My God! It’s Full of Arse!

Internet, won.

Oh, wow! Halfway through I was fully expecting the coup de grace of withering critique—not, um, adulation.

P.s. to Henry: Why in God’s name are you even reading Tablet, or The Tablet, or whatever it’s called?

Has this Berman guy ever heard of the concept of “sentence,” with a subject, verb and maybe object?

I’m certain Berman has written worse things than this passage over the course of his career.

Given that his great claim to fame is making the liberal case for support for the contras, I’d say this is correct.

Fair enough. And common sense takes some hits from this one too.

Remember when TNR published the deep—mythic, even—cultural insights of Lee “sprezzatura” Siegel?

“intellectual ardor”, “asmolder with passion”?!

Ce que vous allumez, m’eteins.

Wieseltier’s voodoo guidance. Stop already. And no, I don’t need to know what his boss’s guidance was like.

“I’m certain Berman has written worse things than this passage over the course of his career.”

@4: I’ll say. But he may have hit a new high, or low, in this instance (stylistically, not morally – that train left the station some time ago).

“But today, amid Iraq’s dreadful death throes, where are the parlor warriors? Have those Iraqi exiles reconsidered their illusions, that all it would take was a brisk invasion and a new constitution, to put Iraq to rights? Have any of them, from Makiya through Hitchens to Berman and Berube had dark nights, asking themselves just how much responsibility they have for the heaps of dead in Iraq, for a plundered nation, for the American soldiers who died or were crippled in Iraq at their urging ? Sometimes I dream of them, — Friedman, Hitchens, Berman — like characters in a Beckett play, buried up to their necks in a rubbish dump on the edge of Baghdad, reciting their columns to each other as the local women turn over the corpses to see if one of them is her husband or her son.” — Alexander Cockburn

In the prism of my small world, I blame TNR for Netanyahu. I could but won’t chronicle my arguments with friends since the early 1980’s about much, since these are still friends, and they long since began to see the errors of their ways. (Though much has been gained by their pursuits meanwhile. Life if complicated.)

All sorts of unlikely people supported the disaster of 2003 at its inception. Most of them changed their minds PDQ; many of them apologised fulsomely. At this point, I’m really only concerned about those who didn’t.

I came about Proyect because he was about the only person taking the time to respond (mainly at marxmail) to Cockburn’s climate change stuff. And I got hooked…

chris y: an apology isn’t enough. It is enough only if it involves remorse. Simple regret – “I wish things hadn’t turned out the way they did” – isn’t.

zap

#23 chris y

All sorts of unlikely people supported the disaster of 2003 at its inception. Most of them changed their minds PDQ; many of them apologised fulsomely. At this point, I’m really only concerned about those who didn’t.

Many millions of Americans went insane on 9/11 and a lot of them hadn’t recovered by 2003. Some of them haven’t recovered to this day.

Whoever did 9/11 has a lot to answer for. Plus whoever decided on the inciteful TV coverage. It was the worst of disaster porn. For the run-up to Iraq, not much more than a year later, a lot of people still weren’t thinking clearly. They hadn’t gotten enough bloody TV coverage from Afghanistan. They wanted more blood.

JT@32
thanks

34: Maybe, or just spent your energy attacking the dirty effing hippies for being against the war for the wrong reasons. Which side that effectively helped at that moment is unclear?

I forget if you came out against giant puppets.

@34/35/36
Not sure there’s much point debating a column from Sept. 2002, but Bérubé’s basic point re the reaction of parts of the Left to the Afghanistan intervention (which had then been ongoing for roughly a year — a bit less) seems reasonable. I.e., if you denounce any and every use of force, regardless of the circumstances, as unjustified and imperialist, you lose credibility with everyone except the small group already convinced of your view.

The invasion of Iraq was wrong mainly for reasons specific to the particular circumstances surrounding it and it was also fairly clearly illegal (though intl lawyers can debate virtually anything). It seems clear to me at any rate that, judged not by their outcomes but by whether they were justified in the first place, the (mainly) air campaign in Afghanistan of Oct. 2001 and the invasion of Iraq of March 2003 stand on different footing. The course Afghanistan took afterward is another matter, but recall that this piece was written in Sept. 2002. (And note btw Bérubé’s criticism of Hitchens.)

I don’t intend to get into a long back-and-forth on this but since mcmanus linked it, it seemed some reaction was not out of place.

judged not by their outcomes but by whether they were justified in the first place

Hoocoodenode? Afghanistan been easy pickings for armies for millenia! How could we know that BushCheneyRumsfeld would find themselfs quagmired?

