I went to dinner last night with some friends, and over dessert — nay, brethren and sistren, Your Working Wegovy Boy was too full to indulge — we all got to talking about Dr. Fauci and Covid. One of the guys at the table said that his grandfather died alone in the hospital; the family was unable to visit him. “I think he died mostly of loneliness,” said the man.
Others had stories. By the time we were done, I think we were all ready to put Fauci in the dock at Nuremberg — not just for what he had done, but for what Sen. Rand Paul’s release of the Fauci Diaries showed about what a petty, vain man he had been during that time.
Peggy Noonan wrote a powerful WSJ column about this very thing (I’m a subscriber, so I unlocked it for you). She compared Fauci to Samuel Pepys, the 17th century London civil servant who recorded in his famous diary what it was like to witness the Great Fire of London. Noonan quotes some of Pepys’ (pron. “peeps”) descriptions, which rip your heart out, and give you an idea of how catastrophic it all was.
Noonan:
With this frame, alas, I read the first five months of Dr. Fauci’s pandemic diary.
As has been reported, it isn’t about witnessing or capturing the size and scale of a crisis, or feeling shock or anxiety. It is about other things.
On Jan. 6, 2020, he goes to a “Super A list” party. At a meeting later that month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hugs and kisses him and tells everyone “how great I am.” At another, President Trump tells Dr. Fauci, “Lou Dobbs . . . told me that you were one of the smartest, knowledgeable and outstanding persons he knows.” Dr. Fauci was “very pleased,” others “stunned and impressed.”
Jan. 30: “All my friends kept saying I was a national hero” and that they “ ‘felt safe in my arms.’ ”
March 8: “Nice profiles of me in Politico and NY Times today.”
It goes on. She continues:
I end with a thought that may sound extreme, but I think there’s some degree of truth in it.
Looking back on the public-leadership aspect of the pandemic—while we were in the trauma and fear of the first months, while we were banging pots at 7 p.m. to thank hospital workers, and scientists were zooming to find out more about treatments and protocols, and earnest medical officials were showing up on cable explaining what they believed to be true—a lot of people tried to do a lot of good things. But it all became pretty political pretty fast, pretty insidery and groupthinky, and pretty smug as the previously obscure became famous overnight.
It all came together and yielded a little societal Chernobyl.
The reactor blew, causing a calamity. The politicians lied and couldn’t be trusted, the bureaucrats lied and couldn’t be trusted, the government scientists lied about the data in front of their eyes, the national press was a propaganda machine. As much as anything, Chernobyl contributed to the toppling of the Soviet Union.
Hollywood Fauci, and his media sycophants, destroyed so much public trust. And so:
My fear is that next time, and there likely will be a next time, regular people will think: There’s no one to trust. We’re on our own.
She’s right, but I ask you to sit with that thought for a moment. When I say, quoting Arendt, that “social atomization” was by far the leading cause of the coming of totalitarianism to both Germany and Russia, this is part of what “social atomization” means: people who had lived in what they believed to be a solid social order, governed by competent people who could be trusted, got to the point where they ceased believing that. “We’re on our own” means “nobody is going to help us, because we can’t trust those who are supposed to have our backs.” We are not part of a cohesive community; we are on our own.
In my study of Russian history — in particular, reading historian Yuri Slezkine’s great doorstop of a book The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution — I learned that two particular disasters knocked down pillars of Tsarist authority: the botched government response to the great famine of 1891, and the shocking loss to Japan in the war of 1904-05. Faith in the imperial order was weakening anyway, but those two events were milestones on the road to 1917.
With that in mind, think about what has just happened, and is happening, with Trump’s war of choice on Iran. One of my friends at the table last night was adamant that Trump has to “finish this thing,” or the consequences will be catastrophic. But it is emerging that there is no way to “finish this thing” absent a full-scale land invasion, which we likely could not mount. Besides which, recent polls show that the war, never popular, is now opposed by 75 percent of US voters. There will not be an American land invasion of Iran.
Yesterday, I was texting with a military veteran friend, a conservative, who has a strong strategic mind. I asked him if the US knew before the first shot was fired that Iran had so many missiles hidden in hardened silos impervious to bombs. Yes, he said: “War with Iran has been gamed for 45 years.”
