“The Left” (part 12214332)

Wait a minute, I thought that human rights were a liberal, not a leftist, concept. Why should liberals let the Left take credit for them?

Jet, surely this was a matter about which reasonable people could disagree at the time. I did not appreciate what I perceived as the widespread ridiculing, though, of those people who raised the objection at the time. Myself, I simply could not see how the Bush administration could be serious about reconstruction, because I believed that even if they were serious (and I believed then, as I do now, that some of them were and are), the American voting public is sufficiently powerful to prevent them from seeing it through. If I’d supported every war aim and been convinced of the existence of WMDs, etc, I’d still have been very reluctant to support the war, given the predictable need to spend years and fortunes to reconstruct Iraq and the predictable unwillingness of American voters to meet that need,

After wading through huge chunks of (mainly) humourless, arrogant, self-aggrandising, paranoid, vindictive and just plain foolish pro-invasion ‘left wing’ prose, I think (I think) I get it.

There are two main ‘theoretical’ aspects to the cruise missile left’s programme.

1: First, they view the history of post-war American geopolitics as follows. After WW2, the US did not become an Empire (as some historians have argued). Instead, American foreign policy was seized by a group of people called ‘Realists’. These people were moral relativists and objectivists at the same time. They were relativists in that they believed that there was ‘no such thing’ as morality, but objectivists in that they believed that all issues of foreign policy should be considered by asking: ‘does this benefit the United States?’.

It was these ‘realists’ (so the story goes) who ran all American foreign policy until George Bush Junior, who began as a realist but then (after September 11) became a ‘neo-conservative’. Neo-conservatives are, we are told, the complete opposite of ‘realists’ (of whom the prime example, apparently, is Henry Kissinger). They are moralists, they are idealists, they believe in the spread of democracy, and they want to ‘remake’ the Middle East by bringing democracy to it. Only by doing exactly what the neo-conservatives say can a genuinely left wing foreign policy be created.

So that’s it. Note: the Keyboard Kommandos rarely state this explicitly but this is one of the key animating aspects of their philosophy.

Now, briefly, (we could be here all night) what’s wrong with this theory?

Well…apart from everything?

For a start it omits the strain of idealism that has always animated American foreign policy, and omits the fact that the more ‘idealist’ the President, the worst tend to be the crimes. Many of the worst atrocities of the post-war era occurred under Kennedy who was no Realist and no cynic. Or what about Carter? He was a ‘left wing’ Christian, who believed in universal values, democracy and civil rights, all of which were strangely forgotten when the issue of East Timor arrived.

The human rights records of the neo-conservatives itself hardly gives cause for faith in this belief: Paul Wolfowitz (as should be well known) did his best to suppress democracy in Indonesia in an earlier part of his career. And other neo-conservative ‘fellow travellers’ (like Rumsfeld and Cheney) are simply extremist paleo-conservatives: hard to explain if neo-conservatism is radically opposed to old style Conservativism.

That’s why the canard that Kissinger opposed the war is such an item of faith for the KKers. They simply cannot accept that one of the key architects of ‘realism’ supported their neo-conservative viewpoint, because they know that would question (to put it mildly) they theory on which they have staked their political careers.

2: The second part of their worldview is even more ambitious, and amounts to a rewriting of intellectual history. In the 18th century, we are told, there was something called ‘The Enlightenment Project’. Karl Marx, and socialism, it is claimed, were part of this project. Then in the early 20th century, certain philosophers like Martin Heidegger revolted against this ‘project’. This ‘revolt’ however was quickly put down until it reappeared in the 70s as ‘postmodernism’. These ‘anti-enlightenment figures’ (such as Derrida, Foucault and others) are (as the Marxists used to say) ‘objectively’ right wing, even though they might ‘think’ they are not. Moreover they are ‘relativists’ whereas the Enlightenment Project (allegedly) was ‘objectivist’.

According to this view, it is the neoconservatives who stand behind the Enlightenment Project and the Islamists and postmodernists who oppose it.

Again the KKers seem to be unaware that they have not produced a serious intellectual argument in sketching this history of our times, but a cartoon. For a start there WAS no ‘Enlightenment Project’ and neither did Socialism descend (directly from it). Socialism (in its modern form, i.e. Marxism) as a quick look at your history books will show, was a product of the Romantic age: the great ‘enemy’ of the Enlightenment. Moreover many of these Romantics (Shelley, Blake, the early Wordsworth) were extremely left wing, and supported the French Revolution. Ipso facto (assuming these terms have any meaning in this context) many of the ‘enlightenment figures’ were ‘reactionary’
(Hume etc.).

