How do I sleep?

5HTP Triptophane is pretty helpful. So’s valerian root.

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.)

“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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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).

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”.

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.

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.

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’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.)

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…”.

@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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

“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.

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.

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 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, 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.

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.

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.

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”.

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 followed to defend the Olympics, or to catch bad guys leading up to Y2K, then 9/11 may well have been thwarted.

Because, while OBL is responsible for attacking us on 9/11, President Bush was responsible for making sure he didn’t succeed.

Hostory records that Bush failed, but that does not mean another president would have.

There is an interesting question about Afghanistan that has been eluded by the supporters of that war – and I supported that war at the time, too. Looking back, is this the war we supported? After five years, what we see is: the U.S. has essentially decided to pay tribute to the one other government besides the Taliban that supported Al Qaeda, Pakistan; made either an unwittingly or wittingly incompetent attempt to crush the people who planned the 9/11 attack, and in effect moved them into Pakistan in really the same way they were moved from Sudan to Afghanistan; cherry picked a list of Al Qaeda leaders, which were picked up, but didn’t even get to the top level; allowed the military dictator of Pakistan to re-finance the Taliban, watched as Al Qaeda’s confederate Islamis parties gained more and more power in Pakistan (due, partly, to the corruption of said dictator, financed and flattered by the Americans); and are now averting their eyes as the tremors of a revolt that will be most probably lead to an even more Islamicist government make themselves felt. So, in other words: the war moved Al Qaeda closer to power over nuclear arms. Really, that wasn’t the war I supported. Was it the war Berube supported? People who speak of the criminal incompetence of Bush in Iraq seem to have given the administration a pass in Afghanistan, as though the incompetence magically started in 2003. Well, the same logic is playing out in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and I’d guess that is going to not be so good. Looking back, given this outcome: we definitely should have negotiated with the Taliban. It would have been cheaper, and Al Qaeda would have less dangerous potential now. Surely the same problems apply to the war in Afghanistan as apply to the war in Iraq – if the war is planned badly, enacted with maximum corruption, and ends up creating a worse situation over an expanded area – it was a bad war.

seth edenbaum writes: “And we could have used that forgiveness to apply all sorts of pressure.”

Lots of handwaving there. What sorts? Ponies?

Sorry, but that’s a fantasy you’ve got there.

“Capitalism works” “Capitalism delivers the goods” “Nobody can come up with anything better than capitalism”

I hate to break it to you, Timothy and walt, but it’s you who’ve lost the argument with history. Yes, for the people in the top tiers of society, capitalism has certainly provided a degree of material wealth that was undreamed of in the past. But at what price? Constant war, continuing oppression of any number of racial and ethnic groups, not to mention women (had anyone else noticed that the gender balance here is pretty messed up?), an environment that reels under the pressure of an ever-more destructive mode of production, social atomization, escalating incidences of environmental physical and mental illness (even among the elites), the commodification of human life — right down to our very emotions, a tremendous waste of cultural knowledge and folklife, and, finally, the impovershment and virtual enslavement of billions of human beings in order to provide the luxuries that those few at the top enjoy.

To be liberal is not to have “made peace with” capitalism, it is to be utterly and completely compromised by one’s support of capitalism. That was the case in 1807 just as much as it is today.

Every war is a rich man’s war.

“I am puzzled how invading Afghanistan, in an effort to eliminate al-Qaeda and their Taliban hosts, was anything other than an appropriate response,”

Here was my take at the time. It was obviously a wholly unrealistic take, one completely outside the flow of history. So weird was it that I can’t remember anyone even taking the time to disagree with it. And yet I’ve always liked it, and I haven’t lost any of my fondness for it over time. It has the advantage I think of splitting the difference between the “decent” and “indecent” lefts – regardless of whether that would have made any short term difference – which I suspect it wouldn’t.

My position at the time was that I would have supported the invasion of Afghanistan had it been preceded by the passage in Congress of an old-fashioned Declaration of War laying out the bill of particulars against Afghanistan (harboring bin Laden, primarily) and the objectives for starting that war and the conditions for ending it. Since that was not the route taken into war with Afghanistan, I opposed that war.

It was perfectly obvious on 9/11/2001 what the Bush administration was going to do. They would use the wave of patriotism to crush all dissent and to plow under whatever “left” impulses remained on every issue. I still remember the sense of forboding I felt that evening.

And it all came to pass. Within days we had Wolfowitz howling about “ending states” and the rest of the neocon nonsense. And we (and by “we” I mean the whole Left, “decent” and “indecent”) never got a handle on it.

Opponents of the Bush Administration needed to find a way of restraining him. Instead of signing on to all the “War on Terror” formulations, they should have striven to channel legitimate American desires for revenge as narrowly as possible against those responsible for the 9/11 attacks without falling into the Cockburn/Chomsky/Herman trap of “always blaming America”. (I should say that I don’t agree with that characterization, and find them bracing at times, but they haven’t found a way out of their little box yet and probably won’t ever.)

Most, but not all, of the talk of the “decent Left” totally ignored this aspect. The “War on Terror” concept was the key idea that needed to be opposed.

Insisting on the republican form of government and the republican form of entry into war (“outdated” as those concepts evidently are) could have been a way of doing that without falling into the far left’s rhetorical blind alleys.

In retrospect, Robert Byrd looks better and better.

And we could have used that forgiveness to apply all sorts of pressure.

Jon H beat me to it, but yeah — *what* pressure would have worked on the Taliban? We had, what? The Saudis? Their regime isn’t strong enough to keep Aunt Fatima from writing checks to that nice boy Osama and his holy friends. Pakistan? Yeah, we’re doing wonders with our pressure there.

As Roger notes, the war we got was a minor disaster, but the justification for the war itself is a separate issue.

old-fashioned Declaration of War laying out the bill of particulars against Afghanistan (harboring bin Laden, primarily) and the objectives for starting that war and the conditions for ending it

Interesting, but what is “old-fashioned” about that? Do we normally declare war with a check-off list?

It was perfectly obvious on 9/11/2001 what the Bush administration was going to do.

Unfortunately, yes, but there were close to 3,000 dead Americans, and having an asshole for President was not a reason to tell Osama “naughty boy, don’t do that again or we’ll get angry!” You go to war with the President you have ….

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.”

Note how this is a straw man argument. Nobody here, least of all myself, has accused Berubé of trying to exclude anybody.

Berubé raised the question of a broad movement in this context:

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.

Of which, several questions.

1. Why should the Z/Counterpunch people make that argument when they do not believe it?

2. In what sense does it make the movement less broad if they do not, since it is perfectly open to others to make it? Isn’t that what “broad” actually means?

3. Isn’t Berubé insisting that the “leadership” make an argument they do not believe in and that they make an argument that he believes in instead? That’s about making the movement less borad, is it not? Because the idea is that the argument that Iraq is a continuation of Afghanistan should not be aired?

4. In what sense are Z/Counterpunch ther leadership anyway? Isn’t much of the movement run by people who are actually very close to the Democrats and have been very happy to try to ensure that what the movement says is what the Democrats would like it to say?

5. Doesn’t “broad” really mean something like “a movement that serves the interests of the Democrats”?

While being a straw man argument though, it is extremely pompous and arrogant: and has the normal tone of the Democratic blowhard, which involves abusing the left as much as possible while insisting that that same left fall into line behind their abusers. Do these people ever listen to themselves, or are they too busy insisting that everybody should listen to them and only them?

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.

Absolutely, Seth. (Also “absolutely”, Ben Alpers at #53.)

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.

This is a remarkable comment because:

1. Doesn’t this demonstrate my point, that what the centrists insist on is that the left shut up and do what they say? Isn’t this enormously arrogant? Doesn’t the fact that they expect it and see it as reasonable tell you a lot about them?

2. Was some sort of deal on offer? Did I miss it? Did the centrists say “tell you what, play it our way for x amount of time and if we don’t end the war by then, the floor is yours”?

I also think (and thought at the time) that the bombing of Belgrade crossed the line from striking military targets to terrorisation

Indeed.

You know, when East Timor was the subject of a quite justified humanitarian intervention, did anybody notice that they didn’t spend two and half months bombing Djakarta?

“… capitalism has done more to end human history than every system behind.”

Is there really anything more to say ? Does that not sum it up ?

Well, that, and the comment that it’s hard to see a difference among left, right, and center when all agree on the ultimately religious notion of ‘American Exeptionalism.’

At any rate, don’t kid yourselves. You feel much better tapping on your keyboards in “the greatest nation on God’s green earth” than you would wondering if you’ll make it through the day without starving to death or being violently murdered by your liberators.

I’m in the unusual position of having been against Kosovo and in favour of Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, I agree that it was mainly about revenge, but the right to retaliate is in Nuremberg for a reason; revenge is a good way of preserving the international norm against aggressive war.

I don’t understand why so many people are in favour of Kosovo; in my mind it fails nearly every criterion you might assess it on. There wasn’t an imminent humanitarian catastrophe on anything like the scale which would justify aggressive war, the way the war was conducted involved numerous war crimes and the end result hasn’t been a success by any reasonable criterion. I think it is standing proxy in people’s minds for an imaginary operation in Bosnia, just as I rather suspect that Darfur is appearing in a lot of people’s minds as imaginary Rwanda.

