Bush's entire presidency has been propped up by the War Myth. By aggressively presenting himself as a war leader, by wrapping himself in the sacred robes of patriotism, the military and national honor, Bush has taken refuge in the holy of holies, the ultimate sanctuary in American life. He has made criticism of his policies tantamount to criticism of the one institution in American life that is untouchable: the military. He uses the almost 4,000 new crosses in military cemeteries as a talisman against his opponents -- notwithstanding the fact that he is wholly responsible for those crosses.
...We are now approaching an endgame in Iraq that has its own inexorable logic, which not even Bush's appeals to the War Myth will be able to stop.
In some part of his brain, Bush knows this -- which explains his other motivation for invoking Vietnam and attacking war critics as defeatists. As a partisan Republican, still dreaming of Karl Rove's permanent Republican majority,he wants to ensure that the Democrats take the blame in the coming argument over "who lost Iraq?" By defiantly insisting, contrary to all evidence, that victory is within grasp, he is planting the seeds of a resentful revisionism, a stab in the back II, which he hopes will come to fruition in the future.
The climax of the slow-motion debate over Iraq is approaching. At some point in the near future, it will become inescapably obvious even to congressional Republicans, who hold the key to the decision to stay or go, that the war cannot be won. Bush will continue to proclaim that victory is within sight and accuse his critics of being defeatists.
But the War Myth cannot save him forever, because he's overused it. It will buy him a few weeks or months of breathing space, but even the talismanic power of the War Myth dissipates if people realize it has been used in a cheap, propagandistic way.
...The president has lived by propaganda. But now that the end is approaching, even propaganda can no longer save him.
Bush's attempt to claim he was stabbed in the back is certain to meet the same fate. That notion will live on only where it always has, in the danker corners of the extreme right wing.
I think Kamiya underestimates the power of these deep-seated popular beliefs in American righteousness and power, the militaristic side of the myth of American exceptionalism. Bush and his minions may have lost credibility among much of the public (I certainly hope so), but that doesn't mean that this bedrock of American political culture has been abandoned or fundamentally revised. "The danker corners of the extreme right wing" serve as a reservoir of these kind of nationalist narratives, but they have a much wider resonance because these beliefs and hopes are widely shared. They are taught in American schools, dramatized in popular media, reinscribed by a recurrent series of public holiday commemorations, and rarely challenged or even questioned. As much as I wish it were so, I doubt very much that Bush's mendacity and ineptitude will have put an end to this powerful, if also destructive, American myth.
The implication here is that the Bush administration is not exclusively responsible for American imperialism. To the extent that Americans accept and propagate mythic narratives of the righteousness of our national power, we will make future Bushes, and future Iraqs, possible. Our responsibility, then, is to question and challenge the myth at every opportunity.
