Elections In Iraq

A particularly interesting editorial in today's NYTimes discussing the options for viable elections in Iraq. It addresses the US disastrous policy of non-diplomacy diplomacy in relation to Iraq's Sunni population in a very practical way. I'm interested in the response of fellow OTRers...

Think Small in Iraq
By ROBERT MALLEY and JOOST HILTERMANN

Published: November 30, 2004
Washington — With the Bush administration, the Iraqi government and Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the religious leader of the country's Shiites, insisting that national elections must proceed as scheduled in late January, and a coalition of Sunni Arabs saying they should not, it seems more likely that the voting will be delayed, discredited or both. But a train wreck can be avoided: by delaying national elections while holding votes for provincial governments wherever possible, an acceptable compromise may yet be found...

Rest of article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/opinion/30malley.html?oref=login

"It's just pitiful"

Imagine maintaining the present troop level in Iraq, with the current degree of violence for a full decade, until "adequate" Iraqi forces are trained. At some point relatively soon, you’d think the impossibility of the present might become a part of the national discourse again. Look to Republicans like Chuck Hegel, Richard Lugar and John McCain to bring up some of the following:

“Iraqi police and national guard forces, whose performance is crucial to securing January elections, are foundering in the face of coordinated efforts to kill and intimidate them and their families, say American officials in the provinces facing the most violent insurgency.
For months, Iraqi recruits for both forces have been the victims of assassinations and car bombs aimed at lines of applicants as well as police stations. On Monday morning, a suicide bomber rammed a car into a group of police officers waiting to collect their salaries west of Ramadi, killing 12 people, Interior Ministry officials said. . . . . In the most violent provinces, they say, the Iraqis are so intimidated that many are reluctant to show up and do not tell their families where they work; they have yet to receive adequate training or weapons, present a danger to American troops they fight alongside, and are unreliable because of corruption, desertion or infiltration.
Given the weak performance of Iraqi forces, any major withdrawal of American troops for at least a decade would invite chaos, a senior Interior Ministry official, whose name could not be used, said in an interview last week. . . . The police "are clearly intimidated to the point where they don't want to come to work," said the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Justin Gubler.
He said the Iraqi National Guard, known as the I.N.G., has only a "little bit more training." They also have serious problems of loyalty and competence. Just a few months ago, he believes, the local National Guard force was complicit in the abduction and killing of its own battalion commander west of Falluja.
"That's what you get out of the I.N.G.," Colonel Gubler said. "They gave up their battalion commander, laid their weapons down, and 23 cars and trucks and massive amounts of ammunition went to Falluja. It's just pitiful."
AK

"On a Certain Strain of Triumphalism"

Jos h's “On a Certain Strain of Triumphalism” is an intriguing (and increasingly solid) piece that I’ll give a qualified endorsement to, though it goes a little too far in a few keys points:

“The people who “got it right” were those who had been relegated to the fringes of the left for a series of strange judgments about Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. You have to go to the Cassandras and the catastrophists, to the usual suspects of Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy, Christian Parenti, et al.”

Sure, but the people who “got it right” on Iraq are far more populous than just the Cassandras of the far Left, and J (perhaps deliberately) neglects many from the more “respectable” Left, from the New York Review of Books to Habermas to Michael Walzer to Salman Rushdie; the intellectuals and publications who decried both Saddam and this unjust war. (Not to mention the Cassandras on the Right from Brent Snowcroft to Jack Kemp to Patrick Buchanan). In addition he grossly overestimates the power, reception and audience of the fringe Left as well as this mysterious “triumph” that they have won. His modifications to his original post, however, go along way in allaying many of my initial concerns and infamous rage.

One especially noteworthy point of “Triumphalism” is that Josh catches Susan Watkins of the New Left Review on a diplomatic transposition, something of a canny correction which modifies her tone and prior politics practiced from the safety of her home turf. Compare her comments at the end of the current Harper’s piece, in which she states: "Such unanimity (a hegemonic American consensus), however, does not alter the fact that the U.S.-led forces have no business in Iraq, or that the Iraqi people have every right to drive them out." With the following from a very similar article, indeed an earlier more militant draft, in her own periodical:
“The Iraqi maquis deserves full support in driving them (the U.S.-led forces) out”
While the first was fuzzier, and arguably safer, the latter hews to Josh’s critique, that the Watkins like elements of the Left are attempting to valorize the insurgency as “liberators” worthy of support, explaining away their more despicable traits as symptomatic in lieu of determinant. What’s curious is that Watkins has to clean up her prose to get her later piece published in Harper’s, a sign, perhaps, that the fringe Left still understands the borders of respectability. Which, of course, doesn’t spare Watkins from being taken to task for vastly inflating certain traits as heroic or even similar to something the Left should support. Watkins is right that they are anti-imperial and secular elements at play in the insurgency but that doesn’t mean they’re not hideous.

My earlier critique, which Josh has somewhat addressed through revision, is that the fringe elements that he flagellates are indeed so marginal. They've little or no impact on key issues of the day, even WHEN THEY ARE RIGHT. Take, for instance, Abu Ghraib. We've all seen the pictures of Military Intelligence officers huddling around a bloody, naked Iraqi, and read Seymour Hersh's articles arguing that this sick shit goes all the way to the top of the Pentagon . . . . that these types of deeply perverted torture were carried over from Guantanomo. So what? The far Left AND “respectable” Left cried bloody murder on this one, and as Josh pointed out before, Christian Parenti, one of his perennial targets on the fringe Left, virtually broke this story. So what? Parenti got kicked off the Jim Lehrer News Hour for an assertion that was certainly “respectable” (about as big a forum as he's had to date) and the story of Abu Ghraib went absolutely nowhere. Not a single mention during the Presidential campaigns or debate. The topic was absolutely taboo as it hinted of dark doings that the American public, if they were to truly focus upon, just might lose faith in the mythopoetic sense of our virtue which has sustained so much of our messianic nationalism. In the face of this, once more, rising tide, I have to question just what kind of “triumph” the fringe Left is indulging in and how much time and energy should be put into denouncing those on the margins that “got it right” in spite of themselves.
AK

Re Re: A Policy Not a Politics

Also, there is very good reason to be concerned about what constitutes a politics these days and what doesn't. And he is perfectly right to point out that much of the interventionist talk falls short of what we would otherwise want a real 'politics' to look like.

