In this recent JWN post I argued that the “soggy universalism” that pervaded much of the discussion among liberal or left-leaning westerners in the 1990s had allowed the emergence of a not insignificant group of westerners whom I characterized as “liberal hawks”.
I wrote there,
- It was in and over Saddam’s Iraq, however, that the arguments of the liberal hawks were put to the severest test; and this one they have very evidently failed.
Anyway, go read the whole of that earlier post if you want to get the fuller context for what follows.
One of the most thought-provoking comments submitted to that post came from Robert H. Consoli. I emailed him subsequently and told him I’d found his comment interesting, but hard to read because of formating problems… and I asked him to try to sort those problems out and resubmit it.
He was kind enough to do that. (He made a few clarificatory revisions along the way. Those do not materially change the argument he made earlier.)
But before I got his return email, I had taken the opportunity of a long train-ride to DC yesterday to work on one of my “tabulated” commentaries– on the basis of his earlier comment, which, yes, I had myself also painstakingly reformated by then.
So what I propose to do here is first of all to paste in his (slightly revised) version of his comment, so it is now here in a main post, and then to paste in the tabulated set of my responses to that. I tried to revise that version of his text in line with the revised version he sent me, but may have failed to incorporate a couple of his–admittedly very minor– revisions.
So anyway, here we have:
- Robert H. Consoli on the question of the ‘liberal hawks’
Hello
I
take issue with your burlesque of ‘liberal hawks’ and their reasoning. You’ve collapsed an unbelievably complex
story into several points in a diatribe.
More, you’re not describing the motives of those who made the
war but
those who simply failed to resist it.
Those who made or strongly motivated the war – the Cheneys,
the Kristols, the Perles,
etc. – had very different motivations from those which you list here. Their motives either had to do with a
millenarian dream of control of oil regions or it had to do with the
supposed
security of
as seen through a Likud prism. These two motives have always been directly
opposed to each other but, for a period, they were made to appear as
though
they were instrumentalities to the same end.
There were additional motives among this top tier of war
supporters. These included things such
as a desire to use
as a test case for Supply-Side economics as Trudy Rubin has so ably
demonstrated. The desire to reward
Republican apparatchiks with sinecures in
this
level.
Nor should we discount the fact of simple personal corruption
among the
most powerful movers and shakers. These
are
people who
obviously see the deaths of American soldiers as a means of
lining their own pockets. I defy anyone
to show that this is too harsh.
The list which you’ve actually provided does not describe those
actors. It does apply to those among
the, shall we say it?, intelligentsia; those
whose
occupations required them to write about the war in newspapers,
magazines, and
journals. These are those who wrote, blogged or
spoke about the
war before veterans groups, foreign-affairs-oriented clubs, womens‘
groups, and service clubs. I’m referring
to the powerless opinion makers of every stripe who used moral grounds
to sell
the
In this list you identify various aspects of that meliorism
which, like it or not, stems historically from the undoubted success of
the
western powers in opposing and then rolling back the physical and moral
destruction of
Among the rank and file of everyday Americans, those who had, as
individuals, no power either to support or oppose the war through any
other
means than their individual votes, a third set of justifications was
assembled. Those justifications reduced to
simple fear. Fear of the Other, fear of Islam, fear of violence on the
part of people
with brown skins, fear of terrorism, and fear of nuclear weapons. Those who had the power to make the war
created this third tier of arguments in order to pacify the broad mass
of
Americans. You know this quite well as
you have often alluded to it. These
justifications, in their simplest and original form, consist of the
continual irresponsible
statements of Cheney, Rice, and Bush (‘the smoking gun’ statement and
many
others) which began right after 9/11/01 and continued with increasing
frequency
and vehemence right up to the actual invasion of Iraq on 3/18/03.
Therefore the list which you’ve provided applies only to a very
small
number of people and had no role in creating the war but it did have a
role in
quieting and pacifying the class of opinion makers.
In any case these motivations were
supplemental to the much more powerful motivation of simple fear.
You can barely conceal your contempt for this catalogue of
motivations. Let us see if that contempt
is deserved. In his book, The Rise of
the Vulcans, Jim Mann describes the
motivations of Wolfowitz in planning and
facilitating the invasion of
makes it clear that Wolfowitz
saw the war as a noble effort to liberate an enslaved people from a mad
tyrant. In his mind it was all one with
the Holocaust and Saddam was Hitler. Let
us go back to that time, 2002, and look at it from his perspective. Here’s Wolfowitz,
the perfect example of your points 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5. Now answer this question honestly: was he wrong?
No hindsight allowed. Was Wolfowitz’s meliorism
wrong? Like the Likud
or
hate it. Likudniks
see
survival as the same as opposing Hitler; opposition to Arab regimes is
the same
as opposing the Holocaust. You adduce
all sorts of hypocrisies inherent in your catalog of justifications.
You’re right.
But it’s irrelevant.
If you can put yourself in Wolfowitz’s
shoes
and honestly answer that Wolfowitz was
wrong then
your catalog is sensible. I personally
don’t know how anyone can answer that way, not even you.
Looking back at it he was obviously wrong. That’s
not the point. At the time no one could
say that that was
not a noble effort. And Wolfowitz’s meliorism
is based on
that simple idea.
Where do we go from here? We can
say, as you imply, that meliorism is wrong
tout
court. That’s fine. We
can live as Jesus intended us to live when
he said ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’
No invasion of
invasion of
(a harder case). No bombing of Kosovo (a
much harder
case). No
(an easy case).
No WWII.
Then suppose that now
is a German protectorate along with
We can re-think our whole post-war history
and get used to the idea of Fascism and race purity as major components
of the
modern Western political experience. Good. We also get used to the idea of the slaughter
of all the remaining Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and babies with birth
defects
in
European societies will be run along strictly ‘Scientific’ lines. Catholic and Protestant churches are tamed
along with their archaic moral attitudes.
Liberal democracies are a thing of the past, even in
since
they so disastrously failed in the between-wars period.
I guess that meliorism was good in that case.
But what makes meliorism good in
some
circumstances and not good in others? No
one knows. There is no decision
principle. As Isaiah
crooked
timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made’.
Or, rather, I should say ‘no one person
knows’. The experience of mankind has
tended to confirm the greater reliability of decisions made on the
basis of
free exchange of views. That is,
political structures founded on the idea of open exchange of views
tend, over
the long run, to be a bit more stable than those regimes committed to a strict hierarchical flow
of information and decision-making. This
is not a panacea, of course. Decisions
made freely and in the open have been failing since at least the time
of the
Athenian’s Sicilian expedition and, probably, from long before.
To see how silly your catalog
is let us
re-phrase it in terms of an immediate situation which we can all
understand.
(1) Sometimes a person is drowning and something has to be done
to stop
it.
(2) “We”, who are well-meaning citizens of societies that
don’t believe in drowning have our
sensibilities so
exquisitely
attuned to questions
of whether drowning is right or wrong whenever it
occurs that we are uniquely positioned to discern
and understand
these situations and we have a unique responsibility
to ‘intervene’ to suppress and reverse the drowning
process.
(3) It “just so
happens” that among the many instruments of policy at our command is to
don bathing suits and get on the diving board and use all the
technology we
have which allows for:
(a) rapid entrance
into the water for a knock-out strike that can rapidly arrest the
drowning
process.
(b) they can
meanwhile limit to an absolute minimum the risks of “collateral”
damage to other swimmers.
(c) they also
obviate the need for “our side” to throw into the battle any large
numbers of life guards such as might be
expensive to raise and
maintain in the field, and might later be expected
to come back as broken people (or
drowned themselves) into our own society.
(4) And meanwhile, though
“we” the righteous rescuers continue to pay lip-service to all kinds
of ideals about human equality and the need for global institutions
like the
United Nations, still all those institutions are deeply flawed; they
are
riddled with inefficiencies and corruption and make it difficult to get
to the
pool in time to rescue actual drowning persons.
Therefore….
(5) We need to conclude, with or
without a lingering scintilla of regret, that the only way those drownings about which we are so concerned can be
prevented
in a timely fashion is through an “intervention” to be undertaken by
us (me) — and on a unilateral or otherwise non-UN basis, if need be. (And how much better if at
the same time we can redefine our language’s longstanding vocabulary to
the
extent we feel comfortable calling this anti-drowning action a
“humanitarian” intervention…)
Stated like this your points would elicit universal agreement. Would you let a person drown if you had the
power to prevent it? You would. Would you let Saddam’s thugs
torture random Iraqis if you thought it could be prevented? Would you lift a hand to save the dying Jews
of Poland? Would you…?
Would you ….?
The questions are endless and some of them are easy to answer
and some
of them are not. I might let Saddam’s
thugs continue to torture if, in order to prevent it,
I had to institute a draft. I
might
allow the murder and deportation of all Kosovars
continue if to prevent it will cost more than 100 billion dollars. Or maybe 50 billion; I’m not certain. I
might be willing to do something for
than 100 military lives and 10 billion dollars.
But if it’s 11 billion all bets are
off. Stated this way it seems immoral but
that’s
life. Every moral action has a cost and
if the cost is too high it threatens to disable the entire moral system. For example, how much should a National Guard
family in
relieve
every 150 inhabitants of
A family of five vs.
150
residents of
Maybe we could allow that family in
have been driven off their lands since the dawn of time and there’s precious
little that we can do about
it. But if the cost to save them is less
than 150 dollars per
or Nebraskan Guard family then maybe it’s doable.
Nor do we even get into Kierkegaard’s elaborations on the
Teleological
Suspension of the Ethical. E.g., when is
it justifiable to break the law (violate ethical principles) in order
to
prevent a greater evil? Hmmm? Kierkegaard
thought that, in the right circumstances, we could violate the Ethical
itself. For Kierkegaard all the Darfurians could go and hang themselves and we
should assist
them – if it was truly God’s will that they should do so.
That was God’s message to Abraham according
to K. And wasn’t that the argument line
in
All these decisions are fraught with considerations and costs. All these decisions are heavily laden with
complex historical antecedents.
To be forced to make such decisions in the face of lousy
information is
the cost of being human.
We must always make decisions in doubt and ignorance; we must
mitigate
the costs and increase the benefits. If we can.
To make a mistake is pardonable.
