Myths II: The Wrath Of Sam

I see this:

The U.S. military drive to train and equip Iraq's security forces has unwittingly strengthened anti-American Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia, which has been battling to take over much of the capital city as American forces are trying to secure it.

And this unsurprising development gets me thinking (which might be surprising unto itself). 

Last week I referred to a book I just finished whilst at dinner down here in Alexandria, VA, called Founding Myths.  I'd love to do a long-winded, detailed and very clever post on myriad strands of history and stuff, but as has been the case for many weeks, I have neither time nor energy.  Below the fold I do have some excerpts from the book that I thought germane with the bare minimum of value-add I can conjure. 

It is left as an exercise to the reader to divine what I had in mind and why it's so damned important.

First off, I was struck by the constant need exhibited by Bush and his apologists to make al-Sadr (or Saddam, or whoever the unlucky nominee is) into Evil Bastard du Jour in Iraq.  But it's not just Iraq: they do it with Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, George Soros, Al Gore, and even Atrios.  And they do it with heroes, too: Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman, Martin Luther King, Jr.

The offensive thing about all of this to me is that it implies that The People, no matter what culture, race or creed, requires some Big Man to lead them.  You know, like people can't liberate themselves.  There's a nefarious Manifest Destiny/White Man's Burden kinda thing going on here, particularly when it comes to the US "liberating" Iraq, continuing to occupy a supposedly sovereign nation, then demonizing one popular Iraqi.

So I turn to Chapter 3 in my book:

Not wanting to grant legitimacy to any form of protest, conservatives in the 1760s and 1770s maintained that all the troubles in Boston were the machinations of a single individual.  In the words of Peter Oliver, the Crown-appointed chief justice who was later exiled, the people themselves "were like th Mobility of all Countries, perfect Machines, wound up by any Hand who might first take the Winch."  Mindless and incapable of acting on their own, they needed a director who could "fabricate the Structure of Rebellion from a single straw."

According to this mechanistic view, one man led and everyone else followed...the role of puppeteer was supposedly assumed by Samuel Adams...The Stamp Act riots of 1765, the Liberty riot in 1768, the resistance to occupying soldiers, the Boston Massacre in 1770, the Tea Party in 1774, and various lesser-known demonstrations were all orchestrated by Samuel adams, master Revolutionary strategist.
...
By attributing all rebellious events to...Adams, disgruntled TOries...exhibited the classic conservative denial of social protest: the people, if let to their own devices, will never rise up on their own.  Without ringleaders, organizers, rabble-rousers, troublemakers, or outside agitators, the status quo will not be challenged because nothing is basically wrong.  All protests and rebellions can be dismissed; demands and grievances need never be taken seriously.

Sounds like history is rhyming yet again.

Now we're told, almost 4 years after the war ended, that all we have to do is show a little resolve and we'll solve all the pesky problems that the Iraqi unsurgency and civil war...oops, sectarian violence present.  Might I present Chapter 12:

On October 17, 1781, Lord Cornwallis, the British Commander, surrendered his entire army--some 7000 troops--to George Washington at Yorktown, Virginia.  When Lord North, the British prime minister, heard the news, he exclaimed, "Oh, God, it is all over!"  That was the end of the Revolutionary War.
...
When King George III heard of Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown, he did not respond as fatalistically as Lord North.  "I have no doubt when men are a little recovered of the shock felt by the bad news," he said, "they will find the necessity of carrying on the war, though the mode of it may require alterations."
...
The post-Yorktown death toll exceeded that of the first twelve months of the Revolutionary War...

The French navy and army that engineered the victory at Yorktown were no strangers to their British adversaries...

In April 1779, Spain allied with France against Britain.  I did not formally ally itself with the United States, but by waging war on Britain, Spain played a major role in the American Revolution...

In December 1780, Holland allied itself with France and Spain...

Russia was also beginning to display a preference for the allies...Europe's greatest Continental powers were finding common ground: British power must be contained.
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With three European powers lined up against them, as well as strong anti-imperial movements in the United States and India, their treasury was running dry and their resolve wearing thin.  Throughout the war, a strong opposition in the British Parliament had been predicting this outcome--and now their predictions were coming true.  It was time to scale back the British Empire to more manageable proportions.

The defeat at Yorktown, coupled with military setbacks in other theaters...helped to tip the balance and trigger a change in the British ministry.  The new government...initiated a peace process.  This was not a blind surrender but a strategic retreat.

Golly, that sounds familiar, too.  And finally, Chapter 13:

The Cherokees waged their own war for independence during the (white) American War for Independence.  When Henry Stuart, a British agent, visited the Cherokees early in 1776, he found them in heated debate over how to deal with the advance of Virginians and Carolinians onto their lands.  Young warriors argued for immediate resistance: it was "better to die like men than to dwindle away by inches," they argued.  Cherokee elders, on the other hand, favored caution.  They young hawks were "idle young fellows" who should not be listened to, they told Stuart.  Warriors, ont he other hand, told Stuart that their elders were "old men who were too old to hunt."  The threat to native lands was producing serious stress within Cherokee society.
...
The warriors prevailed...Colonel Andrew Williamson...reported back on the success of the mission [to starve the Indians into submission]: "I have now burnt every town, and destroyed all the corn, from the Cherokee line to the middle settlements."

The impact on the Cherokee was profound.  Elders signed two treaties in which they relinquished over five million acres of land (an area the size of New Jersey) and agreed to end their hostilities--but the young warriors, the ones who initiated the conflict, refused to give in.  Instead, many moved to the south and west, and they vowed to continue fighting.  These people, called the Chickamaugas after their new home, refused to abide by the the treaties negotiated by Cherokee elders.  The Cherokee...became divided by differing responsed to the American Revolution.

For these and all Indian nations in the vast strecth of land between the Appalacion Mountains and the Mississippi River, the War for Independence--their independence--continued long after the British conceded defeat.  They fought longer because more was at stake.  Before the war, Britain had restrained white Americans from settling in the West.  After the war, unrestrained, settlers streamed over the mountaints at a breakneck pace and claimed Indian land.  It had taken Euro-Americans more than a century and a half to settle the thin strip of land between the Appalachians and the Atlantic, but it took them scarcely a decade to extend their reach across a broader area to the west of the mountains.  The Revolutionary War had made that possible.

Uh...I don't have any more of an explicit, well-reasoned point to make now.

Lemme just observe that during our Revolution, there was simultaneously a world war going on, a civil war in the south, and revolutions and civil wars happening within the pre-existing nations on this continent.  All because the superpower of the day clung to the myth of their own Unique Goodness and Invincibility, as every empire seems to do.

True patriots admit this.  So how about it, 28-percenters?

ntodd