The end of June was a rough time for the neoconservative revolution – a time of suddenly deflated dreams, political panic-selling, horrifying and previously unthinkable concessions to pragmatism and common sense. Just as Lenin on his deathbed had to suffer the rank humiliation of seeing his workers’ paradise resort to limited capitalism to save the Soviet postwar economy, George Bush in his last presidential days of pending indictments and plummeting approval ratings was suddenly forced to swallow the indignity of fellow Republicans calling for “diplomatic solutions” in Iraq.

Republicans calling for diplomacy? What’s next, Don Rumsfeld leading a gay pride march? Things got so bad by the end of the spring that even wrinkled old hawk George Voinovich, for years an automatic “aye” on Dick Cheney’s senatorial scorecard, got it into his head to dress up in hippie garb and issue a statement calling for “responsible military disengagement” from Iraq. Also abandoning ship were John Sununu, Norm Coleman, Dick Lugar . . . It was as if the whole of the old “kill the bastards” coalition decided simultaneously to run for the hedges, each one taking with him a piece of the emperor’s clothing – leaving poor Bush alone and cupping his johnson as he stared sadly out the Oval Office window in the direction of the Middle East.

Next thing we knew, White House spokesliar Tony Snow was grimly admitting to stunned reporters that the president saw troop withdrawals “over the horizon.” A hush went over the press room, for everyone present understood; Snow’s statement marked the unofficial end of the Iraq War.

It also marked the beginning of a whole new era of American loserdom. Remember Stripes, Bill Murray’s take on American self-esteem after Vietnam? “We’re American soldiers!” Murray famously joked. “We’ve been kicking ass for 200 years! We’re 10-1!”

Well, make it 10-2. Which begs the question: exactly how much is this postwar period going to suck? The post-Vietnam era was bad enough. Indeed, that whole Indochina adventure was a perfect preview of the modern American habit for failure. We showed up in Southeast Asia, killed two million or so people, sprayed half the Vietnamese peninsula with deadly chemicals, then pulled up suddenly and went home to spend the next 20 years or so making soft-lit, woe-is-us movies about how depressing it is to buy a Mexican hooker when your legs don’t move.

To cap it off, America’s humiliating defeat in Vietnam at the hands of a few million skinny farmers in pajamas – a defeat that was at once military and moral, a defeat not only of American manpower but of the America-as-superpower idea – that defeat inspired the creation of a whole new political movement dedicated to overcoming the “malaise” of losing. From Reagan to Bush I to Rush to W., the resultant conservative groundswell argued tirelessly that America had been unfairly robbed of its “pride,” that only the intervention of a traitorous ensemble of reporters, protesters and overweight lefty film directors had prevented the Vietnam adventure from coming off aces. Said traitorous ensemble had thrown America’s cultural priorities so out of whack, the story went, that even a bona fide war hero like Bob Kerrey was forced to apologize for having slit the throats of unarmed women and old people during combat way back when. Implicit in the election of George W. Bush in 2000 was a sort of earnest promise that no American would ever again have to apologize for killing an unarmed old person, with a hunting knife or any other weapon for that matter.

By the eve of the Iraq War, the only “lesson” that America had learned from Vietnam is that it took America a long time to recover from the experience – a moral that must have been a source of some amusement to those Vietnamese who were still eating poisoned fish, giving birth to three-headed babies, etc. In any case the invasion of Iraq the second time around was really an announcement that we were now fully recovered from the Vietnam bummer. The fact that we were able to go to war without any observable logical reason for doing so was key to the whole venture. After all, such an invasion would have been politically unthinkable in the first twenty years after the evacuation of Saigon. Even for Desert Storm, we had to wait for someone else to start the fight. But Iraqi Freedom, that was the real deal – war just for the sheer enjoyable fuck of it, started for reasons even sillier than the Gulf of Tonkin. The pride was back.

Except that now the pride is gone again, and one has to wonder, how exactly is America going to recover this time? Because the utter failure of America’s Iraq adventure wasn’t just a massive blow to our international cachet, and a serious setback in the effort to get a grip on the whole terrorism thing. It was also a stark repudiation of 30 years of agitation by political conservatives to prove that Vietnam was an unjust aberration.