To gauge by the president’s speech to the United Nations Thursday, the administration actually has a serious case to make against Saddam Hussein’s violations of UN resolutions …Berube

Some of us knew that bastard Bush was poison since the 1980s, and every word from his and his minions mouths lies. Some ignorant folk were gullible, but I don’t believe that of Berube.

(And note btw Bérubé’s criticism of Hitchens.)

I should paste the sentences in full. Not exactly a Seymour level evisceration.

I just suggest new people read the linked piece more carefully than Berube’s liberal allies. It is a very calculate piece of hedging fence-sitting and hippie-punching.

Hoocoodenode? Afghanistan been easy pickings for armies for millenia! How could we know that BushCheneyRumsfeld would find themselfs quagmired?

not exactly what I meant.

Obvs if you think there’s no difference whatsoever betw Afghanistan, Oct. ’01, and Iraq, March ’03, you’re not going to like the piece. I wdn’t sign on to every sentence by any means, but by all means people shd read it — and yes, pls. read it more carefully than “Berube’s liberal allies.” Since (1) I don’t consider myself a ‘liberal’ as the word is used in contemporary US political discourse, and (2) I’m not one of Berube’s “allies,” whatever that means, this phrase can’t apply to me.

mcmanus apparently thinks everyone who doesn’t share his views on everything and also is not a conservative or libertarian must be a “liberal.” I’ll leave it to others whether this makes sense.

42:Lying liberal, it is the first paragraph. Now you have angered me.

My own position? I will get to it. First, why Chomsky and Cockburn were right and Berube wrong on Kosovo.

Kosovo set up two precedents: one really bad, and one horrible.

1)The bad one: We don’t need no stinking UNSC Resolution to bomb Kosovo. This obviously came back to bite Democrats in 2002, people really opposed to the Iraq War demanded a Security Council Resolution. People who supported Kosovo had big problems avoiding hypocrisy.

2) The Kosovo Precedent of Endless Horror. Death From the Air, LFC’s favored bombing campaigns. The Laws of War explicitly say “You break it, you own it.”

If you disrupt a nation’s internal peace-keeping structures, you need to put as many boots on the ground as it takes to protect civilians from militias and reprisals. You are legally bound to make and keep the peace once you bomb a country into chaos. How many troops did we have in Germany and Japan for how long? War should be very very hard and costly, not simply sending drones guided from Kansas. That is evil.

All, I mean all, the internecine killing in Iraq (and Libya) are our responsibility and our fault.

My own position in 2002-2003? “50 million soldiers for five years, 5 millionfor fifty years…or nothing. Don’t go.”

Ridiculous? I was serious (maybe a little high)

Because I knew the American way of war, established by Clinton in Kosovo, and I knew if Death from the Air started, we would be bombing and droning a chaotic Middle east…forever.

bob mcmanus: As I read Bérubé’s piece, it’s pretty clear that his condemnation of Chomsky et al. was for their opposition to the US invasion of Afghanistan. That had pretty good justification, as the Taliban were protecting the author of the 9/11 atrocity. But you’re conflating that with support of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which then and now seems clearly indefensible. I give Bérubé full marks.

mcmanus 43
The Laws of War explicitly say “You break it, you own it.”

I cd well be wrong, but I can’t recall mcmanus ever explicitly mentioning “the laws of war” before in a comment. There is prob. a reasonably good case that some kind of mil. action vs Afghanistan in Oct ’01 was justified by ‘the laws of war’ or at any rate by the UN Charter. (That doesn’t necessarily say that the specific *means* chosen, initially or later, were justified.)

I heard he just did a Christmas show with Ariana Grande.

#47 LFC

There is prob. a reasonably good case that some kind of mil. action vs Afghanistan in Oct ’01 was justified by ‘the laws of war’ or at any rate by the UN Charter.

Maybe. Try a similar case in a different context.

Imagine that Rupert Murdoch is visiting the USA (for the story let’s pretend he’s Australian), and the Russians announce that he is responsible for a terrible crime that happened in Russia and we have to hand him to them. Also they want us to shut down every US Murdoch business including the Wall Street Journal and 20th Century Fox. We ask what evidence they have, and they say it’s secret and they won’t tell us. We suggest that possibly they might present their evidence in a US court and they say no, we have to hand him over right now. What if we send him to Australia and let the Russians present their case in an Australian court? No, their evidence is secret, we have to give them Murdoch right now. Congress starts debating what to allow the president to do. Seventeen days after their first communication about Murdoch, Russia declares war.

Of course the Russians would never declare war on the USA. But would they be justified to do it given that history?

