The Last Refuge

Wars have always been popular with tin-pot dictators, regular-pot dictators, and politicians in trouble. The reason is pretty simple - when the nation is at war, any attack on the leader can be portrayed as an attack on the soldiers and an attack on the nation. This phenomenon was probably what Samuel Johnson had in mind when he defined patriotism as "The last refuge of the scoundrel." Bartleby.com offers riffs on this theme by Ambrose Bierce and H. L. Mencken:

“In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit that it is the first.”—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, at entry for patriotism, The Collected Writings of Ambrose Bierce, p. 323 (1946, reprinted 1973).

H. L. Mencken added this to Johnson’s dictum: “But there is something even worse: it is the first, last, and middle range of fools.”—The World, New York City, November 7, 1926, p. 3E.
Illinois Senator Dick Durbin put his hand into this buzz-saw the other day when he said :
...after reading an FBI agent's report describing detainees at the Naval base in Guantanamo Bay as being chained to the floor without food or water in extreme temperatures.

``If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime - Pol Pot or others - that had no concern for human beings,'' Durbin said.
(from The Guardian Unlimited.)

While Durbin's remarks are an understandable reaction to the abuses reported, especially in the light of the fact that they were clearly the result of policy rather than individual excess, they were also foolish. They gave the Administration's well trained slander monkeys a perfect excuse to go into one of their well-practiced war dances. It's pretty easy to show that, whatever bad things have happened in GITMO and other islands of the Bush Achipelago, much worse happened to many more people in Stalin's Russia, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Nazi Europe, and Saddam's Iraq. I don't find this fact very comforting, but it certainly gives the wingers a shouting point.

Bad things happen in wars, and that's why they should only be undertaken for the gravest reasons. Of all the catastrophic blunders Bush has made in this war, starting it was the worst, and 1700 Americans have already died for his folly. Those of us who hate the war but not the warrior should keep our focus on the leadership blunders that have gotten us to this sorry state.

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