To fail to predict the future and lives be lost as a result is
pardonable. What’s not pardonable – and
this, I think, is what you’re angry about (along with all the rest of us) – is
to refuse to look the truth in the eye and learn from disaster.
But that’s a different list.
And now, if you have the energy to carry on reading, here is my response to him:
| Consoli’s comment |
My response |
| A. Hello Helena,
I take issue with your burlesque of ‘liberal Those who made or strongly motivated the war – the Cheneys, the There were additional motives among this top tier of war supporters. Nor should we discount the fact of simple personal corruption among the The list which you’ve actually provided does not describe those actors. In this list you identify various aspects of that meliorism which, like Among the rank and file of everyday Americans, those who had, as |
Hi, Robert.
i. I really appreciate your willingness to engage deeply with what I I also appreciate the general friendliness and collegiality of your I was sorry, though, that you thought my post presented a “burlesque” of the ii. Actually, the “liberal hawks” include some of my best friends and iii. I’d like to note, however, that these are not people who “merely |
| B. Therefore the list which you’ve provided applies only to a very small number of people and had no role in creating the war but it did have a role in quieting and pacifying the class of opinion makers. In any case these motivations were supplemental to the much more powerful motivation of simple fear. You can barely conceal your contempt for this catalogue of motivations. You’re right. But it’s irrelevant. If you can put yourself in Wolfowitz’s shoes and honestly answer that |
i. Re “had no role”, see A-iii above. ii. Re your claim of my ill-concealed “contempt” for the motivations of To me, one of the extremely interesting moral questions is “Why do good So maybe, yes, I did caricature the thinking of the liberal hawks iii. Yes, I believe Wolfowitz was wrong. I said so before I repeat: At the time I said the invasion of Iraq was an effort (I’m not sure about the relevance of your excursus into the thinking |
| C. Where do we go from here? We can say, as you imply, that meliorism is wrong tout court. That’s fine. We can live as Jesus intended us to live when he said ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’ No invasion of Iraq. No invasion of Afghanistan (a harder case). No bombing of Kosovo (a much harder case). No Vietnam (an easy case). No WWII. Then supose that now Britain is a German protectorate along with I guess that meliorism was good in that case. But what makes meliorism good in some circumstances and not good in |
i. I don’t believe that meliorism is wrong tout court. But I do think that when a person or persons seek to act on their desires to better the situation of fellow-humans they should be very proactive about seeking the best possible ‘feedback’ they can get from the people whom they seek to help, to ensure that that help is indeed having the desired effect. Paternalistically thinking they know what is best for others and then– without even checking in systematically with those others for their feedback on the plan– is the height of arrogance, and liberals are by no means immune to it. A case in point: sanctions. In both apartheid South Africa and You bring in Hitlerism, I don’t know what position I would have But Saddam was no Hitler, so bringing Hitler in to the present Yes, I know these questions are difficult. But I don’t think it’s You are right to say that “The experience of I note, though, that it was precisely a free exchange of views that the |
| D. To see how sill your catalog is let us re-phrase your catalog in terms of an immediate situation which we may all understand. (1) Sometimes a person is drowning and something has to be done to stop it. (2) “We”, who are well-meaning citizens of societies that don’t believe in drowning have our sensibilities so exquisitely attuned to questions of whether drowning is right or wrong whenever it occurs that we are uniquely positioned to discern and understand these situations and we have a unique responsibility to ‘intervene’ to suppress and reverse the drowning process. (3) It “just so happens” that among the many instruments of policy at our command is to don bathing suits and get on the diving board and use all the technology we have which allows for:
(a) rapid entrance into the water
for a knock-out strike that can rapidly arrest the drowning process. (b) they can meanwhile limit to an absolute minimum the risks of “collateral” damage to other swimmers. (c) they also obviate the need for “our side” to throw into the battle any large numbers of life guards such as might be expensive to raise and maintain in the field, and might later be expected to come back as broken people (or drowned themselves) into our own society.
|
I liked the attempt to describe the drowning scenario. (And yes, I think we can all agree that if we see a person drowning in front of us, we would not even think of calling in the United Nations!) But in the end I think your drowning scenario fails to capture Firstly, there is one huge and operationally important difference Human agency is important because it does allow for what I might call Re your #2, there are vast epistemological challenges involved in Re your 3-a, we can immediately see another key aspect of the ‘human Another means that governments might theoretically use to incapacitate Also, note that in #3 I only say that these precision-guided weapons Anyway, I imagine you see now why I found the drowning scenario |
|
>E. Stated The questions
|
i. No, I would not let someone drown if I could save them! (And actually, in my family, my son was involved around 20 years ago in diving in to save his youngest sister from diving in a pool. I note that this was not because I chose not to, but because I hadn;t noticed she had fallen in… ) Would I “let” Saddam’s thugs torture random Iraqis if I thought it You know, I really am a rampant meliorist, so I don’t know why you Your questions about “saving” Saddam’s victims or the Jews of See what the US’s use of violence in Iraq has wrought. And yes, Your questions about a National Guard family in Arkansas versus X ii. Yes, to be forced to make decisions on the basis of highly |
|
F. We must always make decisions
|
i. Your “We must always make decisions… ” H’mm. I’m assuming you’re referring to decisions that have operational consequences. But why do so many Westerners assume that it is “we” in the west who have to do anything in regard to the actions of distant others, except to (a) examine and re-examine the policies of our own governments, to see how those might have impacted on the situation we are concerned about, and to correct those policies if necessary; and (b) provide comfort and aid to those harmed by the distant actions, and engage respectfully with all the parties to those distant conflicts to see how those conflicts might be brought to an end on a sustainable and rights-respecting basis? With regard to the actions of our own governments I would include arms In fact, if we westerners are serious about preventing the commission of ii. Also, there was no “failure to predict” that an invasion of Iraq |
The problem with Consoli’s argument is that it involves all manner of historical cheating. For example the alternative posed to US non-intervention in WWII is “Britain as a Nazi protectorate…”etc. There are many more alternatives which are more probable. The problem is that people often see the war through Churchill’s eyes. If Britain is so important then consider the critical role played by the historical personage whose name I have taken. Consider the importance of the liberating effects, in US and Canadian societies as well as Britain’s, of the Beveridge Report and wartime New Deal as they mobilised deep strata of alienated people turning indifference into enthusiasm for victory. Then consider, something which is rarely even recognised, the incredible mobilisation of soviet society into an energy which threw off the Wehrmacht within months. (The Cold War prevented the west from recognising the incredible sense of awakening the “Thaw” which pervaded soviet society: one of the great opportunities missed by humanity as Russians were driven back upon themselves after the demonstration in Hiroshima.)
It is undoubtedly true that we make decisions on the basis of incomplete and barely recognised historical data. And that is why we should treat the data that we can discover with respect.
The question , after all, is not what we will do to prevent Saddam’s thugs from torturing Iraqis. That question has been answered. The real question is what we will do to prevent Bush’s thugs from torturing Iraqis, as their predecessors tortured Nicaraguans, Guatemalans and so on. The question is whether we will work ourselves up into blood misted berserker’s fury in order to bomb Iranian cities. And Helena is correct in her evaluation of the crucial role of ideologues in neutralising the revulsion of the, instinctively humane, populace.
I have never experienced war – yet – I feel a deep visceral gut reaction to the very idea of starting up a war where none existed.
It just seems to me that EVERYTHING else should be tried FIRST to prevent a war from ever starting. And there is just a ton of “stuff” that could be tried in Iraq – like letting the UN inspections continue, then lifting sanctions, then promoting trade based on better human rights records ~~
of course, all of the above is based on the assumption that ridding Saddam’s abuses of Iraqis was really the basis for the invasion and occupation. From what I have seen, the bush/cheney administration did not/does not give a rat’s ass about what the Iraqi people are suffering, or even if they survive. So, for someone to postulate that we needed to get rid of Saddam for human right’s sake SHOULD HAVE TAKEN A CLOSER LOOK AT THE US ADMINISTRATION IN POWER IN 2002.
I also don’t think that they care what happens to the Afghan people. With a basic attitude like that, how can anyone expect the application of violence from an uncaring source will result in benefit to the recipient???
or, to put back into the drowning person analogy (even though that is an inappropriate analogy) it’s like asking a group of people if they will act to save a drowning person and the group says they will after they realize there is a huge profit to be made and who cares if the drowning person gets saved or not, anyway?
Helena, your response was very good, but I wasn’t that impressed by the questioner. Hitler analogies are almost always the wrong ones to bring into play, because the situation there was so extreme in so many ways. A more honest comparison would be, say, to the Kosovo intervention. If one accepted that one as justified (and not everyone does), how was Iraq different? When does one decide if war is preferable to some other policy choice? Playing the Hitler card is just so over the top–the situation is almost never that grave.
As for Wolfowitz, I don’t think he is quite the pro-democracy idealist the MSM usually portrays. The one piece of evidence in his favor is the fact that he spoke out for Palestinians at a public event where that was not a popular position to take. (I forget the circumstances, but remember that he did this.) That shows some level of good intentions, I think, at least at that moment.
On the other hand, with respect to Indonesia (where he was a diplomat) and East Timor he was an apologist for Suharto (whose record of mass murder probably exceeds Saddam’s) and for the Indonesian occupation of East Timor almost to the last minute. (My source here is Joseph Nevins’ book on East TImor “A Not So Distant Horror”). And I don’t have my copy handy, but a source that I trust tells me that Ray Bonner’s book on the US and Marcos “Waltzing With a Dictator” shows a Paul Wolfowitz that supported Marcos almost to the end, when he finally changed. (I can’t vouch for that reading of the book firsthand, but that’s what someone else told me. My copy of the book is unavailable at the moment.)
I suspect a fair number of these liberal interventionists were hypocrites, the sort of people who favor US military intervention when an American enemy is the villain, but who say little or nothing when it is an American ally guilty of oppression. Which means they aren’t motivated primarily by human rights concerns, or they’d be focusing just as much or more energy urging us to poke and prod our allies to improve their behavior.
Wolfowitz seems to fit this description (with the possible exception of Israel and Palestine, but then, if he really cared about that issue, did he push very hard for a change in US policy?)
John K. Cooley: An Alliance Against Babylon
http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=136298
to those who like answers why Iraq and Why Babylon please read this book will tells you a lot of why.
To those who believes in evilness that drive a small group in this world this book will tells you how this evil still there and affective.
