“They Don’t Deserve Us”: The Rats Desert the Sinking Ship

In his column “Here Come the Odious Excuses”, Robert Fisk addresses the recent “mea-culpas” of the neo-conservative intellectuals who supported the war in Iraq. Clearly one thing they have NOT learned from the sorry mess that is the Iraq war is humility- in fact, they are as arrogant in acknowledging the failure of that adventure as they were at promoting it in the first place.

It is good that people like Fisk are willing to spend time reading their pearls of wisdom and then report back to those of us who do not wish to subject ourselves to continuous waves of anger and depression. I believe in knowing your opponent’s arguments, but only up to a point. I don’t want to immerse myself in them to get to know their every wretched detail. I know someone who does do that, but then he seems to get a kick out of getting angry. I get angry but I don’t enjoy it. I start to move in the direction of away when he starts recounting neo-con arguments in great detail.

The problem is that however bright intellectuals may be, their intellect becomes a force for ill rather than good when it is directed through the lens of ideology. Ideology breeds arrogance because the believer identifies himself with the fundamental presuppositions of the ideology- and an ideology does not allow its fundamental presuppositions to ever be proved wrong. The important thing to keep in mind is that not only does success prove the ideology to be fundamentally right, but so does failure. For instance, when a country adopts “free market” policies and its economy collapses, free market ideologists conclude not that there is something wrong with the free market policies, but they weren’t applied strictly enough. And when the catastrophic nature of the war in Iraq becomes plain to all, those who claimed that invading Iraq would transform the Middle East in a paradise of pro-western/pro-Israel liberal democracies now say the problem is not with their ideology but with the Arabs. It’s like doing experiments on people and blaming them for dying from the experiments: “they weren’t strong enough.” The fact that this response is racist is no surprise- the idea always was that Arabs understand force, and so if enough force is applied to them they will be “reshaped” in desirable ways. Now they are saying that even violence is not enough to reform the Arabs- therefore they must be incorrigible.

Of course, ideology is an important ingredient of imperialism, and the racism that underlies imperialism (“these backward savages may yet be saved by our beneficent guidance”) is not dispelled by its failures, just turned to “these backward savages are beyond salvation, and not worthy of our beneficent guidance. Screw them. They deserve everything we have to throw at them- and more.”