Post-Iraq Posts
I’ve been fascinated and horrified by the phenomenon of smart young liberals and progressives who — after much deliberation, and not out of any sense of bloodlust or indiscriminate panic — signed on for the war in Iraq. I’ve even seen the phenomenon first-hand: over the past two years, I’ve run into a number of ordinarily-savvy liberal-progressive journalists who were snookered by Bush’s September 2002 UN address, or by reports that there was a threatening storm, or by Saddam’s hideous reign of terror. And while I always agreed with these people about Saddam’s hideous reign, I was always mystified by their obliviousness to what I thought were the clinching arguments — namely, that a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq would be a catastrophic error with regard to the war against al-Qaeda (an argument advanced by no less an authority than Gen. Anthony Zinni), and that any neocon dreams about US troops being showered with rose petals betrayed an unforgiveable ignorance about the sentiments of the Kurds and Shi€™ites we€™d abandoned to Saddam in 1991.
So I’ve been reading the “second thoughts” posts from a few of the left blogosphere’s youngest and brightest — like Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein and Robert Farley — not to chastise these good people or to self-righteously welcome them back to the side of All that is Right and Just, but to find out what led them to think that war in Iraq might be a plausibly good idea. And I keep coming across something really disturbing: as Farley puts it, the antiwar movement itself provided him with a good reason to take the war seriously.
I know that one of the hardest obstacles I had to overcome in adopting an antiwar position on Iraq was the recognition that I would be on the same side as all those dumbass hippies I knew at the University of Oregon, as well as those dumbass hippies I know in Seattle. At the time, I always strove to distance my arguments from theirs, and one of my deepest regrets about the whole affair is that hawkish liberals have really lost all credibility in the face of this war.
Now, I recently had a conversation with a friend in which I found occasion to point out that Gary Numan’s song “Cars” is actually pretty damn good, and the rideout section at the end is particularly cool in a kind of jerky-spacy-Kraftwerky-funky way. How come we didn’t realize that 27 years ago when the song came out? “Michael,” my friend replied, “do you remember just who — in high school — was listening to Gary Numan? Did you aspire to be one of them?” Hmm, good point, I thought. I didn’t listen to Led Zep for the same reason — I mean, who wanted to hang out alongside those skanky, slack-jawed losers with their “Houses of the Holy” T-shirts?
It’s depressing to think that intellectual decisions about war and peace, life and death, get made according to roughly the same logic that drives our affective affiliations in high school. But sometimes they do. Of course, there may be an element of self-exculpation in the Yglesias-Klein-Farley insistence that the antiwar movement was made up of dumbass hippies from whom smart guys like them needed to distinguish themselves. But I remember being mightily pissed, in 2002-03, at some of the dumbass arguments advanced by a few of my colleagues in the antiwar camp. And I remember being absolutely &*$#ing incensed that the neo-Stalinoid drones of the Workers World Party had appointed themselves the leaders of the movement. In fact, I seem to recall writing a few things on the subject at the time, and getting e-bags of e-mail from rafts of furious lefties who accused me of “red-baiting” the WWP (!!) and betraying the movement — when what I really wanted was an antiwar opposition that was broad and popular (and that would win over people like Matt, Ezra, and Robert). In retrospect, I don’t believe we could have stopped the war; I think Bush basically made the decision to invade sometime around noon on September 11, 2001. But the critical question remains — of how the progressive left can win friends and influence people, starting with the people it should rightly claim as its very own.
And on this count, here’s what I can’t make up my mind about. In 2002-03, I had a number of testy conversations with people to my left, and this is basically what we said to each other: I would argue that the hard-left opposition to war in Afghanistan, some of which was plausible and some of which took the form of apocalyptic pronouncements about “silent genocide,” “blowback,” and inevitable riots in the Arab street, had helped to delegitimate the antiwar constituency when it came to Iraq. “In other words,” I would say, “no one’s listening to you on Iraq, because you’ve shown in Afghanistan that you’re basically opposed to the use of US military force in all circumstances, regardless of the rationale or the outcome.” And they would say to me, in return, that I had it exactly backwards: the reason the movement was having difficulty winning people to the cause was that so-called “cruise missile leftists” like me had hopped on the Bush train in Afghanistan and couldn’t very well hop off now. “In other words,” they would argue, “if no one’s listening to us on Iraq, it’s because you’ve sanctioned the idea of unilateral ‘humanitarian intervention’ — and you spent the first half of 2002 telling people that we were out of our birds. If the movement to oppose war in Iraq is having trouble gaining traction, it’s your doing, not ours.”