Nor is the issue of ‘objectivism’ versus ‘relativism’ as clear as you might think. Of course, as Chris points out, Marx was often accused of being a relativist, and Marxism was often attacked because it was perceived as being an attack on the Enlightenment Project (so was Freud, for the same reason). On the other hand, some enlightenment or proto-enlightenment figures like Montaigne really were cultural relativists but drew anti-imperialist conclusions from this (i.e. that the British and French had no right to impose our socio-cultural system on others, because it was meaningless to say one system was ‘better’ than any other). Equally, in the 20th century, some thinkers were objectivist and aggressively in favour of the Enlightenment Project, but decided that they therefore ought to support Fascism (as this supported ‘western values’ as against the relativism of communism): Wyndham Lewis was one of these.

Finally, if Jacques Derrida ever went on record to say he supported Islamism or totalitarianism i would be very interested to see the reference.

In short the pro-invasion left’s worldview is based on theories about intellectual history that are simply wrong wrong wrong, and very easily demonstrable as wrong too.

My god, Daniel is good, isn’t he?

abb1: “Or, alternatively: the liberals like “human rights”, the left likes violent regime change; many liberals revised their view on violence – and bara bing, bara boom!…”

I remain unconvinced, abb1. I don’t see what version of human rights presents the idea of shooting people into having them as a good thing. That’s why I always thought that the human rights argument for a war of choice was, is, and always will be a nonstarter. (Stopping an ongoing genocide is arguably different; people are being killed in large numbers already.) I don’t think that the part of the left which turned its support of violent intervention from one direction to another was ever really decent. No doubt there were some liberals who supported the war on these grounds, but I don’t see any coherent liberal philosophy that would justify them doing so.

Some more evidence on the failed-reconstruction-was unforseeable-at-the-time theme, from, erm, me. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Interestingly, looking back through those posts I find that a prescient comment about of what a disastrous mess it was going to be came from … Kanan Makiya, in March of 2003:

Why do I write this? Because I developed the impression … that some of you [Iraqi exiles] think you can lift your noses and ride into Iraq on American tanks, above the stink of it all, without having to wade knee-high in the shit that the Baath Party has made of your country. You cannot. That is a pipe dream. The Americans will be here for the shortest time that they can possibly get away with, and they will not understand during that time, nor even are they capable of imagining, exactly what it is they are dealing with, much less have they the stamina to move it all in the direction of the gentle and forgiving way of life (by contrast with Iraq) that we all have enjoyed for so many years in the West.

Sorta off topic, but in the passage Chris quotes, Makiya wrote:

The country was rotting. Society was rotting. Sanctions weren’t working. The regime was not toppling from within.

Back before the war, in November 2002, Christopher Hitchens wrote in Slate (collected in his book Regime Change):

However—and here is the clinching and obvious point—Saddam Hussein is not going to survive. His regime is on the verge of implosion.

Emphasis in original. These seem like mutually exclusive analyses on the fate of the regime. Does anyone have any data on which of these projections is the more likely correct?
Also does anyone understand “Sanctions weren’t working”? In that it seems that the WMD were all a bluff and Saddam’s army were in the chocolate-fireguard category of usefulness, sanctions were working, weren’t they? The post-Gulf War I peace seems sub-optimal for just about all parties, but sanctions were keeping the peace, which is a not bad definition of “working.”

Apparently Makiya was a member of the SWP in the USA when I was:

“I started to soak up books and I became active in the Socialist Workers’ Party, the American section of the (Trotskyist) 4th International. I moved to Britain in 1974 and I became active in the International Marxist Group (IMG). I recall there was a Lebanese Trotskyist organisation, remnants of an Iraqi Trotskyist organisation, and some Egyptian and Tunisian Trotskyists. I spent a lot of time in those countries meeting those people, going backwards and forwards to Lebanon. I was a full time political activist.”

But I have no memory of him.

In any case, I don’t think that the USA or NATO have any business invading or bombing other countries in the name of human rights. As I have pointed out here in the past, it is a slippery slope from Chris Bertram’s endorsement of the war against the Serbs to the one currently taking place. Indeed, Christopher Hitchens is a casualty of that precipitous downhill trajectory.

Moreover, the basic problem with invading Iraq is not one of unforseen circumstances bred by inadequate preparation but one of self-determination. It is up to Iraqis or Yugoslavs to solve their own problems, not outside armies especially armies of countries that have a century-long record of murder and exploitation. It is like asking Tony Soprano to police a crime-ridden neighborhood.

Wait a mo, before the fall of the Soviet Union, leftists were supposedly irretrievably tainted by the existence of the Eastern Bloc. Once the Soviets departed stage left from world history, we suddenly all went PoMo relativist? For some reason, the term “moving the goal posts” seems to spring to mind.

