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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
A historian foresees a United States that crushes opposition around the world and tolerates little dissent at home.
Mar 24, 2003 | The president of the United States has just begun a military campaign of questionable legality against a nation that has not attacked us in any direct or obvious manner. A young Illinois congressman introduces a censure measure in the House of Representatives while the war is still in progress, arguing that the president's justification for war is "from beginning to end the sheerest deception." The president, this young congressman argues, would have "gone further with his proof if it had not been for the small matter that the truth would not permit him."
Challenging the commander-in-chief directly, the resolution continues: "Let him answer fully, fairly and candidly. Let him answer with facts and not with arguments ... Let him attempt no evasion, no equivocation."
The year, needless to say, is not 2003 and the war in question does not involve Iraq. The resolution was introduced in 1848 to challenge President James K. Polk's handling of the Mexican-American War, and the young Illinois congressman was named Abraham Lincoln. This example was brought to the public's attention recently by Stanley I. Kutler, a professor of history and law at the University of Wisconsin, in an angry opinion article published in the Chicago Tribune on March 19 and subsequently disseminated far and wide via the Internet.
In his article, Kutler bemoans the "passivity" and "sense of powerlessness" he sees everywhere in American life. "The freedom and diversity we so cherish for others is strikingly lacking in our public discourse," he argues, challenging his readers not to forget the "traditions of challenge and dissent" represented by Lincoln's scathing wartime denunciation of Polk.
To be sure, there is some genuine dissent to be found in America, even once the bombs started falling. A great deal of it has been in the streets of New York, San Francisco, Chicago and other major liberal-leaning cities, but some has even surfaced in Washington. Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va. and former President Jimmy Carter have spoken out openly against President Bush's campaign against Iraq. On Thursday, a group of six dissenting congressional Democrats, including Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., and presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, held a press conference to express their opposition to the Iraq war, at least until a representative of the House Democratic leadership reportedly tried to squelch them.
Those who tried and failed to stop the war against Iraq, whether in the streets or in the halls of Congress, may well be feeling dispirited and depressed in the face of the Pentagon's "Shock and Awe" campaign and the propagandistic, wall-to-wall war coverage of the major news networks. But when Salon reached Kutler at his home in Verona, Wis., he argued that the antiwar campaign could be viewed as the beginning of a struggle and not its end. The author of "The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon" (1990) and editor of "Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes" (1997) points out that the Iraq war is not likely to last long. While many commentators on both the left and right have begun to discuss the future of that troubled nation, post-Saddam, Kutler is more interested in the future of the United States.
In your Chicago Tribune article, you point out that many people have criticized sitting presidents during wartime, from the Mexican-American War to the Civil War and both world wars. Why do we see so little of that in the public discourse today?
Well, in days gone by, meaning the 1960s, we used to say he who controls the mimeograph controls the revolution. Now, the government controls the microphone and the camera.
I was in my car on Thursday, when all this was beginning, listening to Ari Fleischer on the radio. Listen, Josef Goebbels would have been proud of him! He talks about the coalition of the willing, when perhaps a better term would be the coalition of the coerced. He talked about the 45 nations or whatever it is, whose populations include X number of people and who represent Z trillion dollars in gross national product. I mean, what the hell is that about? It's utterly meaningless and irrelevant.
Basically, the media has not served us well in this crisis. It has been very, very passive. Essentially, they were eager to get this supreme television production and now they've got it, they're busy producing it.
So what lies ahead?
This war will be over in days, if not hours. How could anybody have doubted that? Now come the hard questions that we have to grapple with. First, of course is the question of what we do about Iraq. Second, and maybe more important, what are we going to do about us?