It may be an academic question now, but then, I’m not against academic questions. What do you think?
September 23rd, 2004 at 2:22 pm
You’re right, they’re wrong. The circumstances of Iraq and Afghanistan were completely different, and the goal of not confusing people with one’s nuanced positions is not so important that it should determine what countries we invade. While the “War Bad” philosophy is admirably Bushesque in its seductive simplicity, part of what we should be fighting against is the idea that the only tenable positions are those that can be stated in three words or less. When trains leap the tracks and head toward the cliff, you’re right to hop off.
September 23rd, 2004 at 2:25 pm
Michael,
I think you’re correct in thinking that some of the bright young lefty bloggers didn’t want to be identified with the
“dumbass hippies.” They probably like to think of themselves as sober realists who aren’t ready to hit the streets with the masses of unwashed anti-war protestors.
I’ve always thought that one of the strongest arguments against the Iraq War was the fact that it was the brainchild of the Bush administration. Given that Feith, Perle, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld were the architects of the fiasco, wasn’t it obvious from the beginning that it was going to be fought for the wrong reasons and would end badly?
September 23rd, 2004 at 2:25 pm
I find nothing wrong with folks being instinctively anti-war. Logically or emotionally, I find it reassuring. Instinctive hawks are far more disturbing.
But once the knee stops jerking, serious thought of when and why to war are essential. I think Afghanistan was essential. Al Qaida had to be rooted from its base and more importantly, disabused of its notion that the US shuns war and can’t take casualties.
None of us could have foreseen the blunders that permitted Al Qaida’s leaders to escape or how quickly attention to that pursuit would shift before the job was complete.
Furthermore, I can’t see how an act of defense, precipitated by an attack on us, had anything to do with the strategic mindset that went on to fight a pre-emptive war against an already pre-empted cripple like Hussein. Are some suggesting that changed the popular will to grant Bush legitimacy? I don’t buy that for the reasons you state. Bush would have pursued this course with 40% support. And from what O’Neill & Clarke have said, such planning preceded 9-11.
However, I don’t think the hard Left was delegitimizedby their opposition to the first war, except at a personal level. When I see 100,000 people marching, I don’t stop to consider that 40,000 were at the march against the previous war.
And at the personal level, other considerations come into play that affect legitimacy. Experience with or in war, and good argumentation, for example, can outweigh whether someone errs in a prior conflict. The majority of Americans are not war experts by training or experience, so I don’t demand judgmental perfection to consider their opinions from there.
As I recall, the antiwar movement was dismissed as a ‘focus group’ by the administration. Short of street riots threatening a coup, I don’t think Bush would have been influenced had George Patton and Jesus Christ showed up to argue against the Iraq invasion.
September 23rd, 2004 at 2:34 pm
In 2,000 words or less, there has always been apocalypticism and loopiness all along the political spectrum. Everybody remembers the images of mushroom clounds coming out of the faces of assorted Bushies. There have always been left factions — leninist, pacifist, anarchist, etc. — that automatically reject U.S. intervention. They’re right about 90 percent of the time, which is not a bad average. The problem is that it guarantees them minority political status, but all this is an old story.
The real question is why those who do not reject U.S. intervention out of hand are not able to establish their own political center. It’s sort of like Kerry-backers bashing Nader, when what people really need are reasons to be for Kerry.
The impulse of some in this camp seems to be more about distinguishing themselves from bad lefts — an exercise encouraged by the corporate media, who love it when left bashes left — than about opposing bad interventions.
For instance, Todd Gitlin and Rabbi Michael Lerner had columns in the NY Times and WSJ Journal respectively, with which they availed themselves of the opportunity to launch extended denunciations of lefts, and in passing against THE WAR. Possibly they would not have been given platforms under any other terms. So who is at fault there?
Put another way, why are the non-automatic anti-interventionists repelled by the WWP, but not by pro-war supporter Ann Coulter? At an anti-war rally in D.C. administered — as opposed to led — by the WWP, there were a bunch of old school vets with signs calling assorted Bushies chicken hawks. They weren’t bothered by WWP. They paid no attention to them.
Introspection would seem to be called for.
September 23rd, 2004 at 2:40 pm
Damn. After writing all that I realized this farkatke site doesn’t even link to me.
September 23rd, 2004 at 2:56 pm
You err, Max. We’re gradually eliminating sidebar links. Click on the ‘States’ tab at the top and you’ll see yourself mired in a state listing. But please note the vertical column to the bottom where your economocentric leanings are given more prominent billing.
And btw, what is farkatke? Is it macro or micro? Is there a cure?
