The Church Of Deciderology

Matt Yglesias has it about right, I think.

The preferred method is the use of force and intimidation. The problem is that neither the American people nor the international community is prepared to endorse fighting wars for no reason at all. Thus, when the Iranians approach us with peace feelers, the offers must be rejected out of hand. Iranian intransigence at the IAEA isn't a problem, but an opportunity for war.

The most important common aspect all these revelatory books and articles have had is the insight on the decision-making process at hand. To be fair.... eh, the hell with that, I have no interest in being fair to George W. Bush -- to be thorough, it is necessary to point out that, while Bush may fancy himself as the unitard-clad, phone-booth transmogrifyin', mild-mannered brush-clearin' superhero The Decider, he is merely the public face of the policy-making apparatus of the inbred creeps he took with him to Washington. Or, to put it more accurately, the creeps who took him with them to Washington. They're more than content to let him think that God put him there. It makes him seem more sincere when he's reciting the script.

Bush was right about transforming Washington, after all. Washington was indeed once the realm of shady deal-making, of carrots and sticks, of coalitions and concessions. Yes, until the PNAC's wampeter/sheriff came a-swaggerin' inta town with his Barney Fife vainglory, Washington was the province of rancor and intrigue. Why? Because democracy is messy, because running a huge republic with hundreds of millions of people with diverse backgrounds and interests requires patience and compromise and prioritizing, and sometimes even discussion and (heaven forfend) concession.

Bush has changed all this by putting everyone, and I do mean everyone -- the citizens, the press, the opposition party, his own party, all the internal and infernal institutions of bureaucracy -- on a need-to-know basis. All information is either hidden or politicized; all dissent is squelched or purged. All "public" discussions of policy are carefully screened and rehearsed, packaged into pseudo-patriotic snake-oil sideshows, where audiences are entirely comprised of ringers and shills and eager dupes. And never ever admit you fucked up, no matter how many people see the egg on your face and your pants around your ankles.

The key question facing the country at the moment is whether or not those people -- the ones who view a conflict with Iran as a good thing -- will drive national policy. These are not people sitting around, puzzling over the Iran question, scratching their heads and looking for solutions. They're people puzzling over the question of how to get what they want: A war. The task facing people who don't want to see a war is how to stop them.

It's easy to lay most or all of the blame at the feet of Bush and Cheney, and to be sure, that's exactly what honest historians will do. But it is more constructive to recast Bush as merely a replaceable manifestation of the neocons' fixations. They are indeed eyeing their next hand puppet, and no matter how much John McCain sells his soul and genuflects to these animals, it will not be he who gets anointed as the next high priest. Oh, they'll let him linger for a while, rev up the base, roll up some dough and some cred, all of which will handed off some time in the early spring of 2008, to the Rebel of Palos Verdes High.

That's why the long profile of Allen that The New Republic just posted is important. It goes far beyond the Allen cliches -- he's a deep-fried Ronald Reagan, etc. -- looks back over his life and treats him with utter seriousness. He could be president. He should be taken seriously.

It also makes him out to be much, much, much less conventional than previously assumed. His mother is a Frenchwoman who holds America in contempt. He adopted his good-old-boy quasi-redneck shtick while in high school in pampered Palos Verdes. And, according to his little sister, he is sick in the head:

George tormented Jennifer enough that, when she grew up, she wrote a memoir of what it was like living in the Allen family. In one sense, the book, Fifth Quarter, from which these details are culled, is unprecedented. No modern presidential candidate has ever had such a harsh and personal account of his life delivered to the public by a close family member. The book paints Allen as a cartoonishly sadistic older brother who holds Jennifer by her feet over Niagara Falls on a family trip (instilling in her a lifelong fear of heights) and slams a pool cue into her new boyfriend's head. "George hoped someday to become a dentist," she writes. "George said he saw dentistry as a perfect profession--getting paid to make people suffer."

Kudos to Ryan Lizza for getting the (sort of) early word out on this asshole, but who knows if it'll be enough? Because they (the real Deciders) love about George Allen exactly what they loved about George W. Bush -- he's a phony transplanted southerner with a famous father (and the attendant never-quite-good-enough-to-win-daddy's-approval issues) and an easy smile, who backslaps and aw-shuckses his way through everything in life. Best of all, he'll do what they tell him to do, say what they tell him to say, and be happy for feeling included in things. He's perfect for them, and therefore disastrous for the country.

If Bush is unable to get them the war they want in Iran, Allen will continue the fight when it's his turn. (Incidentally, so will McCain, and so might even Hillary, for that matter.) But none of them have bothered answering the tough questions about Iran, because no one's bothered asking them anywhere it might matter.

• If we have been able to work with nuclear countries such as India, who is not a signatory to the NPT, and Pakistan, who is but covertly developed weapons anyway, then why would it be impossible to work with a nuclear Iran?


• Iran got much of its nuclear research capabilities from A.Q. Khan's weapons bazaar in Pakistan. Why has that been tolerated, indeed without any public comment whatsoever, just for the sheer irresponsibility of it all?


• Why, when we are bankrupt (both financially and morally), and militarily weakened and bogged down, are we so quick to hit the military option? It is not unreasonable to have a stick handy, but have we even tried any meaningful carrot at any stage in this process?

And these are just the basic essential questions, not one of which have I heard a single major media weasel touch upon. We have yet to hold Pakistan accountable for any of the things we know they have been complicit in, yet we are ready to pre-emptively attack Iran, possibly with nuclear weapons, for what we think they might do in the future, as if the fiasco next door in Iraq had never happened. It's insane.

Not only is the notion itself insane, but that it's not being seriously challenged, that it's even being deemed acceptable on some level. The marginal has become standard. Bill Clinton called it correctly when he proclaimed that people would rather be strong and wrong than weak and right, and that's not only what plagues political discourse, but the national dialogue, such as it is. All this bitching about gas prices and maybe tapping ANWR; not a goddamned word about, you know, conserving a scarce resource controlled by unstable nations. It's obviously symptomatic of the modes of discussion on practically any issue, whether it's the ginned-up issue (on both sides) of immigration, or the likelihood of starting a third war while we're still mired deeply in the first two.

I used to read a great deal about past civilizations as a child, Roman and Greek especially. Most of the great histories of those eras are not written contemporaneously; there is a world-weary sense of resignation to them, at least in my experience, as if it were a foregone conclusion. Of course it did not happen that way; it is highly unlikely that at any given point, one Roman said to another, "Think the empire's about to fall?". Part of it is the hubris of believing one's own hype, part of it is the pattern of suspending disbelief, of not wanting to believe one's own lyin' eyes.

It is a strange and difficult thing to be so chronically pessimistic about the fate of one's own country, to which one has become so inextricably entwined with. Yet it is unavoidable to any honest observer, at this point. The people who are in charge, and the people who continue to support them and encourage them, are mendacious and cruel, gleefully so, in the manner of the sociopath. They make the requisite feints toward empathy and common sense when it is politically expedient, and then go right back to what they were doing. They are empowered by their friends and "donors", but their true power lies in their ability to utilize their natural enemies to leverage their agenda for them. This is no small trick; it takes muscle and gall to co-opt entire swaths of reporters into dutifully stenographing your lies and pretending that they have any basis whatsoever in reality.

The rest of the legwork is done for them by their flock, whose only desire is to take part in anointing the next Decider, because frankly, they can't handle the responsibility of having to learn and decide for themselves.