Why The Regime Must Lose In Iraq

Edmund Burke: "Defeatist" regarding England's war with America.

Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) thought that the Republican Attack Apparat had grown a bit peckish in recent weeks, and so he decided to throw it a meat-laden bone on which it could feed for at least a week:

"I believe myself that the secretary of state, the secretary of defense — and you have to make your own decision as to what the president knows — that this war is lost, and that the surge is not accomplishing anything, as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday."

The problem with Reid's assessment is not in its “defeatism,” but rather in its moral cowardice, a trait that runs through the Democrat leadership like a vein of fat in a well-marbled steak.

The war in Iraq “is lost” indeed, but not because of a tactical or strategic failure. America – the country, as distinct from the pack of criminals and degenerates we're told to call “our” government – lost that war the moment it began. And patriotism demands that the government lose that war as well.

Let me be unambiguously clear on this point: I want the federal government to lose the war in Iraq.

As a patriot I must oppose wars prosecuted in an unconstitutional fashion. As a Christian I am required to oppose aggressive wars of any kind (including those declared by Congress). As a father, I have no intention of letting the State steal the lives of any of my five children – or those of any other parent, if I have the ability to prevent it – and waste them in depraved ventures of this sort.

Unless the Regime is forced to concede defeat in Iraq, withdraw our troops, and punish the policymakers who led our nation into this abominable mess, we're in for a generation or more of similar undertakings across the globe -- assuming that our country doesn't descend into unalloyed despotism and economic ruin much sooner.

There was a time when conservatives fiercely and consistently opposed war, and did not flinch from urging the defeat of such iniquitous undertakings – as a patriotic imperative.

Two hundred and thirty years ago (April 3, 1777, to be precise), the estimable British statesman Edmund Burke wrote a letter to the sheriffs of Bristol, a city Burke represented in Parliament. The war against the upstart American colonies was in its second year, and Burke – who had vigorously opposed the war on solidly conservative grounds – was dismayed and disgusted to the depths of his soul.

“Indeed, our affairs are in a bad condition,” Burke lamented. “I do assure those gentlemen who have prayed for war, and obtained the blessing they have sought, that they are at this very instant in very great straits. The abused wealth of this country continues a little longer to feed its distemper.”

Like many genuine English patriots, Burke couldn't countenance the creation of a rented “coalition of the willing” -- “German allies of twenty hireling states” against the colonies, and he may have taken some ironic satisfaction in the fact that the Americans were holding firm.

“America is not subdued,” he wrote, as if addressing supporters of the war. “Not one unattacked village which was originally adverse throughout that vast continent has yet submitted from love or terror. You have the ground you encamp on, and you have no more. The cantonments of your troops and your dominions are exactly of the same extent. You spread devastation, but you do not enlarge the sphere of your authority.”

That passage aptly describes the condition of the forces sent by Washington to occupy Iraq, where even the vaunted Green Zone is no longer secure. The one that follows seems almost perfectly tailored to fit our present circumstances, in which a self-enraptured ruler and his courtiers – none of whom has known the terrors of combat – have bullied much of the public into supporting their disastrous crusade:

“I may be unable to lend a helping hand to those who direct the state; but I should be ashamed to make myself one of a noisy multitude to halloo and hearten them into doubtful and dangerous courses. A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.”

“The poorest thing that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from injustice and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man,” Burke continued. “But I cannot conceive any existence under heaven ... that is truly more odious and disgusting than an impotent, helpless creature, without civil wisdom or military skill, without a consciousness of any qualification for power but his servility to it, bloated with pride and arrogance, calling for battles he is not to fight, contending for a violent dominion he can never exercise, and satisfied to be himself to be himself mean and miserable....”

"Impotent, helpless creature[s] ... bloated with pride and arrogance": Neo-con war boosters Johan Goldberg and Richard Perle (l.), and William Bennett (right, on the right).

The war in America was fought to prevent the dismemberment of the Empire, Burke observed, but it was imperiling the Anglo-Saxon system of liberty under law that made the Empire worth saving (in his view). He was particularly exercised about a measure proposed in February 1777 that would suspend the habeas corpus guarantee.

