Those Who Do Not Remember History

Will have long and profitable careers as Neoconservative war pimps.

On the eve of the release of his terrible, terrible book (PZ Myers's lovely review gives the game away, thus saving you from rushing out to your local municipal airport to buy a copy) --

...I learned to loathe Harold and Erica, the two upscale avatars of upper-middle-class values that Brooks marches through life in the story. And then I began to resent the omniscient narrator who narrates this exercise in unthinking consumption and privilege that is, supposedly, the ideal of happiness; it's like watching a creepy middle-aged man fuss over his Barbie and Ken dolls, posing them in their expensive accessories and cars and houses and occasionally wiggling them in simulated carnal relations (have no worries, though: Like Barbie and Ken, no genitals appear anywhere in the book), while periodically pausing to tell his audience how cool it all is, and what is going on inside his dolls' soft plastic heads.

-- David Brooks almost tripped over his own dick by accidentally reminding everyone that he is almost always horribly wrong about everything.

Especially things that involve sending other people's children off to die for one of his pet Neocon foreign adventures.

Fortunately for his future book sales, his genuinely jaw-dropping gaffe happened on an obscure foreign program from an exotic and distant land called "PBS" where 10 of the 11 people watching were doing so because the tepid drone of Jim Lehrer's voice puts their newborns to sleep better than the vibrations from either their washing machine or their idling car.

In my case, however, it was enough to halt me mid-stride -- flamingo-like -- bowl of pasta in one hand and say "Did David Fucking Brooks really just say what I think he said?" aloud to an empty room:

MARK SHIELDS: I think [Libya is] going to play out, Jim, absent a visible, factual evidence of a tragedy of great human dimensions there, I think there will be no entry on the part of the United States militarily.

I mean, Secretary Gates again delivered the sobering news for the administration and to the administration critics, which was a no-fly zone is an act of war. You know, you don't simply say -- it's not like a no-passing zone. We don't put up orange cones. I mean, you have to go in and take out the anti-aircraft capability of the other country.

So, I think that's -- that course, which was being trumpeted and heard rather loudly, became muted. But -- and there's no way we're going to act unilaterally. I think the experiences the United States has had in Iraq and Afghanistan in this first decade of the 21st century have given great cause -- caution and hesitation to the idea of a surgical strike anywhere.

JIM LEHRER: How do you see it?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, the experience has given us great caution.

On the other hand, you have got the following logistics sort of playing out. We have imposed sanctions on Gadhafi. We have more or less isolated him and his regime. There is really no escape hatch for them. And the protesters are marching.

And so we have put them in a situation where we -- they say there is no escape. We're not going to be forgiven. We have to fight to the end and just stick this out.

So, we have given them a strong incentive to do everything possible to crush the activists. And, so, if we...

JIM LEHRER: You mean to Gadhafi?

DAVID BROOKS: To Gadhafi.

JIM LEHRER: An incentive to Gadhafi...

DAVID BROOKS: Right.

And, so, I understand why the sanctions -- I supported the sanctions. But if you are going to give the dictator an incentive to kill a lot of people, well, maybe you shouldn't stop there.

And so are we really going to stand by? If his only choice is, I'm going to do whatever it takes, are we really going to do nothing, the whole world? That is a tough thing to do.

JIM LEHRER: But that's the question, isn't it?

DAVID BROOKS: Right. And so I'm -- I understand Mark's cautions, but I don't think we can just -- to the extent that this has happened, and to what we know about Gadhafi, I don't think we can stand there while he massacres people. We should expect the violence is going to get worse, because he has no incentive to not do that.

MARK SHIELDS: The invasion and occupation of Libya, which is what we are talking about...

DAVID BROOKS: Well...

MARK SHIELDS: No, it is.

DAVID BROOKS: ... invading and occupying.

MARK SHIELDS: You don't go in, you don't go in -- you don't send a platoon in. I mean, this is a war, what we're talking about. It's a civil war in the making. And it is real.

We have as little leverage in Libya as we have any place in the world. It's unlike Egypt, where there was an army, an institution that could provide the option of leadership and the reality of leadership. There's no other countries that have any influence over them.

I mean, absent a collective act by many, many countries, you know, I just don't see the United States acting.

JIM LEHRER: What about General Deptula's idea, or not -- it wasn't an idea; it was an option that he said, well, there's that one area in Tripoli that is fortified; that's where Gadhafi and his folks are; take them out?

MARK SHIELDS: I mean, it always sounds great. I mean, it really does.

JIM LEHRER: That's the surgical...

MARK SHIELDS: That's the surgical -- I mean, let's just go in and take him out, and then we're gone.

And we don't have -- I mean, if there is evidence of a massacre, then there will be collective action. You know that. And I am tried -- I'm sorry that people are being hurt. It strikes me that the tide is going in the direction of the anti-Gadhafi forces right now, from all the reports I have had and am privy to.

So, I hope that that happens. But I do not see the United States -- one more land war in the Middle East?

DAVID BROOKS: But, I mean, nobody is talking about sending troops on land. I mean, the activists don't even want them arming us. They don't want them doing a surgical strike. I don't particularly think that is a particularly good idea.

They're asking for a little way to shift the balance of power. And we have had no-fly zones in Iraq and elsewhere around the world. It hasn't meant we have had to take over the country. In Saddam's reign, after the first Desert Storm, we had a no-fly zone. And, so, I'm not sure it is a good idea, but I'm not sure we can walk up this far and then suddenly stand back and say, OK, sorry.

MARK SHIELDS: After we wiped out Saddam's military capacity in the Persian Gulf War.

