Does America need a good therapist?

Over at TPM Cafe, an excellent new group blog where I occasionally cross-post some of my writing for The Reaction, Josh Marshall (Mr. TPM himself) recently brought up the old (and seemingly forgotten) question of how the U.S. got into Iraq in the first place. "[O]n this question," he says, "the country is in an eerie state of national denial." Well, his post provoked many, many comments from readers, including two by me. I reprint the more significant one here. I wrote it quickly, and, reading it over now, there are obviously parts of it that seem undeveloped and that I'd like to flesh out a bit. But I'll leave it more or less as is, and, needless to say, I'd certainly like to know what you all think about America's state of denial:

In this context (Iraq and what got us there), I liken America (and, sorry, I say this as a Canadian) to an individual who just won't go to therapy lest he or she discover shocking truths about his or her past. Even if we suspect we know the truth, not many of us are strong enough to handle the truth, to deal with what makes us who we are. We prefer to live under the cover of some self-made mask, a thin veneer of self-protection that allows us to lead relatively "normal" lives.

It seems to me that Americans have begrudgingly come to accept that Iraq is a reality. The enthusiasm of the invasion quickly gave way to the drudgery of occupation. That may have been interesting at first, but it's given way to a certain, well, numbing of the American mind, where even the most grotesque violence seems banal (18 killed in a mosque, 40 others injured -- what does this even mean anymore?). It's sort of like Darfur: even if we could get our head around it, many of us just don't want to, lest we lose whatever shred of sanity keeps us going from day to day.

All this is to say that any understanding of America in Iraq will require psychohistory if the story is to be told in any meaningful way in terms of the homefront. That may be the case with any war, but there does seem to be an unusually high amount of self-denial here. Maybe because the spectre of Vietnam looms ever present in the background. Or maybe because the incessant coverage in the media leads to an equal counter-reaction of detachment. All this is speculation. We need therapy to get at the answers.

It's easy to see why the Bush Administration is doing what it can to suppress the history of the lead-up to war. Whether they knew what they were doing or whether they just got it wrong (and I suspect it was quite a bit of both), the urgency is to spin a different yarn, lest Bush's approval rating fall ever lower. For all the rhetoric, they know that things haven't gone according to plan (whatever plan there was), but, no, the truth can't come out so blatantly.

But I wonder why Americans themselves aren't more outraged by this. Is it because they, too, can't handle the truth? Or because they don't want to know what they already know but are pretending not to care much about? Thousands died in Vietnam, after all, and for what? The pain of that war lingers so profoundly in the American psyche. Can it take yet more meaningless death? Thousands have died in Iraq, both American forces and even greater numbers of civilians -- and how many more (do we even know?) have been severely, even irreparably, wounded? Do we really want to find out that it was for a lie? Or a mistake? For some utopian neocon vision? Or Bush's Freudian efforts to overcome his father? Or for the sake of -- gasp -- politics? (Note: In my last post, I wrote that there were legitimate moral and humanitarian reasons to intervene in Iraq. Still, questions linger.)

Admittedly, some of it may also have to do with the fact that American attention spans have dwindled into obscurity. What was it Bart Simpson said when he learned that Homer had been a member of the B-Sharps? I can't even remember what happened eight minutes ago. And they all laugh. Some of that must be going on here. We're too busy with the Michael Jackson verdict or Rob and Amber's wedding to care much about the nuances of intelligence gathering and political manipulation. That's not a good thing, but it's the unfortunate truth.

I wonder, too, what the history books will say. I suppose it depends on how Iraq turns out. But it will also come down to who writes the history books. Right now, I'd even take Dr. Phil. A dose of therapy is what America needs most. Otherwise, Iraq, like Vietnam, will seep ever further into America's subconscious, forever to wreak havoc with her more noble ambitions.