How do I sleep?
Alexander Cockburn wants to know, and it’s sweet of him to ask. In his most recent essay, “Where are the Laptop Bombardiers Now,” he writes:
But today, amid Iraq’s dreadful death throes, where are the parlor warriors? Have those Iraqi exiles reconsidered their illusions, that all it would take was a brisk invasion and a new constitution, to put Iraq to rights? Have any of them, from Makiya through Hitchens to Berman and Berube had dark nights, asking themselves just how much responsibility they have for the heaps of dead in Iraq, for a plundered nation, for the American soldiers who died or were crippled in Iraq at their urging?
Cockburn’s essay is gradually making its way through the Intertubes, as I learned this weekend when I got an email from one of Cockburn’s more gullible readers, asking me to apologize to the children of Iraq. Well, I don’t know how Makiya and company feel about such things, but I can say that my position on Iraq four years ago hasn’t led me to wonder how much responsibility I have for the war. I opposed the war, and no, I’m not sorry about that.
Four years and six weeks ago, I had just gotten back from the antiwar rally in New York, and I wrote this:
Many of us fear what will happen to Iraqi civilians and American civil liberties; I fear this too, but as the impervious Bush imperium machine grinds on, I fear the aftermath of the war even more than the war itself.
A military governorship in Baghdad for at least two years? A Greater Turkey to contain the Kurds in the north? Osama at large and al-Qaeda regrouping in Afghanistan and Pakistan? NATO and the UN in shreds?
What a complete and terrible and deadly mess. Everyone with any damn sense at all knows that if President Gore were sitting in his rightful place in the Oval Office right now, we wouldn’t be on this obsessive and profoundly counterproductive path. Yes, President Gore would have taken out the Taliban and its terrorist training camps immediately after 9/11. And rightly so. But from that point on, there’s almost no point of contact between what Bush has done and what any sane or competent President would have done. That’s why these antiwar rallies are inevitably referenda on Bush. And that’s why it’s so important to keep the grounds of dissent as broad as possible, and the level of public outrage as high as possible, even during and after this war. We can’t call for votes of no confidence before 2004; we have to live with the guy the Supreme Court installed. So we have to contain him until we can remove him.
Now, perhaps you think this is just sloppy Alex Cockburn making a sloppy mistake, tossing me in with people who supported war in Iraq. But this kind of thing has been going on for almost five years now, and there’s no mistake about it. In the US, the Z/Counterpunch left didn’t care much for people who wanted the antiwar movement to be as broad as possible; they took it as their task to make sure that the political ground for the antiwar movement would be as narrow as possible, and to that end, they made a point of describing people like me and Michael Walzer and Todd Gitlin and Marc Cooper and David Corn (all of whom opposed war but favored UN inspections and/or no-fly zones and/or revised sanctions) as supporters of war in Iraq. I pointed this out in late 2002, in response to Ed Herman’s first Z essay on “The Cruise Missile Left”:
I will not take the bait Herman offers when he suggests that in the 1850’s, he and his friends would have been abolitionists whereas people like me, Marc Cooper, Todd Gitlin, and Michael Walzer would have made our accommodations with slaveowners and their sympathizers. Herman’s self-satisfaction on this score is all too common among those white Americans who insist that theirs was always the side of the angels on race matters, and I will not compete with him for the moral high ground of the 1850s. I will say only that I find his analogy between advocates of the overthrow of the Taliban and antebellum defenders of slavery to be every bit as convincing as his attempt to construe my opposition to war in Iraq—along with Cooper’s, Gitlin’s, and Walzer’s resolute opposition to war in Iraq—as a form of support for war in Iraq.
(There’s more—OK, much more—in this vein here, for those of you who feel like checking out my old haunt.)
The only correct form of opposition to the Iraq war, according to the Z/Counterpunch crowd, consisted of opposition to war in Afghanistan and Kosovo as well. The paramount principle at stake, for them, was the principle of national sovereignty: no international institution has the right to infringe on Milosevic’s, or the Taliban’s, or Saddam’s sovereignty. And sure enough, on those grounds, Ed Herman replied that “it is entirely reasonable to describe Berube as a supporter of the imminent war against Iraq.” Indeed, Herman went on to write a whole series of essays on his Cruise Missile Left, and in installment number two, he charged that “the CMLs accept the Bush premise that Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction are a major threat, and most of them believe that the inspections regime is reasonable and should be allowed to continue to seek out and remove those weapons.” “These views,” he explained, “are not ‘left’ at all, they are ‘moderate’ apologetics for imperial violence.” UN inspections, in other words, were a form of imperialism. We CMLs thought they were the best alternative to war and the best way of finding out whether the hawks’ claims about WMD had any merit; but then, being apologists for imperial inspections-violence, that’s just what we would say, now, isn’t it.
Having thus established that it was entirely reasonable to describe me as a supporter of war in Iraq, Herman went on, in his CML-2 essay, to endorse Cockburn’s entirely reasonable charge that I was working in concert with David Horowitz:
Berube has reacted strongly against the charge of being in league with Horowitz, but as Alexander Cockburn points out, “We find it pretty ripe that Berube should whine about guilt by association after he and Cooper and Corn have spent months smearing the peace movement because the Workers World Party and ANSWER have been organizing demonstrations.”
Actually, we spent months trying to argue that the antiwar movement was singularly ill-served by the neo-Stalinoids of the WWP, and we pointed out that an antiwar movement with ANSWER at its head looked like an antiwar movement designed by Horowitz, but no matter. As we knew at the time, the real problem wasn’t that we’d criticized ANSWER. The real problem was that we’d criticized Noam Chomsky, which, for some people, is even worse than supporting war in Iraq. Cockburn notes as much in “Where Are the Laptop Bombadiers Now,” in a passage that’s a minor marvel of disingenuousness:
The war party virtually monopolized television. AM radio poured out a filthy torrent of war bluster. The laptop bombardiers such as Salman Rushdie were in full war paint. Among the progressives the liberal interventionists thumped their tin drums, often by writing pompous pieces attacking the antiwar “hard left”. Mini-pundits Todd Gitlin and Michael Berube played this game eagerly. Berube lavished abuse on Noam Chomsky and other clear opponents of the war, mumbling about the therapeutic potential of great power interventionism, piously invoking the tradition of “left internationalism.”
Neither Gitlin nor I lavished abuse on Chomsky for his opposition to war in Iraq. But we did criticize him for things like this September 2001 interview with Radio B92 in Belgrade, for proclaiming on the afternoon of September 11 that the attacks paled in comparison to Clinton’s 1998 bombing of the al-Shifa plant in Khartoum (I wish I could have been half as eloquent as Leo Casey was at the time), and for announcing, in October 2001, “looks like what’s happening [in Afghanistan] is some sort of silent genocide.” (Two years later, of course, in response to the question, “where is the ‘silent genocide’ you predicted would happen in Afghanistan if the US intervened there in 2001?” Chomsky replied, “that is an interesting fabrication, which gives a good deal of insight into the prevailing moral and intellectual culture. First, the facts: I predicted nothing.” Since Chomsky neither predicted nor described a silent genocide, I’ve since concluded that in 2001 he actually invented a new kind of speech act for which he has yet to be credited.) And more recently, I’ve criticized Chomsky for going off about how poor Slobodan was horrified, horrified when he heard what happened at Srebenica – which, as Ed Herman has been arguing for many years now, never quite happened in the first place.
Familiar stuff, I know. But if Alexander Cockburn is going to wonder whether I’ve had any dark nights in the past few years, I suppose I can wonder in return if he’s had any moments of regret for inveighing against people like me and Gitlin as insufficiently anti-imperialist and unacceptably willing to consider violations of Saddam’s sovereignty. Because although the Sovereignty Left has achieved a remarkable consistency in defending Milosevic and the Taliban from international interventions, they also did their part to make the antiwar movement in the US smaller and less effective than it might have been when it came to Iraq.
The single most promising practical argument against war in Iraq, in 2002-03, was that it represented a disastrous diversion from the real battle, the battle against al-Qaeda and radical Islamism. Those of us who opposed the Iraq war on those grounds—as well as the moral grounds forbidding pre-emptive, unprovoked war—knew that Iraq would be a disaster, because the very idea of war in Iraq indicated that the hawks were going to screw up Afghanistan all over again. At the time, I believed that the people promoting war in Iraq were simply not serious about (or, in the case of our president and vice-president, not very interested in) the question of who’d really attacked us on September 11 and why. But, of course, you can’t make any of those arguments if you believe that the war in Afghanistan was not merely unjustified but actually, in Chomsky’s words (from a June 2006 interview), “one of the most grotesque acts of modern history.” Thus the Z/Counterpunch leadership of the antiwar movement in the US could not and would not make the argument that Iraq was a terrible diversion from Afghanistan, and it was less interested in keeping the grounds of dissent as broad as possible than in demanding that “clear” opposition to war in Iraq be predicated on opposition to war in Afghanistan.
Cockburn’s essay closes, appropriately, with a bit of self-congratulation for the achievements of the Sovereignty Left:
Post coldwar Liberal interventionism came of age with the onslaught on Serbia. Liberal support for the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq were the afterglows. Now that night has descended and illusions about the great crusade shattered for ever, let us tip our hats to those who opposed this war from the start—the real left, the libertarians and those without illusions about the “civilizing mission” of the great powers.