Why did Trump do it, then? I asked.
“Caracas,” was his answer. Meaning, Trump had just triumphed easily over the Venezuelans, and basically got high on his own supply. He went on:
It is catastrophic in ways that will unfold across many years. We have basically been expelled from the Persian Gulf region, for the first time since we entered it decisively during the Carter administration.
You have to go back to 1942 to encounter that level of strategic defeat inflicted upon the United States.
The probability of war elsewhere in the world now gets much, much higher, as deterrence is lost.
Shades of the Russo-Japanese War! Bear in mind too that a big reason Trump was elected — something he campaigned on — was “no more forever wars.” And now look.
In Live Not By Lies, and now in my forthcoming Weimar America, I discuss, in light of what happened to Russia (LNBL) and Germany (WA) how vulnerable America today is to radical political upheaval, chiefly, but not exclusively, because of social atomization — which includes deep loss of faith in institutions. In the US in recent years, even as faith in key social institutions has waned, faith in the US military has remained constant. Will that continue to be the case now?
As I recall, the Joint Chiefs had warned Trump that this Iran thing was not going to be easy, but of course the choice to wage war does not lie with the Pentagon, but with the civilian Commander in Chief. Still, the powerful US military has not been able to defeat a much-inferior power, Iran, because the Iranians have been so damn good at asymmetrical warfare. I do not think it would be fair to blame the military for this debacle. Nevertheless, we all thought we had the most powerful military on earth — because we do! And yet, that same military has been humiliated by Iran, by choosing to — or rather, by being ordered to — wage a war that it could not win absent a massive ground invasion, which was never in the cards.
Now comes news that the Houthis, Iran’s puppets, are planning to escalate attacks on Saudi Arabia. The Gulf Arab states have learned this year that their American ally cannot protect them from Iranian drones targeting their oil and gas infrastructure. Plus, it is highly unlikely that any US-Iran deal to end the war will conclude with anything other than Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz; the Iranians will at the very least ban any US ships from the Persian Gulf.
Like my friend said, the consequences of this Iran defeat will unfold over many years.
Related, look at this interview that Robert Kagan, one of the most influential foreign policy hawks of his generation, just gave. In it, he fiercely denies that he is a “neocon”:
What I am is a liberal. Lib-er-al. My foreign policy is liberal. If you look back on the history of American foreign policy, the people who have pursued the policies that I favor have always tended to be progressive and liberal. And conservative foreign policy in America has always tended to be in the direction of restraint.
His interviewer says that he (the interviewer) supported the Iraq War, of which Kagan was an influential advocate, and is now ashamed of that. Kagan is unwilling to go there.
Di Caro: But we can see how disastrous the consequences were. According to The Costs of War Project at Brown University, there were at least 180,000 civilian deaths from direct war violence, and it was the U.S. invasion that triggered all the chaos and the civil war that ensued. 4,500 U.S. service members and 3,600 American contractors were killed…
Kagan: In ten years! Over ten years.
Di Caro: …millions of people were displaced across the Middle East in the post-9/11 wars. Trillions of dollars for the U.S. Treasury when we factor in decades of long-term care for our veterans. I’m having trouble understanding why you can’t admit that this was a mistake.
Kagan: Well, I didn’t say I can’t admit that it was a mistake. I’m not sure what the utility of admitting that it was a mistake is. It’s not going to bring anybody back to life. But, you know, there were obviously elements of the Iraq war that were a mistake.
Wow. Just, wow. All those deaths Kagan wipes aside by saying “over ten years.” And he says he can’t see the usefulness of admitting it was a mistake. Really? The usefulness is that it discredits people like Robert Kagan and their aggressive, interventionist foreign policy, and teaches us not to trust them again.
I thought Trump was someone who had learned that lesson. So did millions of Americans. And now look.
We are coming up on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and in the time since that horrible and fateful day, we have all been discovering how little trust we should have in the people who govern us (also, consider how the geniuses of Wall Street, beloved of both Democrats and Republicans in Washington, brought us the 2008 financial crash, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression). I think all the time these days about the ominous torn flag of 9/11/2002.
Hard and chaotic times ahead, readers. Prepare.
Subscribers, read on — I want to hear from you about the item below on the moral consequences of taking Wegovy and other GLP-1 drugs.
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