Given that things tend to move at a faster pace in the USA, would the Russians be justified to declare war six days after the first ultimatum?

js. @48
As with many controversial decisions involving the use of mil. force, there were, I’m sure, a range of positions on the initial decision in Oct. ’01 to remove the Afghan Taliban government by force. (I don’t recall the debates that well, actually, partly b.c I was preoccupied with working on something far removed from them.)

The spectrum probably went from “this is a crime against humanity on a massive scale” (paraphrase of Cynthia Peters [as she is quoted in the B&ecaute;rubé column]) to the right-wing talk-radio line, with various positions in between. If you reduce it to a basic binary choice as of Fall 2001 — do something militarily vs. the Afghan Taliban government or don’t — would this be a good rule-of-thumb divide between ‘liberalism’ and ‘the left’? I’m somewhat skeptical of that, but would want to look at the debates at the time more closely (beyond this one column).

p.p.s. And even if one sided with the latter view, that didn’t dictate everything about the particular kind of response. E.g., G.W. Bush ‘declared war’ not only on al-Qaeda but on all terrorist groups “of global reach” — and that set the stage for a string of bad decisions subsequently.

“It was an administration foisted upon us by judicial coup, and composed of the most incompetent crew of clowns we have seen in DC since Warren Harding.”

If I were god this would be the new US motto. It would be engraved on every public monument, bill and coin in the land.

#52 Theophylact

J Thomas, your version has its problems. Bin Laden was hardly “visiting” Afghanistan, and seekrit evidence or not he was taking credit for the 9/11 attacks.

Bin Ladin denied the attacks in 2001. There was a confession which was attributed to him, in 2004.

And Rupert Murdoch is hardly “visiting” the USA. There’s a US law that only US citizens can own US TV stations so he became a US citizen and lost his Australian citizenship. So in reality it doesn’t fit the Bin Ladin case, if Bin Ladin had been a citizen of Afghanistan then it would have been more clear-cut that the Taliban had the right to give him to the USA, just like the USA could easily give any US citizen to Russia that the Russians wanted.

Clarification: what I meant in second-to-last line is simply that unless a commenter responds to insults directed at him or her, they often go unremarked or unresponded to. Which is both sort of understandable and, given the character of comment threads, probably inevitable.

js.:
…I realized (once again!) that I really can’t settle on a coherent, satisfactory view on the legitimacy question

You’re not alone — I’m not sure I can either.

60: Foooor the record, you didn’t make a “factual mistake,” you accused me in 42 of making a false claim about what was in the article, in other words, you effectively called me a liar first.

How was I to fairly interpret “I read the article, and that wasn’t there” in connection with my comment? If it was a neutral article, I might be more generous and say you can’t read (or whatever), but since your “misreading” was combined with an attempt at discrediting me, I think it fair to attribute a malicious motive.

64: I should really fisk the whole article to show how it is done by a professional. But just two examples, already mentioned:

They did not cheer the collapse of the World Trade Center; that is simple slander. …Berube

I think this rises above LBJ’s “make him deny it” tactic. Exactly why are you repeating slanderous material and ensuring it is out there? Who is the “they” you are so valiantly protecting from calumny by publicizing an defamatory accusation? This one is funny.

Hitchens:

like The Nation columnist Christopher Hitchens, have tentatively suggested that the United States might do well to consider that “you can’t subject the Iraqi people to the cruelty of sanctions for so long while leaving the despot in place.” (Hitchens notes that since the United States has intervened on Saddam Hussein’s behalf in the past, “there is at least a potential argument that an intervention to cancel such debts would be justifiable.” Who could have imagined that Hitchens and his lifelong nemesis Henry Kissinger would wind up sitting on the same fence, each refusing to look at the other?) …Berube

What I noticed was that you managed in that portion to quote two of Hitchen’s pro-war arguments into the piece without refuting or agreeing or disagreeing with them. (Perhaps three pro Iraq War arguments, if you count Hitchens and Kissinger newly finding common ground). There is a lot more like that.

In sum, I think the article, written and published in close proximity to the AUMF vote in Congress, does in effect support the War in Iraq, while carefully maintaining a plausible deniability.

“I certainly have no allies”

Well okay but that is mainly your own doing.

p.s. So your charge that I favored ‘Death from the Air’ I now view as leaping to put an uncharitable/unwarranted construction on what I wrote, though, given my phrasing, I see how you could have arrived at that interpretation.

And given what I’ve written on other threads here (for example, the recent long thread on the bombing of cities in WW2), I think I’ve made my views on this question pretty clear.