Shortly before the "shock & awe" attack on Iraq, and for months after, public support for the war was high in the US. This was reflected in the 70-80% approval rating for Bush, who had no doubt hoped that the war would turn him into a great president and American hero. Alas. But even today, many US politicians who once supported Bush but now criticize him, do so with the logic that they didn’t support this kind of war, one that would be so badly run. Bush, they say, should have sent in more troops and supplies, and planned "to win the peace". In other words, they supported an operationally smarter war. They reflect not on the idea of war itself, but on a war that America would have won.
A minority of Americans did oppose the war from the start and called these politicians irresponsible, ignorant, and morally complicit. But what about the other 70-80% of Americans who had also approved? Most of them even re-elected the same politicians, knowing their devious course of action. Are they any less irresponsible, ignorant, and morally complicit?
It's not enough to argue that Americans were lied to about Saddam's nukes and his links to al-Qaeda. With the exact same "evidence", why did Americans support the war, when much of the rest of the world opposed it? Why was the threshold for using the military option so low in the US? Aren't the same people now receptive to the saber-rattling against Iran (including casual threats of obliteration)?
What is it that makes Americans, and hence their politicians, so jingoistic? This jingoism, combined with US military might, Rapture-ready evangelical visions, and the widespread American ignorance about the cultural complexities of much older societies, is today a blight upon the world. In Iraq alone, it has helped kill perhaps a million people and turn millions more into refugees, creating the "most catastrophic refugee crisis in the Middle East since the Palestinian diaspora of 1948".
In the excerpt below, professor Tony Judt offers a compelling explanation for why "the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military":
Americans, perhaps alone in the world, experienced the twentieth century in a far more positive light. The US was not invaded. It did not lose vast numbers of citizens, or huge swathes of territory, as a result of occupation or dismemberment. Although humiliated in distant neocolonial wars (in Vietnam and now in Iraq), the US has never suffered the full consequences of defeat. Despite their ambivalence toward its recent undertakings, most Americans still feel that the wars their country has fought were mostly "good wars." The US was greatly enriched by its role in the two world wars and by their outcome, in which respect it has nothing in common with Britain, the only other major country to emerge unambiguously victorious from those struggles but at the cost of near bankruptcy and the loss of empire. And compared with other major twentieth-century combatants, the US lost relatively few soldiers in battle and suffered hardly any civilian casualties.
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