And, of course, Cockburn has a point. People like Michael Ignatieff and George Packer took Kosovo as a model for Iraq, and in so doing, traduced the very idea of international humanitarian intervention they were trying to promote. (Though, notably, Ken Roth wasn’t fooled, and neither was Samantha Power, and neither was Michael Walzer or Danny Postel or Ian Williams, and neither, for what little it’s worth, was I. Neither was most of the liberal and progressive blogosphere.) But on my reading—and if you want to hear more about this, just stay tuned for my next book, The Left At War—in the wake of Kosovo, the Sovereignty Left and the Liberal Hawks produced each other. In the US, the Z/Counterpunch crew have a symbiotic relation to Berman, Hitchens, et al., just as in the UK the Galloway/Respect crowd have a symbiotic relation to the Eustonites. To this day, each needs the other. And it is in both camps’ interest to pretend that Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq were all part of the same enterprise: all three wars were wars of liberation for the Hawks, and all three were exercises in imperialism for the Sovereignty Left. The Hawks wound up agreeing, in whole or in part, with Bush’s premise that Iraq was the next logical front in the War on Terror. And the Sovereignty Left has never quite explained what American empire was established in the Balkans, and they’ve never quite explained why they opposed the Taliban from 1996 to 2001 but opposed the Taliban’s removal after al-Qaeda’s strikes against the US. But both groups share the common goal of aligning supporters of war in Kosovo and Afghanistan with supporters of war in Iraq.
This is why, these days, you find such a willingness on the part of the Sovereignty Left to refer to the Euston Manifesto signers as members of the “Decent Left,” even though the author of “Can There Be a Decent Left?” opposed war in Iraq; it’s part of the necessary enterprise of blurring the distinctions. It’s also why the Sovereignty Left’s apologetics for Milosevic have gotten only more frenzied and hysterical with time: the debacle in Iraq, for them, has become grounds for delegitimating not only the US’ retaliatory strike against al-Qaeda, but the belated and badly-executed attempt to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide in the Balkans as well. Actually, you don’t hear them speak of “ethnic cleansing and genocide in the Balkans”; they speak instead, as Cockburn does here, of NATO’s “onslaught on Serbia.” And then they tip their caps to the Thatcher/Major wing of the Tories, and the Pat Buchanan wing of the American right, who insisted that the proper response to Milosevic was to do nothing at all.
I don’t always sleep well, I admit. But over the past four years, since the beginning of this terrible war, I have not lost sleep over my position on Iraq. And while I don’t imagine that we in the US could have stopped the criminally insane Cheney Administration from launching war in Iraq, I do wonder whether the American opposition to this war could have been more popular and more widespread four years ago. And sometimes I even lie awake and wonder how best to deal with people as intellectually dishonest as Alexander Cockburn.
Possibly, it might help if you weren’t so intellectually dishonest yourself as to describe opponents of the attack on Yugoslavia as apolgists for Milosevic.
5HTP Triptophane is pretty helpful. So’s valerian root.
Maybe try reading instead of writing.
I’m kind of with you there, most of the way Michael, since I’ve occupied a very similar position. But I have to quibble with your penultimate paragraph since I (an opponent of the “sovereignty left”) have happily called the Eustonites “the decent left”—as has Daniel, by the way.
That isn’t because we want to blur the distinctions, but rather because, among other things, it is a handy way of mocking their pretension and self-righteousness.
(Btw, before they all turn up correcting you on this point, I’ll get in first and point out that some of the Eustonites also opposed the Iraq war.)
Wow, that’s a storming essay Michael. Great to hear some real fire here at CT!
Interestingly, I found your depiction of the Sovereign Left echoes Vladimir Surkin (chief ideologist for Unified Russia, the powerbase of Vladimir Putin)and his ideology of ‘Sovereign Democracy.’ Simply put, his idea is the same: we’re a sovereign country and the West has no right to make any sort of judgement about us. Hell, we’ll even describe Putinism as ‘democratic.’ Its of course, a thinly veiled attempt at defending dictatorship (including the truly horrific ones of Russia’s Uzbek and Belarusian allies) and has been dismissed contemptuosly by most thinkers in the field.
Again great essay, and thanks for pointing out the Galloway/Hitchens symbiosis. I’d been looking for a way to despise both of them equally…
“since the beginning of this terrible war, I have not lost sleep over my position on Iraq.”
I doubt that an expressed disagreement with a particular U.S. war policy ends one’s complicity with the repugnant effects of that policy.
As long as each one of us, as American citizens, allows our individual tax dollars to be used for such inhumane purposes, may none of us sleep well at night.
I think this ultimately identifies an interesting question: when and how did one faction of the Western left come to regard sovereignty as the singular inviolate principle that left politics is called upon to defend, and by which people who are truly “left” may be separated from riff-raff moderates and popular frontists of various kinds? Seen against the long history of the left in the West, this strikes me as a very late and in many ways markedly odd development.
That isn’t because we want to blur the distinctions, but rather because, among other things, it is a handy way of mocking their pretension and self-righteousness.
(Btw, before they all turn up correcting you on this point, I’ll get in first and point out that some of the Eustonites also opposed the Iraq war.)
Ah, point taken on both counts, Chris. And if memory serves, Michael Walzer was among the Euston signatories who’d opposed the Iraq war. I have to admit that when I wrote that passage I was thinking chiefly of Nick Cohen.
it might help if you weren’t so intellectually dishonest yourself as to describe opponents of the attack on Yugoslavia as apolgists for Milosevic.
Well, the phrase “attack on Yugoslavia” does sound a bit loaded to my ears, but no, I didn’t mean to give that impression; I don’t actually believe that most of the opponents of NATO strikes in Kosovo were Milosevic apologists. I’m concerned only with the people who are, and Ed Herman definitely is. Check out the Ian Williams essay I linked on the phrase “belated and badly-executed attempt,” because that’s pretty much where I am on this. I’m also fond of this review essay, for similar reasons.
“I do wonder whether the American opposition to this war could have been more popular and more widespread four years ago.” [if it wasn’t run by the Z/Answer sovereignty left]
I think that is a fair way of paraphrasing what you are saying.
There is an obvious comparison here with the British anti-war movement that was run by the SWP/Galloway/Sovereignty left. It was also more popular and widespread than the American anti-war movement.
So I’d suggest those running the movements actually had very little influence over the size of their movements (there are not 2 million Trotskyites in the UK). To think otherwise would be to suggest that somehow there was a great pool of anti-this-war-now sentiment that simply remained at home because they disliked the left more than the upcoming war.
This is a disappointment, Michael. You did a much better job Chomsky-criticizing at your old blog. I don’t have the link, but I remember reading it and thinking it was quite good. This wasn’t. You’ve got every right to slam Herman and Cockburn for lying about your position, but I think your anger has led you to be less fair than you have been in the past.
Chomsky predicted a mass famine as a result of the bombing of Afghanistan and pointed out that the press in the US didn’t care, which would in his view have amounted to genocide. He based this prediction on the warnings of various NGO’s—he also cited a NYT article by John Burns which said that the US had cut off food aid. His claim that no one in mainstream US circles cared about the possibility of famine was basically correct—there were a number of foolish stories about the food drops from the air, which would have made up less than 1 percent of what was needed.
The Taliban collapsed by November and the famine didn’t occur (though there may have been some starvation deaths). So I think Chomsky (and his fans like myself) over-reacted. It wasn’t a black and white situation the way he portrayed it. But there was a real danger of famine and it was mostly downplayed or ignored in the US press, except to the extent we could make ourselves feel good by telling idiotic stories about useless food drops. I think the British press covered the issue well—it’s where I saw all the debates at the time. As for whether he did or did not predict a silent genocide—he warned that this would be the result of the policies followed, but because the Taliban lines collapsed before winter set in, there was no humanitarian catastrophe on the scale predicted by the NGO’s.
Regarding the Sudan, there really was a German ambassador who thought the bombing of that plant might have led to many thousands of deaths. Whether it did or not I don’t know.
As for Samantha Power, Herman’s got a point. Her writing seems to me to be in the usual tradition of so-called Wilsonian idealists vs. realists. The only sins we commit, in these debates, are those of omission. We don’t need to worry ourselves about our sins of commission, where we actively assist mass murderers. Was it the Herman article where I saw a picture of Power hanging out with Richard Holbrooke? Holbrooke has bloody hands with respect to East Timor and (if you read Ray Bonner’s book “Waltzing with a Dictator”) he was also anti-human rights in the Philippines.
I think the Hermanites would say that US established a humanitarian war precedent/justification in the Balkans, one which could be extended to other places when convenient. Not an empire, just a precedent. I don’t know enough about the issue to have my own opinion about that—what was the legal justification for our bombing of Serbia?
I think I would probably claim quite a lot of the credit for turning “Decent Left” into a political insult, but the reason for doing so was always that they adopted the name for themselves. I was always dimly aware that the inventor of the phrase didn’t really share a lot of the Eustonite views, but took the view that, hey, McDonalds aren’t too keen on the word “McJob” either and so what (also, that the political tendency currently trading under the brand “pro-Israel” aren’t all that popular in Israel).
In my view, Decentism is defined with reference to four core principles:
1. That a particular kind internationalism is constitutive of what it means to really be on the Left – that anyone who disagrees with this particular kind of internationalism has betrayed the true nature of The Left.
2. That this kind of internationalism supports liberal interventionism, which is a much stronger and more controversial position than humanitarian intervention. Or, more weakly, that a very expansive definition of humanitarian intervention should be taken (compared to the standard Human Rights Watch et al one).
3. That either the Nuremberg Principles have been substantially modified by the Genocide Convention and the concept of a “responsibility to protect”, or that all international law based on the UN institutions is corrupt and needs to be wholly redrafted (in other words, that the legal basis for liberal intervention either already exists or should be created by the destruction of much actually existing law).
4. That a suitable institutional arrangement for putting this philosophy into practice exists, and that it is, more or less, the United States of America (in other words, that any doubts one might have about either the general issue of whether it is appropriate for the USA to fill this role, or whether the Bush administration specifically were competent to fill it are motivated by blind anti-Americanism).
