You Gotta Believe

Howard Zinn has a piece on American exceptionalism (he's agin' it, of course) in the Boston Review. It's pretty much the same Zinn you can get anywhere--if you resent America and don't know much history, it's for you.

Nevertheless, there are some claims that throw light on how Zinn (and other critics) argue about the war in Iraq.

Zinn huffs and puffs about how Bush bases his decisions on divine sanction, but he has no evidence. All he has are a few hearsay quotes that prove nothing. Yet, the idea is catnip to Zinn--it must be true because it's so much fun to believe. (It sure is more fun than arguing over actual substance.)

I'm fairly sensitive to religion-talk in politics, and Bush, as devout as he may be personally, is pretty much the same as most politicians. Like so many others, from Carter to Clinton, he prays for guidance, but when it comes to acting, he has real-world reasons. If you bother to read his speeches (for example, here's his famous--or infamous--speech on the USS Lincoln), he tries to explain why we're fighting a war on terror, and it's not because "I asked the Big Guy what to do and this is what he told me personally." In fact, it's pretty much unimaginable he'd say anything like that. That people such as Zinn not only believe he could say something like that, but actually has, shows how irrational they are.

There are people who talk like this, of course. Our enemies.

After mischaracterizing the war in Iraq as a religious crusade, Zinn warns us "Divine ordination is a very dangerous idea" since if you act with Heaven's approval "you need no human standard of morality." This is piling stupidity on top of intellectual dishonestly. After all, it's possible to be a believer and maintain high (human) moral standards, just as it's possible to fight for a secular idea and be ruthless.

I'll skip over the rest of the piece, but let me note something near the end. Zinn writes "Here in the United States, despite the media’s failure to report it, there is a growing resistance to the war in Iraq." Apparently, we'll have to add Zinn to the ever-growing list of leftists WHO HAVE NOT READ A NEWSPAPER OR WATCHED A NEWS TELECAST IN THE LAST THREE MONTHS.

He goes on to say "Perhaps most significant is that among the armed forces, and families of those in the armed forces, there is more and more opposition to it." Why is this significant? If there's a general trend against the war, we'd expect most or all groups, from those who strongly oppose it to those who strongly favor it, to be moving in the same direction. (I'm reminded of the Monty Python sketch comparing the intelligence of penguins to humans. They note the penguin's brain is smaller, but if you enlarge the bird to the size of a human, the brain is still smaller, BUT it's bigger than it was before.)