Caloo! Calay! Oh Frabjous Joy! Ken Livingstone, London’s Mayor, is going to outlast Tony Blair. There is a long interview with him in Johannesburg’s Saturday newspaper , The Weekender. Among other things, Livingstone answers re the 17-year wait for a government decision on the London “Crossrail” project by asking: “How is that different from any other decision the government takes apart from bombing the s**t out of someone in the third world? Those are the only decisions they take rapidly, killing black and brown people”.
I think Ken is only half right. From my observation, the preparation for any particular war project is usually a very long-term affair, and in addition feeds off a generic preparedness for Imperialist warfare. The active record is continuous (see Blum’s “Killing Hope”, for example) and so is the intellectual climate, carefully cultivated (in the USA) from the time of President McKinley, at least, until today.
The intelligentsia are crucial and that is why this site of Helena Cobban’s is so dynamic. Here we see assault after voluntary assault by one apologist after another. The “hasbaras” are only part of it. In recent days, Consoli has attempted to weave a cloth without holes, pegged to WW2, to cover all subsequent US wars. This is commonplace, and is part of the necessary follow-through from the barrage of propaganda prior to a war (in this case Iraq). It is revisionism. It overlaps with the intellectual build-up for the next wars (Somalia, Sudan, Iran et cetera).
Then again, “bb” has asserted, without evidence, that the liberal hawk Gore would have done the Iraq war better, and also made the outrageous suggestion that it was the peace demonstrations prior to the war that made it inevitable. “Inkan” has written that Iraq was bad but Afghanistan is good. This is the quintessential (and preposterous) liberal hawk position: that there are good wars, and the US must fight them. The not-good wars are unfortunate mistakes.
These volunteers are following a more-or less official line that from my South African point of view is indistinguishable whether it comes from Republican or Democrat, liberal, neo-liberal, or neo-conservative. All the hawks are liberals, and all the liberals are hawks.
Helena is very strong to be able to maintain a critique in the face of all this. Generally speaking US critics of Imperial war-mongering are hobbled by reliance the same a priori world view as their opponents. Consoli takes full and indeed “manipulative” advantage of this, insisting that the common US ceiling of assumptions demand only one moral conclusion – his own.
Consoli feels able to do this, in part, because indeed there is such a ceiling. (For an example of how this works, see the way he avoids claiming the military victory in WW2 but nonetheless feels free to expropriate the moral prizes on behalf of the USA). I know about this ceiling because I am a communist, and where US discourse is concerned I find myself faced with peculiar problems. The great body of intellectual work and practical history that we communists represent is simply unconscionable to the US intelligentsia as a whole. Even a passing knowledge of it, if discovered, would be dangerous to their careers, one suspects.
So one tries to write “ex novo” at times, so as to relieve them of their embarrassment, but it is not enough. I really think the war crisis is right here, at this juncture, with this contradiction.
If the intellectual tide could be turned, war would henceforth become difficult to impossible, because the enabling intellectual climate is essential to the war effort.
That’s a big “if”, because it implies a literal revolution, meaning that those now on top would be reduced and those now subordinated would rise to an ascendancy. As we would say, it would “become impossible to rule in the old way”. If such a moment approaches, the incumbents will fight (as they have always fought in previous such situations) a war of reaction, if necessary against their own people. The intellectuals have to be ready for that, too. I don’t yet see how this could all happen without the US intelligentsia rediscovering some kind of overt revolutionary theory – a revolution for peace, that is.
In fact, if we westerners are serious about preventing the commission of atrocities in distant lands we would do far better to use the huge powers at our disposal to build a more equitable, inclusive, peaceable, and humane world order in general, and to build up everyone’s capacities of nonviolent conflict resolution, rather than to continue to pump more violence and divisivesness into the world system at every turn.i>In fact, if we westerners are serious about preventing the commission of atrocities in distant lands we would do far better to use the huge powers at our disposal to build a more equitable, inclusive, peaceable, and humane world order in general, and to build up everyone’s capacities of nonviolent conflict resolution, rather than to continue to pump more violence and divisivesness into the world system at every turn.
Helena does you living between us on this planet?
What you talking about? did you forgot your heroes what they done to Iraqis in Abu Griab?
Did you read last week that 1/3 of your heroes troops doing killing and slaughtering random Iraqis?
Did you know why Africans dieing because of hunger and arm sale with conspires by west to loot the wealth of that land? Remember that Mark Thatcher saga!!
Helena, be more in touch with the reality on this world there is nothing whatsoever what you stating above, looking to the crimes Iraq , in Kosovo, looks to crime in Palestine with the west blindly support a Terrorist State, look all around the world who is behind major crimes against humanity?
Did you forget your bloody western history? Or you like us teaching to you Western again your history?
We got sick and tired of this idlest and words that’s far from the reality by panting that “ we westerners are serious serous of what Helena?
The only thing we can say yes you we westerners are serious of looting other wealth by making the cases, building the case by lies and dishonesty.
Read this from your very bright high educated folk and what rubbish he is saying:
Here’s how the decisions were made. Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the head of the military’s U.S. Central Command, outlawed the Baath Party on April 16, 2003. The day before I left for Iraq in May, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith presented me with a draft law that would purge top Baathists from the Iraqi government and told me that he planned to issue it immediately. Recognizing how important this step was, I asked Feith to hold off, among other reasons, so I could discuss it with Iraqi leaders and CPA advisers. A week later, after careful consultation, I issued this “de-Baathification” decree, as drafted by the Pentagon.
Our goal was to rid the Iraqi government of the small group of true believers at the top of the party, not to harass rank-and-file Sunnis. We were following in the footsteps of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower in postwar Germany. Like the Nazi Party, the Baath Party ran all aspects of Iraqi life. Every Iraqi neighborhood had a party cell. Baathists recruited children to spy on their parents, just as the Nazis had. Hussein even required members of his dreaded intelligence services to read “Mein Kampf.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/11/AR2007051102054_pf.html
Sometime before the summer solstice of 2003, I decided that the main, pretty well the exclusive, reason why the GOP extremists and their facilitators had marched into Iraq was they really and truly were terrorized of those forty-five-minute specials that Mr. Blair spoke of with such ever memorable alarm. The aggressors did not catch any such snarks in the provinces they conquered — there were no such snarks to catch — but these facts cannot, it seems to me, retrospectively alter the fact that what they were doing was above all a snark hunt.
Yet here are two people who must have paid at least as much attention as I did, and disagreeing expressly about what the Republicans thought they were doing, and even set out in a table side by side for convenience — and yet neither column mentions the contemporary WMD fuss at all.
Mr. Consoli has accused “the rank and file of everyday Americans” and “broad mass of Americans” and even “the class of opinion makers” of “simple fear . . . of nuclear weapons,” but he mentioned five other things first inside that ellipsis of mine that we cravens were presumably even more afraid of. In any case, he lets the good folks who actually made the war off the hook altogether as regards any sort of cowardice, and in general gives the impression that the policy-class aggressors cynically took advantage of a vulgar alarm that they did not themselves believe in for a moment. That adds up to about the reverse of my own estimate.)
What is going on here?
Dr. Cobban and Mr. Consoli can explain themselves better than I can guess explanations, but meanwhile it occurs to me that one reason why some American Democrats and Western liberals might not care for a WMD-based view is that it makes it impossible for doves and donkeys to procede on the basis of “Bush Lied!”. To be sure, neither of them actually says so, but I cannot imagine how they could say the rest of what they do say and not presuppose it.
==
Most of the material in the table after Column A and Column B get through disagreeing about how the Iraq fiasco started is a different story, not about Iraq in particular but about “anti-drowning action” in general. Perhaps I had better not get started on that lest I never finish, yet Mr. Consoli does ask a couple of questions in passing that may be answered very briefly:
Q1. “What makes meliorism good in some circumstances and not good in others?”
A1. It is good when it works. It is not so good when it leads to quagmires. Next question?
Q2. [Paraphrase] What would be a nicer name for ‘meliorism’ or ‘anti-drowning action’ or ‘humanitarian intervention’?
A2. How about “military humanism”? That’s what certain Old Euro leftists spoke of when they came out in favour of Secretary Albright’s War in 1998.
Happy days.
By David Michael Green
JHM – The wmd issue was one of the reasons given for the invasion, but it was not the goal. The goal was to overthrow Saddam, dismantle the Baath regime and establish a constitutional democracy in its place. The continued war is in opposition to US and UK having achieved their goal (so far).
I suggest that’s why the wmds don’t figure in the Consoli/Cobban discussion which is basically (I think) about the morality of liberals particularly “northern” liberals pursuing inventionist goals as outlined above, by military means.
The goal was to overthrow Saddam, but it was not the goal either.
Dismantle the Baath regime, but it was not the goal either.
Establish a constitutional democracy in its place. but it was not the goal either (what a joke).
First the strategic interests of the State of Israel (as history revenge from the exile to Babylon by Iraqi king Nebuchadnezzar Please read my suggestion above of the book ” John K. Cooley: An Alliance Against Babylon”) and to control the oil region and set puppet friendly regime kick out all Iraqi in status of chose “kill'”em All” and there will be no normal and formal state that can come backed to KIK the Americans in future.
What’s when wrong is the opposition and fight back Iraqis for their loved land despite heavy recruitments of Iranians proxy guys and use them as killing machine after US shambles of here demonstrated and image of Human Rights abuses in Iraq now it’s handled to those Iranians midwife to do the job on behalf.
This story from Iraqi newspaper will tells what’s going on in Iraq now
US solder (Iraqi born) tells his story about the occupiers troops doing in Iraq?
“Our mission kills any Iraqi “Sunni and Shi’ats” to generate chaos in the country”
مجند من أصل عراقي يكشف أسراراً تفضح جرائم الاحتلال الأمريكي في العراق
مهمتنا “قتل الشيعي والسني” لإثارة الفتن وفشل احدنا في مهمته يعني تصفيته
http://www.almalaf.net/article/detail.asp?id=34564&sid=24
I stopped reading after the drowning rescue. You can make any fancy case you want & debate whatever points as may amuse, but to deliberately launch cold-blooded murder is wrong. It doesn’t become any less wrong with time, it doesn’t become any less wrong with bogus rationalizations.