September 23rd, 2004 at 2:57 pm
Well, let the introspectin’ begin, is what I’m saying. Back in November 2002 when I wrote this 2000-or-more-word essay for a paper that was neither the NYT nor the WSJ, I was pretty ambivalent about my own desires, past and present, to distinguish myself from what I saw as dumbass-hippie arguments (and this is an aspect of the essay that the witty and subtle Edward Herman, over at ZNet, trashed in a way I found at once delightful, humorous, and, um, completely intellectually dishonest) when the matter at hand was a possibly catastrophic war. And I see some of that self-differentiating dynamic in the work of the Apologetic Young Progressives– much stronger, obviously, if it pushed them so far as to join the Cheney-Feith-Perle-Wolfowitz travelling show.
September 23rd, 2004 at 4:36 pm
Despite having the same knee-jerk repulsion to the “dumbass hippie” crowd, and despite being a big fan of Michael’s writing, I’m gonna have to go with the “hard-left” on the issue of Afghanistan. I don€™t think that the €œterrorist intelligentsia€ actually believes that America is weak or €œshuns war€. In fact they count on our war-mongering nature. Terrorism is completely different ballgame, with little or no relevance to wars of the past. The terrorists have no set address, and as soon as country is invaded they hightail it elsewhere, leaving only a few dupes and the civilian populace to face the wrath of their targets (which only serves to swell their ranks). The point of terrorism is to gain attention and new recruits, and how better than an invasion by the Great Satan to popularize their fanaticism.
Now imagine that instead of declaring war, we declared that we were going to turn our vast resources towards solving the problems that create the anger and desperation that drives people into the arms of extremists. Imagine that we used are tremendous political leverage not to expand global corporate interests, not to secure more resources for ourselves, but to pressure national leaders to give their people more rights and more say in their own governance. Imagine that we decided to lead the world in convincing the Israel and Palestine to make a final lasting peace (and enforcing their cooperation by cutting off all aid to both parties - from us or anyone else). We would have actually become the great shining light of freedom and peace that we now pretend to be. And what would the Muslim terrorists do if the Palestians got their own autonomy and were no longer dying by Israeli hands? How would they gain recruits when people could see that America was fighting for the little guy? Who would sacrifice their lives or their children’s to attack someone who was obviously working to make their life better? In time regimes like the Saddam€™s and the Taliban would begin to fall of their own accord, as their support systems collapsed, as people saw the changes in neighboring countries, saw that they would receive global support even though they didn’t practice the same religion or have the same skin color or own anything of value. And if, at that point, if these governments were to attempt to brutally suppress their own citizens, and together the rest of the world stepped in to stop them, who would object then? As long we did it consistently across the board - as long as we sanctioned Likud as harshly as Hamas, were as intolerant of the right-wing dictator as we were of the left-wing revolutionary, I cannot see how such an approach would fail. And in the end we would all be safer, freer, and richer for it (with the exception of arms manufacturers and other purveyers of war - and I sure wouldn’t weep to see their tables overturned…).
September 23rd, 2004 at 4:44 pm
Apologies for spelling and grammatical errors in the last post. I was writing with some haste (being that I’m supposed to be working right now…).
September 23rd, 2004 at 5:17 pm
As a grad of both the University of Washington and the University of Oregon, I am irritated at the comment about the “dumbass hippies” in Eugene and Seattle. Farley is talking about me!
All I can say is…we were right. So who’s the dumbass now?
September 23rd, 2004 at 6:31 pm
Hi, Dallas– just posting this comment over here as well, in reply to yours. Thanks for the critique. I have no special claim on the truth of these matters, and was initially torn about whether to support that war, especially since it was being waged by an administration chock full of madmen.
Though I have to say, by way of clarification, that I never predicated my support for war in Afghanistan on the argument that the €œterrorist intelligentsia€ thought we were we weak. I argued, instead, that (a) we did not have the luxury of waiting around for the Taliban to fall (to whom?) or for our own government to change hands before destroying their terror-training camps and that (b) some of the hard-left arguments against that war (not all– just the €œsilent genocide€ / €œcrime against humanity many times greater than 9/11€ ones) were not only substantively wrong, but (because of their wrongness, and the stridency with which they were advanced) were tantamount to propaganda gifts to the right. I also believe that such arguments drove some progressives and liberals away from the left€™s more plausible post-9/11 arguments, some of which you€™ve mentioned here and most of which I still agree with (particularly with regard to Israel and Palestine).
