Good day.
I haven’t yet checked the news this morning, but last night it was unbearably grim. Every ten minutes Israel kills a child in Gaza. One out of every two hundred people have been murdered by IDF bombs. There’s no clear plan for what happens when the bombs stop falling, what occupied Palestine will look like after all of this is over. And “over” is the operative word here, since it’s important to remember that at some point the murderous aggression will cease, or at least war will enter a new phase, one of pacification and perhaps occupation if the international community allows it. Considering or contemplating the process of “coming to terms with” this end, whatever problematic form it takes, leads one into some even darker and more disturbing waters. This leads me to say that 2023 is not like, will not be like, the experience of the aftermath of the Iraq invasion that took place twenty years ago last spring. It will be much more disruptive.
First, there is the level of domestic politics in Israel: Netanyahu leads the most extreme right-wing government in recent memory, perhaps in the whole history of occupied Palestine, and his intelligence failures have made him unpopular. Like Trump with his criminal indictments, there is probably a sense of desperation that as soon as the war ends, his political life (and perhaps his life as a free man) ends. This intensifies the ferocity of the aggression, heightens the sense of bellicosity, extends the state of exception. Second, I think it needs to be said that some sort of line has been crossed here in the US: in 2003, there always remained a kind of political option for exit that allowed for liberal hawks to abandon their support for the Iraq invasion. Once Abu Ghraib happened, then liberal support began to evaporate: Democrats could say that their initial goals (eradication of WMD, establishing a new republic, importing modernity, liberalism and especially markets to Iraq) were undermined by the Bush administration. What emergency exit exists now for liberal hawks? We can see genocide happening every day on our social media feeds, and yet there’s no turning-point, no backing-down. The hawks are dug in even as Israel is bombing hospitals, cutting off power to premature infants in intensive care units, leveling entire neighborhoods, and decimating generations of innocent civilians. This, by the way, doesn’t even touch the aggression with impunity that happens on the West Bank, at the hands of settlers.
It’s worth remembering that among the most ridiculous aspects of the 2016 election, we allowed ourselves — mostly uncritically — to be lied to about both candidates’ support for the Iraq invasion in 2003. Of course Trump supported it, and Hillary was a liberal hawk whose true colors have reappeared in recent days. For many years I have told my students about how hard it was to be opposed to the Iraq invasion at the precise moment of Spring 2003, how every form of dissent was crushed under the weight of a million flags, yellow ribbons and other forms of grotesque kitsch. How liberal hawks moved rapidly through academic ranks while dissenting voices died on the vine or were simply cut off. And then how awful it was to see the popular opinion shift so radically, even while the proximate cause of that shift — Abu Ghraib! — was expeditiously forced down the memory hole.1 In a few short years, it seemed like everyone thought the Iraq War was a mistake. Few of us could remember why opinion changed, but we all somehow knew it was bad now.
For better or worse, I think this time will be different. It will be harder for the dog to change its spots: the media landscape is such that while we have almost immediate access to human suffering and glaring injustice via social media, we also have an apparatus of whataboutism that spins forcefully in the opposite direction. Israel’s manipulation of that machine has been incompetent, but that hasn’t stopped or even slowed liberal support. Because we see atrocities at the level of Abu Ghraib played out every day for weeks now, it’s hard to imagine the kind of approbation and opinion shift that happened starting on April 30, 2004. This madness is starting to look like a generational struggle, closer to the epic 1970s domestic conflict over Vietnam, than to the amnesiac flip-flop of the early 2000s. There’s no clear exit ramp for liberals this time. Their fate is tied-up with a right-wing government clearly engaged in genocide, which will make later efforts at hand-wringing and washing, half-hearted apologies (“mistakes were made”) and rituals of compunction and exculpation all the more difficult, if they happen at all.
I should probably add as well Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina as a second factor in diminishing support for the Iraq War. People seem to remember this more than Abu Ghraib, which is another way of saying that Americans can acknowledge racism more than empire.