I haven’t read the comments. Did any one else pick up the idea that it wasn’t collateral damage to other non-drowning swimmers, but that those who were in fact being rescued from drowning had previously been aboard a ship teeming with innocents that was deliberately torpedoed “for the good of all”? Iraq-as-Lusitania, US-as-U-boat is a better analogy.
When our leaders are so paranoid they fight their own shadows, fight their parents’s wars, we have bad leaders. Leaders have an obligation to deal with reality as it exists, not relive childish nightmares of BLACK vs: WHITE, GOOD vs: EVIL or GOD vs: THE DEVIL. Men consumed by this sort of internal conflict are unfit to serve. I can reconstruct Wolfowitz’s head all by myself, but once we determine he’s unfit for power, why continue the analysis? Interest then shifts to the overall structures that put such infants in domineering positions and then, to my continued horror, keeps them there.
I believe the average American, or Iraqi citizen would be furious to know how President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Bremer and others caused the societal and institutional collapse of what was a fairly well running, civilized and organized institutional culture.
Their collective decisions is facilitated the American and British contractors in bringing thousands of third world nationals into Iraq while excluding the poor and unemployed Iraqis from even earning a living or participating in the reconstruction of their own country. Many of whom later turned to the insurgency to earn a living.
Iraq; A Hell on Earth Made in Washington D.C.
“In an unusually lucid column, former Iraq War enthusiast Thomas Friedman makes a plea for a responsible policy for military disengagement from Iraq. I’ll go straight to the punch line:
You can’t be serious about getting out of Iraq if you’re not serious about getting off oil.”
To quote the Elizabethan philosopher Francis Bacon: “He that cannot contract the sight of the mind as well as disperse and dilate it wanteth a great faculty.” Robert Consoli’s dilated and dispersed disquisition on the lamentable history “liberal hawks” in America could certainly benefit from an initial contracted focus: namely, a clearly expressed unifying theme, or opening “thesis statement,” as my brother the high school English teacher would say. Take, for example, a paraphrased condensation of a trenchant observation on this subject made by Barbara Tuchman in her classic The March of Folly:
The American imperial regime reacts not to popular movements for national independence and self-determination — both domestic and foreign — but to “intimidation by the rabid right at home.”
In a summary phrase, then, “intimidation by the rabid right at home” (both economic and political) provides the necessary organizing context within which to assess both Robert Consoli’s comments and Helena Cobban’s response to them. H. L. Menken took something of a similar approach, although (like Mr. Consoli) with a slightly bemused tolerance for the intimidating “conservatives” when he attributed America’s early-twentieth century imperial bungling to “the strife of the parties at Washington” — a rather one-sided “strife,” as Professor Tuchman would no doubt say.
I agree with Mr. Consoli that human motivation — especially the motivation of fright — plays a powerful, perhaps even determining, role in the lives and careers of America’s “liberal hawks,” if not of Americans generally. I also agree that other motivations — besides fright of a different sort — explain the dreadful and draining influence of America’s “neo-conservatives,” some of them former “liberal hawks” from the congressional staff of Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Grown tired and impatient with traditional liberal powerlessness in the teeth of relentless Republican Party intimidation, many former “liberal hawks” and/or erstwhile “revolutionaries” simply renamed themselves “neo-conservatives” and joined up with all the corporate money and power — namely, the Republicans. So in keeping with the organizing theme of motivating fear: we could say that “liberal hawks” fear getting left out of power and feel bad about renouncing their own liberalism to attain even a taste of it, whereas the “neo-conservatives” simply fear missing out on the gravy train of David Broder’s quail dinners at Karl Rove’s table and regret nothing of their own humanity lost to the corruption of absolute power. I think Thorstein Veblen had a lot to say about this quisling, compradore (i.e., “Tory”) strata of privileged American society in The Theory of the Leisure [what I call “Seizure”] Class.
I wouldn’t dream of speaking for Helena Cobban, whose sincere and principled pacifism I both honor and respect, but as an unrepentant pro-labor anti-imperialist “liberal” and ex-patriot (not a misspelling) I would say that her critique of the “liberal hawks” stems not from any attempt to burlesque them — although, like the “neo-conservatives” they ineffably and effectively enable, they frequently deserve the most unsparing caricature — but rather from an exasperated disbelief that they cannot directly identify and openly confront the endemic “intimidation from the rabid right at home” that has, once again, led our nation and others to ruination. It takes countervailing power to contest concentrated power run amok (whether political, economic, and/or military) and if the “liberals” in the Democratic Party don’t supply it, then who will?
My own critique of the “liberal hawks” stems not just from my disdain for their silly ornithological metaphors, but from their demonstrated historical ineffectiveness. For to quote the nineteenth-century American scientist/philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce: “Where two faiths flourish side by side, renegades are looked upon with contempt even by the party whose beliefs they have adopted.” In other words: the Republicans have no intention of giving up even a shred of a share of their fear-flogging “national security” intimidation and will only heap even more vicious abuse on those “liberal hawks” like the “triangulatin’ Bawl and Pillory” Clintons who seek to sell out their own party’s liberal, pro-labor, anti-imperialist “base” for a little taste of all that corporate/military/industrial quail and gravy.
At any rate, I see little point in trying to draw distinctions without a difference based on the self-advertised “motivation” (sincere or ersatz) of the “neo-conservatives” and “liberal hawks” who both advocated and authorized the military attack on, and disastrous occupation of Iraq because, as Thomas Friedman so cavalierly put it following the events of 9/11/2001: “We had to hit somebody.” Not “fear,” then, but simple, barbaric, atavistic vengeance — and the cynical exploitation of it — explains the monstrous crime against Iraq that most of America’s political, economic, and media establishments only too willingly saw as the “opportunity” of a lifetime. The “neo-conservatives” thought they could obtain even greater military, political, and economic dominance for a generation. The “liberal hawks,” for their part, imagined that they could get in on a little piece of the “national security” action — as noted above — and in so doing repudiate decades of Republican-manufactured canards and slurs about the Democratic Party that the week-kneed “liberal hawks” had uncritically come to believe about themselves and, especially, the pro-labor, anti-imperialist liberal “base” of their party that they so often and enthusiastically have betrayed. Quail swimming in gravy at Karl Rove’s (or Rupert Murcoch’s) table will do that to leisure class “liberal hawks” every time.
In summary, I can only point out that in their fearful and pathetic attempts to appease and pander to insatiable rabid-reactionary intimidation, America’s “liberal hawks” did, have done, and continue doing fascism’s dirty work while receiving only more contempt from the real fascists for “insincerely” doing so. I don’t know whether any or all of the phrases, “morally bankrupt,” “dumber than dirt,” “too stupid to stipulate,” or just plain “scared-shitless-and-greedy-at-the-same-time” best describe the “liberal hawks” and “neo-conservatives” who — except for their own self-indulgent self-labeling — appear almost indistinguishable as what Gore Vidal called “America’s one crypto-fascist party with two right wings.”
It was one of the most powerful and emotional images I had ever seen. Even though I was born and raised in Australia, I moved to the USA and married into a military family. My brothers-in-law all served, as did my father-in-law. Back home, my father was SAS in the 1960’s. I have a deep respect for those who join the military to stand up for our freedom, no matter how the politicians coin the cause or what their true motivations are.
I mean, you have to hand it to our soldiers. They really are the pride of western civilization. It does not matter what your position or opinion on war specifics is, these people step up to the challenge, and do their job. So seeing this amazing image had an incredible impact on me – an emotional one. I couldn’t help but follow up on it, and find out more about this amazing couple. So I did some digging of my own. & this is what I found out.
http://www.thetrukstop.com/articles/2007/story_behind_the_photo.html
Helena, He is right in saying “They really are the pride of western civilization.” I second his pride of what the westren civilization went to, but in same time what we can say if a small group high jacked this pride for their greed and personal pride?
I’m really sad when these threads peter out. I can’t help thinking it has something to do with Salah’s constant bombardment of non-seqiturs.
[Snip.]
Bits of Mr. Murry’s post are close enough to my own neck of the woods to make it worthwhile to figure out why they are not 100% right:
My own critique of the “liberal hawks” stems … from their demonstrated historical ineffectiveness. For to quote the nineteenth-century American scientist/philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce: “Where two faiths flourish side by side, renegades are looked upon with contempt even by the party whose beliefs they have adopted.” In other words: the Republicans have no intention of giving up even a shred of a share of their fear-flogging “national security” intimidation, and will only heap even more vicious abuse on those “liberal hawks” like the “triangulatin’ Bawl and Pillory” Clintons who seek to sell out their own party’s liberal, pro-labor, anti-imperialist “base” for a little taste of all that corporate/military/industrial quail and gravy.
Well, sort of. Much depends on exactly what the four emphasized words mean. Are Republican Party extremists cynical? Do they threaten us, the ignorant mob, with bogies that they would never dream of believing in themselves? I can’t quite tell, but it sounds as if Mr. Murry thinks so, whereas I am pretty sure 99% of ’em start by thoroughly frightenin’ themselves first.
In any case, he clearly thinks General Eisenhower’s “military-industrial(-academic) complex” has a lot to answer for, and so it does. Complex fans will presumably want to vilify anybody who gets in the way no matter whether greed or cowardice be uppermost in their own minds at any particular moment. To look at it from the other side, no matter whether critics of the MI(A)C think it too selfish ethically or “only” possessed of outstandingly bad judgment about which dangers are real and which are only Chicken Little stuff.
Crudely: are they knaves or are they fools? There is no reason they can’t be both, but all the same, there is no obvious connection between being courage-challenged and being relentlessly avaricious. Being filthy rich and therefore having a great deal to lose does not always result in this slightly ludicrous syndrome of elephants with a morbid dread of mice. Back in the Middle Ages, basically this same class of folks invented chivalry, even if they did not altogether practice it. (That would be “class” in Marx’s sense too., of course.)
Back when Dr. Ike originally diagnosed their brain disease, the patients could point out, not incorrectly, that the Soviet Union could make the planet’s northern hemisphere uninhabitable any afternoon it madly decided to do so, which is rather beyond the powers of M. ’Usáma Bin Ládin and “global terrorism” and even “Islamic fascism” just at the moment. That incongruity comes first for me, so I pronounce them fools with no proper sense of measure first, and knaves only secondarily. For what it may be worth, that choice has the incidental merit of being more likely to annoy the Elephant People. These gentry have heard us donkeys going on about their greed ever since the late Mr. Schlesinger’s Age of Jackson. They’re used to that line of attack, they’ve long since tuned it out as mere background noise, whereas to needle them about what bad judges of facts and incompetent managers of affairs they are might even penetrate their thick hides a little.