There is no way the Australian anti-war movement was affected by the “radicalism” of the “fringy radicals” described here. There is also no way that its being any bigger would have made any difference to the Australian government’s decision to invade Iraq. Similarly in the UK, and I would guess everywhere else. Australia had the largest anti-war demonstration in its history before the war even started, but the war went ahead. Similarly the tens of thousands who turned out to demand intervention in East Timor weren’t particularly fussed by the fact that the demo’s organisers were a commie youth group. I think this mean’s Mr. Berube’s opinion of the role of the so-called sovereignty left in restricting the “broad base” of the movement is overblown.

Without trying to assess the moral or legal situation, I would like to repeat the very mundane point that being in favour of a military intervention means (realistically) being in favour of this intervention as conducted through the current military doctrine of use of force. A consistent proponent of military intervention should therefore know what this doctrine is and what are its recognised military consequences. There is no dispute among military experts on that subject. The doctrine being what it is (or was in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the time frame considered to evaluate Kosovo and Afghanistan)-that is to say, intense air strikes from a very high altitude and the current targeting process of the NATO air forces-those interventions were bound to lead to intense human sufferings (civilian deaths, destruction of vital infrastructures…). A realistic proponent of Kosovo and Afghanistan has to take this into consideration. Being in favour of intervention in Afghanistan (at some abstract level) and deploring Kakrak is slightly intellectually lazy.

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.

You’ve already answered your question. I could tell even as a relatively a-political undergraduate back in 2001 that you were going to do a piss-poor job of it because the motivation was revenge (and because your president couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with the instructions printed on the heel). I opposed it because I could then already see where it was leading (although I regret I wasn’t cynical enough). I wasn’t too disappointed when we failed that round – I didn’t think too much harm could be done to Afghanistan from the invasion – but thought that the opposition would be useful to wake people up for the important battle ahead. (Which to my regret we lost – and I don’t know why M.B. doesn’t lose sleep over things that are being done in his name even when he opposed them). And were I to have the benefit of hindsight, I would have opposed the war in Afghanistan much more strongly and effectively to try and deflect both Britain and particularly the US from the path they went down.

And minneapolitan, pray tell me a system that has been as effective at improving the world as Capitalism progressing into free-market (Scandinavian style) socialism. Until you can present one, I’ll start thinking about Five Year Plans every time you make your complaints.

I think hidari the exceptionalism is because the countries which are encouraged to carry out these interventions are liberal democracies (except when they’re Israel) and their targets are not.

Which is true as far as it goes, but it always seems to me to fail to ask some obvious questions:

1. does international law not apply to liberal democracies?

2. because a country is a liberal democracy does that mean that it pursues liberal democratic aims in its foreign policy?

3. because a country is a liberal democracy does that not mean that it is many other things besides – a country perhaps riven by inequalities of class and race and other factors besides? Is liberal democracy necessarily the defining point about it and is it the element that is most important when it goes to war?

4. Is not, historically, the relationship between powerful (and colonising) countries and weak (and colonised) countries one in which the former are domestically more politically and socially advanced than the latter?

You’re all splitters! Me, I’ll sign up for the Ant-Internationalist-Decent-KingsCrossesque-Liberation Front, if it’s all the same to you.

Joking aside, it might be helpful to the commenters here to remember that anyone around the age of, say, 30-ish or less, was probably in their early twenties when Kosovo was happening, and a good deal younger than that when the break up of Yugoslavia was starting.

I say this not to trumpet my own ignorance (I am indeed 30), but to make the point that for most people my age, the debate on Iraq and Afghanistan doesn’t occur in the same breath as debate on Kosovo and Yugoslavia in the same way it clearly does for many people posting here.

Just a thought.

‘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 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’ (timothy burke, post 51)
Of course not, the Indians are dead or scattered and no longer nations. Genocide solves most problems. Territory cannot be emancipated, only people can. Sometimes I wish the Martians would land and teach you jammy bastards a lesson on realpolitik and sovereignty. In the meantime, do the problems afflicting the Palestinian have anything at all to do with their lack of sovereignty, pre- and post-1948? Or is it just a coincidence? Bad things just happen for no reason at all to people who have no control over their country?

I know this makes me sound like a complete ‘patches on my elbow of my jacket’ died in the wool middle class liberal, but is anyone going to mention what to me is the most salient aspect of all these ‘interventions’: the position of international law?

I think this is an incredibly important point (I even mentioned it myself a little bit in passing!), and marks the real disagreement here, which is why I find myself wanting to say that there is a big and important fault line which has me on one side of it and Michael, Michael Walzer and the Decents on the other.

This is exactly the question of whether the post-1945 drafters of the international law on wars of aggression got it more or less right. I think they did. This doesn’t make me some kind of fetishist of sovereignty, and I would appreciate it if people like Tim Burke would put a sock in it saying otherwise. What it means is that the law on wars of aggression against foreign countries (precis: not allowed) is there for a reason and that reason is that wars have a really bad track record.

A subset of the above is that wars aimed at spreading liberal values have a bad track record, wars aimed at liberating people from tyrants have a bad track record, wars carried out with the best of motives have a bad track record and even wars aimed at the prevention of specific humanitarian disasters have a surprisingly bad track record. Therefore, the best international law is “no wars ever”, just as the statute on murder does not have an exception for pushing fat men in front of railway trolleys and the statute preventing torture does not contain an exception for cases of ticking time bombs.

That’s the basis of my anti-war stance; just a general assessment of the evidence that those guys at Nuremberg knew what they were doing. I also, however, regard as intellectually respectable the proposition that the fighting of wars is inherently a corrupting process and that imperialism is an inevitable consequence. And even the proposition that the UK and USA have such unclean hands that we, particularly, should be opposed on nearly every count when we try to intervene outside our borders. I don’t agree with either of these propositions in any unqualified sense, but I don’t think they’re ridiculous.

But the big fault line is international law. AFAICS, Michael and Timothy think that the blanket prohibition on aggressive war needs to have lots of exceptions, and (presumably) they think that our existing political institutions mean that these exceptions will be used well and wisely. That’s why I can’t understand that Michael in #17 agrees with my proposition 3 (that international law needs to be redrafted to bring in responsibilities to protect) but “wants no part” of my proposition 4 (that the USA can be trusted to be the main organ of foreign intervention) – I mean, it surely cannot have escaped his notice that this is what the USA in fact does and has been doing for some time.

But to summarise, yes, I agree with Hidari that international law is absolutely key to this. It is not “irrelevant”, it is not based on “an outdated Westphalian state” and it does not require “wholesale reform”, or any reform at all, before it ought to be enforced.

Daniel:

I don’t understand why so many people are in favour of Kosovo; in my mind it fails nearly every criterion you might assess it on. There wasn’t an imminent humanitarian catastrophe on anything like the scale which would justify aggressive war, the way the war was conducted involved numerous war crimes and the end result hasn’t been a success by any reasonable criterion. I think it is standing proxy in people’s minds for an imaginary operation in Bosnia, just as I rather suspect that Darfur is appearing in a lot of people’s minds as imaginary Rwanda.

Many of us who supported the intervention in Kosovo did so because we believed mass killings similar to those carried out in Bosnia were imminent and had, to a limited extent, already begun. We don’t, of course, know exactly what would have happened without the NATO intervention. But in many of our minds there was, I suspect, the thought “this is episode 3, we’ve seen this before, we know how this is going to go.”

Your “standing proxy” argument isn’t very strong here. Darfur may be standing proxy for Rwanda in the minds of some, but in Kosovo many of the _very same people_ were involved as in Bosnia so it was reasonable to invoke the precedent and their track record. In thise sense nvading Kosovo would be far more like invading Burundi after the Rwanda experience in the case where Hutu militias had already broadcast appeals to get the Tutsi (or vice versa).

As for the end result in Kosovo not being a success. Well the situation _in Kosovo_ isn’t great, but the the ongoing wars in Yugoslavia are over, Milosevic is gone, his cronies are in hiding and much of the former Yugoslavia has democratic government of sorts.

s/b means “should be”.

“My position at the time was that I would have supported the invasion of Afghanistan had it been preceded by the passage in Congress of an old-fashioned Declaration of War…”

No war without a Declaration of War by Congress. Great idea! Does anyone really disagree with that? The antis should agree, because it would make conducting war harder. The pros should agree, because it would mean any war embarked on would have more popular support and oversight, and presumable be better executed.

Obviously, when I say “no war,” I don’t mean wars where the Declaration is difficult or infeasible, like a reply to a nuclear strike…

Were “many of the very same people” involved in Kosovo as there were in the Croatian and Bosnian wars? Or was that only the case if you think there’s such a monolithic thing as “The Serbs”?

The tensions in Kosovo have only been frozen, not treated and worse, there’s no real solution for them that does not upset either the Albanian or the Serbian population of Kosovo. In essence, the NATO interference has done little or nothing to change the situation, but at a great cost to the civilian population of Serbia during the bombings.

Chris seems to claim in #114 that Milosevic losing power was a consequence of the Kosovo war, but in fact he didn’t lose power until long after the war, as a direct consequence of mass strikes after (iirc) dodgy elections.

Even taking Kosovo at face value, it should’ve been a warning to all that any humanitarian intervention is very likely to cause more harm than do good.

The thing that is missed in this discussion is that, apart perhaps from in the US, everybody was always against the War on Iraq and a very sizable minority at the very least also opposed the war on Afghanistan.

Two million people marched in London against the war, some 100,000 or so in Amsterdam at the same time, millions all over America did as well, not to mention millions elsewhere in the world.

Yet the war went ahead anyway, because the political and media elites in the UK and the US, as well as elsewhere largely supported the war.

