Wanting War, Jeffrey Record
Reviewed
by Patrick McEvoy-Halston
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Jeffrey Record, in “Wanting
War,” would have you know that the Iraq war was/is a war of hubris, that Iraq
presented no pressing threat but an enticing prize, neo-cons and George W. Bush
made use of a nation’s powerful need to
simply trust to empower their intent
to go after. I’m sure you’ve heard
this one before, and possibly long, long ago accepted it in full, thinking what
we most needed to know about the war has been repeatedly revealed; and perhaps
for this reason, principally, we should go into why Record’s account does us
all little good.
BUSH’S LURCH
Record wants to leave no doubt that Bush’s decision to go to war with
Iraq after 9/11 had nothing to do with the new realities of the world revealed
by the attack, and as such, left us all of course in a much worse fix (with
such like Iran’s influence on Iraq now even being greater). Afghanistan was the more likely
suspect, not Iraq; regional history was ignored rather than carefully studied;
old gripes and plans, not newly awakened sensitivities, the primary
movers. It was an abashingly
stupid and ruinous thing to have done, and it depended entire on the
“confluence of George W. Bush, neoconservative influence, and 9/11” (p. 92). The neo-cons had always wanted
America’s foreign policy to be about showing all of America’s scummy enemies
that it meant business, and thought to communicate this most clearly by every
once in a while focusing intently on one of them and eviscerating them, as an
object lesson to the others (pp. 92-5).
They took advantage of a President who had no clear-cut foreign policy
and could be lured by their offering of a plan which would offer profound
personal satisfaction – in that it would lay waste to a personal enemy, Saddam,
who’d greatly afflicted his father and, with America’s withdrawal in the
previous Iraq War, hadn’t quite yet sufficiently been paid back for all his
harm; and in it matching his preference for Manichaen, simplistic, solutions to
pressing problems, to become a blessed chosen agent of God.
Record argues this war had one very
noteworthy success – it did create a “nominally democratic political system in
Baghdad” (p. 149) – but overall has proved a giant mistake, and implicitly that
addressing the requirement we never see its like again in the future requires a
greater alertness to two different styles of leadership leaders lean to. Leaders can either let reality inform
their actions, or let their inner preferences loose upon the world. The first is responsible, but can lead
to doubt which can admittedly be “cripp[ling]” (p. 141); the second can spur
you into effective action (Record tends to make achievements of this course
significant at first [as expected, the Iraq army was squashed in a hurry], but
ultimately effectively lurches that leave you scrambling in quagmire), but
isn’t “enough to craft an effective national security strategy” (p. 141), and
is mostly not about tactics but inexcusable relapsing to childish preferences. His Shakespearean account of sly
advisors and weak leaders prey to them, and neo-Victorian account of good sons
who own up to their responsibilities and bad ones who never stop hoping to
elide them,[1]
is noticeable enough that psychohistorians aren’t just about to let his account
inform them only of Bush and the neo-cons: no doubt you’ll all start noting Record’s own simplistic,
defensive tendencies, how he can – probably successfully – make an argument
telling people we all have to look at leader’s wants and motives, without
appearing to give psychologists any room to now take over. His title bespeaks of id, but there’s
no room for psychobiography given here:
one’s background can certainly influence you – as Bush’s particular
religious upbringing plays upon him – but, ultimately, the choice is yours as
to whether you take the easy or the hard way. It’s “King’s Speech,” stripped of its Freudianism. And recognizable as such, I think
that the primary concern we would finish the book with is how we might work against
this wall which can freely permit talk of delusion and unreality and binary
thinking (though of course this actual term is never used), but staunchly still
keep psychology (and empathy) out while leaving moralizing and righteous anger
clearly in.
THE LURCH RECORD MAY WELL
LEAVE US IN
But if we’re left stumbling over this problem, and wishing if only
people could read it and see it as but a facilitator to the gates of something
about Bush we’ve written, we’ve let ourselves be more worsened than marginally
informed by the book; for we’d at the end be thinking mostly leaders, when
psychohistorians should never find
themselves thinking mostly of them.
Psychohistorians should be wary when anyone puts the blame squarely on
the shoulders of our “leaders,” who we know are but people we study to aptly
guess at the psychic needs of those who wished them in, and this indeed is the
only place Record puts it – Americans-at-large are to him, sensible, if not
pronouncedly disgusted by excess and lack of good sense (other nations [or at
least the ones America has tended to have wary relations with] come across as
level-headed as well, with them being not-at-all sacrificial and in fact
realistic and savy in matters of war [pp. 174-75]: Bush and his neo-cons are in this account, astoundingly
alone.). To Record, “Most
Americans do not believe that it is their country’s mission to convert the rest
of the world into like democracies, and they have limited tolerance for costly
crusades overseas that have little or no foundation in promoting concrete
security interests” (p. 149). But
aren’t we also the lot that’s spent the last thirty years or so participating
in manic consumerism, losing ourselves into an excess of work and after-work
purchase in an economy that may not at all have meaningfully improved despite
the activity? Haven’t we all been
lead by want, unconsciously knowing that we were thereby coating everything in
our culture with a shine we could subsequently easily point to as evidence of
the sinning self we would disown and stand cleanly apart from?
