(The link is courtesy of Aeon Skoble on Liberty and Power, who got it from Fark.)

Among the wits who brought you such straight-to-DVD cinematic masterpieces as FahrenHYPE 9/11 (which is advertised as a rationalization for your preconceived conclusions about Michael Moore) and Celsius 41.11, this, apparently, is the sort of thing that passes for sophisticated satire:

Fellowship 9/11

. . .

Michael Moore’s searing examination of the Aragorn administration’s actions in the wake of the tragic events at Helms Deep. With his characteristic humor and dogged commitment to uncovering — or if necessary fabricating — the facts, Moore considers the reign of the son of Arathorn and where it has led us. He looks at how — and why — Aragorn and his inner circle avoided pursuing the Saruman connection to Helms Deep, despite the fact that 9 out of every 10 Orcs that attacked the castle were actually Uruk-hai who were spawned in and financed by Isengard.

… and the film goes on like that.

Fighting the War on Evil

Now, I don’t have any problem with a good send-up of Michael Moore; but as satire, this is as artless as a MAD Magazine comic, and ends up making warhawks look an awful lot sillier than Michael Moore.

If George Bush were personally going into battle to lead the fight against a massive assault already launched against all the strongholds of the civilized world, by monstrous armies of vile, inhuman goblins, directed by undead great lords of men, and bent to the unholy will of a supernatural Dark Lord who desires nothing less than the complete desolation and domination of the whole Earth, then I don’t doubt that Michael Moore would not have had quite the same objections to Mr. Bush or to his policies.

Misunderstandings of Tolkien’s work abound.

Do warhawks actually think of the war against Iraq like this? As much you might be inclined to say, Come off it, it’s just a stupid joke, the fact is that much of their rhetoric outside of this silly little film seems to indicate that they honest-to-God do. And if they do, it would be very funny–except for all the people who have died because of such childish conceptions of the world.

J.R.R. Tolkien, for his part, put it this way:

The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-d?@c3;bb;r would not have been destroyed but occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth. In that conflict, both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves.

. . .

An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence that is inadequate and ambiguous. It is also false, though naturally attractive, when the lives of an author and critic have overlapped, to suppose that the movements of thought or the events of times common to both were necessarily the most powerful influences. One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.

–Foreword to the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings

And this way:

Life in camp seems not to have changed at all, and what makes it so exasperating is the fact that all its worse features are unnecessary, and due to human stupidity which (as planners refuse to see) is always magnified indefinitely by organization. . . . However it is, humans being what they are, quite inevitable, and the only cure (short of universal Conversion), is not to have wars — nor planning, nor organization, nor regimentation.

–from a letter to Christopher Tolkien, 6 May 1944, Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien #66

In the wake of being shown, once again, definitively, by his own people, that his only legal justification for war against Iraq turned out to be a bunch of hooey, George W. Bush responded today by showing that he has difficulty with understanding modalities:

Bush shot back a few hours later at a campaign rally in Wisconsin. Bush quoted Kerry, who wondered aloud in a speech two years ago whether Saddam Hussein might invade allies in the region or let the weapons of mass destruction he was suspected of possessing slide off to one group or another in a region where weapons are the currency or the trade.

Now today, my opponent tries to say I made up reasons to go to war, Bush told cheering supporters at an outdoor rally. Just who’s the one trying to mislead the American people?

You are, dummy.

John Kerry’s faults are many–and that’s especially true on assault on Iraq. But speculating about a dangerous possibility is different from asserting that it is actually so. Thus, Kerry favored inspections to determine whether or not this possibility was the case–backed by the threat of military force. That was a stupid-ass position, but not nearly as stupid-ass a position as the one held by Mr. Bush–who proclaimed as fact, in front of God and everybody, that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed biological and chemical weapons, was in the process of developing nuclear weapons, and posed a grave and gathering threat to the people of the United States, and so decided to force an end to inspections for no reason whatsoever (other than the time-table of his war planners).