And PZ, what you say we form a 527 called “Dumbass Hippies for Truth”? Me, I’m taking it easy on these young whippersnapper bloggers because, unlike so many other liberal hawks, they’ve had the intellectual honesty to admit that this debacle calls into question their credibility as liberal commentators /opponents of Bush.
September 23rd, 2004 at 7:14 pm
Micheal,
And I’ll reply to your reply here too, as well (last one for today, I promise)…
You make some good points, but in regards to (a), I€™m not convinced that the war adequately achieved either of those goals (removal of the Taliban or destruction of terror camps), while it did manage to squelch the world€™s sympathy for 9/11, and further anger and polarize the Muslim community (not as much as Iraq, granted, but still€). Besides, that was a treatment of the symptoms and not the disease (and the treatment itself may actually kill the patient).
In regards to (b), I find myself torn as well. On the one hand I appreciate the argument that Progressive idealism - particularly in regards to Pacificism - needs to make some compromises to gain any purchase with the larger public, while on the other I fear that such compromises is what ultimately dooms it to failure. It is compromise that has drawn this county steadily to the Right over the last several decades. Visionaries like Jesus and Gandhi did not compromise (which is a big part of what made them visionaries). They never said it was OK to hit back if the offender really, really deserved it (because of course the concept of €˜justified€™ violence opens a floodgate of rationalization, and you€™re right back where you started). Of course, one could legitimately debate the ultimate success of Jesus and Gandhi, as Christianity has come to represent the precise opposite of Jesus€™ teachings, and Pacifism has hardly been adopted as the standard of liberation for oppressed peoples of the world. But is that failure a result of actual human nature, or just assumptions about human nature?
And the “DHT” 527? I’m all up with that!
September 23rd, 2004 at 8:29 pm
Dallas rocks.
Don’t like them dumbass hippies either but they are several lightyears better than their conservative counterparts. The culture and economy in this country positively kept in business by the glorification of testosterone and assumptions that human nature will never change.
September 23rd, 2004 at 8:33 pm
About the removal of the Taliban and the destruction of the terror camps: I happen to agree (which also means that I admit I spoke too soon when I spoke of the €œrouting€ of the Taliban in fall 2002). But my agreement doesn€™t mean that I don€™t support an effective routing of the Taliban and destruction of the terror camps. It means only that one should never trust the Bush administration with anything, anything at all, no matter how important or how trivial. You shouldn€™t even hand them a jelly jar with a tight lid– Christ only knows how they could go about shredding the domestic economy and our foreign alliances with an unopened jelly jar.
And I sense a real groundswell building for this new 527!
September 23rd, 2004 at 10:33 pm
Even though I’m a dumbass hippie who ultimately opposed the American intervention in the decades-long Afghan civil war, well, I struggled with the decision. In the end, I opposed it on a couple grounds.
1. America’s reliance on air war is designed to minimize American death while maximizing the likelihood of civilian non-American death, and this really is a crime against humanity. I don’t know the numbers — nobody does — but George Bush has killed more civilian Muslims than Osama bin Laden has killed civilian Americans. Maybe not in Afghanistan alone, but in Iraq for sure, several times over.
2. I did not trust George Bush to prosecute the war with competence or integrity. Mistrust well placed.
3. The whole “war on terror” rhetoric scared — and scares — the shit out of me. Leaving aside the Orwellian implications for a moment, let’s just think about this word “war.” By declaring (an officially undeclared) war, Bush legitimized the enemy. Warriors can legitimately strike at military targets, such as the Pentagon, such as the high command, such as weapons factories and military bases. Living in Seattle, I’m surrounded by the latter. I know Bush doesn’t mean what he says, and he never met a double standard he didn’t like, but that doesn’t mean I have to like the meaning of what he actually says.
I admire the young liberal hawks for admitting they’d been snookered. I hope they’ve learned to avoid the cultural snobbery that seduced them into a pretty bad mistake.
September 24th, 2004 at 5:21 am
This dumbass hippie opposed any knee jerk reaction that didn’t address the root of the problem. Dallas explained part of the correct approach. What I think is missing at this point is focusing on the source of the fanaticism, which is Saudi Arabia. They espouse the twisted version of Islam that is being touted and they fund it extensively. Now its spreading to every corner of the globe, Bosnia, Chechnya, Pakistan, etc. This will require the dual appraoch of displaying the superior moral behaviour outlined by Dallas as well addressing the sopurce which is Saudia Arabia. Bush is so dangerous because he has done neither.