I am not sure “liberal hawks” annoy them quite as much as Mr. Murry supposes, but they do get annoyed at least a little. That makes sense if we start from the (sincere, although also self-induced) fears of the militant GOP instead of from its lusts. The idea that the Clintons — along with former Secretary of War Albright, and Ambassador Holbrooke, and Mr. Berger, and Senator Lieberman, and so forth and so on — are renegades from anything in particular is too good to be true. It would be nice if our party had always been principledly in favor of non-aggression and opposed to throwing Uncle Sam’s weight around in the world, but to believe that this is what actually happened in history requires ignoring whole mountain ranges of evidence.
So I don’t think our liberal militarists irritate the antiliberal ones because the latter can’t believe that Albrights and Liebermans really share their own sentimental attachment to thuggish international behavior and Lone Ranger impersonations. More likely, the Crawford kind of interventionist feels obscurely troubled because liberal interventionism does not find it quite so mandatory to begin by scaring itself almost to death of whatever foreign mice it decides to take an interest in, being quite prepared to support air strikes and invasions and occupations and nation-buildings and whatever-it-takes along altruistic Tony Blair lines rather than exclusively along self-regarding Richard Bruce Cheney lines.
After all, what is likely to upset Ms. Chicken Little more than being called by her true name? And to be called it by what she considers a gang of complacent nitwits who may even manage to convince an easily misled public that nobody needs to rush out to buy lots of extra insurance against the sky falling, against an al-Qá‘ida victory parade down Pennsylvania Avenue or the like!
No wonder that attitude ruffles her feathers a little.
Editorial note:
I cut some of Dominic’s patronizing and very unfriendly comments to Salah from the above, as also Salah’s response (since it doesn’t make sense without reading D’s provocation.)
Friends, can you all PLEASE try to keep within the courtesy and other guidelines, as there really is a lot we can all learn from each other and with each other if we’re just prepared to discuss things here with civility and basic, reciprocal respect.
And by the way, Dominic, I find it sad, too, when some of the discussions here peter out. But they do have a sort of ‘natural’ life of around a week or so, and then we all move on. Perhaps I drive that process some by putting up new posts.
From my perspective, the posts and discussions here have an aggregative quality. They build on each other. And thanks to the fabulous archiving system here with Movable Type we can always access four-plus years’ worth of past discussions even though the anti-spamming measures require that we close the Comments Boards after some period–15 days?– so we can’t add to old discussions. (Some of the older posts have been comment-spammed by nasty sexual spambots so their comments are not that interesting to read, anyway.)
There is no community without loss, as Isaiah Berlin once said…
Helena – I admire your commitment to dialog with a person you disagree with (would that more of us would follow your fine example!), but I think you give away too much to Mr. Consoli by crediting him with serious arguments.
As Bevin and Don Johnson have pointed out, Mr. Consoli seems more interested in winning with slippery analogies than in real dialog over points of disagreement. His learned references (dragging in Kierkegaard!) struck me as more akin to seminar ploys than an effort to advance the dialog.
I am also surprised you accepted Mr. Consoli’s characterization of Wolfowitz as a *liberal* hawk. I’ve never seen anyone else refer to Wolfowitz as such, and I doubt he would characterize himself that way. Whatever Wolfowitz may believe about the morality of intervening in Iraq, he has long been a *neocon* hawk and a charter member of the Project for the New American Century with all that entails. If Wolfowitz is a liberal hawk, then so is Dick Cheney, with whom Wolfowitz has long been associated.
I did very much appreciate Mr. Consoli’s reminder of the danger of unintended consequences and the intractability of us mortals. But I also say Hurrah! for your declaration, Helena, that you are a “rampant meliorist.” Kierkegaard maintained that despair — “the sickness unto death” — is a much greater danger than naive optimism, and so we need to maintain the tension of optimism and pessimism as we puzzle out how to act responsibly in a world that doesn’t conform to our best intentions.
Tyler Durden: Anyone in history – who would you fight?
(Reply): Gandhi. I’d fight Gandhi.
Tyler Durden (looking at him admiringly): Good answer!
Fight Club (1)
Fry: Clever things make people feel stupid and new things make people feel anxious.
Futurama (2)
Tess: I would like to know why the Sun does shine on the just and the unjust alike.
Thomas Hardy
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (3)
Do we want an asshole to have the courage of his convictions?
Witt Stillman
Metropolitan (4)
Dear Helena,
I thank you again for the extreme generosity with which you’ve treated my remarks.
Your post and your replies have helped me focus my own views. Before trying to answer I’d like to see if I can sharpen what it is that we really disagree about. Some of your views are implied and not stated outright. To a certain extent I’m tempted to put words in your mouth and I really do not want to do that. If I mischaracterize your views I hope you will not take offense. With that said, I plunge boldly forward.
I think that I was most surprised by this: you don’t show us that you have any idea about how the war in Iraq was really caused. But that’s easily stated: The war was caused by Cheney and Bush primarily. The word ’cause’ here means literally this: these two principal actors had the power to make war on Iraq and they exercised that power (5). They had, to be sure, many enablers in the form of Paul Wolfowitz, Colin Powell, Tony Blair, Perle and some others. But not many others. As I said in my previous posts they were primarily motivated by a millenarian dream of control of oil regions and/or a dedication to the security of the state of Israel which was thought (by the Likud and its supporters) to be most directly achievable in that fashion. These actors caused the war and for these specific reasons. It’s like Koch’s Postulates: Without them there would have been no war. With them there was.
Well, to state the obvious, this explanation contradicts yours. Everyone in America might have believed that it would be good to intervene militarily in the Third World for the good of their populations and that it could be done with minimal collateral damage because of technological advances. But this would not, and could not, have caused this war. Therefore, I don’t understand why you adduce this set of rationalizations as having anything to do with our going to war in Iraq. In this respect your reply reveals more than it intends to because you appear to completely ignore the role of Cheney and Bush; those who played the determining role in causing the conflict. I think this is my most serious criticism of your reply; this one gap vitiates everything else you try to demonstrate. People may hold the views you list and you may find them offensive. (People hold a great many ideas that I find offensive) But, Helena, are you a political thinker or are you a moral reformer?
From here a further split opens between our respective approaches. Skipping ahead just a bit I would say that, in your view, History is information-theoretical. Reality can, in this view, be described in unambiguous ways that are, in principal, open to all human beings. When conflicts occur it is because some of the warring parties have incorrect views. Correct those views to bring them into line with reality and, presto!, conflict solved. In this instance, those liberals who have silly or outmoded views about the Third World need to reach views that are more fully informed because the dead giveaway for wrong views is, among other things, hypocrisy and inner contradiction. Right views, as we all know, can never be inconsistent with themselves so that contradiction and hypocrisy (as you say) are the proof that wrong ideation has taken place. Your ability to hold this view is a demonstration of your essential good faith in human beings (this was never in doubt) and is congruent, I think, to your actual chosen role in life.
My view is darker. In my view human beings are vastly different from each other; in personality, in goals, psychological needs, attitude towards each other, to the world, to the task of existence itself. Specifically, they are almost unimaginably different in terms of what they will find to be acceptable motives for action. I believe (and it is only a belief) that we project ourselves onto others with whom we come into contact and that this causes the illusion that human populations are more homogeneous than they really are.(6) Information-theoretics has nothing to do with such a view.(7) In my view humans are driven by a stew of conflicting wants and needs; in such a world hypocrisy and contradiction are not symptoms of wrong ideation but are a sign of simple humanity. I believe that the presence of hypocrisy and contradiction in the thought process is an automatic and inevitable product of what the mind does. As Freud famously remarked, ‘In the Id the principle of non-contradiction does not obtain.’ In such a world-view humanity does not divide into well-informed and less well-informed groups. On the contrary, the storms that rage across the sea of life are driven by needy and desperate personalities whose neuroses, angers, and anxieties are variously introjected, copied, excoriated, or condemned by us, their subjects. In this view reality is not a single thing but a crazy patch-work of conflicting claims – all of them contradictory and yet each claim utterly real to its own claimant.
I sometimes think that the greatest problem facing those who study societies is the problem of veridicality. That is to say: What is REAL – sociologically and historically. In such a world view more and better information (if there even is such a thing – but I am not a skeptic in the classic sense) does nothing unless it happens to align with the affectual needs of those actors with more power. This it is that led to my observation in one of my posts that these conflicts cannot be assuaged by study groups or peace activists but only by the exhaustion on the part of the principal actors of the opportunity for more dollars or whatever other crass motive that impels them. That’s why it seemed apropos to me to mention Wolfowitz – from his viewpoint the existential threat to Israel from Iraq was utterly real. To everyone else (you, for example) utterly unreal and even delusional. But to him the need to save the Iraqis from destruction by Saddam was utterly real. Not delusional – but real. The urge to condemn in general and Wolfowitz in particular is a powerful one. It is well represented in your readers – it beats strongly in my own heart. But our task is not to condemn criminals – but to stop them.
My world view is not an attractive one and I won’t pretend that you should adopt it. One thing that my view does better is that it makes more room for Affect (without which human existence is inconceivable). But which of these views we do adopt makes a huge difference with respect to what we think is appropriate to do in emergencies like this one. In your view conflicts are resolved in principle through teaching. You are like Plato who supposed that tyrants could be taught. In my view conflicts are resolved through victory and tyrants (when they become troublesome) need to be removed (as the Athenians themselves thought).
It is from this standpoint of mine that I regard appeals to liberals and bien pensants as silly and ineffective. Liberals and bien pensants didn’t make the war because it wouldn’t occur to them to do such a thing in the first place. You can speak to them as much as you like; it won’t do you any good until the opportunity for more dollars to the malefactors is removed.
Your attempt to make real your catalogue of ‘liberal hawks’ simply exposes how weak your argument is.
You say: ‘Actually, the “liberal hawks” include some of my best friends and colleagues…’
Really?
Have you told them?
I’m sorry, Helena, you’re going to have to do better than that.