But Steven also, at the end of his post, considers that such a genuine politics for those on the Left might be possible. He also wonders if it really is. That, I would say, is the rub. The reason that many of us have taken some of these policy issues to heart in lieu of a politics is because it is very difficult to imagine a politics that could cover the same ground. To call oneself a leftist right now is almost to concede that the politics is in disarray.

I think Steven knows quite well that I would love to call myself a democratic socialist. But damn if it doesn't feel like a historical vapor. Even when Irving Howe said it thirty years ago it was draped in more nostalgia than he might have cared to admit.

We can't help ourselves to a politics when one doesn't exist anymore. Perhaps something can be made anew. But then there is work to be done.

We Defamed Our Holocaust!

An OTR poll: Which is more repellant? The Israelis' unwarranted actions against the Palestinian people, such as in the story below, or the utter egomania of the Israelis themselves?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1361755,00.html

Regional Blocs

I'm telling you people, this is it... regional blocs... The nation-state is done.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,1361985,00.html

Re: A Policy Not a Politics

This is an excellent discussion and one that seems actually to be going somewhere.

As someone who has been reading and thinking a lot about Vietnam I'd like to add a few comments from that angle. The powerful thing about the Vietnam example is that it allows those like myself who toyed with Left Hawkism to see that there are situations, pace Mitchell Cohen, where anti-imperialism DOES trump anti-fascism or anti-totalitarianism. Though the North Vietnamese were Stalinist on all the major counts, the victory of the North and the re-unification of Vietnam was better than the misguided and brutal American War and has led, through a historical detour, to a country that is now capable of achieving quite a bit.

The New Left was right to oppose the Vietnam War and right to do so in such unequivocal and action-packed ways. But they were right, often, despite themselves. And their hysterical approach to politics in general blinded them to what a melancholy victory they were cheering for. When Tom Hayden celebrated the fall of Saigon as the beginning of the 'liberation' of South Asia he exposed himself as a goon. For about twenty years after 1975 Vietnam descended into a grey abyss of totalitarian blundering. The New Left's inability to distinguish between these things led, eventually, to their implosion into a radical politics that was no longer tethered to any real world.

It has been an incredibly important lesson, and one the traditional Left deserves credit for, to show that Iraq was not and should not have been taken to be Bosnia. But that doesn't mean that elements of the Left (important, vocal, influential, and currently emboldened elements) have learned much from Bosnia or Rwanda or Afghanistan or even from the less well-known
lessons of Vietnam.

Much as many of you correctly predicted that Iraq was going to proceed toward the return-of-Vietnam, I predict that if things continue as they are, the Left is looking to repeat the failures of the New Left if we don't do a good job of synthesizing the lessons of Iraq AND of Bosnia.

A Policy not a Politics

As I have done research into the way intellectuals on the left responded to Bosnia and Kosovo in the Nineties I have gained new insight into Dr. Emile’s politics and so into politics in general. Of course, much of the lay of the land has changed in light of Iraq, but it is instructive to cast our thoughts back to the debates of the Nineties. When one goes back and reads Ignatieff, Secor, Rieff, etc., on the one hand and Gowen, Parenti, Chomsky, etc. on the other, one comes to understand why Dr. Emile structures the left’s intellectual space as one that is partitioned between left interventionists and the anti–imperial left. When one structures the left’s intellectual space in this way, interventionist left-liberalism comes out looking quite good. It comes out looking quite good because of what they are ranged against: a sometimes Stalinoid style of thought that exemplifies the worst of the left. Of course, there are many good thinkers on the ‘hard left', and even some of the worst offenders make points that are worthy of inspection. However, what sticks out about this group’s discourse, especially when it comes to Bosnia and Kosovo, is not only a rampant lack of balance, but the extent to which it takes recourse to a type of magical thinking. This thinking is defended as supra-objective but in fact harkens back to the conspiratorial mindset of the Nineteenth century American populists. When one reads a book like ‘Masters of the Universe: NATO’s Balkan Crusade’ Milosevic’s name is barely mentioned, much less his crimes. Of course, we only think there were crimes because of a massive conspiracy which takes in not just western governments but a heard of international reporters who are of course all dupes of the imperium. The problem is that because the discourse here is so unbalanced and sneeringly arrogant, one can’t actually make an honest appraisal of the legitimate issues that these thinkers want to raise. This is more then a shame, because the work of criticizing the dominant liberal understanding is extremely important.

I must say that during the Nineties I missed the spat between liberal interventionists and the hard anti-imperial left. Why did I miss it? Because I never quite grasped how interventionism could be the defining issue for a left or liberal-left politics. I still don’t. Because I never took interventionism as the basis upon which to define a politics, the anti-imperial left never took on the status of enemy number one. For me, interventions are a policy, not a politics. (This, of course, is close to the saying in France that ‘human rights’ are not a politics.) To see things this way is to cut oneself off from the possibility of grounding ones politics through popular sovereignity, depending instead on the good will of governing elites. But now this politics is essentially disembodied and therefore mostly unable to act, as many Bosnians found out. This detachment of politics from popular sovereignity is, of course, in line with technocratic or managerial forms of liberalism. But this is paltry ground upon which to build a left politics. Indeed, this ground is so thin, that it lends credence to the idea that the ideology of interventionism is a justificatory discourse for an imperial power elite. Certainly this is the way the Neocons and the left hawks have mobilized this discourse.