Next time, they said, we’ll do it right, and we won’t lose. And indeed, they kept cameras out of the battlefield, and convinced the TV networks not to film coffins or frightened teenagers holding their guts in, and developed awe-inspiring technologies that limited casualties and overwhelmed any and all enemy forces in numbers – and they learned to simply ignore mass protests, and stifled upper-class dissent by cancelling the draft, and they made sure returning soldiers were treated as heroes this time around, etc. etc. etc. They fixed, they thought, every tactical mistake, and yet the defeat was even starker this time. We lost to a bunch of hairy dudes with garage-door openers and 50-year-old shells. Our enemy didn’t even have China or Russia backing them this time. They were just a bunch of sneaky guys with beards, and they whipped a country with a $600-billion defense budget, a country that ruled the sea lanes and had its foot on the neck of international capitalism. Who could we possibly blame for this one?

Well, that’s going to be the big question now, isn’t it? America has always defined itself by its wars. Our intense longing for a return to the days when we could view ourselves through the sepia-toned prism of Band of Brothers WWII heroism has driven us to jump into one wrong-headed bloodbath after another. That persistent cultural memory of being the gritty good guy in green engaged in fierce industrial battle with heavily accented bad guys across the ocean has carried us even to this day – so much so that no amount of My Lais or Abu Ghraibs has yet been able to budge mainstream America’s implicit belief in the inherent righteousness of any war we choose to fight.

But those days may be over. Iraq was such a monstrous failure on every level – such a senseless and extravagant waste of lives both American and Iraqi, and one almost certain to result, moreover, in a palpably worsened security situation – that when future generations of warmongers start campaigning to bring the “pride” back, very few Americans are going to know what the fuck they’re talking about. Which pride was that again? The pride of “Shock and Awe”? The pride of “Mission Accomplished”? The pride of spending $400 billion in five years only to end up providing less electricity to Iraq than before we invaded? After Vietnam, we were down on our luck; now we’re officially an international joke. Shit, even the Italians have a better recent war record than we do.

The worst thing about all of this is that in America’s immediate political future there will be no shortage of well-funded opportunists who will try to bring the “pride” back by campaigning for this or that restorative military campaign. Because we never fight anyone who can meaningfully fight back, and because we’ve already been whipped badly in North Africa and the Middle East of late, our choices for future invasion targets may have to involve a slightly less imposing class of belligerent nation – Reunion Island, say, or Liechtenstein, or possibly even Great Britain if we get really desperate. And when we get beat by one of those juggernauts, that’s when the really ugly feelings will kick in. We’ll know the American empire has finally fallen when Oliver Stone makes his epic about the 101st Airborne being pushed into the Gulf of Siam by the Thai tourism ministry.

In all seriousness, the one saving grace of all of this is that America in the years since the end of the Vietnam War has evolved in a direction of such extraordinary collective stupidity that it is entirely possible that even after the inevitable helicopters-leaving-Baghdad moment, a huge plurality of the population will not even be aware that we just lost another war.

In the age of the 24-hour news cycle, we’ll be able to pitch the cessation of hostilities as meaning just about anything – victory, defeat, troops leaving for lunch, anything. And once the money-shot exit moment is past, the country will move on to the next boozed-out Lindsay Lohan scandal three minutes later, leaving the legacy of the Iraq War to be mainly an issue of how skilled we’ll be in future years at lying to ourselves about our history. And unlike knowing when and how and who to fight, we’re still pretty good at that.

Matt Taibbi is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone magazine. His book, Smells Like Dead Elephants, is due out next year.

 

COMMENTS:

Who says this war is over? The US has permanent bases built there, and there's oil to be removed, no way is this going down easy. There's no cop-out clause.
Sriram

Great read!
camtron

When will the States stop deciding who should run a foreign country? Look back to the years after the second world war. They have continually supported and inserted puppet governments. Their buddy Hussein was one. Bin Laden was supported in his fight with the Russians, there are many other similar situations. It's obvious that another kingdom is crumbling thanks in part the the architect Mr. Bush. Aside from the hell to come from China and its allies, I think this is all we have to look forward to for a long time. Thanks Mr. Bush for sealing our fate.
Dennis Regan