That bill, writes Stanley Weintraub in his fascinating study Iron Tears: America's Battle for Freedom, Britain's Quagmire, 1775-1783, was “aimed at stifling dissent in the colonies by revoking the right to habeas corpus, a safeguard to liberty cherished by Englishmen.... The bill was presented in the Commons on February 7, 1777, and to obfuscate its intentions it was formally titled as legislation `to empower his Majesty to secure and detain persons charged with, or suspected of, the crime of high treason committed in North America, or on the high seas, or the crime of piracy.”

Honest and well-informed people would recognize in that measure the ancestor of the Bush Regime's Military Commissions Act, which suspends habeas corpus protections of those accused of involvement in terrorism, and provides for their indefinite detention.

Burke understood that if this measure – which he couldn't defeat – went unchallenged, it would threaten the liberties not just of the American Colonists, but of all Englishmen everywhere:

“Liberty, if I understand it at all, is a general principle, and the clear right of the subjects within the realm, or of none. Partial freedom seems to me a most invidious mode of slavery. But, unfortunately, it is the kind of slavery the most easily admitted in times of civil discord: for parties are but too apt to forget their own future safety in their desire of sacrificing their enemies.”

The “partial” suspension of habeas corpus, Burke correctly insisted, was nothing of the kind; it established a principle “which may be advanced further and further at pleasure, on the same argument of mere expedience....”

Because of the war in America, Burke sorrowfully observed, “not only our policy is deranged, and our empire distracted, but our laws and our legislative spirit appear to have been totally perverted by it.”

For speaking and writing in defense of the rule of law and in opposition to the war, Burke wryly noted, “I am charged with being an American” -- the direct equivalent, in that time, of being accused of sympathizing with “Islamo-Fascists” today.

Burke wasn't an American, of course; he was a loyal and patriotic British subject who wanted his government to abandon its demented war for the good of everybody. And in this he was in good and plentiful company, as Weintraub's book documents: Most conservative figures in London, as well as some radicals, opposed the war with America, and were hardly diffident in expressing their views.

In 1764, during a parliamentary debate over taxing the colonies, Colonel Isaac Barre (a veteran of the French and Indian War) rose to rebuke those who insisted that the long-indulged American colonies needed to be reduced to servility.

“They [were] nourished up by your indulgence? They grew by your neglect of them,” insisted Barre. “As soon as you began to care about them, that care was exercised in sending persons to rule them in one department and another ... sent to spy out their liberties, to misrepresent their actions, and to prey upon them.”

Twelve years later, with blood on the ground and British troops in the field, Col. Barre proposed cutting off all funding for the war: He considered the “cut-and-run” option the only honorable and practical alternative. (Col. Barre also rose in Parliament to defend General Washington's reputation after he was attacked by the courtier press as a “dictator” for accepting extraordinary war powers from the Continental Congress.)

Dr. Richard Price, a parson-philosopher who was a close friend of Benjamin Franklin, argued in a pamphlet entitled An Essay on Civil Liberty and the Justice and Policy of the War with America that the war would be a financial, moral, and political disaster for England.

“Thereafter, whenever the Crown proclaimed a day of fasting and prayer to the Almighty for a blessing on their arms – a propaganda device often exploited to build popular support – Parson Price, from his pulpit, and to crowded congregations, outspokenly decried its mischief
and folly,” recounts Weintraub.

Heeeeeeeeeeere's Johnny Wilkes: The MP and radical Lord Mayor of London, as depicted by Hogarth.

Rather than being hauled to gaol as a traitor, or even widely reviled as a defeatist, Price was well-respected in London, whose mayor, the radical John Wilkes, made no secret of his opposition to the war. "We are fighting for the subjection, the unconditional submission of a country infinitely more extended than our own," Wilkes insisted. As a proud English patriot who championed “universal liberty and the rights of all mankind," Wilkes predicted that "no part of the subjects of this vast empire will ever submit to be slaves."

London attorney William Hickey organized a small group of prominent parliamentarians who condemned “the folly and injustice of the Government in endeavoring to dragoon the Americans into unconditional submission....” Hickey and his companions offered a daily toast, “Success to the Americans” -- and one of them even named his private cutter Congress.