During the Nineties, it seemed to me that one had to help people in need, even if this had other costs. However, a left politics could support this while keeping its eye on the prize, i.e., the development of a left politics that could, in the wake of communism’s collapse, take hold of the impoverished masses of the south and fundamentally challenge global arrangements concerning the distribution of wealth. This would entail major modifications in actually existing capitalism, especially its relationship to political steering in both the North and the south. Perhaps this politics is not possible. But I certainly know that since 9/11 certain elements of the interventionist left have supported a program that positively retards (better, wants to destroy) this politics. And in this, they are my political enemies as much, if not more, then the irrelevant Stalinist throwbacks.

Lewis and Liberalism

In response to my continual harping about the failure of the liberal intelligencia in the face of the Iraq war, a failure that I take to be rooted in a wider political vision, Dr. Emile has posed the idea that perhaps this failure just signals that in this one case a whole bunch of people just made a mistake. If it simply was just a mistake in judgment, a one-time thing, then the judgment could be separated from the intellectual vision that (supposedly) informs it. To support this idea, Morgan throws in a counterfactual: what if things had gone better in Iraq? The point of asking this question is to suggest that the validity of the vision which led so many liberals to support the war should not be impugned by what is essentially a contingent empirical event. If things could have gone differently, then certainly the contingencies of history are to blame, not my world-view. As our would be Heideggers might say, the Iraq war was only an ‘ontic’ phenomenon anyway.

Of course, these ideas are just a way of shielding oneself from radical self-critique. (As the hysterical leftist on the list, I, of course, have gone through many sessions of Maoist self-criticism.) Luckily, they can also be shown to be demonstrably wrong. One can pick many points of entry, but I will only choose one, the remarkable and un-repudiated influence of Bernard Lewis. (See the excellent Washington Monthly article via 3quarksdaily: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0411.hirsh.html.) Now one could say that Lewis is the denizen of the Neo-cons not the liberals. But the problem with this view is that many of the most prominent liberals—Freidman, Ajami, Berman, etc.—take wholly on board his narrative concerning the relations of Islam to the west.

The basis of this narrative is that Islam and the west have been engaged in a civilization struggle (he coined the term ‘clash of civilizations’ after all) since time out of mind. It is this struggle that accounts for the deep resentment of the West on the part of both the Islamist radical and the average citizen. What is distinctive about this struggle for ‘recognition’ is that modernity itself has become the ‘the lord’ and the pre-modern (i.e., the Arab world) ‘the slave’. The upshot of this narrative for Western elites is that this struggle is a battle between modernity and the pre-modern. The twist is that the struggle is not for continued recognition (as it was for Hegel’s master) but to make the pre-modern world modern. This is to be done by utilizing Kemalist methods (it is no accident that Turkey was the country where Lewis gained his expertise) to overturn the current static order in the Middle East. The problem with this narrative, as with Paul Berman’s, is that it does not allow one to see that modernity is not opposed to reactionary movements against it, but is its essential condition of possibility. Let me explain, as Berman does, by unfolding a historical parallel.

The historical parallel has its origin in a thought offered by Toqueville and Arendt. The idea concerns the historical genealogy of totalitarianism in Europe. In their view, the destruction of the ‘society of orders’ by the absolutist state, while an advance for liberty, also planted the seeds for great danger. For now the citizen does not face the sovereign as part of intermediary body that could collectively check the power of the king, but as a single atomized citizen. According to Arendt, there is here a double movement that ties together modern liberal democracy and totalitarianism. While the citizen is now free from his static place in an unjust social hierarchy, he or she is also the essential fodder for Totalitarian social formations. The arrival of the totalitarian masses on the stage of history is thus not a reaction against modernity from the outside but a movement within modernity itself. This makes a big difference in how one sees things. For now modernity itself, and liberalism as its chief ideological mode, are themselves implicated in the totalitarian menace insofar as the life world that they provide cannot meet certain ‘existential’ needs. Because these needs are not met, they are open to being highjacked by extreme political movements. The way to meet this dilemma is of course not to give up the ‘unfinished project of modernity’, but to honestly face up to its inadequacies and reckon with them.

This story, which was formulated with respect to European history, has much currency when examining the West’s engagement with Islam. It has currency because liberal intellectuals once again do not understand that the radical Islamism that came to the fore in the seventies was in response to a failure of modernity, this time in the ideological guise of Arab nationalism and socialism. It is not a reaction to modernity from the outside, but a reaction from within. When this understanding is in place it is clear that the Iraq policy that flows from Lewis’s socio-historical analysis, i.e., pushing a Kemalist style modernization plan of statism and rigid secularization, was bound to fail. It was bound to fail because it offers as a solution something that was initially part of the problem. The point is not give up on ideals like ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’ etc., nor is it the point to stop fighting the fascist elements of the Islamist movement. The point is to think about realistic policies (which could include non-involvement or this or that issue) that can help shore up the space which is being appropriated by the far right. Once again, to do this, liberalism must break out of its own self-understanding and face up to its inadequacies.

The Peril of the Left

As the hysterical leftist on this web log, I would like to comment on a new post at American Notes for General Circulation. Let me start by saying I agree that the hard left will take the Iraq disaster to ratify their positions and that is a danger, at least on certain issues. (Of course, the idea that this is our biggest problem right now is farcical. The American ‘left’ has never been weaker.) But I would like to argue that there is an implicit truth in their politics, as there is in that of the hard right. Take the issue of supporting the Iraq insurgency. One can both be against American neo-imperialism and the viciousness of the insurgency. This is the right position, and I have argued for something like it for some time. But it has a major problem.