In that context, while everybody you speak one to one is opposed to the war, be they conservative, liberal or socialist, yet the media keeps telling you the war will happen, that there are good reasons to go to war, that everybody agrees the antiwar protesters are silly, it is very disheartening to see that those few people who say they’re opposed to the war and who do have access to the mainstream media, chose to attack their fellows in the antiwar movement rather than make their case against the war. That’s the problem I have with people like Gitlin.

Now in retrospect, even had these people spoken out the war would’ve still gone ahead and I dobut anything other than mass revolution, strikes and insurrection could’ve stopped it, but their stance didn’t help matters.

A more united antiwar movement with representatives in the mainstream media could’ve put more pressure on those sections of the political elites like the Democratic Party who stood to gain the least in the war and hence could’ve made it more difficult for Bush and Blair to get their war. That this unified movement didn’t arise in the states is one of the great missed opportunities.

It could’ve been done, as it was here in the Netherlands, where those more centrist forces opposed to the war didn’t spent much of their time sniping at “the loony left” and it at least kept us out of the military war, if not the occupation later.

Timothy Burke: “I think it’s pretty simple: the forseeable and foreseen disasters of the war in Iraq have fully come to pass just as they were described by people like Michael and myself AND by people like Daniel or for that matter Chomsky. It’s not our politics, any of us, that has moved the popular consensus. It’s history’s unfolding. So all of this sniping is, in this sense, profoundly irrelevant.”

I agree with all of this paragraph except the last sentence. The sniping is quite relevant, because there’s going to be a brief moment around failure in Iraq when it becomes possible for the American media and general populace to hear anti-war voices. The sniping is about jockeying for position to be the one(s) heard — there can’t be many people heard, given the way the media works. I’d rather it not be Cockburn, in part because I really do think that he’s lied about what Berube said and because I’d rather the anti-war movement wasn’t represented by an easily detected liar.

Michael, I apologize for going all Leninist on you, but if Sweden was in a position to be “the main organ of intervention”, it wouldn’t be Sweden. It would be the US by a different name.

One small point, Frowner. It’s not about the taintedness. It’s that some of us have done work in organizations or movements and had to watch while the 1% you describe hijacked the whole thing in some completely opposite direction, usually one that pretty much destroys anything accomplished in an issue-oriented manner. I think that’s a concern that goes way beyond personal purity.

He then works himself into quite a righteous lather about how the belief he’s imputed to me is abusive and pompous and arrogant.

No he doesn’t. (It seems reading long comments is not something Mr Berubé does well.) Nor is it helpful to refer to comments made at #41, since it was precisely those comments which defended you only against an accusation that had been not been made.

Let’s try again. This was the initial passage:

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.

Now is this, or is it not, a claim that the leadership* should in fact have made ‘the argument that Iraq was a terrible diversion from Afghanistan’? It is, isn’t it? You are saying this argument should have been made: you are blaming the Z/Counterpunch people for not making it.

[* = if they are indeed the leadership, a claim which I disputed above and which seems to me to ignore that much of the antiwar leadership had done precisely the things Mr Berubé wishes.]

My objection to you is that you’re prepared to describe antiwar activists in abusive terms and then complain that they did not follow the policies you require. This sort of one-sided bargain seems to me to be typical of how the US centre approaches the left, and I think ‘arrogant’ a reasonable description and not an unnecessarily pejorative one.

Would you be all right with a “responsibility to protect” if Sweden were the main organ of intervention?

I would settle for one in which the UN Security Council was, with each permanent member having a veto. If only those smart guys at Nuremberg had … but wait!

I was loving The Daily Show in the early Bush years, but even then what annoyed me about Stewart’s take on both the anti-WTO protests and the anti-Iraq-invasion protests was his going along with the corporate media’s delegitimization strategies in their representations of the protesters. Stewart had a chance to mock the red herring techniques but chose to play along with them. So as often as I tend to agree with Michael and Tim, I respectfully suggest they henceforth be known as “Jon Stewart liberals” on the ANSWER issue. I wonder if we all had tried the “Stephen Colbert conservatives” shtick back then the whole stopping the invasion thing would have worked out better. Or if the Colbert thing could only have worked the way it has when the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld imperviousness to reality was proven by experience rather than foresight.

Ah, but spilt milk, broken eggs, perfect world, etc. I think the real issue–which Tim’s #60 brings out nicely and others have been running with since–is the limits of U.S. nationalism and sovereignty, then and now. Because there’s a U.S. Sovereignty Liberalism with a bad record of supporting human rights only when they support U.S interests, of encouraging the citizenry to equate U.S. interests with humanity’s, and more–and they’re the lesser of two evils (don’t get me started on the U.S. Dominion Conservatives!). Berube has a long history of opposing the latter and critiquing the former, so it seems either disingenuous or nasty to lump him in with them, here or elsewhere. How to get the U.S. public where Berube is is the question I’d like to see The Left take more seriously.

On the international law issue, I’d suggest learning from the problems with the Tokyo trials is as important as trying to realize the Nuremberg principles. Because we’re living with the effects of the Tokyo legacy as much as the falure of the Nuremberg one.

Does Joe Klein actually need to work?

ejh: it would be nice to think he did. Matt Taibbi did a great column on him a little while ago that seems relevant to this debate. Not trying to lump MB in with swine like Joe Klein of course.

d-squared I think you’re being very, very, very easy on yourself here, Timothy. The idea of being against the war didn’t just happen to get associated with Stalinisses! and anti-Americanisses! by accident. You don’t catch red-baiting like a cold. It got associated with a lunatic fringe because it suited a lot of people to try and distance the Democratic Party from a cause that they thought would be unpopular.

I don’t think you comprehend the hatred in the US toward groups such as ANSWER, the WWP and basically any one who protests anything with puppets, and though the moderate left is not without blame, this attitude is much more deeply ingrained to be solely their fault. Rightly or wrongly the majority of Americans hates “hippies”. From a moral or philosophical standpoint it is nice to be on the right side, but as far as the practical and political goes these were the wrong groups to lead the anti-war movement in the States, and like a poster above admitted their leadership actually drove some people into supporting the war.

This is the same with all this talk of “American Exceptionalism”. It is nice to think that in a perfect world Americans would be completely unselfish and only think about the good of all of earth’s creatures, but that is never going to happen in the US or in any other country. While I sympathise with many of the positions of the “hard left”, in terms of stopping the Iraq war they are at the best useless and at the worst destructive to that cause.

their leadership actually drove some people into supporting the war

Really? Some people actually started supporting a war because they didn’t like some of its opponents? Why aren’t we catering for these people?

as far as the practical and political goes these were the wrong groups to lead the anti-war movement in the States

Well why didn’t somebody else do it then? It’s not like they had the magic password or something. If the organising was done by people on the left might that not be because other people didn’t actually do it or want to do it? But they did however, want to lay into the people who did the work?

With the exception of Dsquared, I notice that, yet again, the question of legality has been more or less ignored, although it is crucial. Marko Attila Hoare for example, doesn’t even mention international law, although it is completely integral to the issue, and I think it’s safe to say that anyone who doesn’t base their opinions on the relevant law (and the opinion of legal experts thererof) is essentially contributing nothing to the discussion.

I always feel a bit embarassed at these discussions, as if I was talking to a child. Nevertheless it’s obvious that a whole generation of Western educated intellectuals (such as Hoare, for example) really have no idea as to why laws are written and what they are for.

So: to make this as clear as possible: the ‘philosophy’ of law (I am arguing from my own point of view here) is a sort of pragmatic behaviourism. In other words, it is assumed that ‘motives’ ‘wishes’ ‘beliefs’ etc. and so forth, either don’t exist or else they are unverifiable ‘inner states’ which should be disregarded as irrelevant.

‘Motives’ don’t matter. Only actions matter. And there is a very good reason for this, which is this:

Everybody always claims their motives are good.

As I’ve demonstrated this includes Hitler, but I could include the USSR’s noble crusade to fight fascism in Hungary in ’56, its fight against ‘Islamo-fascism’ in Afghanistan, the British Empire’s desire to eliminate slavery in the 1880s and 1890s in Africa, Mussolini’s desire to prevent slavery and other human rights abuses in Ethiopia, the Chinese attempts to liberate the Tibetans from theocratic tyranny and so forth.

The ‘decents’ of course have an answer to this: whereas all those other people were lying, ‘they’ are telling the truth. Hoare for example tells us that he supported various invasions ‘to end oppression and persecution and halt a humanitarian tragedy’. To which one can only append: well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?

The problem is, that if one discusses motives and beliefs and wishes then the debate goes on forever, because how could I possibly know whether Hoare is telling the ‘truth’ or not? Or, even if he is: so what? We all know that terrible things have been done by ‘good people’ in the past and are being done by ‘good people’ even as we speak. ‘it’s for the Greater good’, ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’, ‘the ends justify the means’: these are the aphorisms by which the ‘good men’ have always justified their own atrocities.

So these discussions lead nowhere.

But there is a solution to this endless maze!

And that solution is the objective facts of international law: created by human beings, yes, but through a process of democratic debate and discussion, which creates a framework for action.

And then we are left with the question, NOT ‘do I support x y and z for ‘good’ reasons’ but instead: ‘does this or that action break the relevant laws?’.

It is also clear, incidentally, that all arguments that presuppose ‘Western supremacy’ or ‘American exceptionalism’ are, and must always be, antithetical to the idea of ‘law’: if there is a law, it must apply to everyone, equally: the reason that invading another country (which poses no threat) is just as illegal for Burundi as for the US (and the ‘motives’ of these countries are irrelevant), is the same reason that murder and theft are just as illegal for George Bush and Tony Blair (at least in theory) as for me and you.

