his most cynical maneuver, all opposition was preemptively decried as unpatriotic. Those of us who disagreed were made to feel alien in our own home, something I very much felt in rural Virginia. And this from a heterosexual, whose prospect for recognized love wasn't put to a referendum scheduled to help a president secure reelection. Bush was not the despot that many in the anti-war movement claimed, but damned if his divide-and-conquer techniques didn't reek of dusty totalitarian playbooks. I think I wrote a book about that. 

I softened in college, becoming generally disgusted with the whole bloody mess of politics. And though my early views were founded on a contrarian's fickle whims, some of the hard-wiring remains. My political consciousness was booted up during the rush to war, at which time George W. Bush taught to me to be a liberal. And his party's continuing unwillingness to cop to that administration's myriad blunders ensure that the Republican Party will have to work a lot harder for my vote than the Democrats ever will (no, a sudden interest in deficits and civil rights now that a Democrat is in office doesn't quite cut it). And I know I'm not the only member of my generation who feels that way.

Pundit historians will cite Obama and gay marriage and any number of other things as our reasons for our general reluctance to support the Republican Party. And those all fit. But it began with Bush. And his war.