I think it can also be argued that Decency is a style of politics rather than a program; in comments on Aaronovitch Watch I’ve defended Michael against charges of Decency on the basis that nobody who believes in the normal maxim “no need to be an ass about it” can be a true member of the Decent Left. But if there’s a program, that’s it.
AFAICT, Michael believes 1) and a version of 3) (I would refer to myself not so much as the “Sovereignty Left” as the “Nuremberg Left”, as in, I believe that the authors of the founding international law on wars of aggression got it more or less right. This would support a position of “no aggressive wars, more or less ever, with very rare exceptions for overpowering humanitarian emergencies, when there is a practical and workable plan”, ie yes Afghanistan (not aggressive war) yes Sierra Leone (both criteria satisfied), no Kosovo (not a humanitarian emergency), no Darfur (no plan). This puts me pretty close to the “Sovereignty Left”, but I think Michael doesn’t really give we Westphalians enough credit here.)
I’ve never really understood Michael’s position on 2), probably out of laziness on my own part, but think he might be at least in principle in favour of it. The real sticking point is 4), and I think Michael is dead right in saying that the hardline Gallowayites and the Decentists have a shared interest in pretending that this is in some way a second-order question when in fact it’s the whole damn point.
I do think it’s really weird to boycott an anti-war demonstration because of qualms about the people organising it though; it is not as if the pro-war side were not making some very questionable alliances of their own at that time, and nobody ever seems to have called them on it (after all, if I joined a movement “effectively led” by George Galloway, Nick Cohen joined on “effectively led” by Donald Rumsfeld, which rather points out the ridiculousness of the original charge. I also agree with ejh above that it’s just not fair to equate opposition to the Kosovo intervention with apologism for Milosevic.
This is a disappointment, Michael. You did a much better job Chomsky-criticizing at your old blog.
Oh, well. But then, it was on my old blog that I went into Chomsky’s claims about Afghan starvation, not here. Here I’m remarking on Cockburn’s willingness to pretend that Gitlin and I criticized Chomsky’s opposition to war in Iraq. So with all due respect, Donald, I find your nostalgia for my better Chomsky-criticizin’ of yore a little hard to believe.
Timothy:
I think this ultimately identifies an interesting question: when and how did one faction of the Western left come to regard sovereignty as the singular inviolate principle that left politics is called upon to defend, and by which people who are truly “left” may be separated from riff-raff moderates and popular frontists of various kinds?
surely it’s the other way round; it’s (one version of) the internationalist faction that have gone around writing books like “What’s Left?” and accusing other people of betraying the leftist traditions. As I say above, the majority of opponents of “imperialism” IMO don’t oppose it out of some mystic reverence for the nationalist geist, but more obviously because imperialism has a really really shitty track record.
dsquared,
I don’t think it is weird at all to boycott anti-war demonstrations because you find the political positions of the people organizing it to be harmful. In fact, I think that is a rather common occurrence in history. In many cases, various leftist forces have refused to unite when they all opposed specific policies. That usually happens with voting, but demonstrations are also an expression of popular will, and if one is adamantly opposed to Stalinism, one clearly might not want to swell a protest organized by Stalinists. In fact, as far as I can tell, precisely this dynamic played out in the US in the run up to the Iraq war. So I think it is weird that you think it is weird.
You’re right that opposition to the Kosovo intervantion does not equal apologism for Milosevic, but all the apologists for Milosevic were against the Kosovo intervention. And the membership of Milosevic apologists was not zero.
a pox on both their houses, bravo
Yet when you write about delegitimating not only the US’ retaliatory strike against al-Qaeda, it seems to me you’re presupposing that the actions taken by the US in Afghanistan warrant no further investigation as far as their morality is concerned, the US got attacked and had the right to retaliate, end of story. Many people share this view, but, without being part of the ‘sovereignity left’, I disagree that 9/11 gave the US carte blanche in Afghanistan.
In the same way that the justice system doesn’t legitimize its punitive authority (solely) with the idea of retribution, a state cannot justify a war solely based on retaliation. Since the US largely failed to eliminate the threat posed by Al Quaeda and failed to get Afghanistan on the road to long-term stability, I’m not so sure if the war in Afghanistan was legitimate after all.
The case is different when it comes to the interventions in the Balkans – as badly executed as they were, there was an ongoing genocide which simply necessitated action.
Franck, a war is more or less by definition an imminent humanitarian emergency. And a humanitarian emergency is the sort of situation which, IMO, morally requires us to set aside second-order differences.
surely it’s the other way round; it’s (one version of) the internationalist faction that have gone around writing books like “What’s Left?” and accusing other people of betraying the leftist traditions.
I don’t think so, dsquared. I think both the international left and the sovereignty left have been accusing each other of betrayal of the left’s traditions, and this constitutes part of the argument over the meaning of the question of “what’s left.”
AFAICT, Michael believes 1) and a version of 3) (I would refer to myself not so much as the “Sovereignty Left” as the “Nuremberg Left”, as in, I believe that the authors of the founding international law on wars of aggression got it more or less right. This would support a position of “no aggressive wars, more or less ever, with very rare exceptions for overpowering humanitarian emergencies, when there is a practical and workable plan”, ie yes Afghanistan (not aggressive war) yes Sierra Leone (both criteria satisfied), no Kosovo (not a humanitarian emergency), no Darfur (no plan). This puts me pretty close to the “Sovereignty Left”, but I think Michael doesn’t really give we Westphalians enough credit here.)
I don’t care for (1), because I don’t have any commitment to a concept of what the left truly is; I think its meaning and purpose changes, like everything else, over time. (This is why I have so little patience, for example, with people who point out, neener neener, that 19th-century liberals believed things that would be considered “conservative” today, or that the left once embraced eugenics.) But as for a version of (3), yeah, I believe in the responsibility to protect, and I believe, like Williams and Hastings, that the West sat on its hands when there were humanitarian emergencies in the Balkans. And I don’t want any part of (2) and (4).
dsquared,
You can say that all you want, but that isn’t what happens in history, over and over again. So I understand that you wish it didn’t happen, but it isn’t “weird”, or even unusual. It happens over and over again. Look what happened to POUM in the Spanish Civil War.
it seems to me you’re presupposing that the actions taken by the US in Afghanistan warrant no further investigation as far as their morality is concerned, the US got attacked and had the right to retaliate, end of story. Many people share this view, but, without being part of the ‘sovereignity left’, I disagree that 9/11 gave the US carte blanche in Afghanistan.
OK, fair point. For clarification’s sake: I would never argue that 9/11 gave the US carte blanche, and I have never believed that US actions in Afghanistan warrant no further investigation as far as their morality is concerned. (Back in 2002 I had no hesitation in calling the bombing of the wedding party in Kakrak an atrocity.) I actually don’t think that 9/11 gave the US the right to kill any innocent civilians anywhere in the world. The right to destroy al-Qaeda’s training camps, check the Taliban, and disrupt the alliance between al-Qaeda and Pakistan’s ISI, yes.
I’ll get in first and point out that some of the Eustonites also opposed the Iraq war
This is scarcely a revelation: they opposed the war and then supported the occupation, which strikes me as somewhat inconsistent but sometimes people are, you know?
I’ve always felt there was something loathsome about people who cheered on the bombing in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan in precisely the same terms as those who cheered it on in Iraq and were prepared to mouth precisely the same smears about those who opposed them. They then want to insist that they are the Onlie True Opponents of the war in Iraq: rather than, of course, those who saw what was going on several years before they did.
Note that for these people, “keeping the grounds of dissent as broad as possible” means saying what they say rather than what “broad” would actually mean which is accepting that there are different reasons for opposing the war and not just the one that says “it’s a diversion from Afghanistan”. Curiously, such was the opinion of a recent piece I read on Counterpunch
Christ, it’s arrogant: people who turn up to a movement several years after everybody else and then insist that it all be done Their Way. It’s the sort of people who always expect to be first in line, who always expect to be the ones who make the decisions. And who expect to dish out abuse to those who opposed the previous couple of wars and are then outraged when they get some of it back.
Well, the phrase “attack on Yugoslavia” does sound a bit loaded to my ears
Oh, does it? Well I’m devastated by your reaction.
I would have thought it an adequate description on the bombing of Belgrade and other Yugoslavian cities.
“I actually don’t think that 9/11 gave the US the right to kill any innocent civilians anywhere in the world. The right to destroy al-Qaeda’s training camps, check the Taliban, and disrupt the alliance between al-Qaeda and Pakistan’s ISI, yes.”
Well, I don’t see how any of these military operations could be carried out without killing innocent civilians (withstanding, perhaps, super-precision [ha!] bombing of empty training camps), so your support for ‘check[ing] the Taliban’, etc., is inherently a green light for civilian casualties—regardless of whether one desires that such casualties be limited.
In fact, the most pointed critique from the left on all three wars (Kos., Afgh., and Iraq) comes not from a defense of nationalism over imperialism, but from a recognition of the way that interventionist militarism, in each case, is devastating to those not purposefully involved (e.g., civilian lives).
from a recognition of the way that interventionist militarism, in each case, is devastating to those not purposefully involved
Quite so. It might be added that saying “we’re the US, we’re the good guys, we’re well-motivated” tends to serve the purpose of obscuring this fact: because we (therefore) don’t mean to kill civilians, we in practice carry on doing just that, in industrial quantities. So to cast doubt on US bona fides for Yugoslavia or Afghanistan isn’t some monstrous act of anti-Americanism, or apologetics for the rulers of whatever cities are about to be devastated: it’s a necesary way of saying “stop, what is happening is not what you are saying is happening and because of this, it will end in disaster”.
Unless anybody thinks Afghanistan isn’t a disaster. The locals seem to think it is. And why would I think that if the USA hadn’t started bombing Iraq, Afghani civilians would somehow have been bombed less?