I think what you’re uncomfortable with is the fact that so many members of the class that you admire are morally corrupt war-mongers. I, on the other hand, am entirely comfortable with the notion that our most prominent and influential people are moral filth.
If they’re war-mongers, Helena, they’re not liberals.
I have said that there is no decision principle for meliorism. You reply that, in essence, there is. What we need to do, you say, is to engage in various information-gathering activities and then we can know. This is of a piece with your view that reality is, in essence, knowable and reducible to a series of categories which can be broadly agreed to. But even you would agree that once we reach an informed conclusion we can still be in error. So, in essence, we can never know when we’ve gathered enough information. And who’s likely to gather more information? You? the CIA? Feith’s intelligence office in the Pentagon? Not to put too fine a point on it: why should we trust you when we can listen to four generals who’ve spent a life-time in Intelligence? Hmm?
Replies to Commenters
Dave of Maryland: ‘…to deliberately launch cold-blooded murder is wrong.’
Thank you for your uncompromising defense of the obvious. It will not, I think, surprise you to learn that other thinkers have reached this conclusion before you. Murder has been a crime in England since the Dooms of Ine of Wessex. And even Shakespeare was moved to write ‘murder most foul, as in the best it is.’ In the best it is.
So why does murder occur? Someone (actually, a great many someones) must think it’s great. Are they always wrong? Are you sure? As I said in my first post (or I implied it) Kierkegaard thought that the murder of Isaac by Abraham was perfectly acceptable because God himself had ordered it and the Ethical itself could be suspended in that instance. What would you do for God? For a lover? For society? To defend yourself? Your child? To defeat Hitler? To kill Beria, Yevshchen, Franco, Mussolini, or Nicholas II of Russia? Lee Harvey Oswald? The case of Nicholas II is instructive. His murder hastened the end of the Civil War in Russia and saved thousands of lives. Was it worth it? Sure! Well … on the other hand. But I’m forgetting. It’s simple: according to you murder is always wrong.
To Bevin:
‘Historical cheating’? That hurts. Nevertheless I suspect that we’re on the same page. The question is, as you say, what do we do now? Whatever it is it won’t be effective just to lambaste a lot of powerless intellectuals. You may as well, and with equal effectiveness, attack the Modern Language Association for making the war on Iraq. If the problem is powerful individuals, as I maintain, who have made war for nefarious purposes then the solution is impeachment.
You describe the populace as ‘instinctively humane’. This must be some other populace than the bloodthirsty and louche ne’er-do-wells that I’m familiar with. At any rate, it’s no criticism of my argument which is that the real and sufficient causes of the war are at the top.
To Susan:
“I have never experienced war – yet – I feel a deep visceral gut reaction to the very idea of starting up a war where none existed.”
Must be all that T.V.
To Donald Johnson:
“Hitler analogies are almost always the wrong ones to bring into play, because the situation there was so extreme in so many ways.”
This is a bit more on point. But, Donald, do you suppose that living in the Twenty-First century protects you personally from the Genghis Khans of History? We always think of these savages as ‘in the past’, as ‘over the top’. But they’re always with us; they’re just waiting until the right historical events unlock an opportunity for them to do their deadly work. It’s not because Germany in the ’30’s was ‘extreme’ (whatever that means) that makes it relevant but because it was so normal.
Just to be clear: I don’t think that Wolfowitz is a praise-worthy character; quite the reverse. What I think is that, at base, his meliorism is the same as anyone elses – the same as yours, for example. And I claim that there’s no principled way to choose between them. If you don’t like W.’s meliorism why should we prefer yours? Is it better?
To Dominic:
I admit my complete inability to discuss your points (must be all that selective indoctrination I’ve been subjected to). Except one: Like many Communists you say ‘the intelligentsia are crucial’.
Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!
Sorry, Dominic. This inflated self-regard of intellectuals goes all the way back to the Greek rhetors or reciters of Homer who thought, because Homer touches on all professions, that they, as rhetors, were capable of exercising any craft, trade, or profession and, as a result, deserved to occupy the highest offices of state. This view doesn’t even make really good nonsense.
Stalin didn’t believe it either.
And if you want more proof of the irrelevance of the intelligentsia you might want to read up on Russia’s ‘Back to the Land’ movement of the early 1870’s.
“Consoli takes full and indeed “manipulative” advantage of this, insisting that the common US ceiling of assumptions demand only one moral conclusion – his own.”
I aim no higher.
To Salah:
If I follow your argument I don’t know how to respond. I have a very good idea of what my country has done to yours(?). I also know that apologies are not enough. But why should we blame the clowns when we can blame the circus owners?
To JHM:
“In any case, he lets the good folks who actually made the war off the hook altogether…”
I did? I sure didn’t mean to. Please go back and re-read the first couple of paragraphs of my post. In my view it’s Helena who’s doing that.
So meliorism is ‘good when it works’? At first I thought this was a tautology. On second reading I see that it’s just plain old-fashioned instrumentalism and logically indistinguishable from the instrumentalism of Cheney.
Conclusion: I can’t argue for or against ‘liberal hawks’ because I simply don’t know who they are. Helena’s attempt to flesh out her construct just makes them look more and more like a bogey-man of her own invention. The war, as is easily shown, was made by a small group of specific individuals devoted only to their own personal profit. Every other justification was meant to deceive the more-or-less influential classes to acquiesce to the war. Insofar as these motives centered on meliorism they cannot be logically attacked. In any given situation meliorism might be the right response. This meliorism hasn’t worked in the case of Iraq and so the people who made the war (Bush and Cheney) need to be controlled. Impeachment is one way to achieve that. Talking to the MLA or the ACLU, will do nothing.
To beat up on liberal hawks (whoever they are) inexplicably shifts the focus from where it belongs to where it can do no good at all.
To Helena: I do have the profoundest admiration for your work. For all my bluster I understand perfectly well which of us does more for humanity.
Robert Consoli
…and the footnotes:
1 Quoting the movie from memory.
2 Quoting from memory.
3 Quoting from memory.
4 Quoting from memory. This line is, in fact, cut from the latest version of the movie.
5 But for a critique of the concept of ‘Power’ see Tolstoy, War and Peace, Second Epilogue, ii, ff.
6 I suggest in good faith that this tendency to projection is what accounts for your odd idea that Paul Wolfowitz and Tony Blair are liberals. Of course, they’re nothing of the kind.
7 And keep in mind that schizophrenics make up about one percent of human societies. One in a hundred; about three million schizophrenics in America alone. The number of diagnosable narcissists is larger. From my point of view narcissism (far more dangerous than schizophrenia and more wide-spread) had a great deal to do with the coming of this war (and most others).
Dear Robert Consoli,
I know you know you have “a very good idea of what my country has done to yours but what I seen some have a single side of this war and what’s really done or doing on the ground.
There are many thinks either not reported or filtered but we “Iraqis” all knew there are a strange things there its crimes done against innocent nation.
The distraction our country I do not care much about it, its will come back 5, 10 years with the resources available for Iraq but most importantly is the humans “Iraqis” those who will builds Iraq again, this war targeting this nation for their will and desire to live in this world, our history tells you what this nations went through 5000 years went down then get on again then went down and came back so now this war designed to kill this nation in its hearts causing as much as an extensive damage as they think there will be no rise for Iraq again.
RC: “Liberal Hawks” is not a construct of Helena’s, but a fairly well known phrase. There’s an OK article and list at wikipedia. Some of these people self-identify as LHs. Neocons, e.g. Wolfowitz, who you brought into the discussion, tend to be more conservative and self-identify as such, serving in right wing, e.g. Republican administrations. Blair is still supposedly on the left. In other words, the term refers to people who are generally regarded both as liberals and as hawks
the term refers to people who are generally regarded both as liberals and as hawks
Chomsky: It is impossible to give a measure to the influence of the Israeli lobby, but in my opinion it is more of a swing factor than an independently decisive one. It is important to bear in mind that it is not neoconservatives, or Jewish. Friedman, for example, is a liberal in the US system. The union leadership, often strong supporters of Israeli crimes, are protypical liberals, not neocons. The self-styled “democratic socialists” who modestly call themselves “the decent left” have compiled an unusually ugly record in support of Israeli government actions ever since Israel’s massive victory in 1967, which won it many friends in left-liberal circles, for a variety of reasons. The Christian right is a huge voting bloc, plainly not Jewish, and in fact to a significant extent anti-Semitic, but welcomed by the government of Israel and its supporters because they support Israel’s atrocities, violence, and aggression, for their own reasons.
Chomsky: I think it would be very likely to happen if “the boss-man called `partner'” – as more astute Israeli commentators refer to the US – were to change course and inform them that the time has come to obey the overwhelming international consensus that the US government has been blocking for 30 years. The “demographic crisis” is impelling hawks in the same direction. The “refuseniks” and Israeli solidarity groups are brave and honorable people, who deserve very bit of support we can give them. Their inability to have much of an impact is our fault, not theirs. No group in Israel can gain much credibility within unless it has strong support from the society of the boss-man.
It all comes down to one monstrous statement by Mme. Albright about the hundreds of thousands who died because of the Iraq sanctions:
“It was worth it.”
I don’t give a damn if she was sincere, a just God would have punted her into the middle of Baghdad with a ration book and a “Good luck.”
Again, if I may paraphrase Francis Bacon, Mr. Consoli’s dispersed and dilated disquisitions want the great faculty of mental contraction: i.e., a summary theme. Let me again supply one as necessary in any discussion of the so-called and self-styled “liberal hawks.”
Fear and Opportunism.
I discovered this handy explanitory phrase while doing an Internet search on the two words “liberal” and “hawk” that returned an article called “Liberal Hawk Down,” by Anatol Lieven, in the October 25, 2004 issue of The Nation. In his first paragraph, he states the painfully obvious:
“From whatever mixture of fear and opportunism, many Democrats who at heart opposed the war (in Iraq) reckoned that the wave of mass nationalist fervor that followed 9/11 made such a stance politically unviable in 2002-2003.”
Fear and Opportunism.
Like some who have contributed comments in this thread, Lieven tries to maintain at least an ostensible semblance of fairness, as in his second paragraph where he says:
“But it would be unfair to accuse the Democratic foreign policy establishment as a whole of acting cynically. For there exist within that establishment powerful groups that shared and continue to share not only the Administration’s case for war but most of the neo-conservative philosophy and agenda in international relations. Some of these “liberal hawk” intellectuals — contributed considerably to building the public case for war.”
