Greenwald on Steele

Damn, Glenn Greenwald is a good blogger. Referring to the laurels being laid upon Shelby Steele by Jeff Goldstein, among others:

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.

As Greenwald points out, we’ve moved beyond the solidarity with the Iraqi people, beyond the purple fingers, and beyond the demand for democracy in the Middle East. Now, all we have left is the angry frustration of warbloggers who really, really want to win and just can’t figure out why they’re not. Jeff:

Which is why there are times when we really should turn off the “smart” bombs and show our seriousness by putting the world on notice that, when we believe the situation calls for it, we are willing to ignore the inevitable bad press and the howls of protest from human rights groups, and exhibit a show of strength and military professionalism that is politically disinterested and tactically thorough and lethal.

In other words, we should massacre more people. This would indicate our seriousness to the world, and would keep them from fucking with us. Jeff and his cronies defend this in the comments in the most odious ways possible; only read if you have a strong stomach. Jeff also demonstrates an understanding of the US military that would be most appropriate for a video game. Believe it or not, the United States military does not consider mass murder to be an element of professionalism.

The most basic fallacy behind all of this is that, if we were just a little bit tougher, things would work out. Success, for Goldstein, Steele, and the rest is tied to toughness and masculinity, rather than to skill or capability. What determines victory is will, the will to be more brutal than the other side. It’s fair to say that a survey of military history does not support Jeff’s conclusions. When we did incinerate cities, the result was not enemy surrender, but rather increased support for the target governments. Brutal, heavy-handed tactics also have a piss poor history in counter-insurgency operations. Murderous brutality didn’t help the Nazis put down resistance movements in Western Europe or the Soviet Union, didn’t help the Soviets win in Afghanistan, and didn’t help Saddam Hussein defeat the Kurds.

I leave you with Jeff’s conclusion:

It is a fight for the soul of classical liberalism, which is being undercut (in my estimation) by nearly 40 years of a concerted effort by those whose goal is power and control to relativize meaning and deconstruct, through incoherent linguistic assertions that have unfortunately been widely adopted out of self-satisfied feel-goodism (specifically, an ostensible deference to the Other that allows us to convince ourselves we are “tolerant” and “diverse,” when in fact we have created the conditions to turn those ideas into something approximating their exact opposites).

Taking back the grounds for meaning—and being willing to fight for those grounds against those who try to shame us out of reasserting them—is the first step toward the recovery of our belief in our strong and generous national character. To that end, we should draw a lesson from the charges of Bill Bennett’s “racism”—cast by those who don’t believe Bennett intended to say anything racist, but who insist, rather, that his words themselves were racist (an idea that grants that public perception is the locus of meaning, and that the utterer can be held accountable for the public perception). Such a dismissal of the importance of intent has led, predictably, to a rhetorical condition wherein those who protest the loudest (and can play to our emotions) will have effectively seized control of “history” as it is constructed and disseminated through language.

This is the will to power—and it is only possible in the vaccuum left by the marginalization of a truly coherent interpretative paradigm.

… which reads like an undergraduate paper written by someone who really, really thinks that stringing together lots of big words produces coherent meaning, without having the benefit of actually understanding what any of those words mean. The shorter version is this: Postmodernist lefties are trying to take over classical liberalism through linguistic trickery, and the only way to stop them is to become fascists and kill plenty of brown people.

He’s right about one thing; we’re in a fight for the soul of classical liberalism.

…another thought; I wonder how long it would take for Hitch to come out in favor of “carpet bombing for democracy” and “mass executions for freedom”?

…yet another thought; does this represent the move to the second stage of wingnut grief? The first is denial; the war in Iraq isn’t a disaster, it’s all just media lies! Now we’re to anger; Exterminate the bastards!

…David Neiwert is indispensible on this, and every other, topic.