{"id":225,"date":"2003-06-18T17:32:07","date_gmt":"2003-06-19T00:32:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stefangeens.com\/?p=225"},"modified":"2003-06-18T17:32:07","modified_gmt":"2003-06-19T00:32:07","slug":"shifting-allegiances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/2003\/06\/shifting-allegiances\/","title":{"rendered":"Shifting allegiances"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been down on the United States for the past few weeks. When the missing-WMD meme hit mainstream on the weekend of May 30, I was moving house, and I kept coming back to the implications in my head as I loaded boxes into the car, feeling slightly nauseous at the thought of having been played so thoroughlyThe moment I decided to trust the US government: the Powell speech at the UN.<\/span>. My blog post<\/a> earlier that week had been measured, but it hid a burgeoning sense of betrayal.<\/p>\n

As the Iraq war started, I had challenged myself<\/a> and others not to move the goal posts post-factum to justify whatever the outcome might be. “This nation acted to a threat from the dictator of Iraq. Now there are some who would like to rewrite history; revisionist historians is what I like to call them.” Bushism is what I like to call that, even though the second part of what he said is literally true. It sounds like he thinks revisionism is a morally suspect activity.
 
To be fair, Andrew Sullivan<\/a> does see the need for an inquiry.<\/span>To no avail; feel the least bit queasy now about this gulf between the promises and the evidence and you’re a “revisionist historian” according to George Bush<\/a>. The Little Green Footballs<\/a> of this world do not even feel the need for a congressional inquiry because, the argument seems to be, as winners we can write the history of this war, and the history will now show that the war was justified even for humanitarian reasons alone — just look at all the mass graves.<\/p>\n

For the record, that is called dissembling, for it ignores the opportunity cost of not spending that money elsewhere for humanitarian purposes. Once we concede that there was no immediate threat from Iraq to the US and its allies, we need to ask what would be the most efficient way to spend $100 billion (and probably a lot more) and 250 soldiers’ lives (and counting). A third of Americans polled<\/a>, including the President, seems to think WMDs were indeed found in Iraq.<\/span>How could we get the biggest bang for the buck? If we had left Saddam to kill his 10,000 people a year, we could be saving millions<\/em> of lives instead by flooding Africa with cheap AIDS drugs. Or we could ensure a moderate and stable Pakistan by buying every Pakistani kid a high-school education. Or we could eradicate an entire disease. My point is not that we should do this. It is merely that the humanitarian claims of the neo-con apologists are as bogus as the WMD claims.<\/p>\n

So, I’ve been down on the US. But I’ve learned to be wary of such shifts in affiliation. Too often, in the past, my emotional allegiances depended on where I happened to live. When I left Switzerland aged 6, I wanted to be Swiss, not Belgian. The first time I left New York, aged 13, I wanted to be American, not European. But by the time I moved to Australia at the age of 15, though, I had figured out what was going on: the people I was trying to integrate with assumed (uncritically) that they were living in the best of all possible societies. I had to participate in the vernacular that maintains this belief (national stereotypes, food preferences, sport team preferences and even sport preferences) in order to play along. Eventually, I would come to believe it, and it would feel goodThere is nothing controversial in this. it’s at the base of Donald L. Horowitz’s excellent Ethnic Groups in Conflict<\/em><\/a>.<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Now, however, I make a point of recognizing this impulse in myself, and compensating for it. I make a point of recognizing it in others. It’s also why I tend to defend Europe in the US, and the US in Europe: Most anti-Americanism and old-Europism is borne from national allegiances that are irrational, pre-rational if you will, and they do not withstand scrutiny. But it was getting harder to defend the US here in Europe — until yesterday, when I found my bearings again in an unlikely place.<\/p>\n

I was listening to last week’s show of A Prairie Home Companion<\/a> on NPR while making dinner, and as Garrison Keillor led a local Oregonian band into some good ol’ country & bluegrass with a genial quip aimed at Republicans, I realized what my mistake had been. The US is not some monolithic agent. It is a complex and splendrous kaleidoscope of culture and ideals and optimism and fear; a fascinating experiment, 200+ years old, that can occasionally go awry, as with the neo-cons currently. I know all this, of course, but it’s easy to lose sight of such self-evident truths when not immersed in the culture day-to-day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been down on the United States for the past few weeks. When the missing-WMD meme hit mainstream on the weekend of May 30, I was moving house, and I kept coming back to the implications in my head as … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-politics-economics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7eNhC-3D","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}