Like I say, I find these points embarassing, but they have to be made, as Marko Attila Hoare and other Western intellectuals seem to think that the world would be a better place if we just got rid of all laws (or at least, didn’t bother applying them to the United States), and let everyone do what they wanted (as long as the United States approved).

Theres a good article about the attitude which underlies this contempt for legality here (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19879)
although of course Hoare etc. will never come out and state openly their real beliefs: sheltering behind euphemisms such as ‘the West’ and ‘liberal democracies’.

143: But who else is going to lead? I mean, I run around with both hippies and filthy reformist liberals, and I didn’t see any impulse to get out and protest the war, even on the “and I’ll write a very strongly-worded letter, too” level, impulse coming from anyone. Where were the churches? Where were the unions? Where the hell were this apparently-existing silent majority of good and proper moderate liberals who support free trade and market incentives but not bombing runs?

Frankly, a good solid coalition of people who were actually willing to spend the time on organizing demos could have taken the whole project away from the hippies. (I’ve worked at the local level to take several projects away from the Maoists, and I know it can be done if you put in the hours and speak clearly; so I assume that similar tactics would work to take things away from the hippies.) But we don’t have the social infrastructure here to make that easy, and the people who could perhaps have done it (being both educated and often sensible) decided it was easier to blame the the puppet-wielders–or else (and this is in some ways a bit more creditable) misguidedly believed that the war wouldn’t be a crashing disaster.

If you–the good folks who like market incentives and working across partisan lines–want to build an activist movement and an activist culture, there’s no damn use at all blaming the hippies. If the hippies are so marginal and ludicrous, surely you can appeal to the masses of regular people out there, and the regular people will be glad to have you.

One thing that I noticed was the whole dynamic where people decided which side to support based on not “who is most right?” but “who do I find more irritating personally?”

Since the puppet-carrying hippies who were blocking traffic on the interstate were more irritating to more people, support tended to lean towards “not saying anything” if not “Bush is better than these guys”.

Yes, of course, those who made the decisions based on such silly considerations should not be taken seriously, and they’re just as bad as those killing children from 30,000 feet, and probably would have supported Hitler in 1939, and so on and so forth.

But this does seem to be the way that a great many people made their decisions on which side to pick. I’d also point out that support for the Vietnam War had a similar dynamic.

If one sees protesting as a form of therapy, I suppose that carrying a puppet and a sign comparing Bush to Hitler would be very cleansing on a spiritual level… plus there’s the joy that comes from freaking the normals.

If, however, one wishes to have an impact on public policy, asking “how can we direct opinion on the war in the direction we claim to want?” might lead one to say “maybe a drum circle followed by a speech from the wobblies isn’t the best plan.”

Then again, Hitler was a pragmatist too.

hidari –
I resemble your remarks.

Seriously, I think you are onto something here and would just like to point out that my remarks (#87, 115), while lacking the intellectual rigor of yours, lean strongly in the same direction.

Requiring that wars be conducted within legal norms (declaration, formal statement of aims, etc.) seems like a good idea, unfortunately abandoned.

Since the puppet-carrying hippies who were blocking traffic on the interstate were more irritating to more people, support tended to lean towards “not saying anything” if not “Bush is better than these guys”.

Whoa, this is yet more condescending. If this is indeed how the much admired ‘liberal democracy’ operates, then I want a king. Now.

The puppet-carrying hippies crowd is an invention of the mainstream media and the war supporters.

In reality, there were 1.5 million or so people marching in New York back on 15-02-2003, there were another two million people marching in London, plus millions of others in countries less directly involved with the war.

The ordinary people, the people outside the Beltway for the most part knew the war for the crock of shit it was.

Sorry, should have started with ‘what you say is technically right’

Condescending? I’m just calling them like I sees them. After the big marches in Seattle, support for the war did not decrease. ANSWER acted like a divider, not a uniter.

Hell, you can see it with Cockburn’s post that inspired the thread.

How exactly do the anti-hippy crowd propose to organise their marches?

With a big advert saying “STRICTLY NO PUPPETS”?

Are they going to have stewards taking down anything that attacks Bush in terms they don’t like?

Can people really not see that this is silly?

Can people really not see that this is intolerant?

Or do they think “we’re the tolerant liberal people so we can’t be intolerant”?

ignores the fact that however many times one says there is something called ‘International Law’ it still isn’t true

Whaaa? There are certainly many serious difficulties with international law, in theory and in practice, which have yet to be resolved, but, with respect, denying its existence is just loopy.

Michael, I apologize for going all Leninist on you, but if Sweden was in a position to be “the main organ of intervention”, it wouldn’t be Sweden.

No problem, Christian — the tone of my question to Daniel really wasn’t clear. And “Sweden” is too telegraphic, as well. For the record, it’s my handy little reference to a telling conversation between Tom Lantos and George Bush a few years back. Lantos, remarking that the US is not viewed as an honest broker on I/P issues, and for good reason, suggested that Sweden would be willing to take the lead in enforcing a cease-fire. Bush replied that Sweden has no army. Lantos gently corrected him, but Bush, being Bush, blustered on. None of the advisors in the room corrected him, which tells you a good deal about the Bush White House.

And now here’s Engels:

Shame on Michael Berube and Timothy Burke for coming out with this concern trollish – and as far as I can see, completely speculative – crap, that if only Cockburn, Herman, Chomsky et al had renounced their convictions and toed the sensible, patriotic American liberal party line – that Iraq was a “diversion” from the War on Terra – it might never have happened.

And now here’s me, from my very own post:

I don’t imagine that we in the US could have stopped the criminally insane Cheney Administration from launching war in Iraq

I hope that’s clear. On a happier note, Helmling takes me back to the land of Dixie:

Interesting, the Z/Counterpunch claim of the abolitionist “high ground of the 1850s,” given that back then the abolitionists were the ones beating the drums for war (think John Brown) and moralizing against moderates looking for a peaceful, negotiated end to slavery.

Interesting indeed. On my own blog, back in August, I wrote, “As for Herman’s little fantasy that he would have been fightin’ for black folk in 1852 while I was writing campaign biographies for Franklin Pierce, well, you never know about those things. It’s just as likely that I would have been campaigning for Lincoln in 1860 while Ed Herman lectured us all on how the fight to save the Union was really just a campaign to expand federal power and prepare the way for the U.S.’ entry into the Global Imperialist Sweepstakes.”

Another can of worms (and feel free to delete this if it threatens to derail) was the whole Israel/Palestine thing going on at the time of 9/11.

A huge chunk of people had the insight “wow, this is what Israel goes through every day” in the month or two following 9/11. Israel got a *LOT* of strong supporters where, before, it only had wishy-washy ones.

One of the things one could not help but notice on the fringes was support for Our Palestinian Brethren Against The Forces Of Zionist Apartheid.

This turned off a lot of people from the anti-war crowd. (This is not to say that they were right or wrong in being turned off, this is not to say whether Palestinian Support is representative of “the Left”, this is not to say whether such support is wrong on its face. I’m just trying to describe a perceived phenomenon here.)

Dsquared:

I’m a student of Russian and East European Politics. Russia isn’t a ‘flawed democracy,’ it isn’t a democracy period. Putinism (which I must honestly say hasn’t been entirely bad for Russian social and economic development) is authoritarian. So is the Communist Party of the PRC. ‘Dictatorship’ may be, admitedly a strong term, but its generally accurate. As for your second point, my point exactly. ‘Diplomacy’ is entirely different from ‘Legality.’ To talk about the UNSC as some form of legal arbiter, rather than a diplomatic one is in my mind to engage in sophistry.

Engels:

Yes, again I’m guilty of overstatement, but only just. My point is that there is no working international legal system. By this I mean not only an impartial judiciary with a universal jurisdiction that treats all states as equals, but also an independent mechanism for compelling states and individuals to abide by its decisions. There is no Command and Conquer-esque GDI to bring international ‘bad guys’ to justice. As Mladic, Karadzic and their Serbian hosts have shown, even a weak state can successfully flip off the ICJ with little in the way of meaningful consequences.

Hidari at 163:

I’m entirely sympathetic to this view, but I don’t see it working for the reasons outlined above, namely ‘diplomacy’ is entirely different to ‘legality’ and to talk of ‘legality’ without an actually working legal system is irrelevant.

I’m a student of Russian and East European Politics

Well you don’t talk like a student; you talk like someone who was recently let into the exact truth on the subject by God Himself. There are a number of views on the subject.

To talk about the UNSC as some form of legal arbiter, rather than a diplomatic one is in my mind to engage in sophistry.

I am not aware of having done this and renounce it if I did accidentally. My point has always been that we don’t need any other criterion for asking “should this intervention be opposed on general principles by everyone, be they liberals, socialists, anarchists, or whoever?” because we have international law, and the international law we have at present is really rather good by any comparison, including comparison to the “plus a not very well defined duty to protect, with a special role for anyone calling themself a liberal democracy” regime that is all too often proposed in general but never specific terms.

” huge chunk of people had the insight “wow, this is what Israel goes through every day” in the month or two following 9/11. Israel got a LOT of strong supporters where, before, it only had wishy-washy ones.

One of the things one could not help but notice on the fringes was support for Our Palestinian Brethren Against The Forces Of Zionist Apartheid.

This turned off a lot of people from the anti-war crowd. (This is not to say that they were right or wrong in being turned off, this is not to say whether Palestinian Support is representative of “the Left”, this is not to say whether such support is wrong on its face. I’m just trying to describe a perceived phenomenon here”

Charming. I suppose, then, that what the Palestinians have been going through has no meaning for you. Wouldn’t it be awful if the Left as a whole were identified with, say, the positions of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem? We might scare off the anti-Arab racists and the crackpot Christian Zionists if we ever let on that both sides in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict have done terrible things. Can’t have that.