Let's now take the case of Vietnam. There were many on the social democratic left who took a similar non-aligned position: neither American Imperialism, nor Vietnam communism. The problem with this position, as Irving Kristol pointed out at the time, is that in not taking a side, in not making a stand, one remains impotent against those who have taken sides. You keep working out your nice fancy position, yet two to three million Vietnamese are still going to die, too bad. This is always the squeeze that a liberal politics faces, and is, purportedly, one of its greatest weaknesses. Of course, in actuality this is one of liberalism’s greatest strengths. While well-meaning intellectuals worry for us about our moral fiber, appeasing our conscience, the American Imperium continues on its way. There was a similar dynamic in Nineteenth century Britain with liberal dissenters. Of course, liberalism is a complex tradition and can lead to more penetrating analyses and thus a more complex praxis. But as is witnessed by liberalism’s widespread failure with respect to the Iraq war, it often does not live up to this complexity.

Ugandan Peace Talks

"Hopes are rising that Uganda's rebels and government could hold talks to end 18 years of conflict, which has led 1.5 million people to flee their homes. A senior commander of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) told the BBC that it wanted to end the conflict through peaceful means.
And the government has extended its ceasefire until next week. The BBC's Will Ross in Uganda says that both sides now say they are ready to talk, which is a starting point. Our correspondent says the main challenge is now to build and maintain trust between the two sides. More than 20,000 children have been abducted by the rebels to become fighters and sex slaves."

From the BBC.

Indistinguishable From a Defeat

"With the market - and now religion - displacing social democracy as the language of public life, writers are no longer compelled by the requirements of the historical imagination. Facing a new enemy, which does not make the same demands that Communism once did, today's intellectuals wave away all talk of 'root causes': history, it seems, will no longer be summoned to the bar of political analysis - or not for the time being. Mimicking the theological language of their antagonists, contemporary writers prefer catchwords such as 'evil' and 'Islamo-fascism' to the vocabulary of secular criticism. Their language may be a response to 9/11, but it is a product of the end of the Cold War. " - from Corey Robin's review in the LRB of Greg Grandin's new book on the cold war in Guatemala, The Last Colonial Massacre. Read the full text here.

Wolfowitz Interview

The British periodical Prospect has an excellent interview with Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz conducted by Radek Sikorski, formerly of the Polish ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs and now at the American Enterprise Institute. Coming from such a similar ideological stance, Sikorski doesn’t throw any curveballs, but this article is still one of the better of recent Wolfowitz interviews.

Of particular note is Wolfowitz’s rather glib take on America’s messianic mission to instill(install) democracy. The slow, assiduous Occupation task of institution building is ignored in favor of simply removing the “shackles on democracy,” as if democracy and free markets are not the result of particular national evolutions and structures but the natural state of human societies, a default position that will arise organically when tyranny is removed:

“Export of democracy isn't really a good phrase. We're trying to remove the shackles on democracy. . . . . But it's a funny empire that relies on releasing basic human desires to be free and prosperous and live in peace.”

We’ve seen the culmination of this anti-sociological view of democracy and state building with the tragicomically brief tenure of former General Jay Garner as American proconsul.

Credit where credit is due, Wolfowitz may be the first American official I’ve read who gives a half nod to Chechenya’s “legitimate political concerns (For an OTR discussion of this, along a very similar vein, please click here.):

“The Chechens have legitimate political concerns. But the fact that some of them pursue those ends by means of terrorism puts any country that's serious about opposing terrorism in a very difficult position. And you have to be absolutely clear in denouncing atrocities like what took place in Beslan. But I think it is not condoning terrorism to support a political solution to the Chechen conflict.”

Lastly, the following is revealing of Wolfowitz’s own evolution on the subject of Iraqi democracy. Back in September of last year, I saw with Morgan at New School University, a live Wolfowitz interview conducted by the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Goldberg. During the question section from the audience section (mostly dominated by Trostkyite and Larouchian cult devotees), a woman asked what the Pentagon would do if the Iraqis voted for a theocracy. Wolfowitz tilted his head upward, smiled as if amused, and responded that he doubted that this would happen since “51% of Iraqis are women.” Compare that past faith with a singular modernity, a universal rational that transcends culture with the concerns expressed here:

“We are not trying to control these countries so we can exploit their resources. We're trying to enable these countries to stand on their own feet and our experience says that when they do so, we're better off. It's back to the absurdity of saying we're trying to impose our ideas on other people when we want to help them become democracies. There's more legitimacy to the question of whether we are really prepared to live with what they produce when they become democratic. There's an uncertainty about the democratic process and there's always a danger that bad people will get elected.”

Bad people, eh?
AK

C Students Rush to War

"Rice's class taught us that C students rush to war, while A students work diligently and patiently toward peaceful solutions to international problems."

From Juliet Johnson's witty March, 2003, article, "A Lesson in Diplomacy," about studying "The Role of the Military in Politics" with Condi Rice at Stanford (Via Email Nation.)