I’m pretty sure that the principle of national sovereignty is paramount to these folks not because it’s some kind of fetish, but because they feel that making it paramount is the only way to prevent the imperialist wars.
So, this Sovereignty Left is, in fact, Anti-Imperialist Left. I certainly have no problem with a little mockery here and there, but this one seems to be the same kind as the “Pro-Abortion Liberals”.
thanks for the clarification, Michael, and I do see your point, even though I myself have come to a different and probably slightly counterintuitive conclusion:
since any action against an enemy so ingrained in Afghanistan as the Taliban and (to a lesser extent) Al Quaeda would necessarily result in civilian deaths and violent disruption of society, the legitimacy depends on what kind of state the US would turn Afghanistan into – had the US been willing and able to establish a stable, humane and reasonably prosperous state there, the intervention could be justified – as it stands it was a waste of lives and money, because of the very limited goals Rumsfeld wanted to achieve there, while I’m inclined to argue that if you’re going to intervene, you better go the whole hog
it’s a tricky case though, anyways, welcome to CT
The description I’d prefer is the “anti-American-exceptionalism left”. Actions do not become either automatically good when America does them or automatically bad. Instead there’s a universal conception of human rights which can be infringed by America or any other state. The intervention in the Balkans was plausibly better for its inhabitants as a whole than what going on without intervention; the intervention in Afghanistan might have been, had anyone attempted it seriously.
In any case, this view has to make its holder antiwar by default, since wars are such extreme gambles with the lives of people in the war area. It’s a lot better (in providing a consistent response to future situations) than either soverieignty or the view of American as exceptionally bad in ways that go beyond its unusual power and therefore its ability to misuse power.
“So with all due respect, Donald, I find your nostalgia for my better Chomsky-criticizin’ of yore a little hard to believe.”
Not sure what that means, but it doesn’t matter.
Others are challenging your position in interesting ways, so I’ll revert to lurk mode.
But I forgot to examine the rhetorical reasons why the named individuals like to lie about you being an Iraq War supporter. It’s clearly impossible for them to end the war by themselves. However, they can attempt to discredit those people just “to the right” of them (if that still means anything). As happened with the Bush administration itself, politics substitutes for policy, and anything that can be used would be a waste not to use, whether it’s appropriate to any kind of poorly conceived larger goal or not. The old cry of “no enemies to the left” can be counted on to insulate them from any backlash.
@25. In fact, the Taliban wasn’t anyone’s enemy. Nor there was any liberal Afghanistan project that supposedly went terribly wrong at some point; this whole project is a pure illusion.
I remember in the middle of the Afghan war (that is: after a week or two of relentless bombings), Mr. Bush publicly stated that he has nothing against the Taliban and offered them to immediately stop “doing it to their country” as soon as they “cough up bin Laden and his lieutenants”. That’s all there is to it; so, your “enemy so ingrained in Afghanistan as the Taliban” doesn’t really make much sense.
The whole doctrine of the “responsibility to protect” or humanitarian intervention is one of the biggest cases of missing the point in recent history. The whole discourse surrounding it is that humanitarian emergencies and human rights violations are things caused by other people that we are in a position to put right. Hence we see the outrage from decents directed far more towards the Serbs, Saddam, and Muagbe etc than the dictatorships that play along with us (Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia). The only time western governments come under criticisms is over failure to act, as in Rwanda (lets leave aside the fact that actually the west – France in particular – did intervene in Rwanda in support of those committing the atrocities).
The reason that this misses the point goes far beyond the “double standards” alluded to above. It is that to engage in the pretence that western powers are noble actors is foolish beyond belief. If one’s concern is human rights and dealing with humanitarian emergencies, then logically an obvious place to start would be the arms trade, debt, and the global trade rules – in particular the intellectual property laws on medicine (surely HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa counts as a humanitarian emergency?).
I consider this a very reasonable characterization.
I’m fairly new to this issue, but with my limited knowledge and understanding, I would argue that the mistake of those like Berube was that in the run-up to the war, they spent far too much time and energy attacking those who were ostensibly on their side instead of attacking those who were trumpeting the war. Was the real problem in Fall of 2002 that the anti-war movement was “compromised” by the likes of Chomsky and ANSWER, or was it that the neo-cons had hijacked the “MSM” into selling a war to a frightened public? I was utterly opposed to the war, but I did not feel the need to criticize those who were opposed to it for different reasons than I. You did Mr. Berube, and you’ll forgive persons such as myself for not being altogether sympathetic that the anti-war far left are none too fond of you as a result.
For what it’s worth, I’d like to think I’m intellectually honest about this issue: I also do not believe that it’s a good idea for those of us who want to get out of Iraq now to spend and overly amount of time criticizing those who first supported the war, and only now are against it (except perhaps those who invite retaliation by consistently demeaning the “anti-war left” despite the fact that they themselves were utterly wrong about the war.)
I’d like to offer my personal experience here. I’m pretty young – born in 1980 – and I didn’t know much about politics in 2001. Sometime in the last few years I picked up surfing the web as a pastime at work and my political views have shifted a lot during that time.
Not to offer that as an excuse, but I did support the war in Iraq, mostly because I thought it was the best chance for democratic change in the middle east. And, in retrospect, I see all the reasons why that was a naive mistake.
Now, I’m not sure under what circumstances I would have had a different opinion at the time, but I can certainly say that I was never intellectually engaged by the argumentation that Michael Berube and others were offering. I did know who Chomsky was- he taught at my school- and I had seen him give political speeches. And let me say this about the man: you don’t always have to know much about politics to know a self-promoting, dishonest political charlatan when you see one. In person Chomsky was belligerent, belittled people he disagreed with, took advantage of his position to quiet opposing views and misused common terms to his advantage.
And as one of the most prominent anti-war leaders, I granted him no credibility whatsoever. I say this not to justify my position, but to say that I really do believe that Chomsky and his adherents did unduly discredit the anti-war movement. People didn’t stay home because they disliked the left; but they may not have considered anti-war arguments b/c the most prominent ones they were aware of didn’t make any sense to them.
Of course, if you really believe Chomsky’s general political views, I can’t blame you for voicing them. But occupying a political space fairly close to Berube now, I think those views are wrong and that sometimes their supporters do more harm than good even if we are in rough agreement on a particular issue. And that leads to a pretty dim view on my part of the whole, “we were here first” complaint.
“Actions do not become either automatically good when America does them or automatically bad. Instead there’s a universal conception of human rights which can be infringed by America or any other state.”
Universal as in “held by everyone” ? There aren’t many if any such.
In any case the U.S. shouldn’t have intervened in the ex-Yugoslavia, and it shouldn’t have intervened in Iraq. It had reasonable cause to intervene in Afghanistan, but that doesn’t imply that it was prudent to do so.
“Laptop bombardiers” lacks the ring of “101st Keyboarders”.
Sovereignty Left
This is a bit better than “apologist for Saddam/Milosevic” but it’s still pretty silly, to my mind. As someone who was against the Iraq War on principle, as an outrage against peace and international law, but who has absolutely no problems with the UN, the European Union, or the (UK) Human Rights Act, I find the implication that I must be motivated by some kind of sovereignty fetish rather odd. In fact, like many others on the left, including, in my limited knowledge of American politics, at least some of those at whom this harangue appears to be aimed, I’m quite okay with the continuing erosion of national sovereignty if this happens in the course of developing (or entrenching) a peaceable, law-governed international order.
It is not obvious that the ‘diversion’ argument is the most practical. It be the most popular in the short term. But if you have a fuzzy notion of the war on terror and remain sufficiently alarmed by the threat of terrorism, there is a case for striking out even though you lack the certitude that might be desired.
I think we all need a better appreciation of why the US Gov—not “we”—does what it does in the use of force around the world. Then the we as in we happy few are better situated to understand and react to actual military interventions.
I think I’m mostly with d-squared, but Westphalian sounds like ruffles and snuff, not my style.
Tim,
[W]hen and how did one faction of the Western left come to regard sovereignty as the singular inviolate principle that left politics is called upon to defend, and by which people who are truly “left” may be separated from riff-raff moderates and popular frontists of various kinds? Seen against the long history of the left in the West, this strikes me as a very late and in many ways markedly odd development.
I’m not sure I agree with your claim here. Perhaps the problem is in regards to what concepts are being packed into the label “sovereignty.” Clearly, any position that is even remotely leftist is going to be unwilling to credit the historical construction of power and elites within state borders with normative authority; the willingness to dispute the claimed “naturalness” or “rightness” of capitalist/colonial hierarchies is pretty much fundamental. But that doesn’t necessarily exhaust all possible meanings of sovereignty; one might also be talking about populist/culturalist notions of power, in which case the defense of sovereignty is a way of defending the self-determination and democratic development of peoples. That is, one might argue that progress/the revolution/liberation has to happen solely through the organic efforts of the oppressed, and if that’s going to happen then some sort of space that is truly their own and not subject to intervention needs to be in principle defended. This is a way of thinking on the left that, far from being recent, has been with us for a while.
Now frankly, I think this is a terribly flawed position, a weird mix of Gransci and realpolitik. Your old essay on the inevitability of interventionism in today’s world makes a lot more sense than anything Cockburn has to say about it. However, I will give this to the “sovereignty left”: there’s a conceptual clarity to their anti-universalism, one which allows them (in the end wrongly, but not without some insight all the same) to see at least part of where liberal nationalists and communitarian social democrats from Christopher Hitchens to George Packer to Michael Walzer and everyone in between got their thinking confused (though obviously some of the above were far more confused than others, myself included!). There’s a reason, I suppose, why Cockburn et al, get so inflamed at certain leftists: because they expect them, demand of them really, a willingness to denounce any kind of interventionary liberalism—that is, universalism—both root and branch. Their antiliberal leftism is both silly and self-defeating given the actual world we live in. Still, I have to say that I find it bracing, and even a little bit salutary, on occasion.