No doubt about it. Impeach the whole lot of them!
Mike Smith

5th paragraph down: begs the question is misused. begging the question is a logical fallacy in which the person making the argument assumes the truth of the conclusion within the premises. such as: the question how do you know god exists? then the argument goes, god exists because the bible speaks of god. the bible can be trusted because it is divinely inspired. so you can see here that they are assuming that god exists to inspire a bible which then speaks of god but it does not actually prove anything. and THAT is begging the question. don't let a mistake like that discredit the intellect of the rest of your article.
Elena

Once again this magazine forgets itself and cares more to write about Bush bashing than advertising commentary. I'm not a fan of Bush myself but I don't want to come here for politics (usually Left-heavy). It's really becoming a turn off and makes me pick up other mags in the store. Just some friendly advise I think you're alienating your fanbase. Stick with advertising and drop the amateur political writers.
What magazine is this

Hooker? Threeheaded babies? This kind of disrespectful, caricatured language depicting real suffering and complex realities indicates an author more interested in writing streaky, 'hip', quasicommentary than crafting insightful, analytical prose. Don't dumb it down for Adbusters – we're not MTV.
Matthew

Amateur political writers? Clearly you don't know what the fuck your talking about. Taibbi is consistently on the top of his game. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2005/12/05/AR2005120502048.html Show me a right-heavy political person that reads this magazine as anything but an enemy organization and I'll give you a metal for finding the needle in the haystack.
Die in a gutter

So where in all of this is 'the cure'? While your shit-talking is well researched and entirely relevant and meaningful, it still raises the question: what the hell are we going to do about it?
Snackmaster

I am sad that we continue to talk about The War as if it was merely a policy issue, and that we could just pull up our stakes and leave if we could just swallow our pride; or admit that it is now a Civil War; or admit that our mission was accomplished when Saddam was photographed in his boxer shorts. Unfortunately nobody is telling the American Consumer that as long as we chose to drive around in our personal real-estate SUVs, and as long as we base our economy on continuous economic growth and unabated consumption, and as long as we believe that there is merit to the wasteful concept of economies of scale, we will need a war to fuel the whole house-of-cards enterprise. My American Lifestyle needs somebody else's oil. If I want to stop the war, I will need to stop consuming oil as if I owned the planet. Perhaps Adbusters should get back to the pediment of examining a consumption machine that is killing us, rather than wagging your finger at those easy targets who call themselves our leaders.
Michael

One of the best articles that I have read lately. Thank you, and please do keep adding more content similar to this one. Although some 'fans' may accuse you of alienating your 'fanbase', I would like to say that you have gained a new fan thanks to this article.
C.E.

Politics and culture are directly linked to advertising and the media. I don't think this is too off base at all.
Snakes

Just because righties probably identify this magazine as an enemy organization, doesn't mean that Taibbi isn't an amateur political writer. It just means that he is smart enough to say the correct things to push their conservative buttons, which isn't too hard to do. I'm not saying that Taibbi IS an amateur political writer, I'm simply pointing out that Die in a gutter's attack is a non sequitur, and childish and unnecessary at that. Instead of being rude to other Adbuster's readers I assume we're all here because we have similar sentiments concerning modern media, let's just stick to the subject, and not alienate others for their opinions which if I am not mistaken, is historically another of Adbuster's causes: protection of free speech. That being said, focusing on yet another American loss is being just as prideful and self-centered as the leaders who got us into this mess, because the stance lacks the presence of mind to realize that we aren't the only ones who lost in this war. Maybe instead of shit-talking our current political leaders (such a novel idea) we should look at the big picture (this would include the rest of the world as well) and try to employ courses of action that benefit all.
youngin

As well as Ad they appear in pages of all type, is very natural to see a page with this content here. It admires me the astonishment of some! This is the best example of as if it feels somebody that visits the page of a periodical and is surprised by a Ad. Congratulations! PS1: Excellent article. PS2: Sorry my Babel Fish english.
J. Miguel

Personally, I don't think this is off base at all. Rightwing fucks don't read Adbusters merely because they can't stand us wagging our fingers at the mistakes going on now. Whether it be a childish approach or amateur approach or not, it's true, nonetheless. Great read for me. Bookmarks.
Street

I read an article recently which claimed that the creators and propagators of the subprime mortgage and derivatives boom were largely hyped up on antidepressants. Then consider the reality of an entire generation of old, brain dead acid freaks. Add the two together and you get a very large population of total idiots.
A. Spohrn

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