Israelistine and South Africa

While I appreciate the optimism in Alan's post 'Understanding Israelistine', I think comparing the “Israelistine” issue to the modern history of South Africa is rather too hopeful. South Africa was able to unite itself despite having been culturally and racially divided for its entire history as a nation-state primarily because, though incredibly imperfect to say the least, it did always consider itself to be one nation. After 1967, the Occupied Territories served mainly as an indefinite refugee camp, and the Palestinians like refugees, i.e. a nationless mass with nowhere to go. Conservative Israelis and their supporters have tried to pretend for decades not that the Palestinians were inferior or were undeserving of equal rights, as in South Africa, but that they did not exist at all. I myself cannot count the times I've heard people say, “There is no such thing as a Palestinian,” and really mean it. There's no process of reconciliation to be had with an enemy that doesn't exist, but perhaps, in time, there can be forgiveness enough such that the new state of Palestine and the less-new one of Israel can at least be hospitable neighbors. Arafat managed to draw enough attention to the Palestinians to often make people think the Territories were just another failed state, but in doing so often drew attention away from Israel's role in the subjugation of these people and their statelessness.

I don't think that Alan and I are ultimately in disagreement except maybe that I am moving further and further away from the one-state solution as an option, now or in the future. My guess is that the one-state solution will only be pertinent in the future if a Palestinian state ultimately fails.

On another note, a press release South Africa's Department of Foreign Affairs website says: “South Africa supports the realisation of a two-state solution in the Middle East with an independent state of Palestine coexisting side-by-side with Israel within secure borders.”

http://www.dfa.gov.za/docs/2004/mide1018.htm

Final Thoughts on Lieven

My last words on Lieven. Lieven’s review of Packer’s book was unfair and overly narrow. Second, this in itself signals that Lieven underestimates the complexity of the liberal tradition. Thirdly, Lieven is a Nieburian realist and not a realist tout court, and this is a difference that makes a difference. This type of realism, which Lieven traces back to Niebuhr, Senator Fulbright, C. Vann Woodward, and Hofstadter, is a type of skeptical liberalism that attempt to reflect upon the ways in which liberalism can lead to messianism and its own form of absolutism. It is thus not outside liberalism, but a reversionary movement within liberalism itself. As a democratic socialist, I am sympathetic with the diagnostic aspect of this tradition, but would diverge significantly on its positive proposals. (However, if we are to be honest, the space for my politics is closing by the minute. In this sense Lieven is right that in the future a good deal of ‘progressive’ politics will be concerned with ‘protecting society’ from radical capitalism and its social, environmental, and cultural costs. For one who is attracted to the left for its vanguardism, Virginia Postel and George Gilder are the future, not Jurgen Habermas. No wonder so many self-described avant-guardists got on board the tech-boom.) Fourthly, Lieven is interested in explaining the in my view unprecedented collapse of the liberal intelligencia in the face of the nationalism unleashed by 9/11 and the promise of messianism offered by the Iraq war. This collapse aided and abetted (I said aided and abetted not caused) not only the Iraq disaster, but also the general atmosphere in which radical conservative power could come to be entrenched. Many reflective liberals have begun to grapple with this. Many have not, or have dome so only in a superficial way. In my view it is important to press this point home, not to ‘gloat’ as some have accused me, but to actually effect change in our intellectual life. This change is enormously difficult to enact, as has been shown by our nation's response to Vietnam. This misadventure did, for a period of years, open a space where the type of reflectiveness necessary was practiced. But we know the sad story of the ‘great backlash’ which, starting with Reagan’s story of national renewal, has closed that space quite effectively. (This talk of ‘intellectual space’ might be seen as metaphorical, but it is the explicit self-understanding of most high officials in the Bush Whitehouse to definitively overcome the weakness that is symbolized in their minds by Vietnam and the sixties in general.) Liberal intellectuals, in my view, have not done nearly enough to combat this ‘closing of the American mind’. And this too, will be part of their historical legacy.

The Speed of Error

Since Morgan has not read Lieven's America, Right Or Wrong he is at a bit of a disadvantage and tendentioulsy oversteps himself in his critique of Lieven. As he says in his last post, but once again fails to heed, "Not so friggin' fast." (His recovery from NeoConservatism, in order to be thorough, will be slow and painful, I promise.) His error, this time, is as follows:

"The final proof, I think, in this pudding, is that it is difficult to find any word in Lieven's recent writings where he laments the isolationist and self-serving agendas of most European powers. That would be the balance to his well appreciated criticism of the bridge too far of Left Hawkism."

Lieven, on page 36 of America, Right Or Wrong, discusses the impact of bloody war of colonial liberation on the European political psyche:

"Thus the experience of several European countries of the often bloody, chaotic disillusioning process of decolonization and of the failure of democracy and development in many of the former colonies already had provided a considerable immunization against the more optimistic and violent forms of mission civilisatrice. As a result, belief in the possibility and justification of spreading civilization by force of arms is also very much lower in Europe than in the United States, although it has been growing in recent years as a result of the shameful and disastrous European failures to prevent wars and atrocities on the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1995. But when it comes to a really strong program of development and backed by the presence of force, and without American control, the immediate periphery of the EU in the Balkans is still the limit of European ambitions." [emphasis added]

And as to Morgan's query, "It is very difficult to imagine Lieven writing these lines. Indeed, it isn't clear exactly how Lieven feels about Power but given his arguments about the Left Hawks one has to wonder whether he would simply lump her in with the stooges." Perhaps it would be charitable to take into account Lieven's support for Iraq War I, the Bosnian intervention and Afghanistan and meld it with Lieven's statement of purpose on page 18:

"Calling on the words of Julien Benda, it [Lieven's latest book] is an appeal to American intellectuals to do what thay have asked of intellectuals of other countries: to recognize and confront their own nationalism and to transcend it in the name of higher universal values . . . . It is an appeal to return to older American traditions of Realist diplomacy softened by ethics and conscience."

Now there is a task for Morgan, and in many ways he's already addressed the universal values part . . . . while neglecting a thing or three about American nationalism, and its presuppositions, during his brief romance with neoconservatism.