There is no ‘decent left’ etc as a force in US politics. The significant social forces are the oil producer lobby (Bush, Cheney, Condi etc) and elements of the israel lobby (Feith, Wolfowitz, Perle, Pipes etc), both empowered by the outraged nationalism of the American south (cf Lieven). Attempts to try and fit the invasion of Iraq into the process of the history of ideas which includes such words as Foucault, Hume or the ‘enlightenment project’ are claptrappery, whether promoted by the participants themselves, or the projections of irrelevant outsiders.

Brendan, for the neo-cons pre-Bush jr, see Billmon’s classic post: http://billmon.org/archives/000924.html

On the likelihood that Bush would make a mess of things, here’s post from 2002 linking to more from Tim Dunlop, and Iain Coleman. In fact, these theme was so prevalent among the “not this war now” left that there was a corresponding right-wing talking point that “the left only opposes the war because they hate Bush”.

‘I think that Marx is at least as Enlightenment as he is Romanticism. He admired Darwin for giving an Enlightenment-style explanation of phenomena that had been prized by Romanticism for their developmental rather than either-or character.’

Yeah, I think if pushed Marx would have probably have viewed himself as neither being ‘Enlightenment’ or Romantic, because he probably saw Marxism as moving beyond this dichotomy.

But in a sense this proves my point. It is simply not true that Marx was a simple ‘man of the Enlightenment’ let alone that he was part of the ‘Enlightenment Project’ (as though all 18th century thinkers got together and planned a ‘project’ which they then all signed up to…shades of Scott Burgess methinks).

Otto

I read the post you recommended and it’s very good. But I think the ideological antecedents of the ‘pro war left’ go back even further than that. For example does anyone remember the ‘Non-Communist Left’ immortalised in Frances Saunders in the classic ‘Who Paid the Piper’?

Or what about going even further back to the ‘first wave’ of defectors from Trotskyism? Reading Orwell on James Burnham one has a strange sense of deja vu: people who moved slowly but seemingly effortlessly from worship of the Soviet Union to worship of the US Empire.

Of course one might trace their intellectual heritage even further back to the ‘liberal imperialists’ of the late nineteenth century but that’s another story.

I see that Ketland is a big fan of Jean Bricmont. Somebody should inform Ketland that Bricmont is another example of “Cretino-Leftism”, at least on the basis of his latest book:

http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/msg77097.html

…And in keeping with my New Year’s Resolution, that will be my last blog comment for six months. Unless someone does say that Orwell opposed war against Hitler after September ’39….

There wasn’t a lot of evidence that Bush wasn’t serious about reconstruction until the actual reconstruction.

Actually, Bush had stated an length as a candidate in 2000 that nation-building wasn’t the US’ job and was a waste of time. Between this certainty and a lack of interest in the world around him (with its corresponding ignorance of the world around him), why would anyone expect him to succeed?

As for relativism, I would refer your author to the origin of the phrase “reality based community.”
.

“correction” that is, not “correcting”.

“They failed to to take account of the concrete circumstance that the Bush administration would manage its intervention with such utter incompetence and leave Iraq a fragmented and traumatized society that today stands at the edge of civil war.”

Well, they at least failed to take into account the idea that the French, Germans and Russians would make it almost impossible for there to be an international effort. Most of the leftists who supported the war would have especially supported it under such circumstances.

Now I think it is perfectly appropriate to criticize such people under the idea that such international help is worth a lot less than it is cracked up to.

I think it is perfectly appropriate to criticize such leftist advocates for the war on the basis that it was never going to be politically feasible because modern international institutions can’t deal with some as able to manipulate them as Saddam.

Basically the left he criticizes did everything they could to thwart the kind of war that he supported. Which is precisely his point. If the left had supported getting rid of Saddam we would have had a very different post-war administration because Turkey would have been involved (having not been threatened by France), the UN would have been involved, etc.

Now I am much more open to such attacks, because I believe that wouldn’t have made things much better at all. A right-wing hawk such as myself has a lot to answer for when it comes to not recognizing and attacking Bush’s incompetence properly. But if you buy the internationalist vision, he has a point.

But it’s such a stupid error- it would mean that Orwell had spent 21 months opposing war with Hitler *at a time when Britain was actually at war with Hitler*- which would have the profoundest implications for everything the man ever wrote on politics. Stop posting and go away and use your time to read some books. I’d say the same to Abb1, but books haven’t been the same for him since he lost his colouring-in crayons.

Yeah, yeah, we’re all fools here, Dan; you da man. We already know that. Everyone knows, save your energy.