Dsquared – My profoundest apologies for failing to preface everything I state with ‘in my opinion’ in order to specify that what I write here is in fact, an opinion which you are perfectly inclined to disagree with. Lets have another stab:

In my opinion, Putinism is autocratic and authoritarian, and not democratic in any sense flawed or otherwise. In my opinion the systematic exclusion of anti-Kremlin parties from qualification for the latest round of elections is indicative of this. In my opinion Unified Russia and Just Russia are two transparently artificial parties that have been created by the Kremlin solely for enhancing its control, and in my opinion their dominance in the latest regional elections is indicative of concerted and systemic manipulation of the electoral contest in their favour. In my opinion the total subjugation of the Duma as a serious policy actor under Putin due to Unified Russia domination is indicative of a super-Presidential dictatorship. In my opinion, anyone who doesn’t accept this is an apologist for a regime that has grown increasingly violent towards its internal dissidents (to whit, Politikovskaya) and should cringe with shame before attempting to defend ‘legality’ ever again.

Okay, Jaybird, no problem. I don’t know if the I/P thing would have helped or harmed at an antiwar rally. Depends on how it was done, perhaps.

Trying to please everybody that’s what the politicians do. At an anti-war rally people speak their minds, and thank god for that, more power to them.

ejh your meaning is lost on me. Is it off to work we go?

Perhaps a follow-up question: at the end of the day, is half a loaf better than none?

But a better question might be the one I put above. How are you going to go about it? Are you going to say “no speakers shall raise the question of Palestine”? If you do, what are you then going to do when your edict causes enormous controversy and loses you a large chuck of your support?

ejh your meaning is lost on me. Is it off to work we go?

My meaning is “well, what a surprise, people are calling those who disagree with them ‘apologists’ again”.

Daragh, I think this is so right: “And even if there was, there is no system of equal enforcement of the law, no independent policeman. Given the vastly unequal power relations between states in the international arena, and the willingness of precisely none of the most powerful ones to level the playing field (see how quickly nuclear disarmament is proceeding) the notion of international legality, that is a uniform system of justice based on the treatment of states as equal legal entities is laughable.”

This gets to the heart of the huge problem with liberal interventionism, which is its tendency to maximize the executive branch of the largest powers and its blindness towards any system of checks and balances. Law, even law under a monarchy, does presuppose some kind of equality. The monarch who simply continually violates the law was punished in one way or another even in supposedly absolutist empires. A good, esoteric example is the Wan-li emperor in the Ming period in China, who went against protocol, trying to elevate his third born son as his successor, and failed – the courtiers at the court wouldn’t allow it.

But in the current world system, there is no player who can make the U.S. obey any rule it doesn’t want to obey. If the U.S. unilaterally abrogates the anti-ABM treaty, the U.N. is not going to treat it like the UN is treating Iran. If – as the Bushies say – the U.S. starts stupidly underground testing of nuclear bombs again, who is going to sanction it?

A legal system is only as good as its ability to rein in the power of its strongest member. Otherwise, it is an anarchy disguised in codicils. And I’m not even talking, here, about the numerous legitimacy problems entailed by the lack of any kind of real democracy (that is, any kind of forum for people to intervene) in the international system – that is a separate problem that has spawned systematic apathy about foreign affairs except among a very narrow specialist class. A lot of this discussion about the pros and cons of the political coloring of the anti-war movement seems to me characteristic of what happens when a part of governance is taken over, ever since the beginning of the cold war, essentially by a small elite. What was striking about the pro-war segment of the population in 2003 is how abyssmally ignorant they were not only of Iraq, but of all of the middle east. This ignorance has been well nourished. And that is where someone like Chomsky is heroic, insofar as he has found a way to break through the barrier of official speak.

That seems so elementary, to me, that if his critics on the “left” (I really dislike the term the left – it has become a bogus brand name) don’t acknowledge it, it detracts in a major way from their criticism.

I think here the problem is that a lot of the radical left do not understand that when one gets rid of laws one does not get freedom, one does not even get anarchy, one gets a new order where the rich and powerful take everything and the poor and powerless get nothing (this is the fundamental problem with anarchism).

In this context it would seem that the radical left and some realist moderates (moderates in the best sense of the term) are the ones arguing this point, while it’s the Liberals who are arguing against it. The choice is between the rule of law, which includes bad or partially corrupted law, and the rule of the righteous. I prefer law. The rule of the righteous sets bad precedents.

I’m saying that the evidence is so overwhelmingly in favour of the erosion of democratic freedoms in Russia that yes, any description of it as ‘democratic’ flawed or otherwise is essentially an apologia.

#150:

I believe you have misunderstood my comment in #143 to mean I was with Marc Cooper and David Corn on the ANSWER sponsorship of anti-war rallies. I was not. At the time, and through today, I was with Max Sawicky that David Corn and Marc Cooper had no business attacking the anti-war rallies sponsored by ANSWER because it was the best we had at the time. Indeed, as you say, where were the unions, anti-trade groups and MoveOn, who failed to organize anti-war rallies that would have increased the possibility of a larger anti-war coalition?

Most people knew they were not endorsing ANSWER by appearing at or supporting the anti-war rallies ANSWER had organized. That is why I believe Cooper and Corn were wrong to try and tell people to stay away.

This entire discussion is poisonous however because there is no reason to have these intellectual “wars of words.” I respect David Corn and Marc Cooper for example. I am a Chomsky fan, but am also devoted to Berube’s insight and wisdom.

As for Alex Cockburn, I have become disenchanted with Cockburn in recent years, but still find him interesting to read in most instances (this attack on “sovereignty liberals”, however, being a dreadfully painful read). As for Ed Herman, let’s just say I have strong negative feelings about his ridiculous attacks on Berube and others over the years.

ejh: Just my natural charm I guess.

“what are you then going to do when your edict causes enormous controversy and loses you a large chuck of your support?”

If the demonstration is in opposition to the war, then let it be in opposition to the war.

If saying “Leave your FREE MUMIA signs at home” means that a chunk of people won’t show up, but that means that a larger chunk of people will actually listen to your issues, then that’s a good thing.

The Palestinian thing turned off a *LOT* of people. Seriously. If you can’t go to an anti-Iraq War demonstration without explaining that Islamic Jihad and Hamas are logical consequences of Israel’s reign of terror, you should not be surprised when people support the Iraq War as a “logical consequence” of opposition to the war’s opposition.

If we’re talking about getting a bunch of people to oppose something odious, not presenting as offensive is important… lest people oppose you because they find you more offensive than, say, the Iraq War.

I’m not sure that saying “we don’t need those people anyway” will have the results you want.

Hidari:

(1) You obviously need to look the word “invariably” up in a dictionary.

(2) You’ve obviously never heard of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and a host of other people who broke the law in a just cause. If you want to tell me that the cause was only just “in their opinion” or some such, then go ahead. Further dialogue with you will be pointless.

No I agree with Chris on this one; there can certainly be cases in which it is appropriate to break even the Nuremberg Conventions. I’d put Sierra Leone in this category – imminent humanitarian emergency and credible plan with a good chance of success. But I’m glad that people like Hidari are about, because as he says, everyone’s an exception, in their own minds. I’d much rather have a strong law like Nuremberg, occasionally broken, than the weak version that Timothy and Michael want even with 100% compliance (which one of course would not get).

Chris Bertram,
You repeated what I wrote, with an added tone of moral seriousness. Perhaps I should have added italics: “I prefer the rule of law.”
The case for action has the benefit of sounding christian and of giving people an opportunity to feel good about themselves; the case for inaction a responsibility to feel like shit. I was opposed to the overthrow of the Taliban by the American Government; not more, and not less.
I am not saying that laws should never be broken, I am simply describing the issue as bluntly as possible.
As usual I’m left saying that the defense of the rule of law in academic circles in not what it should be.
Too much idealism. Too much science.

You’ve also completely ignored the thrust of my point, that it’s hypocritical to effectively tell people like Cockburn that they should have kept their mouths shut, while lecturing everyone about the need for a broad-based coalition against the war. And that it is quite unreasonable for you to demand that they suppress their own views in favour of a party line which you have chosen and for whose political effectiveness you have not provided any evidence.

No, Engels, I got the thrust of that point. I just think it is a point not worth making, because it distorts what I’ve said beyond recognition. And in the future, when I say “Cockburn lies about my position” and you hear a call for censorship to my left, you should stop pretending you’re responding responsibly to me. I am, however, impressed by the sheer variety of Strawbérubés you’ve managed to concoct in a pair of comments: according to you, I claimed that Cockburn et al. prevented liberals from stopping the Iraq War and I demanded that Cockburn keep quiet and I didn’t think any of this debate mattered anyway. Once more with feeling: the demand that opponents of war in Iraq also be opponents of war in Kosovo and Afghanistan, a demand that Cockburn renews here, was a tactical move taken by people more interested in ideological purity than in appealing to the American populace at large. As Timothy says:

It appears that asking people to think about what actually works in political struggle is deemed a silencing or anti-pluralistic move on its face. I don’t see myself as having said anything different than what Stuart Hall said about opposing Thatcherism a bit earlier, that progressives have to ask why popular consciousness takes the forms and structures that it does in a given historical situation, and to not rely on the thumb-sucking security blanket that it’s all the evil hegemonic media that has implanted false ideas into that consciousness, that everyone would agree with progressives otherwise.