Lastly, it seems that my distinction between Left Hawks and Liberal Hawks has not taken root in these discussions. By my reckoning, real Left Hawks, like Michael Walzer and Joschka Fischer opposed this Iraq War, contra the Liberal Hawks who, like Morgan, punked for power and the easy thrills of an over-simplified moral drama. Grab a copy of Reinhold Niebuhr's "The Irony of American History" and slow down, Morgan. Maybe your conscience can catch up.
AK

Ironies and First Steps

The admission by Lieven that he is a Nieberian realist puts into perspective his view of the liberal hawks. For they personify the irony of history that Niebuhr was so keen to identify. Under the guise of spreading freedom and fighting fascism they actually forwarded nationalism and militarism. Now that is an irony. Lieven, of course, is just a starting point insofar as his project is fundamentally critical. It is an essential first step, but just that. What is the second step? Now that’s a good question. ›

Thoughts About Some Thoughts

Lieven is not trying to 'unmask motives', he is trying to break through the 'haze of ideality' which, in his view, prevents many liberals from correctly analyzing political situations. You keep assimilating Lieven to the anti-imperialist left but this is a misreading. He is not of this left but is, in his own words, a Neiberian realist. This type of realist (there are many) does not discount nor argue against the ethical strains in the American political self-understanding. Indeed, it finds this strain to be one of America’s great strengths. It does, however, want to warn against the 'ironic' perversion of these impulses. This has nothing to do with a realism which takes it that the behavior of states operates according to quasi-natural laws which can be analyzed independently of the values and beliefs of the political actors involved. You may not like this position either, but your failure to even see it makes you unable to discern that Lieven's discourse is not governed by the opposition imperialism/anti-fascism. That opposition already operates at the normative level, i.e., at the level of those reasons we should take to be most binding for our action. Lieven's discourse has a different target: what are the values and background beliefs that structure our interpretation of a situation in the first place.

Lieven is quite willing to use American force when necessary. This is demonstrated by his support of Kosovo and Afganistan. Indeed, I think if you read more Lieven you would critique him from the left insofar as he thinks American power should be used to ensure a stable international order. Under this would be included humanitarian interventions insofar as his definition of order requires that the 'benign hegemon' must assure that there are not outrageous violations of human civilization.

To throw my two cents in, I would say that the stress on humanitarian interventions throws your politics off in general. This is like a health care system that takes it to be OK that health care is mostly administered to the poor in the emergency room rather then attempt to fix the health system at a more basic level. Of course, when there is a humanitarian crisis we should address it vigorously, just as we should treat someone who comes to the emergency room. But I do think that many interventionist liberals like Ignatieff are basically willing to continue along with the international status quo concerning wealth, etc. I think this acceptance is accompanied by a smug ‘politics of pity’ that treats the third world masses as children which must be saved or scolded according to the situation. I reject this aspect of modern liberalism and will fight it with every fiber of my body.

re: Thoughts on Lieven/Samantha Power

Steven writes that Samantha Power is an antidote to the claim that Lieven underestimates the potentially useful aspects of American intervention, especially in the case of genocide and failed states. He notes that Power shows us that the US has never made such interventions for moral reasons. Thus, it would follow that Lieven's unmasking of US motivations leaves the Liberal Hawks as nothing but dupes for the self-interest of a hegemonic state.

Well, again, there is some truth here but not so friggin fast. Ms. Power's argument is not that because the US has shown little desire to act out of moral principles in foreign policy it never will. In fact, it is closer to the opposite. The US, she contends, is such a powerful state actor right now that anyone interested in stopping genocide, curbing tyrannies, directing resources to failed states etc., has almost no one to turn to as a global actor other than the US. We ought, she argues, to try and put more of these situations on the table of American foreign policy. That doesn't mean militarism. But when the US directs its eye, and sometimes its ire, at a situation, the world pays more attention. Accepting the current geo-political arrangement, Power asks how we can make it as moral as possible. She writes:

We have to be prepared to throw some of our weight in the interest of saving people, to recognize that American leadership, unfortunately, remains essential in motivating multilateral interventions, in freeing up the UN to do what it should be doing. Indeed, even diplomatically, [we must use] the leverage and the strength of America's normative power, which [surprisingly] still exists, rather than bypass leadership. I've come to realize is that leadership is binary: when America doesn't lead, everyone else sees it as leadership not to act.

It is very difficult to imagine Lieven writing these lines. Indeed, it isn't clear exactly how Lieven feels about Power but given his arguments about the Left Hawks one has to wonder whether he would simply lump her in with the stooges. And that, again, is the problem with his otherwise trenchant analysis. Returning to Mitchell Cohen's claim that he was willing to support the war because he is anti-fascist before he is anti-imperialist, the problem with Lieven is that he ranks anti-imperialism as 1st, 2nd, 3rd , 4th and 5th. He provides a necessary corrective to those of us who failed to rank anti-imperialism as highly as we should of, but I'm not sure his position is exactly desirable in itself.

Because Lieven is no fool, he has couched his suspicions of US actions in Kosovo and Afghanistan in nuanced terms. Fine. But let us call a duck a duck. Lieven doesn't buy anything, even the vague initial premise of the Left Hawk argument and even the concerns of someone like Michael Walzer. And he can't be particularly sympathetic to a person like Samantha Power, who wants to utilize the progressive potential of American idealism to direct US resources toward those trouble spots where it could have positive effect. Ultimately, people like Power have limited use for Lieven's ideological unmasking of US motivations. Rather, she asks, how can we make the most and the best of those already compromised motivations.

The final proof, I think, in this pudding, is that it is difficult to find any word in Lieven's recent writings where he laments the isolationist and self-serving agendas of most European powers. That would be the balance to his well appreciated criticism of the bridge too far of Left Hawkism.

