Re: Radical Society - Review of Culture & Politics Timothy Don talks with George Packer about Iraq
Michael Pugliese wrote:
http://www.radicalsociety.com/article3201_02.html
In which George Packer says:
First of all, I never took a stand on the war in public, so that I could have actually faked it in my book and said, “In fact, I actually decided on that night of March 19 that I was against the war.” No one would have known the difference because I hadn’t come out in favor of it. I’m somehow being punished for having told readers, long after it became a very unpopular cause, what I was thinking. I thought I owed it to the reader because I’m a citizen too. But in a way it’s irrelevant. That’s not the position I’m in. That’s not my role. My role was to chronicle, to understand, to perceive. Remember that the chroniclers of the Vietnam War, like Halberstam and Sheehan-the best ones-were pro-war when they went to Vietnam, and they’ll say that in their books. They then went to see and gradually began to feel that the war, whether or not it could have been won in the beginning, was not being won, and they began to ask why wasn’t it being won, and what did that say about us and what did it say about Vietnam; and in the end Sheehan believed that it couldn’t have been won from the beginning because it was a war of Vietnamese nationalism. I don’t think Iraq is the same in that way, but what’s interesting is the change in our political culture, where someone in my position, who is essentially doing the same thing, is required to issue an apology or a mea culpa. That’s recent. That’s about the culture wars and the Clinton wars and the Bush wars. It’s not about Iraq.
To which I can only say, fuck George Packer. Just before the war started, that little creep made fun of Liza for being a naive leftist for opposing the invasion. He deserves a lot more than being forced to utter a mea culpa.
Doug