A Specter Haunting America

Alec Dubro

February 15, 2007

When the House of Representatives began debate earlier this week on a measure popularly known as the War Resolution (H. Con. Res. 63), one member in particular stood out amid the posturing, pontificating and just plain speaking: House Minority Leader John Boehner. The impeccably-coiffed Ohio Republican castigated the defeatists among us, and left no doubt about his position. It’s worth a look at the entire passage:

Right now, we are fighting them in Iraq. The battlefield is the most visible part in the global war against these terrorists, but it is but one part. If we leave, they will just follow us home. It is as simple as that. We cannot negotiate with them. We can't reason with them. Our one and only option is to defeat them. And this nonbinding measure before us today will only embolden them.

“If we leave, they will just follow us home.” Who will follow us home? The Iraqi Sunni insurgency? The Shiite militiamen? The opportunist kidnappers? Or the foreign Sunni fighters, some of whom have some allegiance to al-Qaida? They’re dying in Iraq so that some day they’ll get the chance to come to America?

I don’t think so. If America is the goal, why go through Iraq? Why not just come here? Has Boehner even been listening to the news? Does he even know why the resolution is being debated? It’s not about terrorists, it’s about civil war. Had Iraq not descended into sectarian massacres, with U.S. troops vainly trying to maneuver their way around, it’s unlikely that this debate would even be on the floor of Congress.

Boehner’s line of specious reasoning has been around for a long, long time. Americans were urged to support the Vietnam War because if we didn’t fight them there, we’d have to fight them on our beaches. The Vietnam War ended in defeat and the only Vietnamese who followed us here were ones who settled here, went to school and opened businesses.

The same argument was trotted out in the 1980s to justify the war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas. During and after the conflict Nicaraguans came and went from the United States. None stormed the beaches, however.

So, what’s this about?

Boehner’s arguments don’t exist in a rational world, but they do have enormous resonance around the country. That’s because they speak to the deepest fears of the American public, fears so deep that most people couldn’t even give them a name, or a cause. And they don’t have to.

In our minds, millions of us know that we’re facing an implacable foe in the form of darker, poorer and occasionally desperate people. They’re barely human, and they’re fearsome. As Boehner said, “We cannot negotiate with them. We can't reason with them. Our one and only option is to defeat them.”

But we can’t defeat them because they keep changing their faces, the ideologies and their locales. So, in the face of certain disaster, we have to keep on fighting, gloriously, doggedly and bravely. From the Halls of Montezuma to the Alamo, from Iwo Jima to Khe Sahn, from The Shores of Tripoli to Beirut. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, but we must keep on fighting.

That’s not to say that others never mean us harm. The World Trade Center attack was a horror, a tragedy and a provocation. But there were grievances behind it, years and centuries of grievances. Nothing excuses it, and a policy based on vengeance will only worsen matters. If our only option is to defeat it, we will keep losing.

Of course, as Freud once said, the small, insistent voice of rational thought does eventually force itself out. At the moment, the voice is not loud or strong enough to be spoken in the halls of Congress, so objections to the war have to be cloaked in “drawdown,” “protecting our troops” and “successfully fighting terrorists.”

But an end to conflict, an end to the new Long War is possible. Our enemies have their own irrational fears, and have committed their own crimes, but there are opportunities for settlement. Iran and even al-Qaida have specific and negotiable goals. If we fought for peace as strongly as we fight our fictionalized enemies, we could achieve it.

But first we have to confront the fear right here. John Boehner and like-minded conservatives have to be challenged when they spout paranoia. And we have to recognize that the paranoia is part of all of us. It followed us home a long time ago.