Kerry damn well should have known better from the start. So much the worse for him, but in light of new evidence he’s admitted that he made a mistake about Iraq. Bush, on the other hand, intends to show us how resolute a Commander-in-Chief he is by insisting that it just doesn’t matter whether or not he told a bunch of lies, and that America is safer today with Saddam Hussein in prison.

Safer from what?

Just in case you were wondering, it’s official. George W. Bush looked us in the eye and he told us a bunch of damned lies. Colin Powell stood up in front of the United Nations and told a bunch of damned lies. Dick Cheney has told lie after lie in front of everyone.

Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons investigator in Iraq, told Congress today that Saddam Hussein destroyed his stocks of chemical and biological weapons and agents in 1991 and 1992 and that his nuclear weapons program had decayed to almost nothing by 2003.

Duelfer, a former U.N. inspector and the personal representative of the CIA director, said the former Iraqi dictator had intentions to restart his program, but after weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998, Hussein instead focused his attention on ending the sanctions imposed by Western governments following his incursion into Kuwait and the Persian Gulf war of 1991.

— Washington Post 2004/10/06: Iraqi Arms Threat Was Waning, Inspector Says

Thanks to the lie, more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians have been murdered, and more than 1,000 American soldiers have been sent to their deaths in order to conquer a foreign country that posed no threat whatsoever to people in the United States. Messrs. Bush and Cheney have responded by saying, Well, it’s the thought that counts:

The White House has responded that the Iraqi leader had an intent to restart his programs, some of which he could do quickly, and that he was working on developing prohibited missiles that, if armed with chemical or biological agents, would threaten the region.

— Washington Post 2004/10/06: Iraqi Arms Threat Was Waning, Inspector Says

So Saddam Hussein didn’t pose a threat, but hey, he thought that maybe some day he might want to start working towards pose a threat… to somebody or another in the region.

Mr. Bush also likes to point out that the intelligence he had before the war looked like a good reason for invading at the time. Now, that’s a damned lie, but set that aside for the moment. Suppose you did make such a monstrous mistake and killed so many people over something that turned out not to be true, after all? Would you have a good laugh about it at press events? Would you keep on stumping for re-election on your choice to invade a country over claims that turned out to be completely false?

What kind of man can look at the more than 11,000 deaths, with more casualties coming in every goddamned day, find out that the reasons he gave to justify the war were completely specious, and then just say Oops, my bad?

Yesterday I offered the following commentary on the debate over the authenticity of the alleged memos on Bush’s alleged no-show for Air National Guard appointments: Blah blah blah. As devastatingly brilliant as that response was, that didn’t stop it from netting some critical responses from intelligent people; so it’s worth taking a bit of time to follow up a bit on why I think that the issue isn’t worth taking a bit of time to follow up on. (If this seems paradoxical, you’ll have to review the object language / meta-language distinction.)

Sam Haque defended the claim that Bush’s war record does matter:

Well the issue is important beacause as President he shouldn’t be giving orders for US soldiers to do things he wouldn’t do himself. These countries are being invaded on the authority of President who knows of war from Hollywood. To quote Vonnegut, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.

I responded to some of these points in situ on the page; but there is a larger point to insist on here. Although I certainly agree with Sam that Bush’s bellicose Hollywood strutting (bomber jacket, War President, and all), when held up in comparison to his (perfectly rational!) unwillingness to ship off and fight in Vietnam, reveals him as a pretty contemptible character, I don’t think it would have made him better to have signed up to fight in Vietnam. John Kerry’s voluntary enlistment in Vietnam was bold but it was not courageous–there is no virtue in letting yourself get duped into volunteering to ship off and kill people for another dumb imperial war. John Kerry was courageous to live up to his own conscience and, after getting out of Vietnam as quickly as possible, standing up to oppose the war. Which is part of the reason it’s too damn bad that he can’t seem to live up to that anymore.

