How far will we go to save face in Iraq?
By ROD DREHER
DALLAS MORNING NEWS
One of the more remarkable and depressing aspects of the Republican presidential contest is how difficult it is for the candidates to talk realistically about Iraq. At the recent New Hampshire debate, when Mitt Romney exhaled a faint puff of skepticism about the surge’s results, John McCain jumped in to stiffen his spine. Those boys are going to white-knuckle this thing through till the end.
It was left to Ron Paul, who has virtually no support, to point out that the Iraq war is a disaster and that the GOP is destroying itself with its catastrophic war policy. Mike Huckabee shot back: “Even if we lose elections, we should not lose our honor, and that is more important than the Republican Party.”
To which Paul replied hotly: “What do we have to pay to save face? That’s all we’re doing, is saving face. It’s time we came home.”
That exchange was the most important of the debate, because it explains the GOP’s self-destructive paralysis on Iraq — and America’s. I don’t think many Americans would say that the U.S. is going to win this war, not in any meaningful sense. The minimal security gains made by the surge are unsustainable absent real political progress, which hasn’t been made and which is by now a fantasy.
But the thought of America’s losing — of being humiliated by insurgents — is unacceptable. America doesn’t lose wars, goes the thinking. Therefore, we are not losing and will not lose. Paul must therefore be a kook and a coward when he points out that the U.S. government is asking American soldiers to give their lives mostly to save America’s reputation. That was the reasoning behind Huckabee’s rebuke.
Wrong though he was, it would be foolish to sneer at Huckabee’s noble declaration. It is a rare thing to hear a politician these days say that preserving honor is more sacred than preserving power and advantage. If we have no love for honor, we will create a low, mingy culture. As C.S. Lewis warned: “We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
Yet cultures in which honor is an absolute value — Arab societies and some Mediterranean cultures — can give themselves over to irrational spates of emotion-driven violence to avenge humiliation (so-called honor killings of women, for example). For those who live in a shame/honor culture, to endure shame is to suffer death in life — a psychological torment greater than most of us can grasp. It must be expiated at any cost — even self-annihilation.
We in the West, however, hold honor to be a relative value. We believe there are evils worse than losing face — and that in trying to uphold a false notion of honor at all costs, we can inadvertently commit those evils. Where is the honor in continuing to fight and die for what all reason identifies as a lost cause? Is it truly honorable to expect American soldiers to die for a war that cannot be won?
Besides, is honor truly at stake in Iraq? Honor is not the same thing as pride. Our pro-war stalwarts have confused the two, which is understandable. As British writer Dorothy Sayers observed: “The devilish strategy of pride is that it attacks us, not in our weakest points, but in our strongest. It is pre-eminently the sin of the noble mind.”
Higher goal
Why? Because the noble soul accepts the moral duty to sacrifice oneself for a higher goal. Isn’t that what surge advocates are doing? In their minds, likely yes. The trick comes in discerning whether the noble aspiration is motivated by pride or humility. Pride says that the ego can accomplish anything it wants to and that limitation is no barrier for the human will. Humility accepts finitude as part of the human condition and is unafraid to accept reality and the limits it places on what we can do.
Pride involves lying — first to oneself and to others. Humility requires truth. A sense of nobility built on the foundation of self-deception is in fact ignoble. Humility is noble because it entails reconciling oneself to the truth, to reality, with one’s head held high. There is never shame in telling the truth, and in living by truth. Though it may take a long time to out, there is always dishonor in living by falsehood — never more than sending other men to their deaths for the sake of a noble-sounding lie.
In Purgatory, the poet Dante depicts those condemned for the sin of pride as proceeding slowly around the mountain, carrying heavy stones on their backs, such that their burden bends them double. They cannot raise their heads, only look down at the ground as they trudge grimly forward. This is an apt image of President Bush and many fellow Republicans today, trapped by pride masquerading as honor, and holding the U.S. military captive to their self-delusion. And we all know what pride goeth before.
X Rod Dreher is a Dallas Morning News editorial columnist. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.