Enemy Combatant
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Wingnuts: Wrong From The Beginning
Before it disappears down the dark tubes of the internets, I wanted to bring to everyone's attention an excellent historical/analytical essay about the American Right Wing from Harper's magazine, entitled "Stabbed In The Back." (The essay is all the more timely given the latest news about the neocons' attempts to throw Condi Rice under the bus, over Bush's wall-to-wall trainwrecks in the area of foreign policy.)
What's particularly engrossing is the history of how the wingnuts have been wrong about every major policy issue for the last 75 years (and it doesn't even touch on civil rights)! But what saves the Right, time after time, is its enduring ability to forget entirely its past mistakes (even its past positions!), and blithely adopt new heroes and causes without breaking its stride.
Case in point: Harry Truman. The wingnuts of his day loathed the man, and did everything in their power (fortunately not much) to bring him down. Now, of course, they'd like to canonize him. His biggest sin, in their eyes at the time, was firing Gen. MacArthur in the midst of the Korean War. But does anyone remember what MacArthur had in mind as that war's "endgame?"What the general proposed was a massive escalation of the war. U.N. troops would not only "blockade the coast of China" and "destroy through naval gunfire and air bombardment China's industrial capacity to wage war" but would also "release existing restrictions upon the Formosan garrison" of Chiang Kai-shek, which might lead to counter-invasion against "vulnerable areas of the Chinese mainland." Above all, MacArthur urged that no fewer than thirty-four atomic bombs be dropped on what he characterized as "retardation targets" in Manchuria, including critical concentrations of troops and planes. Even this soon seemed insufficient. MacArthur later added that had he been permitted, he not only would have launched as many as fifty atomic bombs but also would have used "wagons, carts, trucks, and planes" to create "a belt of radioactive cobalt" that would neatly slice the Korean thumb from China. "For at least sixty years," he said, "there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the north."Sound familiar?