Changed my mind. I probably shouldn’t have said a word about Chomsky in my previous post, because, Michael, you missed my other points.
You list Samantha Power as one of the good guys, apparently. Ed Herman is right about her. She wrote a widely acclaimed book about the American response to genocide and it is widely acclaimed for precisely the reason Herman identifies—Samantha Power carefully selects only those examples where the US was guilty of inaction. Mainstream pundits love to debate whether or not we have the duty to intervene overseas—they don’t like it at all if you start talking about how the US actively sided with those who committed genocide. East Timor, as Herman says, gets one or two lines in her book (unless there are some others not listed in the index) and those two sentences are a lie. The US didn’t “look away”—we sided with Indonesia and gave them the support they needed. Samantha Power’s dishonesty is a small part of the reason why there is almost never an honest discussion of America’s human rights record in the mainstream press. She didn’t cause this phenomenon—rather, she’s popular because she plays the game. She could have written a chapter about East Timor and another about Guatemala and maybe one about Angola (technically not a genocide, but probably bloodier than Darfur to this point). She stuck to the safe examples, where we were guilty of inaction rather than active complicity in mass murder.
You’re mad at Herman because you’ve had this feud with him and he tells lies about you. But that doesn’t mean that everything he says is wrong and if we can step away from the personalities a moment, maybe none of the three factions you’ve identified have been right in every circumstance.
Thanks for this post Michael. Count me as one who enjoyed and now misses your old blog. I have a question- a follow up to this statement of your’s:
“I actually don’t think that 9/11 gave the US the right to kill any innocent civilians anywhere in the world. The right to destroy al-Qaeda’s training camps, check the Taliban, and disrupt the alliance between al-Qaeda and Pakistan’s ISI, yes.”
I tend to agree with those sentiments. But I can’t help but wonder what rights have we given other nations and groups to respond to illegal and immoral US actions? That’s one of our dilemas. What’s appropriate for the goose must be appropriate for the gander. I, myself, am a wannabe pacifist. But I’ll settle for nations finding less and less lethal ways of dealing with conflict.
Humanitarian interventions- given the troubled history and nature of modern developed nation states- seems to be a most difficult nut to crack. Likewise with legitimate responses to attacks in one’s own country. It’s too bad we have to work our way through this difficult territory in an ad hominum manner. But however we do it- it needs to be done.
“So with all due respect, Donald, I find your nostalgia for my better Chomsky-criticizin’ of yore a little hard to believe.”
Not sure what that means, but it doesn’t matter.
I just mean, Donald, that you’re criticizing me chiefly for things I’ve said before and didn’t say here, while saying that you preferred the things I said before. It’s not a big thing—I know I’m not going to persuade you on this one.
Note that for these people, “keeping the grounds of dissent as broad as possible” means saying what they say rather than what “broad” would actually mean which is accepting that there are different reasons for opposing the war.
No, ejh, I won’t note this, because it is not true. I never expected that the antiwar-in-Iraq position would or should consist entirely of people who supported war in Afghanistan; that would have been bizarre beyond belief. And I never asked that ANSWER and the WWP be “banned” from the movement, as so many ANSWER apologists claimed; on the contrary, I said in so many words that “every mass movement is allowed to have its fringy wingnuts, and we are certainly entitled to ours.”
Was the real problem in Fall of 2002 that the anti-war movement was “compromised” by the likes of Chomsky and ANSWER, or was it that the neo-cons had hijacked the “MSM” into selling a war to a frightened public? I was utterly opposed to the war, but I did not feel the need to criticize those who were opposed to it for different reasons than I. You did Mr. Berube, and you’ll forgive persons such as myself for not being altogether sympathetic that the anti-war far left are none too fond of you as a result.
Who’s asking for their fondness, xanthippas? Their honesty would suffice. Besides, I wasn’t criticizing them because they opposed Iraq for different reasons than I did; I criticized them because I objected to their political litmus test on both substantive and practical grounds (I thought their arguments about Afghanistan and the Balkans were wrong, and I thought they would do damage to the left). And in early 2003, I objected to their willingness to defend ANSWER’s decision to prevent progressive rabbi Michael Lerner from speaking at the San Francisco rally on the grounds that he had criticized ANSWER in the past (their stated reason). I thought that was Stalinist, and I know it alienated many liberal and progressive Jews. For what that’s worth.
I do wish I’d done as much as Todd Gitlin did to protest the hijacking of the MSM, though. His essay on the hawkishness of the Washington Post was a nice piece of work, and I liked his pair of essays on the Cheney Administration’s National Security Strategy, too. I disagreed with his calls for liberal patriotism, because I thought they were a dead end, but I was aware that he spent more of his time criticizing Bush and the media than criticizing people to his “left,” and rightly so.
For what it’s worth, I’d like to think I’m intellectually honest about this issue: I also do not believe that it’s a good idea for those of us who want to get out of Iraq now to spend and overly amount of time criticizing those who first supported the war, and only now are against it.
Agreed, though I’m going to insist, doggedly, that that’s not what Cockburn is doing here. He’s not criticizing people who came around too late; he’s actually lying about people who opposed the war from the start.
Well, looks like the “liberal internationalists” are back. Am I the only one who is slightly disturbed to see the following two sentences in the same essay:
In the US, the Z/Counterpunch left didn’t care much for people who wanted the antiwar movement to be as broad as possible; they took it as their task to make sure that the political ground for the antiwar movement would be as narrow as possible, and to that end, they made a point of describing people like me and Michael Walzer and Todd Gitlin and Marc Cooper and David Corn (all of whom opposed war but favored UN inspections and/or no-fly zones and/or revised sanctions) as supporters of war in Iraq.
and:
Actually, we spent months trying to argue that the antiwar movement was singularly ill-served by the neo-Stalinoids of the WWP, and we pointed out that an antiwar movement with ANSWER at its head looked like an antiwar movement designed by Horowitz, but no matter.
I get it: make the anti-war movement as broad as possible by… writing whole issues of Dissent (should it be renamed Assent?) criticizing the real-existing anti-war movement.
I am sure once an attack on Iran comes, we’ll have Gitlin spending his time complaining of the lack of anti-Mullah signs at the rallies. Because, you know, it’s those damn radicals and Stalinists insisting on ideological purity.
“a” at 34 disagrees with my mention of a universal conception of human rights by writing “Universal as in “held by everyone” ? There aren’t many if any such.”
No, I didn’t mean that they were held by everyone—no idea at all could meet that criterion—I meant that for the people who do hold them, they are intended to apply to everyone. There is also a fairly good agreement on what they are, given the various declarations and treaties involved. As such they provide a standard of judgement for when the U.S. goes wrong that is a bit more complex than either “the U.S. is the world’s policeman” or “the U.S. is an imperialist country”, even though both of those statements are in some sense true.
These are actually more important times for Cockburn and Hermann to be held to the truth about what people actually wrote than earlier. As the Iraq War collapses, there will be a brief period before the inevitable backlash when people will actually listen to anti-war voices that opposed the Iraq War from the start. Cockburn’s piece is an attempt to stake out that territory by ejecting other people from it.
But I can’t help but wonder what rights have we given other nations and groups to respond to illegal and immoral US actions?
That’s a great question, dale, and the mind boggles at the list of crimes that have been added to the rap sheet in the last five years alone. I’m open to suggestions, and I’ll say that I think the US would be getting off light with a hundred or two hundred years of parole and community service. And I promise I won’t invoke US sovereignty as a defense, either.
Let me give you one form of where I see the “sovereignty left” and see what you think. It’s actually not about intervention, it’s about anti-colonial nationalism in Africa, and in particular the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. It seems to me that many people in the western left between 1960 and 1985 came to understand the primary objective of political struggle in Africa as the end of colonialism or apartheid and the achievement of national sovereignty.
At the same time, most of the bill of particulars levelled against imperialism or apartheid in Africa centered on liberalism. Yes, there was a small subset of structural Marxists whose critical attention to the interrelationship of capitalism and colonialism did not take a route through either dressed-up complaints about the illiberalism of imperialism or apartheid or take the form of a simple glorification of national independence. But most of what the Western left had to say about what was actually wrong with colonial rule and apartheid concerned the illiberalism of those systems: their lack of respect for individual rights, their instrumental use of race, their misuse of police powers, their lawlessness and arbitrariness, their systematic impoverishment of Africans.
Even the arguments that most scrupulously tried to avoid being “liberal”—say, for example, that “racial capitalism” as a form of capitalism in Southern Africa used race as a social category in order to create a labor reserve—ultimately lodged a moral complaint against that form of capitalism in liberal terms, that it was an illiberal constraint on the labor market for Africans, that it made them unfree laborers in various ways, etc. Yes, I know there was a lot of sophisticated attempts to think this problem through in the context of apartheid, and it’s also a major branch of marxist thought in general (e.g., the extent to which radical praxis ought to depend on or build on the achievement of bourgeois liberalism.)
But the point of all this for me is the oddness of assuming that national sovereignty (or the defeat of imperialism) is a meaningful goal in and of itself for addressing the illiberalisms that the anti-colonial left attacked. Why should we have ever expected that Zimbabwean independence, in and of itself, would do anything to address the complaints that the Western left made about Rhodesia, save for the racial identity of people inhabiting the upper hierarchies of state power? If the left was concerned with Rhodesian use of police power, with Rhodesian seizure or alienation of land from rural people, with constraints on the free movement, association and expression of Zimbabweans, with the monopolization of power and resources by a tiny elite, then national sovereignty is in the absolute best case scenario merely the first and most minor precondition of the redress of those circumstances. In fact, arguably some of those circumstances can be addressed in political frameworks that go outside the narrowly Westphalian; certainly Westphalian sovereignty is the least of the preconditions we could imagine.
