Perception vs Consequence
There are some estimates that place total casualties of the Iraq War at over 1,000,000 dead. Others suggest 500,000. The lowest credible estimate is a bit over 100,000. The vast majority of casualties - over 90% - in all these estimates are civilian. Through the lens most generous to the United States, then, the US government and military killed over 30 times as many civilians in Iraq as were killed in the whole of the 9/11 attacks. This war has been, in scale, comparable to what we think of when we think of genocide.
Yet we don’t view any of key figures responsible with animosity comparable to the level of atrocities committed in Iraq over the last 15 years. People like Dick Cheney are hated, sure, but they don’t elicit public resentment or anger in line with their actions. Bush, in particular, has managed to elude any serious social or ideological culpability for championing the mass slaughter of hundred of thousands of Iraqis. Even the most ardent proud angry liberal won’t actually speak about Bush the way they would Sadam Hussein or Kim Jong Un.
Want proof? Michelle Obama said of Bush that he is her “partner in crime”, that she "love[s] him to death…He's a wonderful man. He's a funny man,” and that “Party doesn't separate us…Color, gender, those sort of things don't separate us." If Bush were viewed as a truly heinous war criminal who should be tried in the Hague, no one would tolerate anyone defending him, and would certainly not look fondly on another member of the aristocracy who identified him as a close friend.
Yet Michelle’s remarks drew no anger or condemnation from the liberal voter class. Her public image suffered not one iota for championing and defending the man chiefly responsible for the war in Iraq. The public then, demonstrably, does not actually have a guttural emotional or ideological opposition to the war to match their intellectual or political opposition. The disdain many may feel for Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld or Condoleeza or any of the others in government responsible for the war is more a matter of political theater and partisan resentment than it is anything resembling deep-seated principle.
This follows a long standing pattern in American politics. Despite the fact that the majority of American power and economic prosperity is due to its foreign policy initiatives, the population by and large regards foreign policy as ancillary to America’s greatness as well as its shortcomings. Foreign policy and military conflict is, for many, distasteful and suspect, but not anything that should prove utterly disqualifying, or even deserving of the same level of scorn and bile we reserve for tyrannical violence committed by leaders in other countries.
A US politician could champion the Iraq war and years later say they regret their decision and even for the most stalwart Democrat, that simple utterly immaterial verbal expression of regret is enough to absolve them of all the violence they wrought and lives they extinguished. They made “a mistake”, their votes were “a blunder”, but none of it was so morally offensive as to write them off from having a voice, or even leadership role, in politics.
Of course, this tendency to discount mass atrocities or violence is well documented - “A single death is a tragedy, a thousand deaths is a statistic” and all of that. Naturally, this would come into play when making any moral calculus about a politician and it’s not hard to see why there would be even more incentive to be forgiving when you feel, at least in part, complicit in whatever your government does.
There are other explanations for this phenomenon, as well, not least of which is a deeply ingrained xenophobia that imbues the average American with a deep subconscious sense that the people who live in the sort of countries the US invades and destroys are in fact less fully human than their fellow US citizens. If one thousand American deaths is a statistic, just how much more emotional distance is there when imagining the deaths of a thousand people on the other side of the planet who speak a language you’ll never understand?
I think, however, this particularly tendency to see US politician’s crimes and violence as being less worthy of scorn or ostracism than such acts from foreign leaders is a result of something else: the narrative of positive American exceptionalism.
Perhaps the most heavily propagandized and deeply held belief among white America is that the United States is fundamentally a capital-G-Good country. Right, left, undecided, Democrat, Republican, Independent - there is an unshakable faith in the notion that this country has been, and remains, a force for good in the world. That this is the land of the free and home of the brave and that any “mistakes” we make are shameful tangents from our path of sterling good intentions, a blotch on the stars and stripes that have stood as the global embodiment of moral and intellectual progress for decades if not centuries.
This narrative of intrinsic American Goodness is the most powerful countervailing force to truth in both politics and ideology. You can see it in what people consider the most damning denunciation of Trump possible: That he is the first president who does not actually care about the country. On the right and the left, the one thing critics of Trump all seem to agree on is that, love them or hate them, all previous presidents were at least trying to do what they thought was right. The well being of Americans mattered to them, even if they didn’t always do what was best by us. You might hate Bush, but at least he hugged those widows/comforted those children/condemned Islamophobia, etc.
For an overwhelming number of people, these displays of humanity by previous presidents as well as certain moments of transcendent decorum, were evidence that no matter the impact of their actions, past presidents had at least some good intentions. Even if they entered as self-interested kleptocrats, they left as presidents because the office changes you. But Trump, he’s something different, he only cares about himself.
