Further thoughts… for my previous post go here.
First, an analytically and morally serious critique of liberal hawkism by Stephen Holmes at The Nation. Holmes reviews Paul Berman’s Power and the Idealists and David Rieff’s At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention. Here he is on Rieff:
Faced with the “appalling and degrading” conditions in postwar Iraq, where things were “worse than anything I was able to write about it,” Rieff has felt compelled to reconsider his advocacy of US-led humanitarian intervention. What he discovered on his visits to Iraq was a collapsed state, not a liberated country…. Idealists who trumpeted a purely humanitarian case for invading Iraq should have known that their benevolent motives were not sufficient to trigger the war and were not going to govern the way the war and the occupation unfolded.
Many (but not all) liberal hawks began by supporting the war and ended up doubting it. I, on the other hand, began by opposing the war and ended up bitterly at odds with the antiwar movement—primarily the calls from more radical quarters to support the so-called “resistance.” On this issue I am with the hawks one hundred percent. Dexter Filkins, the battle-hardened NY Times reporter, gives us the unvarnished truth about these fascistic death squads and their victims:
[Iraqi liberals] started newspapers, they organized political parties, they called meetings to start a national conversation. Some of them, surveying the psychological ruins that Hussein and his torturers had left behind, formed institutes to teach their countrymen how to think for themselves.
And now, today, many of these Iraqis, if not most of them, are dead. They have been shot, tortured, burned, disfigured, thrown into ditches, disappeared. Thousands of them: editors, lawyers, pamphleteers, men and women. In a remarkable campaign of civic destruction, the Baathists and Islamists who make up the insurgency located the intellectual heart of the nascent Iraqi democracy and, with gruesome precision, cut it out. As much as any single factor, the death of Iraq’s political class explains the difficulties of the country’s rebirth. The good guys are dead.
Remember this at your next antiwar demonstration. The Iraqi insurgents did this, not the U.S. military. And it’s a dodge to shrug your shoulders and say, “It wouldn’t have happened if we [the U.S.] weren’t there.” Because we are there, and it did happen. And some in the antiwar movement (George Galloway and company) continue to praise the insurgency as a “liberation struggle.” If you care about the welfare of Iraqis, you condemn this garbage. Period.
That said, the title of Oliver Kamm’s forthcoming book, Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy, impels me to stress my deep differences with the liberal prowar camp. I’ve cited Kamm’s brilliant attacks on antisemitism and knee-jerk Chomskyism and I’ll continue to do so. But I part ways with Kamm, emphatically, in his enthusiasm for Bush-style regime change. Kamm remains single-minded in his campaign against far-left war opponents, but puzzlingly disengaged from the kind of soul-searching that Rieff and Fareed Zakaria have exhibited. Granted, Kamm’s book has not been published and one mustn’t oversimplify his historically grounded argument, laid out here.
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