In the end, I plead guilty to many of the accusations that Lieven levels against the Left Hawks. I promise to change my ways, truly. But do we really all think that Lieven is facing up to the failures of his own political position?

Return of the 3 State Solution

Fred Kaplan, a noted skeptic of Peter Galbraith’s three state solution for Iraq (first discussed by Doghead here), has come around to the hard logic of separation. He writes today is Slate:

“I criticized this notion last May after Peter Galbraith proposed such a plan in the New York Review of Books. I complained that it could turn Iraq into a weak state, sire civil war, and lure neighboring countries to intervene, potentially inflaming the entire region. I still fear this possibility. The problem is, Iraq seems headed toward the same nightmare under the status quo. A new political structure might better contain the chaos than blithely muddling through.”

What makes the three state, or multiple state solution, more salient now are its advocates from within the Iraqi government of Iyad Allawi:

“In his latest online Newsweek column, Christopher Dickey reports that Iraq's national security adviser, Moweffak al-Rubaie, is floating a similar plan, called "democratic regionalism." This would split the country into between four and six districts—the Sunni triangle, the Kurdish territories in the north, at least two Shiite areas in the south, and an administrative center in Baghdad.”

These various schemas of federalism and disunion will move from salient to relevant when members -- at first lower-level -- of the next Bush administration begin to float similar notions. This could happen when the Bushies realize that the President’s rhetoric of combating terrorism in Iraq by creating a “secure” and “democratic” country was, in actuality, debunked months ago. It is not just the question of whether US forces can create such conditions, currently it looks pretty bad, but the real likelihood that even if, (a huge if), they could secure whole cities and conduct some elections, regional pockets and tribal networks would still generate insurgency and terror. Not that fractionalization will help out on this account either. The most troubling question with al-Rubaie’s “democratic regionalism” plan is the composition and political flavor of Sunni-dominated districts. What would insure that these new Sheikdoms would not become terrorist safe-havens, mini-Afghanistans, or Temporary Autonomous Zones in the formulation of the counter-terrorist expert John Robb (borrowed from the queer Sufi mystic, Hakim Bey)?
AK

Liberalism and Communalism

It is a cliché that liberalism, because of its stress on tolerance, has a difficult time defending itself against illiberal forces. Usually this argument is projected ‘outward’ against ‘threats’ (Nazism, Stalinism, Baathism, Islamism, etc.) which encroach from outside liberal societies. Even though Strauss, for example, was taught the lesson of liberal weakness from the experience of Weimar, an experience in which liberalism was destroyed from ‘within’, contemporary neo-cons and Straussians only focus on external threats. Liberals, for the most part, follow in this for the reason that they live in a life-world where the desire for communalist identities over and above singular live narratives is not very strong, or at least not strong enough to inform a politics of conservative revolt. However, in many parts of the US, this desire is an active and powerful force. Here is what Brad Carson, the defeated senate candidate in Oklahoma, said about this issue in the New Republic:


As a defeated Senate candidate in the most red of red states, many people have asked me for insights into the Democratic Party's failure to connect with culturally conservative voters. Much has already been written on this topic, and scholars will add more. But I do know this: The culture war is real, and it is a conflict not merely about some particular policy or legislative item, but about modernity itself. Banning gay marriage or abortion would not be sufficient to heal the cultural gulf that exists in this nation. The culture war is about matters more fundamental still: whether nationality is, in a globalized world, a random fact of no more significance than what hospital one was born in or whether it is the source of identity and even political legitimacy; whether one's self is a matter of choice or whether it is predetermined, before birth, by the cultural membership of one's family; whether an individual is just that--a free-floating atom--or whether the individual is part of a long chain that both predates and continues long after any particular person; whether concepts like honor and shame, which seem so quaint, are still relevant in a world that values only "tolerance." These are questions not for politicians but for philosophers, and, in the end, it is the failure of liberal philosophy that we saw on November 2.

For the vast majority of Oklahomans--and, I would suspect, voters in other red states--these transcendent cultural concerns are more important than universal health care or raising the minimum wage or preserving farm subsidies. Pace Thomas Frank, the voters aren't deluded or uneducated. They simply reject the notion that material concerns are more real than spiritual or cultural ones. The political left has always had a hard time understanding this, preferring to believe that the masses are enthralled by a "false consciousness" or Fox News or whatever today's excuse might be. But the truth is quite simple: Most voters in a state like Oklahoma--and I venture to say most other Southern and Midwestern states--reject the general direction of American culture and celebrate the political party that promises to reform or revise it. That is what Antonin Scalia famously called the Kulturkampf. And there can be no doubt either that this is a fundamental dynamic in American politics or on which side of this conflict the electorate rests.


Of course, in the American case, things are complicated because this desire for communalist identity co-exists in the same breast with a fanatical desire for self-groundedness and self-reliance. This, after all, is what the gun symbolizes in American life. However, while it is undeniable that many American’s what the freedom and self-reliance that a market culture brings, they also want the existential security and bonds of solidarity that is secured by a pre-modern life-world.

