In reference to this discussion, I thought I’d dust off a post I composed about a month ago but never published where I try to work through why some of Rod Dreher’s posts make me so angry, and how I can move that anger to a more positive direction.
Enjoy….
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Tom has noted that I have once again succumbed to the temptation to react in anger to the writings of Rod Dreher. So in this post I will attempt to channel that anger to a constructive purpose.
Commentators like Dreher and Andrew Sullivan seem to think that the mistake they made in support of the war was a mere error in judgement. They trusted Bush, but they shouldn’t have. They overstimated what the US military can accomplish. So all they need to do is admit and apologize for these mistakes, and carry on with the same style of commentary with this course correction.
I have very little good to say about George W. Bush in general and his leadership on the Iraq War in particular. But I think blaming it on Bush is a little too easy. He’s unpopular and useless now, but was elected twice, the second time with a majority of the popular vote, so these commentators are hardly alone in once trusting Bush but no longer. Still, I don’t think the story of the run-up to the war in Iraq was, “Bush leads a reluctant public into war.” I don’t think these commentators required much convincing to back ousting Saddam. The problems in our system that led to the invasion of Iraq are bigger than one man. Sullivan wouldn’t submit to Bush’s leadership on same sex marriage, for example. I can accept the notion that they uncritically accpeted the Administration’s analysis of the WMD intelligence, but I submit that this had more to do with the commentators disposition toward war than a personal trust of George W. Bush. Pledging never to trust Bush again won’t change that.
What these commentators have not apologized for or atoned for was their dismissal of those opposed to the invastion. Sullivan and Dreher and many supporters of the invasion employed a take-no-prisoners scorched-earth approach to the debate that pre-empted questions that should have been answered more throughly before the invasion. The tone was not that of a reluctant supporter placing trust in his president, but of a full-throated advocate. I recall lots of commentary about whether Bush was “going wobbly.” This narrative of Bush dragging along commentators into support for the war puts the cart before the horse. Commentators were demanding war; Bush gave it to them.
Now, those of us who were more skeptical about the invasion should not have been so easily intimidated. We often flopped rather than argue our position. Nevertheless, it is true that Dreher’s and Sullivan’s tactics had the effect of making people more reluctant to voice opposition to the war, which in retrospect appears to be a bad thing.
Take this WSJ column. At that time, commentators like Dreher were fond of pointing to bishops’ falling down on their job of moral leadership as a “root cause” of the sexual abuse scandals. It wasn’t just a failure of administration; it was a failure of leadership. They had failed to effectively confront the sexualized culture; thus the abuses were thinkable.
Ok, but then when the bishops expressed moral leadership on something that he disagreed with, Dreher dragged out the sexual abuse scandal to discredit them, without regard to how this will effect its ability to provide moral leadership on anything.
Now, this argument was probably comforting to the WSJ’s Op-Ed page readership, which is probably why they ran it in the first place. And I admit that when you’re on their side, it’s fun to read commentators like Dreher, Sullivan, Lileks, and Hitchens, and you can laugh along with them at how foolish those on the other side are. But it’s expensive fun.
Because the effect of when a Lileks “fisks” some college newspaper writer is similar to the effect of when the schoolyard bully beats up the the kid nobody likes. Yeah, we might cheer him on, because that punk really is annoying, but we also don’t want to be the next victim. And just because the bullies are beating up on different targets doesn’t mean they’re not bullies anymore.
So what’s the lesson? Tom proposes “Don’t prefer anger.” I would propose, “Be wary of appeals to emotion.”
Which brings me to my current beef — Mr. Dreher has posted several times about his how his brother-in-law is being deployed to Iraq, leaving his wife alone with two kids. I’m sure Mr. Dreher’s anguish about his family’s situation is very real, and I hope you will join me in praying for his brother-in-law’s swift and safe return home.
Absent from these laments is any reckoning for the role Mr. Dreher and other pundits played in getting us where we were. Take a spin through the Corner in the first quarter of ‘03 to see what I mean. Making fun of Hollywood, Cheerleading, telling Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton to shut up, taunting other world leaders, saying others don’t understand, saying Bush isn’t hawkish enough(so much for this “trusted the wrong guy” explanation), praising the morality of the war, rolling his eyes at Jessica Lange invoking her motherhood, defying the pope’s request to fast for peace, referring to “peacenik pastors”, etc. There’s even a piece about the emotional irrationalism of the war’s opponenets. Suffice it to say that the 2003 Dreher wouldn’t have much time for the 2007 Dreher’s concerns for his nieces and nephews not having their daddy around for a while.
Now, does this mean that Mr. Dreher is disqualified from criticizing the war or its execution? No. Does it make his family’s pain any less real? No. But I think we should be wary of the appeals to emotion. “We should get out of Iraq because it’s taking my niece’s and nephew’s daddy away from them” isn’t any more valid than, “We should invade Iraq so my daughter doesn’t have to grow up in fear.”
I’m not sure what the best solution is for Iraq; I’d like for our troops to come home as soon as possible, and for families to remain intact. But I also have a moral sense that we have a responsibility to clean up what we messed up. And that this responsibility should weight heaviest on those who worked to get us into this mess.