Such supposed sedition was remarkably common in London. “Every night during the American war,” recalled parliamentarian Thomas Coke, “did I drink to the health of General Washington as the greatest man on earth.” Anti-war and anti-enlistment broadsides circulated widely throughout London

As I've noted elsewhere, David McCullough's book 1776 offers many examples of outspoken English opposition to the war with America. One London newspaper denounced the escalating British war against the rebellious colonies as "unnatural, unconstitutional, unnecessary, unjust, dangerous, hazardous, and unprofitable."

Another denounced the King, regarded by many as a dim-witted and shallow man (he wasn't), as "foolish, obstinate, and unrelenting" for his determination to take the country to war. Similar sentiments resounded during the legislative debate over King's October 1775 war speech. One critic described the King’s war plans as "big with the most portentous and ruinous consequences"; he was particularly opposed to sub-contracting troops from foreign powers, a move he called an "alarming and dangerous precedent."

These critics of King George's war in America, it should be remembered, lived under the shadow of the Treason Act of 1351, which dictated death by decapitation for nobles, and by torture – being drawn and quartered – for commoners convicted of the offense. At the very least, they faced the prospect of prolonged imprisonment under the anti-dissent law opposed by Burke.

Yet they spoke out against the American War with a vigor and candor not displayed by the likes of Harry Reid. Like the rest of what passes for leadership in his pusillanimous party, Reid is willing to criticize the Bush Regime's incompetence without telling the unvarnished truth about the war itself, to wit: It was an abomination from the beginning, and should be brought to an end immediately.

Obviously, the war in Iraq is not a perefect parallel for our War for Independence. Those fighting against the U.S.-led occupation are not the heirs of Washington and Paul Revere. Bush's war is an act of cynical aggression clumsily disguised by the rhetoric of necessity, rather than an effort to reclaim rebellious colonies

In any case, it must be said that the War against the American Colonies waged by England's King George III, however monumentally unjust, was more defensible than the war in Iraq waged under America's King George II.

True patriots know when to root for their government's defeat. This is such a time.

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Patriotism vs. Nationalism

“That's what they, they start when you're young, y'know. When you're little they, at school they, they Baden-Powell all the boys and they Betty Crocker all the girls and they, then they air condition ya' and put ya' in the Heat N' Bake Oven and ya' can't breathe any more.”

Jerry Fletcher, describing collectivist social conditioning, in Conspiracy Theory.

To understand the critical difference between the commendable impulse called patriotism, and the murderous group psychosis called nationalism, it's useful to think of the contrast between the organic reality called family ties and the silly fiction called “school spirit.”

While the terms patriotism and nationalism can refer to the same thing – the love of one's native country – in practice they have acquired very different meanings. Nationalism, in practice, describes not to the love of a country but rather the veneration of its central government.

Patriotism is not built on zero-sum assumptions: It is quite possible to love one's country ardently, while recognizing and respecting the love that patriots of other countries display for their homelands. I am convinced that one result of a global pandemic of genuine patriotism would be a general abatement of warfare, since people who really love their country would spare it the horrors of war in all but the most exigent of circumstances.

Authentic patriots thrust into combat against each other would be likely to seek the earliest possible end to conflict, as well as to pursue a just and sustainable peace. The objective, after all, would be to preserve what's best for one's own country, not to impose the will of one's government on another country.

As historian John J. Dwyer notes, nationalism is a degenerate impostor of patriotism. “The patriot says, `I love my country,' works for its good, and defends it if necessary – against enemies within and without,” writes Dwyer. “He strives and prays not primarily that God will bless his country, but that his country will bless God. The nationalist, meanwhile, says, `My country is better than yours.' `My country is the greatest there has ever been.' `The greatest nation on God’s green earth.' `They hate my country because it is so good.'”

Nationalism focuses on the State, rather than the community. It is unambiguously based on zero-sum assumptions about power, and nationalists define victory in terms of imposing their will on others.