All well and good, but the thing is that none of these issues, or the issue that Sam originally raised, are the issue that’s being debated in the bluster over the Killian memos. All the parties to that debate are already well aware that Bush dodged the draft by heading into the Texas ANG, and that part of his ability to land that cushy position was due to being the fortunate son of a powerful Dad. The debate here isn’t over whether he dodged the draft, but whether (a) he dodged the draft and then failed to show up for some of the pointless rigamarole involved in a pointless position he never should have been coerced into taking, or (b) dodged the draft and then showed up for all the stupid stuff he was told to show up for. (Actually, that‘s not even the debate; the debate is over whether or not some of the evidence claimed for (a) is genuine or a forgery.)

On that note, I echo my own statements from yesterday’s post, and sympathize with John Lopez’s comments:

Not at all. My interest is in the fact that Dan Rather is a confirmed lying sack of garbage. I don’t care one iota that Kerry and Bush dodged the draft – I’d say “good for them”, if I didn’t hold them both in utter contempt. As for what “the most important political issue in the world” is, that happens to be my one-and-only life, which is affected more by the culture of willful self-deception we live in than by, say, the mess in Iraq.

George Bush had every right to dodge the draft, and happened to have the opportunity at hand. If he was also able to get away with skipping some of the pointless rigamarole that his draft-evasion technicality supposedly required, then more power to him; would that everyone had the opportunities that he did.

If there is any interesting issue here, as John Lopez rightly points out, it hasn’t got anything to do with whether or not Bush actually failed to show up for something or another. The only real point where interesting discussion might be possible (unless other observers are willing to honestly take on the issue of individual rights, the draft, and Vietnam–and they are far too busy dickering over the latest inconsistent poll numbers for that) is CBS’s conduct: whether one thinks that they published a major exposé based on forgeries, and if so, how culpable they were in the process.

John thinks that they are forgeries, and that CBS and Dan Rather are being revealed as at best casually indifferent to the truth. I don’t have much of a dog in that fight–I haven’t spent much time researching the issue, have mostly skipped over posts about it on other blogs because of the fact that I don’t care, and only mention it at all here in order to point out why I think the whole debate is a waste of time–in particluar when it’s being pursued by apparatchiks such as Drum or that other Charles Johnson dude, who–unlike John Lopez–are trying to make some partisan hay out of the memos (whether at Mr. Kerry’s or Mr. Bush’s expense). I will say, though, that I think that, say, the on-going disaster in Iraq and the never-ending stream of lies and Newspeak coming out of the ruling class in the attempt to justify it or explain it away, or the know-nothing bellicosity that the rank and file of the Right lap up, is a lot more troubling than the sort of nonsense that’s produced by the everlasting jabber of court intellectuals talking to each other about each other’s opinions. (N.B.: I’ve read too much of John Lopez’s excellent contributions at No Treason to include him in this characterization–but I do think that he has–as we all do sometimes–fallen victim to one of its smelly red herrings.)

If you want cases that reveal Rather and his colleagues in network and cable news as a bunch of dishonest gasbags, war coverage is where it’s at. (When PIPA found that television news actively made you stupider about the Iraq War, nobody should have been surprised.) And these are the sorts of lies and prevarication and ruddy-faced ignorance that actually hit home, that most people end up listening to and arguing about and having to sort through when they think about how politics impacts their lives. Not to mention, say, the crying need for rational discussion of abortion rights–which reminds me that I need to get back to part II of Pro-Choice on Everything–or something, Jesus, anything that actually bears on your life or the lives of some folks that you know.

The kind of gossip-rag material that flies around most election coverage, on the other hand, is an excellent indicator of how degraded political culture has become. But the rules of the game with the chattering class are so twisted that it’s no longer clear that either truth or rationality is even expected–even part of the rules in the language game. Or perhaps that these terms could, in those contexts, only be deployed to indicate the conformity of a position to the party line. Spending much of any time trying to get to the bottom of this sort of noise, or to correct it, seems much less to the point than simply working to replace it; certainly it’s not a strategy that has ever seemed to me to be well-justified by its success. The sort of people who bring themselves to hang on the twists and turns of issues such as these–who provide the major market niche for channels devoted to 24-7 soundbite repetition–who are outraged at Dan Rather but not at Brit Hume (or vice versa)–are not really the sort of people who are worth worrying about, or addressing, or trying to convince of the bankruptcy of the professional news media.

