Strange Happenings
Peter Schultz
There are
strange political phenomena. One, cited by Walter Karp in his book The Politics of War, is the phenomenon
of the “heroic defeat.” As Karp explains this regarding Woodrow Wilson and the
League of Nations:
“Defeat held irresistible attractions. The League, defeated
in the Senate, would regain what it had lost at the peace conference: the
pristine purity of a noble ideal. The League’s defeat would shift from Wilson
the burden of guilt that was crushing him. Who could accuse him of vainly
inflicting war upon his countrymen, after ignoble politicians made his noble
war vain….The defeat, per force, had to be a noble one, a defeat after heroic
efforts to triumph. In the summer of 1919 Wilson drew up his plans for staging
a heroic defeat.” [pp. 342-343]
In light of
this, think of LBJ being “driven” from office in 1968 as he gave up re-election
to work for peace, as he claimed, in the face of what he knew would be a
“heroic defeat” in Vietnam, a defeat caused by the likes of imperialistic
Communists, long-haired hippies, spoiled college students, treasonous
professors, the mainstream media, and left-wing radicals who despised America. And, of course, Nixon and Kissinger had waged
deadly war in Southeast Asia, a war that was ultimately lost because of the
actions of ignoble politicians in Congress who refused the necessary funds when
Ford was president to win the war. And all of this prepared the way for Ronald
Reagan to claim that the Vietnam War was “noble.” Of course it was, as its
“nobility” was guaranteed by sending a lot of American soldiers to die and kill
in Vietnam when it was known that that war was unwinnable.
Here’s
another strange political phenomenon: the surprise attack. Now, almost everyone
knows that surprise birthday parties, for example, almost never work. The
surprise is less than genuine. And yet both the “surprisers” and the “surprisees”
have a mutual interest in pretending that the surprise did work. It’s more fun
that way and it’s polite to pretend that you were surprised. Well, in surprise
military attacks, like those that occurred on 9/11 in the US, this same mutuality
of interest of pretending that the attacks were a genuine surprise is at work.
If both sides pretend that the surprise was total, both sides benefit. The
attackers benefit because they are made to seem quite impressive in their power
and intelligence, especially when a powerful nation like the US was surprised.
The attacked also prefer pretense to reality because the greater the surprise,
the less blameworthy they are.
So perhaps we shouldn’t be
surprised when nations and otherwise intelligent politicians ignore warnings
like those made prior to 9/11, one of which was that bin Laden intended to
attack inside the United States and cautioned that these attacks would be waged
with aircraft. By ignoring such warnings, these politicians were, in fact, protecting
themselves from blame for not detecting and detering the forthcoming attacks.
By ignoring such warnings, these politicians could later claim that they were
totally surprised and were, therefore, blameless because, after all, the attack
was a surprise.
