“Liberal hawks” like Hitchens, Oliver Kamm and Paul Berman are much derided on the left for supporting the invasion of Iraq. I differ with them on this, but I back them fully in their case against Chomskyism, which tends to portray Islamist terror as an epiphenomenon of Western imperialism rather than a self-motivated totalitarian threat (one that disproportionately victimizes the very non-Westerners the Chomskyites claim to care about).
Here’s the problem. The liberal hawks—including the bloggers at Harry’s Place whom I admire and link to regularly—argue for a “pro-liberation” foreign policy that replaces Kissingerian “realism” with a more morally grounded interventionist ethic. There’s much to be said for this view. But the hawks err in accepting the Bush administration’s freedom-and-democracy rhetoric at face value. They fail to see that the current foreign policy is still cynical and “interests”-based, even if couched in the language of idealism. (Ironically, the administration’s right-wing “realist” critics don’t seem to grasp this either.)
That’s not to say that the fall of Saddam shouldn’t be applauded. But Hitchens, Kamm, et al., are far too quick to dismiss the antiwar case against Halliburton and the corporate greed and abuse that it represents.
Laura Secor, in her essay “The Giant in the House” (from The Fight is for Democracy, edited by George Packer), gets it right:
If we imagine that the United States is exceptional, that it represents universal interests, behaves altruistically, or commands an unrestrained right to intervene in the affairs of other states, we run the risk of deceiving ourselves, but we are unlikely to deceive anyone else. We may mistake what is at its best enlightened self-interest for an unbounded moral warrant for waging war. Moral authority cannot be arrogated on the basis of might, nor even of good intentions. The U.S. government justifiably declares Saddam Hussein a menace and Slobodan Milosevic a war criminal. But these claims and the equally justifiable ones that no American government will ever make will always be open to political challenge, because they spring from a political source. That does not mean that our government should stop making such claims. But it does mean that as critical observers of our country’s foreign policy, we cannot calibrate our moral compasses to that of the Pentagon.
Comments are closed.