September 24th, 2004 at 7:16 am
I’d like to see this argument explored from another viewpoint. How much of the Right’s view of the world is colored by revulsion of “dirty hippies”? I’d say it’s one of their main driving forces, if not THE main driving force. The image of “liberal” they concocted, and foisted upon the world, is a derivative of this. A large segment of the American public hears “liberal” and thinks of hairy, dirty kids screaming in the streets and smoking dope. We need to get this image changed in the minds of the public, and it’s going to take years. Hell, as evidenced by this thread, even ome of us buy into it.
September 24th, 2004 at 7:47 am
Why do I always think of “The Great Rock and Roll Swindle”, when I hear (SCL)’Murkins debating this war? Just what in ‘Murkin Govmint history leads anyone to think ‘Murkin Govmint is anything but the latest bully in the world? I mean it’s not the first time ‘Murkin Govmint lied to get people to fight for them is it.
September 24th, 2004 at 8:19 am
Two points:
1. It was the political activists on the radical left in the 60’s - who despised the hippies - who propagated explanatory theories of which blowback and “silent genocide” are modern examples of the same reasoning process. The contempt was mutual. Jerry Garcia, he of the Grateful Dead, once said, “For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.” I assume that Jerry subsumed fine herbal refreshments, great music, and transcendent sex under the rubric of spiritual here.
As a long-haired musician back then, with all that implies, I went to anti-war rallies -you’d have to be a fool not to, given the total stupidity of the war and the beautiful young people of your preferred sexual persuasion you’d meet - but I never bought into the radical political theorizing.
2. As for it being a bad thing to be kneejerk anti-war, I’d be very curious if anyone can come up with any “just war” fought during my lifetime (1952 to present) that resulted in a happy outcome and that was worth the slaughter. When I think about it, the Cuban Revolution is perhaps the only one that comes close. Great example. Ditto Algeria. Things improved, yes, but at terrible cost.
On the other hand, the Velvet Revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union was pretty bloodless (the Velvet entirely so). South Africa was bloody, but the transfer of power to Mandela and the ANC did not require the armed overthrow of the government and the carnage of major war.
Any more?
Now, the way I see it, it stands to reason that every once in a blue moon a just war comes along that’s worth the bloody price (your blood, not mine, I’m not a fool, dammit!). But in the past fifty-two years, I can’t think of one. As for pre-’52, I’ll defer judgment as to whether or not those wars were just to those who went through them.
Peace, love, flowers.
September 24th, 2004 at 4:04 pm
Odd that the “dumbass hippies” comment is the one that has made the rounds; I think that the point regarding Wolfers and the careful construction of the national interest is a more important element of that old post.
Also, in fairness to myself, I did successfully overcome the “dumbass hippie” obstacle well before the Iraq War, although supported the Afghan operation. Moreover, just because the hippies turned out to be right doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.
September 25th, 2004 at 6:26 am
At least the dumbass hippies share their weed. The smart ones just lord it over you and end up being stock traders, anyway.
Tristero seems to be a little older than me - it was my older brother that got to go to all the fun anti-war rallies in the sixties. But he brought home the literature for me and I didn’t buy into it ’cause I didn’t understand what the hell they were talking about.
One thing that was lost to all but the dumbass hippies is that war is a bad thing. The price is high in ways people ignor before hand. For example, there are Americans whose personal histories now include being torturers. That self knowledge will now torture them. There are thousands with missing limbs made not completely whole with prosthetics. People don’t deal with killing all so well. And what kind of trade is treasure for blood when the blood just disappears into desert sand? But nobody, nobody would accept the best of the anti-war arguments - that war sucks and is not worth fighting less you are attacked.
Those looking for irony can find it in Afganistan. I think Tristero is right - time and moral suasion will right the wrongs of the worst among us. Franco’s Spain isn’t quite as Facist as it was pre-Chevy Chase. Yet, even I thought the Afganistan war was justified since between Al Qaeda and the Taliban one can’t tell which is dog and which is tail. And we were attacked. The irony comes when one considers that if the neo-cons focused their attention and our resources on Afganistan as a pilot for their crazy hegemony theories they might have impressed me and the world with their Neo-World Order. Instead, they had to write the tragedy of Iraq.
September 27th, 2004 at 6:54 pm
You’re absolutely right, except that Bush didn’t make the decision at noon because he was still having his diaper changed from having wet himself while reading ‘my pet goat.’
September 30th, 2004 at 1:13 pm
Bush learned from his father: War is great for the popularity, but if it peaks too soon before the election, you’re out.
George W. Bush’s problem was this: The war in Afghanistan had peaked, and there were two years to go to the election season. In order to keep his popularity up, he needed another war . . .
That’s the only possibility that really makes any sense, no matter how repugnant the thought.