This is what seems so odd to me, in retrospect: why did quite a few people delude themselves into believing that the achievement of national sovereignty in Africa was the alpha and omega of the left’s interest in African politics, save for preventing “outside forces” from abrogating or interfering with that sovereignty? So you could reliably get a bunch of people on the left to care about a multinational corporation’s illiberal conduct in a postcolonial African state, but it was pretty difficult to find people on the left concerned with the structural character of the postcolonial state in Africa until the mid-1990s. Given the things that the left professed to object to (that, as Daniel puts it, imperialism “screwed up”), the nature of the state in Africa should have been at the top of the list from the outset.
In 1998, I had a very serious, very erudite, very smart left scholar with a very long political engagement in southern Africa tell me, in all apparent seriousness, that solidarity demanded that we be patient with the Mugabe government, that in time they would “get it right”. That’s what I’m talking about: for this man, once Zimbabwe became independent, the problem was solved. And yet, in 1978, the problem of Rhodesia for him would have been, in its particulars, a laundry list of Rhodesian illiberalisms: the use of race to construct unequal personhoods and deprive rights, the misuse of state power, the lack of law, the lack of a framework for individual rights and expression. Sovereignty was and is a political mismatch to that list of complaints.
So, too, is military intervention. Don’t misunderstand me (or Michael): the “decents” are just as screwed up in another direction, in part because of their incoherently self-righteous overreaction to the mismatch between settling for sovereignty as a goal and the critique of colonial illiberalism.
You reasonably could lose sleep over weakening the anti-Iraq War argument by associating it with such drivel as “if President Gore were sitting in his rightful place in the Oval Office right now…”.
Somewhere in my files I have an exchange with MB that began with me saying that he was doing little more in one op-ed than huffing and puffing about moral seriousness and moderation, and which ended with him accusing me of putting words in his mouth and me quoting his words back to him. Imagine Leiberman’s mannerisms and self-importance applied to debates three notches to the left (and I don’t say that as a great fan of Cockburn or an acolyte of Chomsky.)
I’m with DD on this, except on Afghanistan. The invasion was about revenge and little else. It might have done some good if we’d kept our promises, but it was not necessary and in fact weakened our position. It was neither planned nor carried out with the best intentions and only a small percentage of the world population ever thought otherwise. And unlike most Americans (and as a left-wing realist) I thought that the opinion of that forgotten majority was the most important issue.
Otherwise, pace Max, pass the [t]ruffles.
@45. National sovereignty and the defeat of imperialism is not the goal in and of itself, but it’s the necessary first step. They will get it right eventually, and to start getting it the first thing they need is national sovereignty.
Every time they get under someone’s thumb (like Afghanistan and Iraq now), they have to start from square one again: find some common identity, consolidate power and fight for their independence. These are all illiberal moves, but there’s no way around it.
dale, your question cannot be addressed to Michael et al., because liberal democracies – conveniently, all allies of the US - are the only agents that are allowed to intervene, punish or act at all in their form of internationalism (pace Michael claiming that he would have been more than happy to see China intervene in Bosnia). Even resistance of the population being attacked by US or allied imperialism is out-of-bounds if they don’t conform to the desired ideological norms.
By the way, Michael, I am amused by your complaint about those who opposed both the Taliban and their removal by the US. That from the guy who claims to oppose both the occupation of Iraq and the resistance against it; both the Israeli attack on Lebanon and the resistance against it; both (I suppose) the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the fundamentalists resisting it.
There are lots of interesting dialogues going on here, but I just want to focus in on one comment that seems to me to encapsulate much about how we got to this point:
I would argue that the mistake of those like Berube was that in the run-up to the war, they spent far too much time and energy attacking those who were ostensibly on their side instead of attacking those who were trumpeting the war. Was the real problem in Fall of 2002 that the anti-war movement was “compromised” by the likes of Chomsky and ANSWER, or was it that the neo-cons had hijacked the “MSM” into selling a war to a frightened public? I was utterly opposed to the war, but I did not feel the need to criticize those who were opposed to it for different reasons than I. You did Mr. Berube, and you’ll forgive persons such as myself for not being altogether sympathetic that the anti-war far left are none too fond of you as a result.
We had a similar situation here in the UK as well—there was entirely too much bending backwards to avoid being contaminated by the loud and vocal opponents of the Iraq mess. And this played into the hands of the neocons in the US, and the Blair supporters here, and moved the default position. We still do have this problem, in fact. We’re still enduring Nick Cohen and David Aaronovich’s blather about how we’re all deluded because we don’t understand how evil the world is, and therefore need to keep supporting the war. Or something. Well, it was the unwillingness of everyone, not just the dirty hippies, to challenge the Bush/neocon view of the world that has created the mess we’re in today. And to say, well, I couldn’t be bothered because I didn’t want to be identified with Herman and Chomsky—well, sorry, that doesn’t cut it. This ranks up there with Joe Klein telling us that he told John Kerry that he really did oppose the war—he just couldn’t say so publicly.
I guess, abb1, it’s that position that I find really odd. If what was wrong about imperialism was what the imperial state did, why does the removal of outside overrule make that state potentially self-correcting, something that can “get it right”?
The United States was an internal empire; its extension of imperial rule over North America is arguably not been utterly contradictory to its (difficult, contentious, struggle-filled, imperfect, incomplete) movement towards certain kinds of freedom. E.g., the precondition of further emancipation within the territory of the United States today is not the reversal of its imperial expansion and the restoration of sovereignties its expansion overtook. I would find a claim that Scottish independence is a fundamental precondition to the initial achievement of liberal freedoms within its territory odd.
Moreover, if this is somehow different for portions of the world seized by European powers in the new imperialism of the late 19th Century (as opposed to older imperialisms), then why isn’t the international left still on the sovereignty case in Africa? Why isn’t the achievement of Zulu sovereignty important? Or Igbo sovereignty? Or Asante sovereignty? There have been meaningful social movements on the ground in those places asking for limited (or fully Westphalian) sovereignty with very little sympathy from the Western left (if indeed any recognition at all). At least in the case of the Igbo, international support from the European and American left for sovereignty might actually have made a difference during the Biafran war.
So if it’s a precondition for freedom, why is it a precondition only within the boundaries drawn by European powers?
wufnik,
Opposing ANSWER and Chomsky is a very popular position. You can’t require people to join your political movement, you have to persuade them. For whatever reason, ANSWER and Chomsky were not persuasive enough to many people who ostensibly agreed with them on the Iraq war. Saying it “doesn’t cut it” isn’t enough, or the anti-war movement will fail again and again at preventing wars.
I do think that there’s something odd about calling for a broad antiwar movement while pointing fingers at people in the antiwar movement who disagree with you.
I completely agree with Michael that the problems with ANSWER are organizational and tactical. It’s an entirely fair position (and in fact, one I share) that ANSWER’s positions are tolerable, ANSWER’s organizational intolerance and hostility to movement democracy not so much.
But the constant harping on ANSWER, like Herman’s constant harping on the “cruise missile left” (which is, unlike the harping on ANSWER, built on lying about a number of things, including Michael’s position about Iraq….I’m not suggesting moral equivalence here) seems like an enormous distraction.
Take this passage in Michael’s post:
Because although the Sovereignty Left has achieved a remarkable consistency in defending Milosevic and the Taliban from international interventions, they also did their part to make the antiwar movement in the US smaller and less effective than it might have been when it came to Iraq.
The international pre-Iraq War antiwar movement was among the largest, if not the largest, antiwar movements in world history. Even in the U.S., and despite the often sectarian leadership of groups like ANSWER, the movement was huge. Ultimately, the movement was ineffective. But its ineffectiveness had nothing to do with its being too small. And its size spoke of its actual breadth, which was apparent to anyone at any of the large antiwar rallies, despite the attempts by many on the “right” and “left” extremes of the antiwar movement to point fingers at the other side for somehow narrowing it.
And such finger pointing was all too common. Michelle Goldberg’s coverage of the antiwar movement in Salon.com during the fall of 2002 was entirely concerned with criticizing its left fringe. See, for example, her October 16, 2002, article, “Peace Kooks,” in which Todd Gitlin worries that the then-upcoming October 26 demonstrations will be “a gigantic ruination for the antiwar movement.”
In fact, the October 26, 2002 demonstrations marked an important stage in the movement’s phenomenal growth. Tens of thousands showed up in DC for the main demo. And, despite the fact that ANSWER called for these demonstrations, United for Peace and Justice, the largest anti-war umbrella organization in the US, grew out of the planning for them.
So I guess I largely agree with xanthippe above. Intra-anti-war finger pointing was a tremendous waste of energy in the run-up to the war. And the continuation of this finger-pointing now stands in the war of our getting a clearer understanding of why the antiwar movement was so ineffective at stopping the war.
your question cannot be addressed to Michael et al., because liberal democracies – conveniently, all allies of the US - are the only agents that are allowed to intervene, punish or act at all in their form of internationalism
to say, well, I couldn’t be bothered because I didn’t want to be identified with Herman and Chomsky
Well, we’ve now reached a point in the thread at which people are just makin’ stuff up, so I’ll just remark that I did reply to dale and did attend the NYC rally four years ago and send a glowing account of it to OpenDemocracy, and that Cockburn really is lying about me, etc. I also had “analogy to Joe Lieberman” in the home office pool, so that’s twenty bucks right there. I think I’ll ask Hillary out for a drink.
