What's so funny' bout peace, love and ...?

From the Times:

WASHINGTON, March 2 — About a dozen members of the Out of Iraq Congressional Caucus gathered on a sunny day last summer on the terrace outside the Capitol for a news conference. The only problem: no reporters showed up.

Ha ha. How funny. Of course, the Out of Iraq Caucus actually represents the opinion of a strong majority of Americans (who thought they were voting to bring the troops home last November). Why would anyone want to pay attention?

And why has talk of peace become such a taboo? Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi tries to grapple with the latter question. He begins a recent piece by quoting an ugly note from a Marine fighter pilot in Iraq, who laments that his tour of duty is almost up, because "the opportunities to kill these fuckers is rapidly coming to an end."

Taibbi takes this as an opportunity to actually ponder just how far America has gone down the road to complete militarization, which is pretty rare for a columnist for a mainstream publication:

I'm always wary of these stories about American soldiers acting like hateful, mindlessly violent psychopaths in Iraq, though they're not exactly rare -- from Abu Ghraib of course, to a chilling video of a pilot pointlessly wasting a huge crowd of what appear to be civilians in Fallujah ("Oh, dude!" the pilot chuckles, after the explosion appears to kill dozens), to a gang of squids in the Gulf who lined up on an aircraft carrier deck in a formation that cleverly read "Fuck Iraq," to soldiers running over a cab driver's car with a tank because he was suspected of looting a few pieces of wood to stories about the use of napalm in Tallulah and so on.

It's not that I don't believe these stories, and not that I don't want to hear them. I'm just wary of sullying the debate over this war with a referendum on the behavior of young soldiers who have been placed in an impossible position, sent to fight in a strange and hostile place with no clear mission and no detectable strategy for securing peace or victory. In my mind, all the people in the Bush administration and in Congress and in the media who got these kids sent there in the first place have to be the first ones held responsible for whatever those kids do after being thrown into the fire. I just don't yet have the stomach to start pointing the finger at a bunch of teenagers and twentysomethings who never should have been sent there in the first place.

But the letter from this Marine pilot is something different. What worries me about it is this unabashed glee in killing people from high altitudes might not be a psychiatric aberration, but an inevitable consequence of the entire structure of our economy, which is based heavily on government spending in the area of high-technology defense manufacturing. When [former Pentagon analyst Franklin "Chuck"] Spinney [who forwarded the Marine's note to Taibbi] focuses on this gruesome and bloody letter from a single Marine pilot, he's not ripping an individual soldier but showing graphically how the tail has, by now, wagged the whole dog -- how a society whose economy is based on high-tech defense spending will first tend to gravitate inexorably toward high-tech defense solutions to policy problems, and then over time will raise whole generations instilled with an implicit belief in and enthusiasm for such lunacies as the "surgical strike." Here's how Spinney put it:

We all know that the American Way of War is to use our technology to pour firepower on the enemy from a safe distance. Implicit in this is the central myth of precision bombardment that dates back at least to the Norden Bombsight in World War II...Of course this is all hogwash, as the conduct of the Iraq War has proven once again. Real war is always uncertain and messy and bloody and wasteful and accompanied by profound psychological and moral effects. But these preposterous theories are central to the American Way of War, because they justify the maintenance of a high cost high-tech military which is so essential to the welfare of the parasitic political economy of the military-industrial-congressional complex that is now seamlessly embedded in our political culture.

The reason I'm even writing about Spinney's letter this week is that we're now just seeing come into focus the first outlines of the rhetorical parameters for the 2008 presidential campaign. Among other things, I'm seeing a lot of TV commentators pound home the theme that the Democratic party needs to shed its reputation for "pacifism." An article I saw about Rudy Giuliani last week saluted the former mayor for being sensible on Iraq without being a "peacenik." After four years of Iraq, we still can't talk about peace in public! This evil bullshit has been buried in the commercial media's descriptive campaign language seemingly forever by now, but it may be time -- in the wake of this Iraq disaster -- to start thinking about where it comes from and what effect it may have on the national psyche.

I believe that Marine pilot is driven by the same forces that render the presidential candidacy of someone like Dennis Kucinich impossible in America. A country that feeds itself through the manufacture of war technology is bound to view peace, nonviolence and mercy as seditious concepts. It will create policies first and then people to fit its machines, finding wars to fight and creating killers to fight them. If that's true of us, and I think it is, our troubles won't be over even if someone brings the Iraq war to an end. We'll be treating the symptom and not the disease. And the reason our elections are a sham is that the disease is never on the table. Excepting the occasional Kucinich, no one in either party is interested in trying to change who we are, no matter how sick we become.

Read the whole piece....

Update: And today David Sirota takes the Times to task for its condescending coverage of the Out of Iraq Caucus, which it saddled with a "fringe" image, even with a majority of Americans opposing the war."

Says Sirota:

... Democrats who want to bring the troops home from Iraq do not have a "fringe image" among the public, which also -- according to polls -- strongly wants the same thing. Then again, maybe I'm wrong: Maybe this statement is just a very public admission that editors and reporters at newspapers like The New York Times really believe they get to unilaterally decide "images," not the public; and from their Beltway vantage point where the only Serious People are those neoconservatives who pushed the war in the first place, anyone who wants to end the war is a Dirty Hippie on the "fringe." Either way, this line is stunning (though sadly not shocking) for its sheer idiocy, its Beltway-typical disconnection from public opinion, its deliberate contempt for the majority of the country -- or whatever combination of all three led to its publication.