In Bradley Manning, We Finally Have a Scapegoat for the Iraq War
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/08/22-1
Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, in handcuffs, is escorted out of a courthouse in Fort Meade, Maryland, February 23, 2012. (Reuters/Jose Luis Magana)
The best way to cope with humiliating military disaster is to find a scapegoat. For the Germans after World War I, it was leftists and Jews who stabbed the nation in the backthe Dolchstoßlegende that set the global standard. In the resentful folklore that grows like kudzu around our Vietnam War, American defeat is blamed on the hippies and anti-American journalists who sabotaged a military effort that was on the verge of total victory. (More sophisticated revanchists season this pottage with imprecations against General Westmorelands leadership.)
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The horrible problem with our Iraq and Afghan wars is that policy elites cant find anyone to blame for their failure. Widespread fatigue with both wars never translated into an effective antiwar movement with any kind of mass base or high public profile. As for journalists, even liberal media platforms like The New Yorker and MSNBC dutifully mouthed administration propaganda in favor of both wars. (The liability of thoroughly embedded media is that they cant be blamed for military failure.)
In other words, the usual suspects for stabbing-in-back whodunits all have ironclad alibis. Who will save us from this thoroughly unsatisfying anticlimax?
Enter Pfc. Bradley Manning. In the young Oklahoman we finally have a fall guy for two failed wars against whom Republicans and the deeply compromised Democrats can unite in vindictive harmony. His release of 700,000 documents to WikiLeaks is well under 1 percent of what Washington classified last year, but the moral panic it has generated among American media and policy elites has scratched a certain punitive itch. His thirty-five-year sentence is a sign that he must have done something seriously wrong. Finally, we have held someone responsible.