It takes relatively little prompting to teach an individual to love his country. It requires a considerable investment of time and effort to indoctrinate him into the love of the State that rules him. The former can be taught in the home by parents who have a decent grasp of their country's history and culture. The latter, however, requires the efforts of the state's paid clergy..

Typically, an individual doesn't need prompting to love his family, even if there are some within it he doesn't like very much. Familial affection is not the product of ritualized peer pressure, like pep rallies and similar liturgies.

“School spirit,” by way of contrast, is an entirely synthetic pseudo-emotion. Public schools are about as organic as polystyrene, and the “communities” they create are the product of geographic accidents and arbitrary government decisions. They have those traits in common with the “nations” brought into being by the Power Elite after World War I.

Like those artificial “nations,” public schools compensate for their lack of community authenticity through the cynical propagation of convenient myths and the state-managed manufacture of ersatz enthusiasm.

Last fall (for reasons I'll explain below), my wife and I found it necessary to put our three oldest children into the local government school, whose mascot is the Pirate (an appropriate choice for a government-run institution). As a result we became aware of the school district's incessant efforts to instill “school spirit” in them – through competitions involving the sale of Pirate t-shirts, or classroom participation in “Pirate Fridays” by wearing the school colors.

None of this has anything to do with athletic competition; we're discussing an elementary school here. So why is there such an effort underway to confect “school spirit”?

I suspect that teaching students to revere their school is the first stage of indoctrinating them in the state-worship called nationalism. “Be true to your school” is the first line of a catechism that concludes with some variation on the theme of der staat uber alles.

As Gary North observes, this is nothing new: “Throughout the West after the rise of Napoleon, nationalism became the State's substitute for organized religion. The public schools universally inculcated some form of State-deifying nationalism.” What North describes is Rousseau's Civil Religion, in which the State -- as the instrument of collective human power -- is treated as "God."

Since the State is an abstraction, it is the most visible representative of the central government – in our case, the president – who is deified as the State Incarnate. As in the early Roman empire, our presidents are generally deified after death: Witness, for example, the revoltingly blasphemous depiction of Washington' apotheosis (literally, “ascent to godhood”) in the national Capitol, or the routine depiction of Lincoln as “the martyred Christ in democracy's passion play,” as neocon Walter Berns puts it.

In this, as in so much else having to do with executive despotism, the beady-eyed, slack-jawed, bloody-handed, illiterate little troll in the Oval Office has turned over new ground: He claims to commune with the Shekinah, or divine presence.

Recounting a recent White House lunch with Bush, British commentator Irwin Steltzer reports:

“The president divulged with convincing calm that when it comes to pressure, `I just don’t feel any.' Why? His constituency, he feels, is the divine presence, to whom he must answer. Don’t misunderstand: God didn’t tell him to put troops in harm’s way in Iraq; his belief only goes so far as to inform him that there is good and evil. It is the president who must figure out how to promote the former and destroy the latter. And he is confident that his policies are doing just that.”

How much of this is narcissism, and how much is a serious psychological disorder (I do not say that flippantly), it is difficult to say. The truly terrifying thing is that the purpose of government schools is to catechize the young in an official religion that would make them accept such grandiose claims without so much as a tremor of critical thought.

Postscript

So the question must be asked: Given what I describe above, why are my children in government schools?

The answer is this: My wife Korrin is seriously and chronically ill. She has been hospitalized four times since last April, and – my soul is grieved to report – she appears to be headed there again. Her condition makes it necessary for me to work at home, in order to care for both her and our children; this severely limits my career options.

"Fairest of form was this queen, glinting and grey of eye; No man could say he had seen A lovelier, but with a lie": Korrin and I on our wedding day, January 10, 1997.

There are other schooling opportunities available, but they were cost-prohibitive, even before I was fired by the, ahem, heroes currently running the John Birch Society for no defensible reason (thereby losing both a steady income and our family's health insurance coverage).

We don't plan on keeping our boys in school for any longer than necessary. I have no idea how long that will be, but – God willing – it won't be much longer.

Please forgive me for bringing up personal matters of this sort. Out of a desire to avoid being a hypocrite, I'd largely avoided writing about the government school system until now.

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