Without going any further into Lieven’s astute presentation, I would just like to note — again for some sense of fairness and balance — that “many” Democrats in Congess (where, here, “many” means more than twenty Senators and one hundred Congressmen) also found it perfectly viable politically to rebuff crude Bush Administration and Republican Party intimdation. To their great credit, a goodly number of our elected representatives, almost all of them “liberal” Democrats, wisely refused cattle-prod induction into the lemming-like stampede to board the salvaged “Gulf of Tonkin II” on its predictably disastrous second voyage to quagmire and national ruination. So, what separates these clear-eyed, confident “liberals” from the panic-stricken, wild-eyed, or just-plain opportunistic “liberal hawks” and “neo-conservatives” who supposedly reside in different bands of the political spectrum yet who have acted so often and so disastrously in concert with each other?
Fear and Opportunism.
I grew up during the then-hardly-final throes of rabid Republican Party McCarthyism, so I’ve seen this opportunistic reactionary shit in operation for most of my life. Intimidated by the ubiquitously flogged canard “Who Lost China?” (hint, hint), Democrats from Harry Truman through John and Bobby Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson — “liberal hawks,” all of them — “reckoned that the wave of mass nationalist fervor that followed [the “fall” of China to Communist revolution in 1949] made [resisting military intervention in Indochina] politically unviable …” Always “politically unviable,” the “liberal hawks” rationalize as they cave in to one after another of the collusive power-grabbing schemes marketed mercilessly by the combination of right-wing corporate Republicans in league with the rampant, self-interested, ticket-punching careerism so endemic in the reactionary military officer caste. Eisenhower knew all about this always-lurking militarist fascism and warned us of it. Hardly anybody listened. Certainly not the “liberal hawks.”
Fear and Opportunism.
Some here have suggested that I go too far in my allegations of rank cynicism against the “liberal hawks” who so very much — and so pathetically — wish to think of themselves as fierce birds of prey and not those wimpy “doves” that Republicans like to sneer at every opportunity they either get by chance or can invent through choice. Glandular political stimulation through resort to ornithological metaphor may seem on the surface a rather ludicrous and adolescent enterprise: one too silly for adults to entertain seriously, yet precisely this vapid and vacuous posturing by American “leaders” cost me six years of indenured servitude in the United States Navy during the last eighteen miserable months of which I languished somewhere far south in the very bowels of the now-defunct Republic of South Vietnam. So I know from bitter personal experience that these self-indulgent bird hallucinations have real and terrible consequences. That so many Americans continue to indulge in them — out of some or any combination of Fear and Opportunism — strikes me as not just “cynical.” It goes far beyond that. It has now — once again, as so many times before in the last half century — morphed menacingly into the stupidly pathological.
Fear + Opportunism = Lunatic Leviathan.
Looking with disgust at the present array of anthropoid apes now parading and posturing before us as “hawks,” both “liberal” and “Conservative,” fills me with nothing but despair. If the Democrats, for example, cannot come up with a “leader” less fearful and opportunistic than “liberal hawk” Buffaloed Girl, i.e., Senator You-Know-Her (currently) from New York if not Tel Aviv, then I see no exit from the inevitable implosion. Her husband Bill couldn’t refrain from appointing George “slam dunk” Tenet as director of “Can’t Identify Anything” or bombing the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade (not to mention Iraq for most of eight years) and so I hardly think that the other half of the Partners in Pathos can or would resist the usual Fear and Opportunism any better. She certainly has no past track record to indicate othewise.
At any rate, Fear and Opportunism have never led the “liberal hawks” to do anything but rabid fascism’s bidding while reaping only the scorn of the real fascists who consider them “useful idiots.” This quintessentially American political phenomenon of liberal-hawk-ism reminds me — in moving towards closure — of the hillbilly groom who came back to the old homestead without his new bride. “Where’z yor wyfe?” the boy’s poppa asked. “I shot her, pa!” the indignant bridegroom replied. “Why’d jew dew that?” inquired daddy. To which the injured youth responded: “She were a virgin, pa!” (A paternal look of recognition and understanding floods the elderly hillblly’s bemused countenance) “Well then boy, I don’t blame ya none. If she waren’t good enuf fer her own fambly, then she shure as hell ain’t good enuf fer ourn.”
Fear and Opportunism in pandering to predatory power, instead of fidelity to one’s own values and sense of truth, have never gotten the “liberal hawks” — or the America they claim to serve but don’t — anything but a well-deserved contempt for doing what they know better than to do butwho do it anyway because the plethora other alternatives always available to them seem “politically unviable” at the moment, i.e., circa [whenever] …
Anyone, “liberal” or otherwise, who has to call him-or-herself a “hawk” to pump up their pathetically weak lack of confidence in the power of peace qualifies in my consideration as a bird brain — no offense intended towards real, as opposed to metaphorical, birds.
Fear and Opportunism.
” This process was well underway before 11 September 2001, and in domestic affairs at least, Bill Clinton and his calculated policy ‘triangulations’ must carry some responsibility for the evisceration of liberal politics. But since then the moral and intellectual arteries of the American body politic have hardened further. Magazines and newspapers of the traditional liberal centre – the New Yorker, the New Republic, the Washington Post and the New York Times itself – fell over themselves in the hurry to align their editorial stance with that of a Republican president bent on exemplary war. A fearful conformism gripped the mainstream media. And America’s liberal intellectuals found at last a new cause.”
Bush’s Useful Idiots
Tony Judt on the Strange Death of Liberal America
What is going on here?
Column B: “Actually, the ‘liberal hawks’ include some of my best friends and colleagues….”
Column A: “Her construct just makes them look more and more like a bogey-man of her own invention”
==
To pick one generally well-known specimen, presumably Dr. Cobban and I would both call Mr. Michael Ignatieff a liberal hawk — why, he’s even a brand-name Canadian Liberal to boot!
Assuming that Mr. Consoli does not deny that the honourable member for Etobicoke-Lakeshore exists, he must prefer to call him something different.
What would that be, I wonder?
Greetings Helena and Best Wishes,
JHM: Call them what they are: warmongers. It takes more than just adherence to lefty-type shibboleths to make a liberal. A person who advocates war is by definition NOT a liberal. War is the negation and destruction of the core definition of liberalism and everything it advocates.
Much as I respect Helena and her work it’s not enough for her to just name something in order to bring it into existence. If it were otherwise we’d be overrun with unicorns.
Robert Consoli
From the best friend an American liberal never had: “I have always defended President [G.W.] Bush against the Left on Iraq.” — former “Democratic” President Bill Clinton.
Thanks a lot, Bogus Bill, for nothing. Someone once called you “a far more effective imperialist” than the hapless Deputy Dubya Bush, and I heartily subscribe to that evaluation; although I would hasten to add “and among the most fortunate, too.” Given the near decade of sanctions, inspections (consciously undermined by CIA assassination teams), and regular bombings inflicted upon the poor people of Iraq during the two Clinton administrations, it seems a miracle that Saddam Hussein’s decrepit regime didn’t collapse earlier, before the Dick Cheney Shogunate Regency and its sock-puppet, propaganda-catapulting dimwit dauphin got their chance to break the camel’s sagging back with that one final straw. Always better lucky than smart, eh Bill?
I agree with Robert Consoli’s finally brief and succinct point that fear-flogging, war-agitating “hawk” opportunists have no business or right calling themselves “liberal,” in any of that honorable word’s best senses. And since both of the Clinton Partners in Pathos would certainly agree that “liberal” — as defined by American crypto-fascist reactionaries for decades — means something dreadful from which they willingly flee at the drop of a Republican canard, then I reciprocate their antipathy with my own. I always have and always will defend the Left from fellow-travelling imperialist “hawks” like You-Know-Them who got it wrong about Iraq (and Afghanistan) from even before Day One when “the Left” didn’t. And since these two unrepentant imperialists, like many other “liberal hawks” still seem intent on blaming the victims of American imperialism instead of American imperialists — themselves prominently included — I pledge my undying efforts to see that both of these bird-brain “hawks” never again get anywhere near the Lunatic Leviathan and all its destructive schizophrenia. I can’t speak for others on “the liberal left,” but this victim/veteran of the Nixon-Kissinger Fig Leaf Contingent (Vietnam 1970-1972) doesn’t need and will not stand for any further “commanding” by either the Best and the Brightest or the Worst and the Dullest. In my nearly sixty years of life on this planet, I’ve seen and had enough of both.
Is it really a surprise to anyone that a group formed around the American Democratic party & British New Labour party that was less to the right on domestic policy than on foreign policy? Mike Murray was of the right vintage and vinyard to aptly quote Gore Vidal on this particular old chesnut.
Both countries have two- horse-race electoral systems. This scenario is repeated in other countries. If the elite is more imperialist than the voters, then the leftwards bunch of them gel into “liberal hawks” – a form of “imperialist lite” to maintain the voter’s illusion of choice. Even if the term “liberal hawk” is somewhat self- contradictory why would the group care, so long as its “catchy”. As John R noted, “Liberal Hawk” is a googleable term in fairly common parlance and not one coined by Helena. DJ and BG are factually correct on Wolfowitz’s connections. I too was alarmed if not totally surprised Helena didn’t contest Wolf O’wits being called a liberal in this context -though he may well be a “classical” liberal for whom the poor house is charity gone mad.
The entire hawk camp, shall we call use the term “leaders of the free world” (?) really should have known where the invasion would lead and how they would look four years on in 2007. The extent to which they did; or did not, and how they see the longer term future are more interesting questions. If they have a coherent (even if amoral) plan it’s not being debated with us. We lesser citizens have yet to show that it needs to be.
We are, after all talking about the most powerful imperial elite and army in human history. How badly do they have to do; and who has to realise and reject it, before they lose power? Especially in the absence of any option to vote (perhaps electronicly) for a significantly different foreign policy, because the reduction in hawkish rhetoric ATM is no more than today’s cross-party PR position.
Yes; impeaching Bush would be a blow to the elite, if it actually happened, but then not such a serious one if he is replaced by someone as hawkish as a Clinton. And if that happens, then wasn’t RC’s suggested Likud/Cheney plan right? Won’t you still have a huge permanent US presence in the Oilfields of the ME?
