WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T MENTION THE WAR
The classic catchphrase from Fawlty Towers has been going through my head as I drive around the South puzzling out why at least 45% of the electorate will vote for Donald Trump. At least part of the reason must have something to do with America’s failed wars of the first decade of this century. Afghanistan and Iraq are not really being discussed. But surely when a Nation goes to war and fails that affects the body politic.
Defeat in World War I helped the National Socialist German Workers Party rise to power, after all. There is a difference between defeat with surrender and failure and withdrawal, of course. But I do wonder if Afganistan and Iraq are a deeply hidden facet of the psychology that has driven American society to this state of cold Civil War.
In the US this election there has been virtually nothing about those two conflicts. Arguments about Vietnam rumbled on for decades. Where people stood on that issue determined voting allegiances in my generation that last to this day.
Wonderful books were written about Vietnam — fiction and non-fiction. They were written by men who fought there and men and women who covered the wars in southeast Asia. These books were widely read for decades.
Films were made about the war, including the bona fide masterpiece that is Apocalypse Now.
Afghanistan and Iraq have Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker, both directed by Kathryn Bigelow. But I’m hard pressed to think of much else. Green Zone by Paul Greengrass was a failure despite a cast topped by Matt Damon.
Green Zone was adapted from Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, about the gross corruption of the American occupation.
The corruption, Abu Ghraib, the persistence of the Taliban, all speak to the failure of the Global War on Terror which so many endorsed after 9/11. The Republican Party of George W. Bush’s two terms no longer exists in large part because of these failures and the lies that accompanied them.
I wonder if Liz Cheney warning against Trump has had any real effect on the MAGA party that has replaced Bush’s old guard. When the same neo-Cons who led the propaganda effort in favor of the Iraq invasion from the op-ed pages of the New York Times and Washington Post and Atlantic now warn of the Fascist dangers posed by a second Trump term I wonder if they are reaching the one or two percent of MAGA Republicans who need to either break free of Trump and vote for Kamala Harris, or at least sit out the election.
Sometimes, when I am observing the US from my home in London, it feels like 21st century political history begins in the autumn of 2008 with the election of America’s first Black president as the banking system was collapsing. The wars could be repressed down the social memory hole. But lost wars are never really forgotten and repressed memories will eventually work themselves out in the form of neuroses or, in the case of Trump, social psychosis.
In any case, I never forget the war in Iraq. Particularly at this time of year:
Ahmad Shawkat was murdered in late October 2003. Six months after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Ahmad was a political dissident who had been arrested and tortured a number of times. The only reason he was alive for us to meet was the regime loved money more than death and his in-laws had ransomed him from prison. He embraced democracy and all its possibilities and opened a newspaper where he was free, for the first time in his life, to write as he pleased. He was gunned down after getting 11 issues out.
I wrote a book about him, a good book, but it quickly went out of print. No one wants to know or remember this war. Summoned to patriotism, Americans found out they had been lied to. That really does count for something in how people vote, even if they aren’t aware of it.
The book has just been re-published with a new title and new afterword if you’re interested.
This is the fourth of my dispatches from Georgia and North Carolina. Both states are critical to Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’s hopes of winning the election. And both are competitive according to opinion polls but, as you can tell, I prefer to gather my own facts.
I plan to stay here through the counting of the vote, which promises to be fraught, particularly in Georgia but I need your help to do it. Here’s how:
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Draft is an excellent point
Two quick points. There was also Cloony's "Three Kings", meh. And one about AFghanistan with Tina Fey and Billy Bob Thornton, I forget the name.
IMFO a huge reason Vietnam was so much more in everyone's face was The Draft, which really radicalized a generation.