But dammit to hell, Tim, that’s the other half of my book. Maybe I should just quote your bit above and make the Stuart Hall chapter a whole lot shorter.

Sometimes breaking the law is the right thing to do – and it would be a strange “leftist” who declared otherwise.

How is this different from rationalizing the actions you guys seriously hate; things like stalinism or suicide bombings? For example, Sartre said “terrorism is a terrible weapon but the oppressed poor have no others”, and he said this about the Munich 1972 massacre – so, did he have a point, then?

I’m just curious how you manage to maintain consistency here.

Chris, when you write, “You’ve obviously never heard of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and a host of other people who broke the law in a just cause,” you are naming people who actually can suffer from breaking the law. The moral gesture is meaningless otherwise. The Marquis de Sade broke the law in what he regarded as a just cause – his own pleasure – and got away with it for a time because the system was fixed. In the same way, the U.S. can break the law by, say, giving India support in building thermonuclear weapons, but what is going to happen to the U.S. because of it? Is the U.N. going to pay the same scrupulous attention to the U.S. actions as they are doing to Iran?

In the real world, no. Those who break the law with confidence that they will never have to pay a price might do it for something morally good. Or, tomorrow, they can do it for something morally bad. They don’t, however, share the same kind of moral status as Gandhi, or even Robin Hood.

As for Alex Cockburn, I have become disenchanted with Cockburn in recent years, but still find him interesting to read in most instances

I think Cockburn, like a lot of leftists, has been very affected by the sheer amount of abuse that has been directed his way (and the way of the left in general) in recent years and I think that may in some ways help explain the intemperate nature of the piece which was the subject of the original posting. The people who have been dishing it out have often acted as if everybody to their left should answer to them, while they themselves should answer to nobody: and now that the War Against Terrorism project has drowned itself and everybody else in blood, there’s an understandable desire to call for answers from the people who provided its moral justifications while really laying into the people who opposed it.

The settling of scores is rarely, of course, the origin of fair and reasonable polemic. Or of good writing.

I certainly do believe it, I’m just saying that this line of argument opens a whole new can of worms.

Michael, I apparently was the one being telegraphic. When I mentioned Leninism and “Sweden as main agent of intervention”, I meant to point to what I see as the fundamental flaw in your position: that is, the idea that imperialism is some kind of foreign policy choice for a hegemonic advanced capitalist state like the US, and we could just as well choose to use that shiny army of ours to do “good” (insert M. Albright quote here). I think that’s just rubbish. This leads me to believe that support for US “humanitarian intervention” is in effect always support for US imperialism.
The plain fact is that large numbers of liberals were swayed by the argument that invading Iraq could be justified as humanitarian intervention – even liberals who I trust wouldn’t just argue for any war they see (see, I’m not Herman).

Unfortunately its just become terribly relevant again. On the Guardian its being reported that Blair is pushing for a No-Fly zone in Darfur, and proposing overcoming the technical problems of enforcing it (Darfur is apparently the side of France) destroying Sudanese air bases if Khartoum violates it. Full Text here.

Initial thoughts? Its a damn good proposal in principle. Targetted strikes against Sudanese military assets (not civilian centres) in order to restrict their ability to carry out ethnic cleansing in the region. As its a Bush/Blair initiative however, my initial gut reaction is real apprehension, especially since they’re considering doing it outside the UNSC since China probably won’t bite. And I’m sure Cockburn will immediately condemn it, and the ‘Decent Left’ or whatever it is will have serious doubts about supporting it not due to the validity of the proposal itself, but rather the sad history of this pair’s style of interventionism.

taking sovereignty or international law as principles in and of themselves.

Surely they are? They’re just not absolute, any more than anything else is.

“You’ve obviously never heard of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and a host of other people who broke the law in a just cause. If you want to tell me that the cause was only just “in their opinion” or some such, then go ahead.”

There is a difference between a legal conflict between two citizens and between a citizen and that state. Countries are subjects of international law. Conflicts between states requires states to be treated as citizens within the larger whole.
Gandhi’s or King’s illegal behavior is not in the same category as the illegal behavior of a foreign state that comes to their aid.

‘(2) You’ve obviously never heard of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and a host of other people who broke the law in a just cause. If you want to tell me that the cause was only just “in their opinion” or some such, then go ahead. Further dialogue with you will be pointless.’

NO!!!!!!

And very obviously no. Nelson Mandela and others broke the law because they believed the law to be unjust. And they wanted the law (i.e. the law that forbade ‘inter-racial marriage’) to be repealed .

Your position is not just different it is the opposite. You believe that the law is fundamentally just (i.e. it is and should be the case that countries should not invade other countries), you just believe that you, personally, should be allowed to break it. Perhaps you believe that others should also be allowed to break it, but who these people are will be decided upon by you.

Your interpretations of this is not a recipe for civil disobedience (which I support, if you want to do it) it is a recipe for vigilanteism.

And if you think I have never heard of Gandhi, you have obviously never heard of Peter Sutcliffe, who believed that God had told him it was the right and good thing to do to walk the streets and kill prostitutes ‘for the greater good’. Hey it was against the law, but, apparently, we all get to choose which laws to obey nowadays, as long as we can come up with some fairy story about how we believed it to be ‘the just and good thing to do’.

(The main difference between Bush, Blair and Sutcliffe of course is that Bush and Blair have killed more people but the basic thought processes are the same. Also, they lack Sutcliffe’s people skills).

Hidari: of course you’re right to say that they broke the law because they believed it to be unjust. I’m unclear how that helps your absurd position, though, since you placed a great deal of weight on the fact that this or that is right or wrong (according to you) only _in the opinion_ of the person carrying out the action. Either you are now allowing that some judgments about justice and injustice are correct (I hope so!) or you must condemn MLK and the others on the same grounds as you did before.

In any case I also believe that there are occasions when it is right to break a basically just law that I would not want to see repealed. I’m prepared to run any number of red lights to get my injured child to hospital, and, for that matter, to steal money for the petrol if I need to. If I’m ever unfortunate enough to have to do such a thing, I won’t be doing so in a spirit of seeking a repeal of traffic regulations or the laws on theft.

So am I not supposed to say or have said how I read the tactical situation

No, obviously you’re not. You’re supposed to think about how objectionable it is to tell other people that they should remain silent in order for your views to go unopposed. You’re supposed to have a little think about the ethics of that and what other people are going to think about it.

I’m prepared to run any number of red lights to get my injured child to hospital, and, for that matter, to steal money for the petrol if I need to. If I’m ever unfortunate enough to have to do such a thing, I won’t be doing so in a spirit of seeking a repeal of traffic regulations or the laws on theft.

But these would be extraordinary exceptions where not only would you have no choice, but you could reasonably expect that nobody else would have any fundamental objection to your actions.

Can this be said of any of the breaches of international law which we have discussed? don’t thye, in fact, fall into a wholly different category, of actions that are actually very controversial and to which many actors have very serious objections? (Indeed, is that not precisely the reason why the Security Council is not resorted to?)

You or I may consider those obections ill-founded, but the situation is nevertheless very different from the one you descirbe.

Chris Bertram
well actually, insofar as I understand it, not only is my position not ‘absurd’ it is the basic position of almost all international lawyers (and domestic ones for that matter).

In any case, people make a distinction between ‘victimless’ crimes (i.e. running a red light) and non-victimless crimes (robbing other people, invading other countries).

In any case, the ‘breaking the law’ thing only works if you are prepared to accept it as a universal principle. Personally I have absolutely no problems with you going through a red light to get to hospital quickly, and I would be happy to do it myself. It’s a universal thing.

On the other hand there are other actions that I would not be happy to see anybody do under any circumstances. Rape, for example. I don’t care to what extent somebody thinks that it’s ‘for the greater good’, I would never accept it under any circumstances.

‘Invading and occupying somebody’s country’ is very much closer to ‘rape’ in my book than ‘running a red light when you are in a hurry’. It necessitates killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
MLK and Gandhi were very careful to morally justify their actions in that their actions were victimless (the ANC didn’t but, luckily for us, they were rubbish at terrorism).

So there are two related points here: harm caused by actions in terms of breaking a law and the universality issue. ‘Not invading another country’ is not like ‘don’t litter’. It’s closer to ‘don’t kill’ or ‘don’t rape’. It is the absolute basis of international law. In fact it’s difficult to see how you could have international law if it was widely flouted.

Finally, the Universality issue. As I said, I would be happy to have the ‘red light’ law flouted by anybody who was genuinely in a hurry. So: the ‘invading other countries’ law can only be broken by people who would be perfectly happy to have the same strictures applied to them.

So, Chris, if you are genuinely and honestly telling me you would be perfectly happy to see Britain invaded by some foreign power because they didn’t like some aspect of British domestic policy (i.e. they thought it was ‘right and good’) then fair enough. But note: not even MLK and Mandela were not prepared to grant THIS much power to the international community (let alone the ‘West’ an entity both of them distrusted, and with reason). Even despite all the horrors of apartheid, and so forth, Mandela never actually called for the law of sovereignty to be overthrown: he never actually called for South Africa to be invaded (let alone by the United States, who were responsible for a great deal of the problem in the first place).

In short: if you accept the laws are there to be broken, you can’t come and complain when other people break those same laws and act against YOU.