It seems to me that opposing the war that toppled Saddam, but supporting the reconstruction process that lead directly and inevitably to Fallujah and Najaf, is surely the least supportable of all possible positions on the war.

Many observers correctly predicted that turn of events beforehand, given the lack of planning, lack of commitment, and sheer incompetence of the Bush administration. You can’t reconstruct without security, and a foriegn military cannot impose security without provoking resistance. Surely that is self-evident?

‘We broke it, we fix it’ is a soundbite, not a serious argument. Why did so many people fall for it? Was it solely because it was first made by critics of the administration, and then accepted by them as a concession?

soru

France’s objection was because it is historically suspicious of US power and had strong links to Saddam. Russiam opposition was entirely economic. Nothing as principled as respecting the UN process. I’d be very surprised if Putin and HRW agreeed on much.

Kieran in #17 quotes from a “war diary” Makiya wrote.

If you read it completely, it shows that Makiya was part and parcel of the operation. (The fact that he was watching the statue spectacle with Bush in the White House gives probably a good indication of his position)

So how could he foresee failure if he himself was involved in the operation?

Only it was his opinion that the Iraqis should do it themselves. And shouldn’t rely on the US to do it from start till finish.

That’s why the Iraqi exiles should wade knee-high through the shit of the Baath party. That’s why there was that silly army called the Free Iraqi Forces. Probably modeled after the romanticised idea of revolutionaries going off to fight in the Spanish civil war.

From the interview: “Look back at the Spanish civil war and think of the brigades of volunteers who went to fight. Think of George Orwell. That’s the spirit of the traditional left.”

But for Makiya’s opinion on this is we’ll have to wait for the second part of the interview in the next edition of Democratiya.

Dan Simon: Do you intend that argument seriously? Since, despite Bush’s fondest wishes, we are not a dictatorship, if he could have been prevented from doing anything, there would not be any gigantic waste of money and lives. The problem is not that Bush is incompetent, but that Bush is incompetent and people like you gave him a blank check.

Whoops, forgot to close the loop on that part of the argument. The argument that UN authorization is just useless is appealing to a right-wing hawk like me, but doesn’t say much to a left-wing critic of other left-wingers because neither side in that argument is ever likely to conceed that UN authorization isn’t militarily very meaningful.

of course, as i’ve pointed out to SH a few times, if the US actually wanted to have the EU to have a rapid deployment force independent of the US, the US could take steps to actually encourage the EU to do so. of course, the fact that (for example) the EU having independent heavy lift capacity might weaken the US’s position in NATO has nothing whatsoever with the US’s position toward independently deployable EU forces.

certainly not.

dropping the sarcasm, the US has consistently expressed the desire to be the 400-kilo gorilla in NATO. Not surprisingly, EU taxpayers are delighted to free ride (which appears to me to be the logical choice. see, also, new drug development).

SH is also notable among the lack of commenters a few posts down on the end of reconstruction funds for Iraq. What, precisely, were those victory conditions? Something along the lines of a pro-West oil-producing democratic beacon to the other [presumably benighted] middle east countries.

i thought that a failed state constituted defeat for the US. yet somehow the most rabid pro-war posters seem unable to marshal any defense of the administration’s decision to cut off the gravy train [which, best evidence appears to show, primarily fed western contractors hiring non-iraqi labor].

what, no paeans of victory that the iraqis, including their impressive new air force, can now stand on their own?

“of course, as i’ve pointed out to SH a few times, if the US actually wanted to have the EU to have a rapid deployment force independent of the US, the US could take steps to actually encourage the EU to do so. of course, the fact that (for example) the EU having independent heavy lift capacity might weaken the US’s position in NATO has nothing whatsoever with the US’s position toward independently deployable EU forces.”

If the EU wanted to have a useful force it would. If any of the larger countries wanted to have a useful force, they would (see the UK as opposed to France). They don’t want to have a useful force. The only funny thing is that they think they ought to have equal say in how the US uses its force.

Oh, and they wanted us to give them all of our best military technology for about marginal cost. Unfortunately for the EU in that respect, it isn’t as easy to free ride on military technology as it is on drug compound discovery.

well, when the US is spending 500b USD per annum on military expenses plus the war on iraq, what’s a few hundred million dollars spent on researching new guns and tanks between friends?

