There is a strangeness to the way in which American pundits responded to Donald Trump’s genocidal threat (now deferred by a fortnight) to destroy Iran.
This is apparent to everyone who isn’t American.
“A whole civilization will die tonight”, the US president posted.
US leader writers were shocked.
Who talks like that? Columnists reached back to the last American president who had killed lots of Muslims in West Asia, the wicked, stupid, but always decorous George W.
Fareed Zakaria, that tireless apologist for American Empire, made the comparison in a conversation with Ezra Klein, published in The New York Times.
“If you watch or listen to George W.
Bush when he is essentially losing the war in Iraq, what is striking is the difference.
Bush, for all his flaws — and he made many, many mistakes in Iraq — always looked at it as an essentially idealistic, aspirational mission.
We were trying to help the Iraqis.
He never demeaned Islam.
He always tried to see this as part of America’s great uplifting mission.” Zakaria’s rehearsal of American exceptionalism, its essential benevolence, its selfless policing of the world and its tragic end at the hands of the vulgarian Trump, is not peculiar to him.
Ezra Klein, his interlocutor (and arguably his successor as American journalism’s all-weather centrist), has more reservations than Zakaria about American virtue, but he is a true believer in the idea of America as an embodiment of liberalism and its values.
And both are broadly representative of liberal punditry in the US and the West in general.
What is strange (and interesting) in their response to Trump’s vileness is its narcissism.
We’re not like that, they say in chorus.
Bush might have killed tens of thousands of people on a false prospectus, but he preserved the decencies and said the right things.
To the extent that Bush made ‘mistakes’, he made them in the service of bringing democracy to Iraq.
Liberal angst about American wars is mainly about American trauma.
You can see this in Hollywood’s films about Vietnam, even the unillusioned ones like Apocalypse Now.
These films are seldom about the natives killed by these wars because their deaths are obscured either by the fog of war or the misty haze of American innocence.
This is only possible if your leader’s proclaimed intentions are good.
Bush, in Zakaria’s grotesque take on the Iraq war, was just trying to help.
That this veteran ventriloquist for American Empire should be able to say this unchallenged twenty years after the hideous mayhem of America’s Iraq war tells us how durable and useful this doctrine of good intentions is.
It isn’t surprising that Klein didn’t call him out on this because Klein himself was a young cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq.
Trump’s willingness to own up to the central aim of modern warfare, namely, killing civilians and destroying habitat from a distance at such a rate that a demoralised and outmatched enemy surrenders, makes it hard for these liberals to reconcile hegemony with the Enlightenment....