It was -- the war was stopped after 96 hours because they had been totally decimated and devastated. There was no resistance. He did...

DAVID BROOKS: Saddam had -- was using gunships on Shiites. We don't need to -- on the south, but...

This is what stopped me cold in my living room: the stark revelation that America's Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual had obviously forgotten the entire first Gulf War.

Had just slipped the whole thing down the memory hole.

Had forgotten that Iraq had been carved up by treaty like a roast after the first Gulf War.

Had forgotten that even after his army had been destroyed and his country had been cauterized by no-fly zones, Saddam Hussein had managed to hang onto power.

Had forgotten that it was precisely this fact -- that Saddam Hussein had been contained but not overthrown by the massive and sustained application of American military power -- that provided the impetus for PNAC thugs in media, in think tanks and in the White House

to lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie us into the disaster that is George Bush's Iraqi Debacle.

So you'd think that unless David Fucking Brooks is planning on spending the rest of his life going from town to town individually apologizing to the Americans whose lives he ruined and futures he bankrupted by being one of the Dear Leader's eager, blood-soaked, smirking Neocon boosters for his Excellent Iraqi Adventure, simple common decency would suggest that Bobo once-and-for-all shut the fuck up about Iraq already.

But of course he can't.

He can't because it squats out there, bestriding his resume and dwarfing his many, many other journalistic failures. He can't because it is the ragged hole where a massive professional tooth used to be that he just cannot keep his tongue away from.

And what's more, he doesn't have to.

He doesn't have to because we now live in a country where there is no penalty whatsoever for Conservatives who are grotesquely and serially wrong about matters of life and death. And so well-paid buffoons like Brooks have no incentive to learn the lessons of Iraq that other, less-privileged citizens have paid for with their lives. Instead, he and his ilk are left with their lives, fortunes and positions of power in American politics and media blissfully untouched, free to whitewash their failures over and over again, unmolested by the inconvenient realities of the pain and ruin they left in their wake.

From "Foreign Policy":

Whitewashing the failure in Iraq
Posted By Stephen M. Walt
On the eve of President Obama's speech to the nation on Iraq, some of the people who dreamed up this foolish war or helped persuade the nation that it was a good idea are getting out their paintbrushes and whitewash. I refer, of course, to the twin op-eds in today's New York Times by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and neoconservative columnist David Brooks.
Wolfowitz, you will recall, was one of the main architects of the war, having pushed the invasion during the 1990s and as soon as he became Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Bush adminstration. He was the guy who recommended invading Iraq four days after 9/11, even though Osama bin Laden was nowhere near Iraq and there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with it. For his part, Brooks was an enthusiastic cheerleader for the war in the months prior to the invasion, and he continued to defend it long after the original rationale had been exposed as a sham.
As for Brooks, his column is a transparent attempt to retroactively justify an unnecessary war. He marshals an array of statistics showing how much things have improved in Iraq, but all his various numbers show is that after you've flattened a country and dismantled its entire political order, you can generate some positive growth rates if you pour billions of dollars back in. He claims this "nation-building" effort cost only $53 billion (hardly a trivial sum), but that figure omits all the other costs of the war (which economist Joseph Stiglitz and budget expert Linda Bilmes estimate to be in excess of $3 trillion). And like Wolfowitz, Brooks is mostly silent about the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and thousands of dead and wounded Americans who paid the price for their naïve experiment in social engineering.
...

Of course, what Wolfowitz and Brooks are up to is not hard to discern. They want Americans to keep pouring resources into Iraq for as long as it takes to make their ill-fated scheme look like a success. Equally important, they want to portray Iraq in a somewhat positive light now, so that Obama and the Democrats get blamed when things go south.
...

Sadly, there is, of course, nothing new here. This is all part of a "specific, mutagenic strain of "Wingnut Doublethink"" that I referred to here as Strategic Forgettery --

...the training of an entire generation of Conservatives to mindlessly attack!attack!attack! the "Left" while holding themselves willfully and belligerently ignorant of what their Movement is really doing and who is really running it -- is, in the end, Ronald Reagan's most potent and vile political legacy: Strategic Forgettery.

-- one part of a set of radical blueprints upon which the entire Modern Conservative Movement has been constructed, and which as turned the Right into what is it today: a mob of willfully amnesiac killbots who stay angry, crazy and electorally-compliant only by completely forgetting their origins, founders, history, pedigree and basically everything else that happened before whatever Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity upchucked into their skulls yesterday.

And finally, in the most hilariously, multi-dimensional, letter-perfect, public example of "Irony" I have unearthed in many a year, consider that this succinct and damning description of exactly the sort of brutalizing mental and moral devolution upon which the entire Conservative Brain Caste depends --

"Anti-ideology consists of the attempts to shrink men's minds down to the range of the immediate moment, without regard to past or future, without context or memory -- above all, without memory. so that contradictions cannot be detected, and errors or disasters can be blamed on the victim.

"In anti-ideological practice, principles are used implicitly and used to disarm the opposition, but are never acknowledged and are switched at will when it suits the purpose of the moment. Whose purpose? The gang's. This men's moral criterion becomes not "my view of the good -- or of the right -- or of the truth", but "my gang, right or wrong."

"This is what makes today's public issues and discussions so sickeningly false and futile. Most issues rest on so many wrong premises and carry so many contradictions that instead of the question: "Who is right?" one is constantly and tacitly confronted with the question: "Which gang do you support?""

-- was penned by Ayn Rand -- the materfamilias of the whole fucking unholy Movement -- in 1967.

They have become the very monsters they used to write crappy fiction about.

And so it goes.