When will the commercialised mass media be ethical or investgative? When will most voters feel they have the energy and time to think, (if the media opens the debate) let alone act? RC made a snide remark about Susan only knowing war from TV. While it seems more likely she learned from the internet (having found us in this little corner) we can’t bank on everyone being as astute about how stupid and horrible war is through personal research.
And how will American and British voters ever effect a situation where there is a real choice in elections, when people who believe in policies more like those Ken Livingstone and Dennis Kucinich, can be represented in executive government? With maybe a few shades inbetween for good measure. Democracy can be a lot more representative of the people than what you people seem to be managing at the moment. And as Dominic so often tells you, the alternative to a failed elite is revolution. Or of course, decline and fall.
Call them [“liberal hawks”] what they are: warmongers. It takes more than just adherence to lefty-type shibboleths to make a liberal. A person who advocates war is by definition NOT a liberal. War is the negation and destruction of the core definition of liberalism and everything it advocates.
Much as I respect Helena and her work it’s not enough for her to just name something in order to bring it into existence. If it were otherwise we’d be overrun with unicorns.
Robert Consoli
That is as clear as could be asked for, and thanks for supplying it, because I really did not know what to expect. However . . .
. . . I’m not going to start calling Michael Ignatieff a warmonger myself. The main reason may not matter to you and many others, being historical. If the L-word is to apply to John Locke as well as the late John Rawls, it cannot be defined that way. Historians of the nineteenth century frequently point out that in those days it was reactionaries who were the doves. What appears in retrospect as “our” team rather liked the idea of going to war, perhaps especially against Russia for the sake of Poland. That was a long time ago, to be sure.
At the moment there is the lesser difficulty (for me) that Ignatieff & Co. do not think of themselves as simply “advocating war,” but primarily as advocating justice and human rights while at the same time, but secondarily, being prepared to resort to organized violence if and when unjust oppressors should make that step necessary. With only a small amount of twistification (which I do not accuse M. I. in particular of, since I haven’t re-read his arguments lately), such reasoners can end up believing with total subjective sincerity that it was the bad guys who started the violence, either because the injustice and oppression intervened against must be counted as violence also, or else because the bad guys used force when the Military Humanists marched in to clean the joint out.
Like everybody else (practically) nowadays, Ignatieff & Co. would not recommend the mongering of any wars except defensive ones. The essence of their special position seems to be that they do not hold out strictly for self-defense. When State X has good self-defense reasons for fighting State Y, then those reasons are frely transferable to State A even though State Y has never done State A the slightest injury and shows no signs of planning to do so. Furthermore, when the subjects of State Y have good self-defense reasons for rebelling against the current régime in State Y, then those reasons are automatically transferable to General Ignatieff and the Military Humanist Brigade as well.
Apparently — but I’m admittedly not quite so sure about this bit — it is not required that State X or the subjects of State Y be actually engaged in forcibly resisting the misguided, or even illegitimate, Y régime to warrant an Ignatieff intervention, only that one or the other or both would be justified in resisting violently should they decide to. (The danger of paternalism and the moral inequality of the human race creeping in through that loophole I find especially distressing, but perhaps that is an eccentric reaction.)
Ignatieff himself is rather a favorable specimen of the breed if I correctly recall him conceding that something like what was just outlined is not consistent with international law as it stands, although of course he wants traditional international law revised as soon as possible to accommodate it. Should such a revision happen, he would no doubt feel 100% secure against any serious, rather than scurrilous and partisan, charge of warmongering. Even without it, he probably feels about 99% secure. An Ignatieff intervention is simply not a “war” at all, you must understand; it is, well, call it a “police action.” That claim is true “by definition,” as it were, and has nothing to do with the level of violence involved.
Now one additional problem over here in the peanut gallery is the By-Definition Gimmick itself, whether deployed about the word “liberalism” from one direction or about the word “war” from another. My own usage of English does not reflect either of these definitions, and it does not seem to me that common or average usage reflects them either. Most Americans called Secretary Albright’s Ignatieff intervention in Serbia a war, I’m quite sure about that item, and almost as sure that, given a brief overall account of his politics, they’d call Michael Ignatieff a liberal, even after being adequately informed about the matters discussed here.
I don’t mean to insist upon the By-Majority-Vote Gimmick instead, necessarily, although in the last ditch I am rather a mongrel Democrat and democrat than a pedigree liberal, and would not be utterly heartbroken to find myself excluded from the Core Liberal Club.
==
More practically, there is the difficulty that if we are to call the Ignatieffs warmongers, how shall we label the Cheneys and Wolfowitzes and James Polks and Saddam Husseins? Surely there are some verbal and substantive distinctions worth making over in that unpleasant neck of the woods? “General” Michael Ignatieff is, in my view, seriously mistaken about war and the law of war, yet hardly in the same way that General Napoléon Bonaparte was mistaken about them.
Happy days.
Salah, thanks so much for that link to the Tony Judt piece. I didn’t see it at the time. I think he does a brilliant job there. Including with this:
what distinguishes the worldview of Bush’s liberal supporters from that of his neo-conservative allies is that they don’t look on the ‘War on Terror’, or the war in Iraq, or the war in Lebanon and eventually Iran, as mere serial exercises in the re-establishment of American martial dominance. They see them as skirmishes in a new global confrontation: a Good Fight, reassuringly comparable to their grandparents’ war against Fascism and their Cold War liberal parents’ stance against international Communism. Once again, they assert, things are clear. The world is ideologically divided; and – as before – we must take our stand on the issue of the age. Long nostalgic for the comforting verities of a simpler time, today’s liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense of purpose: they are at war with ‘Islamo-fascism’. / Thus Paul Berman, a frequent contributor to Dissent, the New Yorker and other liberal journals, and until now better known as a commentator on American cultural affairs, recycled himself as an expert on Islamic fascism (itself a new term of art), publishing Terror and Liberalism just in time for the Iraq war. Peter Beinart, a former editor of the New Republic, followed in his wake this year with The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, where he sketches at some length the resemblance between the War on Terror and the early Cold War.[1] Neither author had previously shown any familiarity with the Middle East, much less with the Wahhabi and Sufi traditions on which they pronounce with such confidence. / But like Christopher Hitchens and other former left-liberal pundits now expert in ‘Islamo-fascism’, Beinart and Berman and their kind really are conversant – and comfortable – with a binary division of the world along ideological lines. In some cases they can even look back to their own youthful Trotskyism when seeking a template and thesaurus for world-historical antagonisms. In order for today’s ‘fight’ (note the recycled Leninist lexicon of conflicts, clashes, struggles and wars) to make political sense, it too must have a single universal enemy whose ideas we can study, theorise and combat; and the new confrontation must be reducible, like its 20th-century predecessor, to a familiar juxtaposition that eliminates exotic complexity and confusion: Democracy v. Totalitarianism, Freedom v. Fascism, Them v. Us…
And this:
Bush’s Middle Eastern policy now tracks so closely to the Israeli precedent that it is very difficult to see daylight between the two. It is this surreal turn of events that helps explain the confusion and silence of American liberal thinking on the subject (as well, perhaps, as Tony Blair’s syntactically sympathetic me-tooism). Historically, liberals have been unsympathetic to ‘wars of choice’ when undertaken or proposed by their own government. War, in the liberal imagination (and not only the liberal one), is a last resort, not a first option. But the United States now has an Israeli-style foreign policy and America’s liberal intellectuals overwhelmingly support it. / The contradictions to which this can lead are striking. There is, for example, a blatant discrepancy between Bush’s proclaimed desire to bring democracy to the Muslim world and his refusal to intervene when the only working instances of fragile democracy in action in the whole Muslim world – in Palestine and Lebanon – were systematically ignored and then shattered by America’s Israeli ally. This discrepancy, and the bad faith and hypocrisy which it seems to suggest, have become a staple of editorial pages and internet blogs the world over, to America’s lasting discredit. But America’s leading liberal intellectuals have kept silent. To speak would be to choose between the tactical logic of America’s new ‘war of movement’ against Islamic fascism – democracy as the sweetener for American involvement – and the strategic tradition of Israeli statecraft, for which democratic neighbours are no better and most likely worse than authoritarian ones. This is not a choice that most American liberal commentators are even willing to acknowledge, much less make. And so they say nothing. / This blind spot obscures and risks polluting and obliterating every traditional liberal concern and inhibition. How else can one explain the appalling illustration on the cover of the New Republic of 7 August: a lurid depiction of Hizbullah’s Hassan Nasrallah in the style of Der Stürmer crossed with more than a touch of the ‘Dirty Jap’ cartoons of World War Two? How else is one to account for the convoluted, sophistic defence by Leon Wieseltier in the same journal of the killing of Arab children in Qana (‘These are not tender times’)? But the blind spot is not just ethical, it is also political: if American liberals ‘didn’t realise’ why their war in Iraq would have the predictable effect of promoting terrorism, benefiting the Iranian ayatollahs and turning Iraq into Lebanon, then we should not expect them to understand (or care) that Israel’s brutal over-reaction risks turning Lebanon into Iraq.
A really excellent article, which helps my thinkling on the ‘liberal hawks’ issue a lot. Thanks for the link!
I just got back to my desk after doing family things for 4-5 days… I re-read JHM’s comment above more carefully and say thanks to him (her?)– okay, to YOU, JHM– for those contributions. The point about “liberals” often being more hawkish than (some) conservatives is one well worth bearing in mind. I have noted, for example, regarding the history of the laws of war, that Grotius– generally revered by liberals as the originator of the “modern, mainly secular” body of the laws of war– actually provided for significantly harsher treatment of captives taken in war (including their permanent enslavement) than did his more solidly (Catholic) church-based contemporaries, who felt themselves restrained by traditional church teachings regarding the dignity of ALL people…
In an entirely similar vein, we can note that secular liberalism’s intellectual “Godfather”, John Locke, both helped to write the (slavery-encouraging) original Constitution of the colony of South Carolina, and was himself a shareholder in the Royal African Corporation whose principal business was, yes indeed, the transatlantic transportation of enslaved Africans… while some 100-plus years later it was arch-conservative Samuel Johnsom who observed– a propos of the American colonies’ UDI– that “There are none who yelp so loud for freedom as the holders of slaves.”
And then of course there is Max Weber and his advocacy of a specifically “liberal” imperialism…