The Great American War Dance

Academic historians insist upon the uniqueness of periods and places. They tell tales of a world where “the past is a foreign country.” It’s rather striking to note, therefore, that the voice of American military power has remained consistent throughout our history. The powerful make each new cause a Holocaust and every enemy a Hitler, even an enemy who was a relatively recent dinner date. If the United States ever decides to bomb Nova Scotia, Canadians will spend several weeks dressed in the rhetorical habiliment of the Totenkopfverbände—it’s just what we do.

Endlessly tilting against unspeakably evil windmills, American political leaders feel no great need to color inside the lines of reality. In 1846, for example, president James Polk told Congress that war was an inevitable moment of reckoning, since Mexican troops had “invaded our territory, and shed American blood on American soil.”

It wasn’t, and they hadn’t.

Mexican and U.S. troops had traded gunfire over Mexican territory that the United States wished to possess and that Texans, being a briskly confident people, believed themselves entitled to control. A young member of the House of Representatives, a tall lawyer from Illinois, fussed over the point for a while, though to no great effect—and now I speak English in Los Angeles and use ketchup and mayonnaise as primary condiments.

Still later in our country’s history, the vile Spanish horde sunk the U.S.S. Maine. Except they hadn’t, not really. Nearly seventy years after the U.S.S. Maine exploded, an “attack” on the U.S. Navy allowed president Lyndon Johnson to announce that “open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America” had left “some of our boys . . . floatin’ around in the water,” except that, once again: not really. Information contrary to the narrative of war-fever usually dawdles into the barn sooner or later, often much later. The U.S. Navy, for example, cleared Spain of the destruction of the Maine . . . in 1976.

When the animatronic figures who serve as American political leaders begin to recite their inevitable handful of bullshit lines in the service of anther nascent conflict that their carefully trained neural circuitry obligates them to attempt to wage, there’s absolutely no mystery at all about their performance. If you resurrected the nation’s dead and assigned them to listen to thirty seconds of secretary of state John Kerry, they would nod: Yeah, seen this.

The nation’s recently departed, who are surely watching somewhere bored with the administration’s predictable war dance, would be particularly comforted by the familiar exercise of painting everyone more dangerous than Pierre Trudeau as the new Adolf Hitler. Manuel Noriega is Hitler, and Saddam Hussein is Hitler, and Hugo Chávez is Hitler, and Bashar al-Assad is Hitler, and my mom, who totally said she would pack me a pudding for lunch but all I have is a fig bar, is OMFG HITLER. The best newspaper lede of recent weeks is from the Guardian story, linked above. It reads: “Poor Pol Pot.”

So now comes the Obama administration with an intelligence assessment of a chemical weapon attack in Syria, except that, according to the Inter Press Service news agency, the “intelligence assessment” was prepared and released by the White House press office rather than by anyone in an intelligence agency. No, it isn’t credible.

But, if the current administration is really having trouble selling its war, it should be easy enough to fix: Doesn’t Doug Feith still live near the District of Columbia?