There were probably many speeches like in the aftermath of the American civil war:

Is it obvious to all that the Civil War has been a failure and the so-called Reconstruction should cease immediately. far more negroes all being killed now by the insurgents, some of which call themselves the Klan, that ever died under slavery, however undesirable I consider slavery to be. The negro-dominated governments in the south are incompotent, corrupt and deeply divided. We know that Yankee businessman are plundering the south and seem to have the local governments in their pocket. In large part the war seems to have been motivated simply by greed of Yankee capitalists. The Republican Party should accept responsibility for the daily carnage in the south and the sad fate of the Negroes whose welfare they hypocritically claimed to have in mind. Only the people of the South can sort out their problems in their own way. We should withdraw our troops immediately and bring to end this squalid tale of conquest and carnage that has left too many American mothers grieving.

Was this a correct argument? Is Iraq similar?

Brendan, January 11th, 12:39pm:’After wading through huge chunks of (mainly) humourless, arrogant, self-aggrandising, paranoid, vindictive and just plain foolish pro-invasion ‘left wing’ prose, I think (I think) I get it’….(Continues at length).

Brendan, January 11th, 5:02pm, smarting from a well-deserved rebuke :’I’m a grown adult.’

If ‘grown’ means ‘self-righteous to the point of monomania on the alleged sins of others’, and ‘adult’ means ‘person grossly ignorant about subjects he pontificates on’, I think we can agree. Otherwise…

Bye-bye- back in six months, unless someone says something spectacularly foolish.

‘Bye-bye- back in six months, unless someone says something spectacularly foolish.’

Since we’re on the subject of writing things that turn out not to be true, can I just point out that you have promised not to write any more about three times now, and yet you continue to do so?

On this subject at least you seem to be wildly mistaken. Is it because you are ‘grossly ignorant’ about your own behaviour or is it just because you are a ‘fool’? Because you obviously couldn’t have made a mistake because as we established earlier, you don’t make mistakes do you Dan?

No, no really, I’m genuinely interested. Please disprove your own predictions again, and reply.

Speaking only for myself, I’ve been hired by the CT (way back then) to create the contrast to Dan’s brilliance, erudition and moral stature.

My every comment is painstakingly designed to serve this admirable goal, I’m infinitely grateful to the CT proprietors for choosing me and I’m proud of the work I’m doing.

Damn. But wait, all is not lost – I’ll be contrasting Dan’s brilliant silence now! It’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it.

Otto

http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/index.cgi/work/essays/burnham.html

Why would resistance to remilitarization of the Rhineland cause downfall of Hitler in 1936?

Dan Simon’s “resistance is futile” gambit is great: it´s pointless to oppose any one of Bush’s idiotic and destructive projects because it would only be replaced by something else equally idiotic and destructive: ie. the amount of crap which Bush can inflict on the human race is a fixed quantity. Is there a name for this kind of thing: the “lump of ordure fallacy”, perhaps?

It’s especially nice to have this on a thread about alleged relativist tendencies on the Left.

Abbe1:

Why would resistance to remilitarization of the Rhineland cause downfall of Hitler in 1936?

The German military at that time was hollow. If the French had pushed back, the Germans could have done nothing to stop them, an outcome Hitler could not have survived. Speer remarks on it in Inside the Third Reich, IIRC.

If the French had pushed back, the Germans could have done nothing to stop them, an outcome Hitler could not have survived.

Let’s say this is true. So, then, Herr Schmitler who’d replaced Hitler in 1936 – is he a liberal, pacifist and judeophil?

Not to mention that, of course, the British, French and Americans were the ones nurturing and supporting the Nazi regime in Germany in the first place – anticipating and hoping that it’ll do ‘drang nach osten’.

To the extent that there was a plan, it appears to have been to sweep the Baathists out (as was done with the Taliban), replace them with a “reconstituted” Shiite force (cf. the Northern Alliance)

That’s the catch–there already was a Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. In Iraq there was the Iraqi Army, but the Americans immediately declared it disbanded, and attempted to handle internal security themselves for quite some time, with no armed local allies and only perfunctory efforts to organize them. That was a mistake, but it should ultimately be correctable, and it certainly doesn’t undo all the good done by the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

In Iraq there was the Iraqi Army, but the Americans immediately declared it disbanded…

Apparently because the INC had led them to believe (mistakenly) that there was broad-based Shiite support for Chalabi and it would be relatively easy to raise and train another army to support him. (That belief was dashed almost immediately, which was one reason why the Americans were left holding the security bag on their own.) Also because the exile supporters on whom they based much of what can loosely be called their “planning” convinced them that de-Baathification was an absolute condition for securing Shiite support. Thing is, on the second score the INC may in fact not have been wrong, which if true would mean that the Coalition walked willingly into a Catch-22 situation.

And sorry, but the “all the good done by Saddam’s ouster” line wore thin a long time ago.

ps — make that February 13, 2003 — I was going by my weblog. Here’s the bbc story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/2759789.stm.