(Almost every proponent of the ‘laws are there to be broken’ viewpoint in actual fact smuggles in an argument about ‘Western’ or ‘British’ or ‘American’ exceptionalism to their position without stating it. Very very very few people are prepared to follow the logic of their own argument and accept that if the US can decide what laws it wants to follow then logically, so can Canada, or Turkey, or China, or Iran. Still fewer are prepared to follow the logic to its conclusions, which is that any of those countries should be able to take military action against ‘us’ if they see it as being ‘in our best interests’ or ‘for the greater good’ or whatever. It tends to be presupposed that Western politicians are basically well meaning decent chaps, not like Johnny Foreigner).

“Actually, the law often is concerned with intentions…”

For the question of whether a law was broken, intention, like ignorance, counts for little. But after that, yes.
Once the act has been put in the category “crime” debate opens up.

“Why don’t the liberal interventionist ever go for some non-military interventions that ‘go beyond the law.’ For instance, the U.S. could do a lot to insure the viability of a Palestinian state simply by setting up a multi-billion dollar reparation fund for Palestinians who claim to have been kicked off their land, or be descended from dispossessed families, that would give the Palestinians much needed cash and solve the right to return, or at least elevate it to another level?

I’ll answer my own question: the U.S. wouldn’t do that because the governing class would see no return on that money. Beyond the politics of Israel and Palestine, the U.S. simply has opted out of the grand foreign aid schemes of the fifties and sixties, and they have never returned to the table. However, the symbolic value of military intervention does pay a solid return – if, in nothing else, the reminder to banks that take U.S. T notes that the notes are backed by awesome power. Liberal interventionism feeds that system. It is bad for the U.S., ultimately, and bad for the world.”

That was Roger, in post 229. I think that adequately answers the question of what empire the US was protecting in Kosovo–whether or not the war was justified in itself, it’s obvious that if the US government were interested in saving lives and helping people, there are vastly more cost-efficient ways of doing so besides bombing the alleged villains of the month.

Mitchell Freedman–if you are bored, go to another thread. There’s a little too much vitriol here and there in this thread, but IMHO hidari/dsquared/ejh/roger (and others)are doing a pretty good job pointing out holes in the liberal interventionist position

“apologetics & denial of the crimes committed by Milosevic & Serbian Nationalists combined with exaggeration & preoccupation with the less than kosher aspects of the NATO campaign, both real & imagined.”

One man’s crime is another man’s less than kosher aspect. We are talking about actual deaths of actual innocent civilians on both sides of the conflict. Yes, the Serbs killed more than NATO bombs. But take a look at your own rhetoric before you start flinging charges of bad faith around.

Michael – Perhaps you can point me to the part where I take issue with your claim that Cockburn lied about your position? Pace Mitchell Freedman, I am not a “Cockburn defender” (nor does that seem to be an accurate description of your other critics on this thread) and I don’t feel qualified to pass judgment on your ongoing squabble with him.

What I do care about, as might have been clear to you had you read what I wrote instead of indulging your desire to find a substitute Cockburn to beat up on, is your silly and presumptious suggestion that the American left should have toed your party line in the run up to the war – by criticising the policy only as a “diversion” from the “War on Terror” – despite the fact that this would have meant abandoning their own principles, and despite the fact that you have produced not a shred of evidence that this strategy would have been effective.

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… 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. … 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

(You seem mightily vexed that I referred to this suggestion of yours as “demanding that Cockburn shut up”. Well, fine. It would certainly have been more accurate to have said: suggesting that Cockburn and others like him should be losing sleep years later because they had the temerity to open their mouths and voice an argument which you believe, on the basis of very little evidence it seems, to have been politically counterproductive. That’s a lot longer, but I don’t think that it is any better for you.)

Now you can either engage this objection on substance, on you can carry on fuming about how I have allegedly misunderstood some incidental aspects of your position.

(And I have to say that for someone who writes a post whose main point seems to be to make up yet another silly name for people to the left of you, which distorts their substantive views and motivations, you seem to have a remarkably short temper with people who you believe have misunderstood your own position.)

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…

This brings to mind all the liberal hand-wringing in 2002 and 2003 about the big antiwar protests being organized by ANSWER.

I remember thinking, sure, ANSWER’s messaging is tedious at best, divisive and inflammatory at worst but, hey, why don’t you critics get off your fat butts and do the hard work of organizing events of your own? I’ll be happy to march in them, too.

Fast-forward to the present argument, I think the key question, as raised by dsquared and others, is how do we all feel about imperialism? Not “soveriegnty Left”, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean, but imperialism, and the agressive wars that always accompany it?

I have opposed my country’s imperialist interventions consistently, in Vietnam, Chile, Central America, Panama, Grenada, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq. No dancing, no hair-splitting. I believe Chomsky, Cockburn, and others you belittle, Mr. Berube, have done the same. I think that’s a consistent and honorable (not to mention “left”) position that deserves respect and careful consideration.

I do agree that Westphalian international law got it mostly right with regard to wars of aggression. And that the various follow-ups seem to have gotten it right with regard to humanitarian crises.

Unfortunately, those laws don’t do a very good job of addressing the question of whether or not intervention in Kosovo was legal. Or in Afghanistan. International Law *does* do a good job of addressing the question of whether or not the *conduct* of the intervening parties was legal, but I think the main argument in this thread is over justification rather than conduct (or it is for all parties willing to concede the distinction, at any rate).

International law is not well-developed with regard to civil war, particularly due to the problem of deciding when a given pattern of violence stops being an internal criminal matter and starts being a Civil War subject to International Law. In the case of Kosovo, one could make the case that a) there was, in fact, a civil war underway, and that b) Milosevich’s conduct in that civil war was in violation of International Law. One could of course also make the argument that c) the conduct of every other party in that civil war was also in violation of Article 3, or contest any of propositions a, b, or c, and naturally any such claims ought to be heard by the security council and a judgment rendered prior to intervention to make everything nice and tidy, but I think we’re rather a long way from demonstrating that NATO had no possible legal justification for intervening, as asserted by dsquared and others.

DD also asserts in passing that intervention in Afghanistan was legal under International Law, implicitly on the basis that an act of aggression had been launched against the United States, but this is of course problematic in that the action was not undertaken by Afghanistan’s military, or indeed by any part of that state at all. There has been some talk since about amending International Law to address the problem of inter-state aggression on the part of non-state actors, but at the time, International Law was indeed “too old-fashioned” to address the particular immoral act that had taken place.

I’m not entirely convinced by those who claim that future war-like conflicts will tend to be more and more of the “fourth generation” variety, featuring non-state parties and/or conflicts that are characterized as “civil war” or “resistance” by one party and “insurgency” or “terrorism” by the other, but I do think it’s clear that existing International Law does not address such conflicts adequately.

Hey, you guys who didn’t join in antiwar protest because you didn’t like the organisers or the puppeteers! Here’s a girl who would like to express her appreciation for your finely tuned moral sensibilities!

I’m real tired of Cockburn. He wants to be the conscience of the American left, and he loves to stomp around, rhetorically speaking, about a war that disgusts not just him but millions of others.
I like Berube’s fire. He represents a new generation of leftists who are solid on theory but deeply into praxis. Cockburn is more fastidious and mandarin than Berube,in the old style of moralistic leftism.
Berube’s in the midst of things. Berube teaches at a public university. He has a family and a kid with Down syndrome that he and his wife have loved and heroically cared for. I’ve read his books,*Life as We Knew It: a Father, a Family and an Exceptional Child,* and *What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts,* both excellent and enlivened by his unique voice as a writer.
Cockburn’s voice is similar to that other Brit’s, Hitchens: strident and self-righteous. The scion of a wiser civilization and scold from across the waters stuff played well on the left post WWII, but no one cares about that act any more.
If there is any similarity between Horowitz and Berube, it is that the covers of their books are mighty similar. But Berube’s came out first!
If Horowitz’s current book is the feast for thought that most of his writing is, I guess I’ll save my money and not buy it.

Then tell me what, in your view, plausibly could have derailed the determination of the Bush Administration to go to war. After all, they relentless marginalized significant fractions of their own government, all external critics (liberals, conservative realists, leftists, Europeans, you name it), all other governments, and any actual evidence from reality during the process of planning the war. Fuck, by all accounts, the president’s own father told him it was a bad idea, to no effect.

Well, Timothy, they certainly did a good job of marginalising their critics, in part by deploying some of the same silly anti-protest clichés which you trotted out in #60 above. Still, there were also a large number of “external liberal critics” whom, if you will recall, didn’t have to be marginalised because they were busy cheering the war on. Of course, I do not number you and Berube among them. Berube was, as we all know, out there waving a Bush Hitler sign and mucking it with the filthy hippies, and I applaud him for it. You, on the other hand, have informed us that you were steadfast in your opposition to the war but decided that the best tactical move was to keep your mouth shut and do absolutely nothing. This strikes me as rather less honourable but, unlike you and Berube, I do not presume to lecture other people on the most effective means of expressing their political convictions.

So I suppose my answer to your question might be: if large numbers of liberals among America’s policy, media and intellectual elites had not, in the run up to the war, bent over backwards to spread Bush’s disinformation, to whip up hatred against ‘Islamo-fascism’ and fear over the ‘War on Terror’, to do Karl Rove’s dirty work for him by smearing the anti-war left, or had sat in the comfort of their ivory towers sticking their heads out of the window only occasionally in order to yell abuse at Noam Chomsky, that might – possibly – and I know this is a long shot – have had a positive effect. To quote an American liberal for whom I have a good deal of respect:

It is the liberals, then, who count. They are, as it might be, the canaries in the sulphurous mineshaft of modern democracy. The alacrity with which many of America’s most prominent liberals have censored themselves in the name of the War on Terror, the enthusiasm with which they have invented ideological and moral cover for war and war crimes and proffered that cover to their political enemies: all this is a bad sign. Liberal intellectuals used to be distinguished precisely by their efforts to think for themselves, rather than in the service of others. Intellectuals should not be smugly theorising endless war, much less confidently promoting and excusing it. They should be engaged in disturbing the peace – their own above all.

