our own monstrosity

Tex of the Antiwar.com/blog was kind enough to give comments (here and here) on my own war posts in this blog.

Below is my reply:

The remaining question for me is this: Why support the war?

You suggest it's a follow-the-leader phenomenon -- people want to believe their president. (Whether "their" means Americans' or Republicans' I'll leave ambiguous.) They experience cognitive dissonance from evidence that delegitimizes the leader. We saw this with Nixon supporters during Watergate and we saw it with Clinton supporters during Tailgate. I accept this is a contributing factor to the blood fever, but I don't see it as the dominant cause since support for the war seems to be greater than support for Dubya.

We see the pattern over and over again, but the pattern is larger than the denial stage. Once the evidence against Nixon was too overwhelming to be denied, his supporters switched gears from He didn't do it! to He was right to do it! Same with supporters of Ollie North. The pattern was only minorly different with Clinton, where it went from He didn't do it! to So what if he did it? It seems to me that in all three cases, the second response is only legitimate if it was held as an initial position. Otherwise, the first response invalidates the second.

But let's assume the second response is always the more accurate reflection of the supporters' views. If the support for the war is greater than the support for the president, then we really only have two remaining candidates for explanation:

1. Love of war -- there's always some of this, but since Clinton's wars were unpopular, we can discount this factor;
2. Hatred of this enemy -- where enemy is not defined as a man or a clique or a regime or a nation-state, but as a people. The Arabs in this case. Thus my claim of racism.

I agree with you about the Likud Doctrine, but again, I don't think it's enough, because I don't think enough Americans took Israel or the Middle East personally to account for the current level of support. Zionists and Christian fundamentalists take the situation very personally, but are there really enough of them to account for this level of hatred and insanity?

Would this racism have blossomed before 9/11? I doubt it. But that feeling that "we" had been attacked by "them" brought out some deep, primitive ugliness that now has to be rationalized and justified, and the real "them" is just too small and too slippery a group to absorb our pain and fear and rage. I think the cognitive dissonance experienced in the face of evidence is brought about not by loyalty to the man at the top, and not just by a need to see these frightening dark foreigners obliterated, but by questions of personal identity and self-perception. If the war is wrong, then what does that say about us for feeling so good about it? I really do think it's our own monstrosity that we're hiding from.