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What Were They Thinking?
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

With bombings, killings, human suffering all around, and nothing in sight in Iraq but the bad choices of continued military dictatorship or fundamentalist Islamic rule, everyone but the war planners now regard Iraq as a disaster.....

...One thing war does do in the short term is cause people to rally around the flag, an effect which the political cynics count on to cover the disaster that war always is. But there was more than this operating at the White House. They didn’t want to merely boost Bush's poll ratings; they wanted to instill a new national ethos to supplant one that they didn't like. The neocons who gave us this war believed that Americans needed a new civic mythology to unite the country around great ideals, and that cheering on a war would revive the idea of national unity.

They longed for the Cold-War ideal when an entire population hunkered down as hostages to the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Their writings heralded the eras of "national greatness" when the Panama Canal was built, when every business displayed a Blue Eagle, when every American mourned the death of JFK, when everyone cheered the moonshot. The "national mood" following 9-11 convinced them that this could be revived.

Even more than that, they continue to convince themselves of the great Lincoln Myth, a man who used immoral means to unite a country but somehow managed to emerge from it with the reputation of a great liberator, a new founding father. The trick, they believed, was to have the "moral determination" to inflict as much violence as possible in the hopes that they would be seen as visionaries, and to utterly demoralize the enemy.

In fact, the idea of national unity, beloved by every would-be tyrant, is something to be feared. It is not a sign of freedom but of despotism. It is the morality of the ant heap. In any case, the forced unity of the World War II era is long gone. Good riddance. The country is too diverse, and the culture too broken into niche markets, too many people too knowing. May the un-American "unity" of the World War II period never return....