“Praxis happens on the ground. Not on blogs, nor on the pages of the Village Voice, Nation, et al. It happens in the streets.”

You might want to tell that to everyone who donated money to moveon.org*.

Man, are they ever going to feel stupid.

–

* only the most obvious counterexample, we could go on all day listing more. Blogo-triumphalism is indeed grating, but blogs, collectively, are a much bigger part of this “praxis” you speak of than the splinter group ANSWER is, and are likely influencing the body politic more than all of the leaflets, petitions, and placards*** on USia’s** pavements put together.

** UKia, in which I understand there are still some Marxist (and other far-left) political organizations willing to devote at least a substantial fraction of their resources to gaining elected office and then actually facing the problems of governing, is another story.

*** and puppets. Mustn’t forget the puppets.

Hey, Michael. What a joy to read your prose again — how’s the family doing? And when can we see you on Dancing with the Stars?
P.S. You wonder why the left never gets anywhere in this country? The thread answers itself.

“I think we’re rather a long way from demonstrating that NATO had no possible legal justification for intervening, as asserted by dsquared and others.”

No possible?? It’s possible that pigs can fly. It’s *possible* that there was justification to intervene in Iraq. I doubt that d2 or anyone else has claimed that there is no possibility – just that, when all is said and done, it was wrong to intervene, legally and morally. At least that is my position.

“it was wrong to intervene, legally and morally. At least that is my position”

And since you are not the security council or an international court, or even engaging the problems presented, that leaves unresolved the question of whether or not intervention was in accord with international law, at least in the two cases I discussed. Neither of which involved Iraq.

Iraq is a much simpler case– Saddam wasn’t engaged in a war of aggression, there was no ongoing civil war, and no imminent humanitarian crisis in the country. The problems in international law that I outlined do not come into play.

“And since you are not the security council or an international court, or even engaging the problems presented…”

YOu’re right – I’m not trying to engage. I’m simply pointing out you created a strawman of the lowest possible order – you claimed that it’s “possible” to say that intervention in Kosovo was legal, and D2 was wrong because he asserted it’s not “possible”. I don’t think D2 made such a strong assertion, but I could be wrong since there are a helluva a lot of comments.

“See comments #11 and #98, for daniel’s position…” Which says nothing like what you attributed to him. So my strawman comment stands.

Hey, Engels. I wrote plenty about the war, attended protests, gave speeches at rallies. So good job on the continuing misreadings. Moreover, the references to puppets, etc., are (at least for me) ironic terms that are shorthand for a more profound split about tactics in the anti-war movement, of long standing.

Wow this is a long thread. I think it demonstrates conclusively that intramural fights are always much more intense than intermural ones.

engels, there’s a problem with having a serious argument in a thread that starts with a poster reporting that someone else has lied about him. Serious argument about policy is not really what the post is about. It’s about the more basic activities of first, reporting the truth, second, motivating the not-truth-tellers to stop. Admittedly that’s complicated in this instance by Berube having to explain exactly why this particular untruth was told, but it’s still not a good lead-off for a general discussion.

Yeah, what engels said.

“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…”

So what – I’m asking myself the same question. Every US citizen should be, including Cockburn and Chomsky, and I am sure they do too.

Darn, now I’ll have to go back and reread both Cockburn and Herman.

But not right now.

I don’t remember. Has anyone linked to to Berube’s original piece?
This is the one that bothered me.

Rich Puchalsky,
there’s no lie in that paragraph. It’s polemical that’s all. The argument goes that defending American intervention in one instance clears the way for it in another.

“Among the progressives the liberal interventionists thumped their tin drums, often by writing pompous pieces attacking the antiwar ‘hard left’ ”

Most likely the hard left’s myopia and intransigence will not matter to most Americans — that is, those who never trusted the judgment of Chomsky or Z Magazine in the first place and don’t see why it matters now that anti-imperialists have lost a “credibility” they never had in some quarters. But the reason it should matter, even in parts of America where there are no campuses, no anti-Sharon rallies, and no subscribers to Counterpunch, is that the United States cannot be a beacon of freedom and justice to the world if it conducts itself as an empire. Nor can we fight Al Qaeda networks in 60 countries if we alienate our allies in Europe, who so far seem to be much more capable of finding and arresting members of Al Qaeda than is our own Justice Department.

The antiwar left once knew well that its anti-imperialism was in fact a form of patriotism — until it lost its bearings in Kosovo and Kabul, insisting beyond all reason that those military campaigns were imperialist wars for oil or regional power. And why does that matter? Because in the agora of public opinion, the antiwar left never claimed to speak to pragmatic concerns or political contingencies: for the antiwar left, the moral ground was the only ground there was. So when the antiwar left finds itself on shaky moral ground, it simply collapses.

The last two paragraphs are both Berube.
Blockquote was off.

I don’t really care that much either way. I had an exchange with Berube about the piece I just linked to and after all this just found the link. So I posted it.
Cockburn is an ass. But so is Berube. It’s depressing to think that nobody mentioned Tony Judt’s piece until well into this thing. When I saw engels’ comment… “duh!”
why didn’t I…?”

But it didn’t. And Judt is right. And Berube’s piece is pathetic. And Cockburn is an ass. And I’m done

Rich – It’s a polemic. Cockburn lumps Berube in with the people who supported the war for reasons staed. You may think it’s wrong to make up silly groupings of your opponents for your own rhetorical purposes but lots of people do it, cf. “Sovereignty Left” above. You seem to think the article should be judged on the impression it might give to someone who had never heard of Berube and was interested in knowing whether or not he supported the war. That is not it’s point. It is aimed at people who are already familiar with politics.

In context the person not aware of Berube’s writings would think Berube was prowar.

Berube is indeed “pro-war” and that’s Cockburn’s point. He considers Berube to be someone who is generally pro-war but opposed the war in Iraq. And I’m sorry but your reading seems absurd to me. The piece is not intended to convey factual information about Berube’s beliefs. It’s a polemic. To its intended audience its meaning is perfectly clear. And there are plenty of clues in what Cockburn wrote – that he mentioned Berube alongside Gitlin, that he contrasted Berbube with “clear” opponents of the war, like Chomsky – that he meant to imply Berube was against the war.

And, Donald, you are moving the goal posts. This is not about whether the piece is “misleading”: that’s arguable, although I probably wouldn’t agree. Berube is accusing Cockburn of “lying” and being “intellectually dishonest”. You do not chuck those kinds of accusations around without evidence of intent.

Chris – I didn’t say that it was “accurate and justified” to lump ‘liberal interventionists’ in together with people who specifically supported the war in Iraq in the way Cockburn does. I said that Cockburn appears to believe this is justified because he sees them all as being part of a militaristic faction of the left which he blames for the war in Iraq, and given that this is his view, however unfair you think this is, it is not right to say that he is “lying” here, or even being “intellectually dishonest”.

I think this is getting out of hand. Everybody here is (more or less) on the left. Everybody is attacking each other, sometimes rather viciously. The most common charge? That people have, um, spent too much time attacking people on the left, when the right is the more important target.

Oops.

Am I the only one to think that most of the attacks on this thread are a waste of time and energy? No, worse than that: they’re sowing anger and discord among people who agree on probably 90% of all things political. Is this really what we need to be spending our time on?

Mistake #1: Cockburn attacking Berube for being pro-war when, clearly, Berube was not pro-war. Cockburn:

“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,….”

Clearly, Berube did not believe that the war could “put Iraq to rights.” That’s just a lie.

Justified reaction: Berube pointing out that Cockburn lied about this.

Unjustified reaction (mistake #2): Berube attacking Cockburn in return. Here’s the key part where Berube goes off the rails, IMO:

“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.”

In fact, if you just removed everything from that paragraph forward in Berube’s piece, the need for the fights throughout the thread pretty much disappears. Unnecessary attacks breed unnecessary attacks. Cmon, aren’t we (mostly) friends here? Is intra-party purity really the most important thing?

And Michael, any time to do feel up to the challenge of trying to say something half-way intelligent, here’s a short list of some of the outstanding substantive objections to your post:

(i) Your term “Sovereign Left” is an silly straw man, which distorts the views of the people to whom it is intended to apply.
(ii) It is arrogant of you to suggest that Cockburn and others in the anti-war movement should be losing sleep now because they campaigned against the war in their own way, rather than toeing your preferred ‘diversion from the War on Terra’ line, which goes against the principles of many people on the left, especially as you have provided no evidence that this would have helped matters, and, indeed, as it appears far more likely that such people did a damn sight more to actually try to stop the war than you did.
(iii) You have given no real grounds for the serious accusations you make of Cockburn, namely, that he “lied” or that he is “intellectually dishonest”.

See, these last few posts are what is wrong with so many internet debates–tempers are lost and people start erecting strawmen and so forth.

There were a fair number of substantive principled anti-intervention points made all through this thread, but it got tangled up with personalities.

Engels–I didn’t move the goalposts. I just said Cockburn’s statement would give the unwary reader the wrong impression of what Berube thought about the Iraq War. If he meant to give that impression it was dishonest. If it was part of a polemic and the misleading aspect was inadvertent, then it wasn’t. I don’t know which it was.