Bush can order the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, set up black site torture prisons around the globe where random Muslim kids are maimed and abused for years with no hope of escape, can establish ICE and Homeland Security and spend years terrorizing Muslim communities in the US and talking about the “Axis of Evil” centering in the Middle East, but if he does a speech of two where he says we need to love our Muslim neighbors, all of a sudden he’s a complex man who was only doing what he thought was right and at least he respected the humanity of all Americans.
Obama can drone bomb Pakistani wedding parties and then throw anyone who tries to tell the public about it into solitary confinement, he can expand domestic surveillance and support the largest corporate mergers in history, he can fast track fracking projects across the country and tell residents of Flint their water is okay to drink even while it’s still being poisoned by lead, he can set up makeshift cages for children and deport their parents at higher rates than any president in history, he can assassinate American citizens abroad and sabotage climate negotiations that don’t economically benefit the US, but if he goes on TV and says “Boy, I bet you wish it was Michelle up here instead of me. To be honest, so do I” then he’s a funny self-aware Good Man who had to make Difficult Choices because of a Republican Congress (nevermind that Democrats had greater control of the government for the first two years of his presidency than the Republicans did under Trump) and who would never willingly do harm to another human being for personal gain.
This emphasis on words, demeanor, and tone is not just a symptom of the liberal tendency to play nice as long as your material well being isn’t threatened, it’s also a symptom of just how desirable the Heroic America narrative is. If Obama and Bush and Clinton and Bush and Reagan and Carter and so on were all, to one degree or another, willing to spill the blood of thousands, if not millions, of innocent civilians in other countries for the sake of American dominance, and if those lives matter just as much as any life of any American, then the United States is not a good country. If all of that is true then the United States is in fact a global villain, an international tyrannical empire that can strike anywhere at any time if a quiet cabal of millionaires decides it would be advantageous for them to do so.
On the other hand, if America really is the scrappy little kid that could, who found itself with more power than it knew how to manage but who fundamentally wants to use that power for good, then the illusion of good intentions is not an illusion at all - it’s a sincere expression of the American Soul, a soul that believes a better world is possible through hard work and compromise. So we can excuse a drone bomb here or a torture victim there or a genocide yonder or a forever war beyond because underneath it all we know that our leaders are Americans like us, grown from the same soil that bred this great experiment of a country, a country that has led the world in freedom and liberation for 200 years. We know that when Michelle Obama hugs Bush and calls him her “partner in crime” she means that above it all, we can respect and admire the fact that their two families are ultimately on the same side: the side of America.
This is true, of course. They are on the same side and that same side is the side of America. It’s just that, America as a government is not on the side of the people of this, or any other, country. To borrow an exchange from the show You’re The Worst between an Iraq war vet and his friend:
Jimmy : Why would I even listen to you? Eh? You're a mental case. You're like on a billion medications that all say take for bastshit craziness.
Edgar : I was defending our country.
Jimmy : Oh please. You weren't defending anything except the business interests of evil men.
Edgar : Jimmy, our country is the business interests of evil men.
Michelle and George can get along because, at the end of the day, they share the same priorities. Sure, if you go down the list Michelle probably cares more about dismembered children and vaporized farmers than George does, but both are far more concerned with the flourishing of themselves and their allies in the ruling class than what happens to anyone below.
The Obamas can see the Bushes as “wonderful” because they share the same blood on their hands and they share a self-justifying ideology that says it was all worth it as long as the other powerful wealthy people around them say it was. The Bushes implicitly, or explicitly, tell the Obamas their crimes against humanity were okay while the Obamas tell the Bushes the same and instead of the public viewing them as exemplifying the class solidarity of the aristocracy, they see it as an elevated expression of dignity and class. Iraq becomes a messy disagreement and the ability to transcend that and share a beer demonstrates a high minded commitment to American unity, not a betrayal of the hundreds of thousands left dead so the most powerful people on Earth could feel just a little bit more secure in their unrelenting dominance.
And so, if we want to understand why the majority of Americans are so quick to forgive Bush or so reluctant to loath Obama, we just need to look at what would unravel if the reverse were true, if the two families were comfortably seen as responsible for their victims. To truly hold these people to account for their actions, to truly possess a level of anger and bile commensurate to the consequences of their rule, would be to accept that we have been, and continue to be, ruled not by an assortment of people trying their best to do good in the world while working through a complicated system of competing interests, but by a series of sociopathic grifters who all rose out of the same self-serving class of predators to use our implicit trust in the system against us for self-interested aristocratic gain.
That perception, regardless of how obviously and easily it overlaps with the material consequences of American government since its inception, is too bleak to be tolerated. Thus, we end up here: where no action, no crime, no violence committed by any government official, for any reason, is ever more than a single act of lip service away from being forgiven and absorbed into the collective consciousness as a moment of complicated politicking and messy American-ness. Meanwhile, the millions of destroyed bodies and psyches left rotting in the wake are forgotten in the darkness of the vast shadowed plains just beyond the glowing clone of light generated by American Progress.