Lying By Delusion

Six thousand American soldiers, marines and airmen dead ... for nothing. Trillions of dollars flushed down the toilet. Constitutional rights shredded. International respect destroyed.

But the greatest loss caused by the illegal invasion of Iraq may have been our ability to base decisions on reality.

Jonathan Schell in The Nation:

Many of these delusions play a role in a perverse pattern, apparently harking back to the war in Iraq, that has established itself in policy decisions. It consists of falsely alleging the existence of some problem to which your proposed solution is something you want to do anyway, for some other reason that you prefer not to advertise. The false allegation in the case of Iraq was, of course, that weapons of mass destruction existed in that country. The thing the Bush administration wanted to do anyway was to attack Iraq. The reason it wanted to do so was to make a demonstration of the United States’ readiness to use force in pursuit of its newly claimed global hegemonic ambitions. Stated honestly, these ambitions were unlikely to be popular. Saying you were preventing a nuclear attack on the United States was more appealing.

Now the pattern has cropped up at the center of economic policy, in the debate over the budget deficit. The false allegation here is that the deficit presents an urgent danger to economic growth, for example by threatening a rise in interest rates. (These, in fact, have remained very low as the deficit has risen.) The thing the right-wing groups want to do anyway is cut government spending on programs that benefit ordinary people and the poor. The reasons they want to do it can be debated, but they include undercutting programs, such as Social Security and Medicaid, that are among the foundations for popular support of the Democratic Party.

We can see the pattern again in the matter of voting restrictions now at issue in states around the country. The Republican Party and right-wing groups have been alleging an epidemic of voter fraud, to which they have been responding with a campaign of challenging voters at polls and passing legislation mandating onerous requirements for voting, such as presentation of official identification. The false allegation here is the wave of voting fraud. A study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University has shown fraud to be negligible to nonexistent. The thing the right-wing groups want to do anyway is restrict voting among Democratically inclined voters, such as poor people and students, who are less likely to meet the new requirements. The reason they want to do it is to get and keep themselves in power.

The provocateur’s strategy of manufacturing a threat in order to respond to it is a familiar one, but it has never played as large a role in American politics as it has since 9/11.

Another price has been exacted, perhaps the highest one, though it is the hardest to measure. While the United States has been exhausting itself trying to find solutions to unreal problems, the real problems facing the country, and world, go unattended. The nation that was absorbed in its misbegotten wars failed to notice the financial crisis that crept up on it and overtook it in 2008. The nation that has been occupied with propping up its misbegotten empire has had no attention or energy to spare for that existential threat to itself and the whole species, global warming.

The suspicion grows that our acts of self-destruction since 9/11 have at a more fundamental level been acts of self-distraction—that we have summoned up imaginary demons precisely in order to spare ourselves from facing the all-too-real burdens of our time.