Current Events
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.†Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