If Record had been eager to do something
other than nicely complement his account of grossly negligent leaders (and my,
does he ever offer it up: “U.S.
performance in Iraq has been a monument to the combination of arrogance,
ignorance, poor planning, worse execution, and a willful refusal to
acknowledge, much less correct, mistake after mistake after mistake” [p. 149])
with a rudely ill-served, staunchly and commendably conservative and fair
polis, he might have done some of the work that would have us psychohistorians
learning from his wisdom rather than maybe actually being tripped up by his key
folly. If he had, for instance,
wondered if the fact that we were all so quick to wake up to this nightmare
deception – with his book being maybe the thousandth to have come after Bush’s
first term delineating Bush’s hubris – may suggest that maybe we all-along
kinda knew the President was smacking back at a world in way that was grossly
indifferent to precision and to good form, would be easy to thereafter spot-out
as in fact actually rotten, and therefore why we all would want something like
that.
I wonder it myself, and I think actually that
we were at some level aware that our president was responding to 9/11 by drawing
the world to recoil and maybe awe at our readiness to just whip out our
collective cock and humiliate and fuck, in public, indifferently, before
abashed and stunned you and you and you, whomever stumbled mostly readily into
view in our reptilians minds after being let loose and agitated to seek out
some tit-for-tat revenge. I wonder
if we went after Iraq knowing it drew us back into a time when imperialism
hadn’t gotten the cleaner coat we knew it needed, because it would make the
humiliation we would “apply” less sparing and complicated – more indulgent and
satisfying – and because it would be so easy to thereafter pin on the hubristic
desires of leaders who made use of our understandable need to trust to draw us
back into neanderthalic politics unrelated to our current world, to our current
selves. I think we made use, are
still making use, of the neo-cons and President Bush, maybe not so much
ultimately even to deposit and disown our own “hubris” but to no longer
recognize it in future; and so when authorities like Record sum up Bush and the
neo-cons (or, more precisely, the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine) as evidencing a
“nostalgic yearning for the days when wars were wars (and men were men),” as
having very “little relevance in a world in which instrastate wars and
intranational terrorism replaced interstate warfare as they primary threats to
U.S. security” (p. 175), we can substitute into this well-pounded imprint of
archaic, regressive, boarish manners – and therefore of manners, presentation, in general – in the definition of what
all is actually occurring as a consequence of our foreign policies, a
substantially more sober and current style, to help begin our process of making
the sacrifice and humiliation we enjoy so that it’s largely invisible to us as
anything but appropriate conduct.
Individual Nazis may have needed twin selves, one that humiliates and
destroys, and the other that goes home for dinner and talks domestic, to
execute as much; but maybe we think we’ve found a way to (perhaps only temporarily)
manage it with but one.
Record is by no means against war. He just wants it kept “competent,”
“realist,” “clearly defined,” evidently last resort, with public and
congressional support but presumably lead by “extraordinary statesmen like Roosevelt”
(pp. 151-52). One wonders, though,
with his intent to see Americans in his preferred fashion, probably losing
himself to temporary needs of narrative empowered by the fact that he can rely
on it not being anywhere near his alone, if he’d recognize it when he saw
it. I kinda doubt that what Obama
is actually doing, what Americans are
enabling him to do, abroad, is competent and adult, but he surely knows
he’s got to present it that way.
Psychohistorians know that leaders are ones
to be particularly sensitive to, never
criminally obtuse to, our most deeply felt desires. If Bush wanted war for gross reasons, we wanted it for the same as well. Bush intuited our desire to indulge one last time in blatant
drunken excess, and delivered; Obama, our desire to continue on with the same
but feel ourselves clean, by delivering ourselves for awhile to an aesthetics
of sensibleness, consideredness, restraint and sanity, sourced from our
leaders. Record sees Bush and the
neo-cons as nostalgic and archaic; I see them as but part of the same gross
one-two punch.
[1] To Record, Bush Sr. took a
weightier account of the world which drew him ultimately to respect restraint
(pp. 155-56), and he and Jr. end up seeming as much good path-bad path brothers
in the same fraternal order as father and son.
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