On his book tour, Alan Greenspan has been talking about the dangers of capitalism. Sounding the socialist, he sees a moral problem with
the rising gap between rich and poor. The unprivileged will begin to
question the rightness of capitalism and globalization. Any system has
to be consensual in a democracy, says Greenspan, and capitalism is
in danger of losing that legitimacy. It seems unfair. There are different rules for the wealthy and the poor, and no sense of shared burdens.
This is of course one of the main problems with the Iraq war. How many of the people who signed off on this mess or pushed
for it had anything beyond an intellectual stake in the aftermath? I heard that neocon Eliot Cohen has a son in the
service, and so does neocon David Gelernter, but they’re the great exceptions. To most everyone else who thought this was a good idea, it’s a parlor game. Even the liberal media that stake out a
position against it, what do they have to lose? There’s something idle
about their posturing. Everyone
calls it a tragedy, but for whom is it a tragedy? Not the
decision-makers… If people really took the war seriously, as a mistake, they’d have to
engage Walt and Mearsheimer’s theory more honestly.
When I was in college, all us ambitious journalists wanted to emulate a startling essay on Vietnam that a guy we knew had written: Jim Fallows’s piece "What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?" It appeared in the Washington Monthly in 1975 or so and said that the privileged and wealthy had largely escaped service in Vietnam. I know, today that seems obvious; but the backdrop then was World War II– when George Bush and John Kennedy and other blueblood scions served.
I can’t find the piece on-line, but Fallows’s not-so-obvious point was that the Vietnam War dragged on because the people who were making decisions about the war didn’t have children serving there. His essay needs to be revisited today. How many of the people who form opinions and policy about Iraq go to sleep tortured by fears about that conflict? Very few…