Chomsky predicted a mass famine as a result of the bombing of Afghanistan and pointed out that the press in the US didn’t care, which would in his view have amounted to genocide
Ironically, few recall that in the Summer of 2001—just prior to “the-day-that
changedeverything”—the Taliban announced that the UN and NGO’s would no longer be allowed to distribute food outside the capital. Widespread famine was predicted for the approaching Winter, with as many as a million Afghans dead.Wow, MB has kooky opponents on all sides.
To pick out just one mystery from many above, I am puzzled how invading Afghanistan, in an effort to eliminate al-Qaeda and their Taliban hosts, was anything other than an appropriate response, at least for anyone not devoted to applying the Sermon on the Mount to foreign policy.
We did a piss-poor job of it of course (Rumsfeld, Franks, etc.), but the right to do so appears inescapable, to where automatically distrusting anyone who argues to the contrary would seem to be a really good rule of thumb.
I take issue with the argument that there is an equivalence between people like Herman and the Decents.
The Decents supported military action against Milosevic and the Taliban. Herman et al did not. Yes the Decents also supported military action against Saddam – because he was a dictator. That has proved too costly but it is hardly any sort of mirror to Herman’s views. The Decents would have also supported whatever action Al Gore would inevitably taken against Saddam. Unlike Herman.
“To this day, each needs the other.” No.
Had Gore been the one to finally deal with Saddam then I think that the differences between Michael Bérubé and Herman/Chomsky would remain but those with the Decents would be negligible. That’s a significant difference if this secrtarianism is going to be an on-going open wound.
“We did a piss-poor job of it of course (Rumsfeld, Franks, etc.), but the right to do so appears inescapable”
Inescapable until you wonder if countries which have been afflicted by America’s interventions have the right to invade us.
I came around to the pro-Afghanistan invasion position in November 2001, when I read the reports of Kabul residents rejoicing over their liberation by some of the same groups that had helped trash the place years earlier. But of course none of the rhetoric about finally making up for our abandonment of Afghanistan was meant seriously. So, on the whole, I think I was wrong to oppose the Afghan invasion, but not terribly wrong.
anderson’s intellectual predecessor in 1917 Voienna might have written:
To pick out just one mystery from many above, I am puzzled how invading Serbia, in an effort to eliminate the Black Hand and their Serb nationalist hosts, was anything other than an appropriate response, at least for anyone not devoted to applying the Sermon on the Mount to foreign policy.
We did a piss-poor job of it of course (insert name of any K.u.K. commander here), but the right to do so appears inescapable, to where automatically distrusting anyone who argues to the contrary would seem to be a really good rule of thumb.
On the other question, whether folks unhappy with what we’re here calling the sovereignty left spent too much time attacking their local enemies and not enough time opposing the war itself, let me make a couple of observations.
1) In a limited way, I’ll cop to this. 9/11, like a lot of disjunctive moments in history, did have the effect of crystallizing long, slow antagonisms between groups of people who might have politically cooperated under previous circumstances. This isn’t just on the left: conservative pragmatists and realists, who had a long-standing presence within US policy-making circules, were thrown into the wilderness by 9/11 and forced to either quietly carry water for the neocons or to consider alliances leftward that they had previously scorned. Or to just shut up.
So I know that in my own political history and in my own academic speciality, I had been growing very frustrated with what Michael is calling the Z/Counterpunch crowd. It was 1998 when I had that conversation about Zimbabwe, not 2001. But 9/11 brought it all tumbling out of me more forcefully than it had before, because I saw some of the same problems in the reactions of some people to 9/11. Critiquing that was probably a misapplication of my time and energies, and certainly once the Iraq War started to take shape, that became my preoccupying target. I, and maybe others, should not have been so easily distracted from that goal by older and less important intramural squabbles.
2) On the other hand. So I thought that puppets and the usual tactics, coupled with the usual discourses, were counter-productive, unlikely to achieve any meaningful political objectives. I still do in this particular case, within the context of American mass politics. Moreover, I had by 2001 more than a few experiences with Sparticist-like seizures of larger political coalitions or groups, and not only do I object that ethically, I object to it as a matter of practical interest—it tends to make potentially large political coalitions fall apart. (E.g., SDS to Weather Underground). It is not a side issue at the beginning of a political effort to debate, strenuously, about tactics, and if you think that a given set of tactics are likely to rebound negatively on achieving a political objective, to argue against those tactics.
You know what? I think those of us arguing against the puppets were basically right, that the only opposition that was going to make a difference was going to grow organically from the inevitable failure and disaster of the war. That may sound cold, but that’s the way I see it. I saw no possibility of stopping the war. What I also saw was that the war was a guaranteed disaster of epic proportions. So the important thing was to clear the space between the people planning the war and the inevitable anger that would spring up once it became clear that it had always been a bad idea. Puppets and Bushitler signs and dogmatic leftist anti-imperialism struck me as a lot of useless noise in that space, giving the people who planned the war needless opportunities for Reichstag fires.
3) What I find annoying in these conversations is the left version of a “Who lost China?” mythology that people like Cockburn are trying to build. E.g., “Oh my god, we could have stopped the war but you other leftist/liberals prevented us!” It’s like Doctor McCoy yelling at Captain Kirk in that episode where they go back in time and Kirk keeps McCoy from saving Edith Keeler.
I don’t remember the people on the left who wanted to roll out the puppets and the rigorous anti-imperialism agreeing to shut up and follow the liberal line for a period of time. I don’t recall them listening carefully and being in a respectful conversation about ANSWER or tactics. The contempt coming from people like Herman towards people like Gitlin and Berube was immediate and unconditional. It was the old hostility between the left and the liberals, just remapped onto new issues. Cockburn doesn’t need to sit around and wait for results: call something liberal, and he’s willing to hate on it regardless of what it is or what it does.
So given that, seriously, why the fuck didn’t the radical anti-imperialist anti-war movement successfully stop the war? You were always free to roll out the puppets and the Bushitler signs. Are you saying that if only Berube and Gitlin had also gone out with the puppets and been indifferent to ANSWER and had screamed through megaphones about American imperialism in Kosovo, that would have done it? That one anti-war left was oh so close to political success but it was held back by the few treasonous liberals who were opposed to the war too, but in the wrong ways?
This goes back to my second observation. Anti-war politics in the US is successful now precisely BECAUSE it’s not Bushitler signs and ANSWER-led rallies. It’s successful because it’s becoming part of mass sentiment in the United States. In order to do that, it has to come with certain kind of patriotic bona fides intact. It’s hard for one lineage of anti-war, anti-imperial struggle to get this, but if anti-war had been successfully equated at the level of mass consciousness as being anti-American, a betrayal of American soldiers, or any of the other things that the right-wing desperately has been striving to make it, it would have been a lot longer and lot harder to get to the political moment we are at now.
But by all means, continue to believe that if only there had been huger and stronger protests from the outset, it would never have happened at all. Just tell me why on earth you have such high regard for Michael Berube and Todd Gitlin and a few others like them that you single-handedly credit them for preventing a much vaster mass response. If on the other hand you think it wasn’t the size, but the lack of militant tactics, you have nobody to blame but yourself. Nobody stopped you from chaining yourself to tanks: if you didn’t, don’t blame me.
To take the bait, Austria-Hungary had a colorable case for war with Serbia, whose covert sponsorship of terrorism is not, I think, seriously disputed today.
There were two problems, of course: (1) A-H had a record that strongly suggested a desire to gobble up Serbia anyway, which left her motives in question; and (2) regardless of justification, war with Serbia was going to trigger war with Russia, which simply wasn’t worth provoking—even if it was unforeseeable by A-H that Russia would mobilize against her and Germany, which is debatable.
Had it not been for the Russia factor, a limited war b/t A-H and Serbia would’ve been a blip that nobody but specialists would have heard of today, rather like the First and Second Balkan Wars.
“The international pre-Iraq War antiwar movement was among the largest, if not the largest, antiwar movements in world history. Even in the U.S., and despite the often sectarian leadership of groups like ANSWER, the movement was huge.”
But in the US, not big enough. And as it is, in the US Darfur gets billboards (a bizarre Freudian display) 3000 US troops are memorialized and The Iraqi dead at 3/4 of a million or more including the period covered by the sanctions are ignored.
The most important factor in this as in the war itself is the ability of the American people, their leaders and their nominal dissidents to ignore the ideas and opinions of outsiders. Tony Judt put it well in Bush’s Useful Idiots.
Even America’s dissidents are american exceptionalists. Is it any wonder that those few who aren’t can sometimes allow their rhetoric to get out of hand? It’s frustrating.
Inescapable until you wonder if countries which have been afflicted by America’s interventions have the right to invade us.
Well, for better or worse, “right” isn’t determinative on such questions. America’s abuse of her position has & will come around to bite her in the ass, but the position itself is simply a fact on the ground.
Regardless, I don’t recall any serious objection by other powers to our attack on the Taliban; it was pretty well conceded, by many of the same countries which wisely opposed our Iraq adventure, that a regime that would host al-Qaeda was a legitimate target after 9/11.
Just a minor correction: while Major insisted that the proper response to Milosevic was to do nothing at all, and was backed up by most of those who might be called the Thatcher-Major wing of the Tories, Thatcher herself came out for action against Milosevic pretty early on, as I recall.
The list of people I’ve seen on the list of “decent leftists” leaves me confused. Do all these people take the same morally consistent stance on human rights on all issues? I’d bet not.
I’ve got my own moral consistency test I’d like them to take—here’s a list of issues—
True or false
1. Numerous high-ranking American officials, Democrat and Republican, have been responsible for supporting terrorists, mass murderers and occasionally even genocidal regimes.
2. When America is justified in intervening, it still has the duty to keep civilian casualties from its own actions as low as possible. It did not do so in the Kosovo War.