Further reading:

• GT 2004/08/16: The Long Memory
• GT 2004/06/12: Outrage Fatigue
• GT 2004/03/20: The War on Iraq One Year On: Countdown to Regime Change
• GT 2004/02/08: What you mean we?
• GT 2003/11/12: White House Press Flack Tells All
• GT 2003/11/12: Roderick Long Unblogs Veteran’s Day
• GT 2003/08/17: Who Has the Better Argument? We Report, You Decide

In his comments on my post yesterday, Mark Noonan asks what my answer to his challenge is–to wit:

We’ve given the left a pass long enough — its [sic] time for those who are of leftwing opinion to make their final call: which side of the river are you on? If you’re on America’s side, then you want total and overwhelming US victory — and just to really spell it out; this means that our enemies are dead or begging for mercy. I challenge you — choose, and let you be known for what you are by what you choose — patriot, or traitor.

The easy answer would be to say that I don’t take the challenge seriously (which I don’t) and that I regard the question Do you want complete American victory in Iraq, or are you of another opinion? as fundamentally confused (which I do). However, perhaps it will be best to lead off by repeating what I said the last time Mr. Noonan asked me for my opinion on the matter:

Finally, even if you were to convince me that Kennedy is entirely in the wrong, I could not possibly see it as an instance of the general principle that you set out: “If you’re on America’s side, then you want total and overwhelming US victory — and just to really spell it out; this means that our enemies are dead or begging for mercy.” It could not be an instance of that principle because the principle is jingoistic claptrap that is obviously and wretchedly false–not to mention dangerous to basic points of republican virtue.

The highest form of love is the love of the virtue in the beloved, and those who are truly “on America’s side”–in any sense of the word that would make it an attitude worth having–are those who want America to live up to its better self. Whether that involves victory in war or not depends entirely on whether the war in question is just or unjust; even if you are right (as I think you are not) that support for this war is righteous, the idea of extending unconditional support for victory in any war that the United States government has committed itself to strikes me as nothing more than belligerent foolishness.

To that I should only add that, as I have argued in The War on Iraq One Year On and What You Mean “We”?, the assault on Iraq and the on-going occupation were not and are not, in fact, anything approaching just or righteous, and that it is becoming more obvious with every day just how ridiculous the demand to take a side is–where the only sides on offer are the Imperial Legions of the United States and the newly sovereign Iraqi junta, on the one side, and terrorist jihadis aligned with thugs such as Muqtada al-Sadr, on the other. If those are the two sides of the river, I would rather drown.

I am not on the United States government’s side. Nor am I on the jihadis’ side. (As a secessionist republic of one, I have an official policy of non-alignment in this conflict.) I don’t think that loyalty to any side in any conflict is, or can be, a virtue unless it is conditioned by loyalty for the truth and for justice, and what I’ve repeatedly argued in this space is that there is precious little of those in the Bush Administration’s case for war or practice of the war and occupation. (And the same, of course, goes for Mr. al-Sadr and his militia.) If I am on anyone’s side, it is innocent Iraqis who continue to be caught in the crossfire and to have their freedoms squelched, their rights trodden upon, their dignity insulted, and their lives and livelihoods destroyed, by two gangs caught in a bloody, apparently endless turf war.

The best thing that the U.S. government could achieve at this point would be to make it right to what degree they can. And that would mean:complete and immediate withdrawal, an official apology, and war reparations to Iraqi civilians maimed or dispossessed by the war and occupation–or to their heirs if they were among the tens of thousands killed. (The funds for reparations should, ideally, be expropriated from the personal fortunes of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, Tom DeLay, Tony Blair, Jack Straw, José Maria Aznar, Saddam Hussein, Uday and Qusay Hussein, Tariq Aziz, Ahmad Chalabi, et cetera.)

That’s not “complete victory,” in any sense, but there is an important sense in which–since “victory” is, by definition, something worth having, and since it is not worthwhile to achieve dominance in an unjust war–there is no victory possible for the American military in Iraq. There is only conquest. And mere conquest is not something worth having, nor is it something worth wishing for your friends to have.