3. It was hypocritical of the US to denounce Serbia’s actions in Kosovo while supplying F-16’s to Turkey to use in bombing Kurdish villages. (Chomsky makes this Turkey/Kurd Serbia/Kosovo comparison a lot, and it’s a fair point, even if it doesn’t demonstrate that we shouldn’t have intervened in Kosovo.)
4. Israel is practicing something close to or nearly as bad as apartheid on the West Bank.
Someone could have supported the Kosovo War and the Afghanistan invasion and if they also said “true” to all the above, I’d have to say they are genuinely decent lefties. It’s not clear to me how many of the “Decent Leftists” are decent leftists in my definition.
I’m not sure if you think you’re disagreeing with me, timothy burke, but I don’t entirely disagree with you.
My problem with the finger-pointing is not that I think that, absent the finger-pointing, there would have been larger demonstrations, and larger demonstrations would have stopped the war.
My view is that, despite the leadership of ANSWER and despite the non-participation of Gitlin, the antiwar movement in the run-up to the war was huge. But it didn’t make much of a difference.
Where I may differ with timothy burke is that I think its ineffectiveness also had little to do with the presence of puppets or Bushitler signs. Despite those things, there was considerable mass sentiment against the war. And the policy elites ignored it. That mass sentiment has grown, of course, and its growth, and a shuffling of elites, might account for the slightly greater traction that the movement has today.
But that traction is only slightly greater today. Three quarters of the American public wants us out of Iraq, the Democrats control both houses of Congress, yet the best Congress may be willing to do (we have yet to hear from the Senate) is write Bush another $100m+ check and ask him to leave in a year and a half.
I think that’s right, Ben. Opposition was huge anyway. That was my reason for thinking the war was going to happen anyway: it was clear to me that whatever we did, it wasn’t going to matter, so chaining yourself to shit was largely about indulging your own theatricality, not about political results.
If opposition to the war is going to end up having an actual political consequence now or soon, it is only going to do so well because the kind of political differences we’re talking about here are going to be irrelevant in the face of overwhelming popular consensus against not just the war but the kind of political elites that prosecuted it.
“I am puzzled how invading Afghanistan, in an effort to eliminate al-Qaeda and their Taliban hosts, was anything other than an appropriate response,”
It’s the logic of realism. After 9-11 as a wise king or any good PR man could tell you, we were golden: we were getting mash notes from the entire planet and Bin Laden and Al Qaeda could be seen as having peaked. What was their next move? They were trapped. The bravest and most mature response, even or especially if done cynically[!] would have driven their international numbers into the dirt. We were the giant and giants can afford to be forgiving. And we could have used that forgiveness to apply all sorts of pressure. But Instead we have the shit we’re in now.
The invasion of Afghanistan was mindnumbingly stupid.
Donald, I don’t aspire to the label “Decent Left”, but I also don’t have many problems with your list.
1. I doubt that anyone here disagrees that high US officials of both parties have supported terrorists and dictators, including on occasion, genocidal regimes (most obviously, Saddam’s)
2. On Kosovo, I agree
3. All governments are hypocritical, but my preferred route to consistency here is to stop helping Turkey’s campaign against the Kurds, not to quote this precedent in support of Milosevic.
4. I don’t think fights over terminology are helpful, but I deplore Israel’s policies in the West Bank as both unjustified and counterproductive.
With marginal differences, I think similar views are held by most people at CT. That didn’t stop nearly all of us concluding that both in Kosovo and Afghanistan, armed intervention was justified.
Donald, yes this decency thing is tricky, at the end of the day, we’re all hypocrites:
3.8 million people died in Congo between 1998-2003 and nobody gave a flying f@ck.
From what I read above, with the exception of Chomsky, virtually everyone described falls into a very narrow spectrum of opinion which goes from slightly right of the center of US political discourse to ever so slightly to the left of it. Of course, attacking the proximate is often the formula for maximizing gains and minimizing effort, but it shouldn’t be confused with an actual moral or intellectual debate. Rather, it’s the same kind of jockeying for status and position that everyone besides its practitioners among the petit bourgeoisie finds uniformly repugnant.
Here’s how I see it: If you don’t oppose capitalism, you’re not of the left. If you don’t oppose oppression based on race, class, gender, etc., you’re not of the left. If you don’t oppose fake reformist tendencies, you’re not of the left. And most of the people discussed above simply don’t oppose those things, not with any vigor or authenticity.
I’ve gone to plenty of protests organized by groups I have serious political differences with, because on the whole, we belong to a similar philosophical tradition, and on the issues in question, our differences are inconsequential compared to the possibilities for solidarity and real social change that our joining forces represents. That’s what it means to be a principled leftist.
As a principled leftist, of the anarchist communist variety, I can’t find it in myself to rush to the defense of people who, as soon as an opportunity for feel-good jingoism presented itself with the Sept. 11th attacks and the subsequent hyper-immiseration of Afghanistan, jumped in headfirst, only to emerge a few months later, with the viscous oily discharge of mass murder stinging their privileged eyes a bit. Save your crocodile tears about how “Cheney screwed up Afghanistan”, after a couple of hundred years of absolutely inhumane imperialism in that region, those tears simply aren’t enough to matter.
Perhaps “puppets” and “dirty hippies” with “Bushitler signs” aren’t enough to stop a war, but the blame for that rests not with Stalinists, but rather with the over-refined mass of apathetic “liberals” who can’t bear to think about a future where their place and position is not secured by force of arms.
Unless anybody thinks Afghanistan isn’t a disaster. The locals seem to think it is.
That doesn’t seem to be the case, for any reasonable definition of disaster. For example:
http://www.asiafoundation.org/pdf/AG-survey06.pdf
http://65.109.167.118/pipa/articles/home_page/155.php?nid=&id=&pnt=155&lb=hmpg1
I’ve noticed a few people here saying that Afghanistan really should have had the same root-and-branch, rewire-the-society-from-zero, long term formal military occupation that worked so well in Iraq.
I guess people are wierd.
[...] Michael Bérubé has an interesting post up at Crooked Timber. In it, he discusses those on the anti-war left who opposed action in Iraq more as a knee-jerk reaction to “US imperialism”, rather than because of rational concerns about the merits of such a war. He terms these individuals the Sovereignty Left. Bérubé counterpoints the Sovereignty Left to the Liberal Hawks who he suggests have in response ended up agreeing with Bush that the “three wars [Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq] were wars of liberation” and suggests a mutual symbiosis between them. In the US, the Z/Counterpunch crew have a symbiotic relation to Berman, Hitchens, et al., just as in the UK the Galloway/Respect crowd have a symbiotic relation to the Eustonites. To this day, each needs the other. And it is in both camps’ interest to pretend that Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq were all part of the same enterprise: all three wars were wars of liberation for the Hawks, and all three were exercises in imperialism for the Sovereignty Left. The Hawks wound up agreeing, in whole or in part, with Bush’s premise that Iraq was the next logical front in the War on Terror. And the Sovereignty Left has never quite explained what American empire was established in the Balkans, and they’ve never quite explained why they opposed the Taliban from 1996 to 2001 but opposed the Taliban’s removal after al-Qaeda’s strikes against the US. But both groups share the common goal of aligning supporters of war in Kosovo and Afghanistan with supporters of war in Iraq. [...]
Good job, Minneapolitan. So go ahead and be victorious in the struggle without any of those filthy apathetic liberals. You don’t need them. I await your plan for victory.
unfortunately it’s not the ordinary people who’ll decide the fate of Afghanistan, but the warlords and drug barons – the country is at the tipping point of becoming a failed state yet again, several UK commanders have said that repeatedly, and the mission that could prevent this is spectacularly underfunded and undermanned
this guy:
http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=195&cid=967
is really worth listening to
I think there’s a moral obligation to get things right, an aspect which tends to be ignored in these kind of discussions.
minneapolitan: You have lost the argument with history. Liberals have made their peace with capitalism because capitalism has done more to end human history than every system behind. Capitalism is not perfect, and is not the end-state of history, and liberals would support any number of reforms to it, but if the litmus test of leftism is inflexible opposition to capitalism, then the left has no future.
Yes, or you could acknowledge that the only people who can “get Afghanistan right” are the people of Afghanistan. And that bombing and invading the country, paying off the same warlords that misruled the country into supporting the Taliban in the first place to do your dirty work and now keeping it occupied and killing its people (sorry, I meant “terrorists”) won’t help. But I guess that would make you a “Sovereignty Leftist”.
I remain amazed at the number of clubs that humans can form. I find it dizzying to try to evaluate where I might fit in the spectrum so well enunciated by several commenters above. So many lefts! Defining myself, subvocally, only as a human among others of my kind, it is a bewildering exercise to try to contemplate what is correct, what is forbidden, in the range of opinions I might hold about the actions of one society or another in relation to the greater world. Could one only posit a desire for some harmony? Is that not enough? How do I marshall my own puny forces for good? For what am I responsible, by which actor(s)?, in what particular proximity of time? How can I prepare for my own death when I live in fear of responsibilities of which I may very well be unaware? Oh, to just join a club of like minded individuals—those who can define things such that I too can rest assured that I remain above the frey. But which club is being proposed here? Is something wrong with all of them? I cannot decide easily. In the end I ahve to say that, as embarrassing as it is to admit, I am swayed by Michael’s sincerity and marvelous writing, and I have to say, you go, girl! (to use a phrase of the day, not to insinuate anything else.)
Good points and nice corrective. One major flaw in your argument. You quote yourself saying:
“Yes, President Gore would have taken out the Taliban and its terrorist training camps immediately after 9/11. And rightly so.”
That means 9/11 happened, but surely it was not predestined to happen. Had President Gore faced the intel community running around with its hair on fire, and had he followed the same steps he and President Clinton followe