I say all of this a prelude to grappling with the mystery, elucidated by the aforementioned Thomas Frank in his Book ‘What’s the Matter with Kansas’, that the coalition that supports the ‘great backlash’ now used to be the populist left. He wonder how this coalition, which mixed fundamentalist religion with leftist economic hell raising, could veer so far from its founding gesture. My suspicion is that in the populist configuration the leftwing economic vision was undergirded by a moral vision of solidarity and equality (white solidarity and equality of course). Nonetheless, it was the left which offered protection and solace from the forces that were breaking up yeoman forms of life at the end of the Nineteenth century. Here is how American is different then other civilizations: the traditional way of life that was encroached upon by gilded capitalism was not communiterian per se, but made up of yeoman or aspiring yeoman. Now of course, the belief that all (whites) were freeholders is a partly mythic projection, but it is one that had enough truth to secure the ascent and loyalty of the population. By noting that the American ‘state of nature’ was different from the European one (See Louis Hartz for elaboration) we can distinguish between two types of self-reliance: the yeoman self-reliance offered by American civic republicanism, and the form that is offered by corporate capitalism. Both are entrepreneurial, but one is based upon self-proprietorship, while the other is based upon wage-labor. By making this distinction we can see that the desire for both self-grounding and communalist solidarity is intelligible. It is, however, based upon a misunderstanding, the belief that the form of self-reliance offered by contemporary capitalism is they type that was offered by American civic republicanism. This is not the case. By not seeing this, one is lead to promote forms of political and economic life that actually destroys the life-world that one thinks one is protecting.

The upshot is that the Democrats have to offer an economic agenda that is grounded in a moral vision of solidarity and equality. Although I don’t like Edwards, he was the only candidate to clearly see this. The cold war is over, vital center liberalism is over, interest group liberalism is over, let’s try something ‘new’.

Understanding Israelistine

Stefany’s skepticism in attaining a one-state solution for Palestinians and Israelis seems quite correct for now (re: The Death of Arafat below) . . . . the practicalities of how to proceed with such a plan appear almost insurmountable at this stage of negotiations. However, her “abused child” analogy doesn’t adequately address the central ideal of the one-state solution, that of a multi-ethnic, democratic state with strong guarantees for civil rights. The model, perhaps the greatest national success story in the past decade, is South Africa where a much “abused” indigenous population -- now that it has gained strong democratic rights -- has been able to forgive and live in relative harmony with their past apartheid masters. Would a similar achievement for "Israelistine" really be the “epitome of sycophantism and defeat” as Stefany claims? To meld her analogy of the abusive household to the (admittedly) very optimistic South African scenario, the abused child (Palestinians) would shortly add tremendous demographic weight and democratic rights while the parent experiences a relative aging and diminishment. Things change around a bad household when the smacked up runt shoots to four hundred pounds. While the South African success story is appealing for acknowledging and accepting these very realities, it is all the more difficult to see why hard-line Israeli elements would ever choose a fate similar to the vanishing Afrikaaner.
AK

Arafat and the Neocon Dream

From Bob Dreyfuss:

Yasser Arafat is crafty ‘til the end. His death could not have come at a worse time for the Bush administration.

It creates a problem for the neocons that they cannot deal with head-on. Tony Blair's Washington visit is critical, because Blair is meeting President Bush face to face, unfiltered by aides, to tell the president that he needs to take the Road Map out of the glove compartment. It’s an issue on which Blair, already facing an increasingly anti-Iraq war public opinion at home, agrees with the Old Europeans. They all believe that it’s time that Ariel Sharon get his comeuppance.

According to the Post, Bush is considering the naming of a Middle East envoy to restart the peace process, an action that would trigger a huge behind-the-scenes struggle to determine who it is and what powers the envoy might have.

It also provides an opportunity for the Republican coalition’s two anti-neocon factions to join hands. The realists, led by Brent Scowcroft, Colin Powell, et al., and the nativists, led by Pat Buchanan and Co., can be expected to mobilize in support of a major new initiative to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Scowcroft outline the general shape of what an agreement might start with in a Post op-ed today:

The president should add substance to his commitment to an independent Palestinian state. It must include steps to provide security to Israel and to give the Palestinians the ability and means to construct a viable political entity free from the crushing presence of Israeli troops. The United States should insist that Israel stop construction of its wall on the West Bank and mirror its withdrawal from Gaza with the evacuation of the West Bank. In return, the wall and Israeli troops would be replaced by an international force, principally European or perhaps NATO troops.

And the Arabs can be expected to unite in demanding a return to Oslo-style negotiations and the Road Map. Already King Abdullah of Jordan and Jimmy Carter have side-by-side op-eds in the Times trying to push Bush in that direction.

How can the neocons deal with this? I’m sure their strategy will be to delay, counting on the militants of Hamas to bail them out by blowing up buses. Keep your eye on Elliott Abrams, the Middle East chief at the National Security Council.

Here's the link: http://www.tompaine.com/blog.cfm

Kepel

From a recent interview with Gilles Kepel, author of 'The War for Muslim Minds':

Gilles Kepel: The neocons are indeed commonly considered a bunch of hypocrites. I don’t agree: I may be naïve, but I have seen many of them at work and read their texts intensively, and I think that they are indeed firm proponents of democracy.

Most of them, however, have a peculiar agenda in relation to the middle east, where all criteria except Israel’s security pale into insignificance. They do not understand or wish to see the contradiction between preaching the necessity of democratic regimes in the area and refusing to engage seriously in the Israeli–Palestinian dispute. Instead, they choose to believe that no requirement for democracy should be allowed to put the slightest pressure on Ariel Sharon. As long as this continues, the neocons have no chance to win the support of Muslims or middle–east civil societies against radicals and terrorists.

In recent discussions in Washington with US administration officials and agencies dealing with middle–east policy, I tried to persuade them of the centrality of the “war for Muslim hearts and minds” – and the fact that in this war, weapons cannot be an end in themselves, only a means. What Ayman al–Zawahiri calls “the Muslim masses” are ultimately the only group able to eradicate terrorism, to dry up the pond where people like him thrive. To tackle this, you must engage civil society.

This issue is decisive in Iraq today because the jihadis believe that Iraq is their new terrain. They believe that Iraq will follow 9/11 in setting an example for the Muslim world – exposing the weakness of the west, then mobilising and galvanising the masses, who will become fearless in the face of the enemy.

In cyberspace at least, they have already largely succeeded. The jihadis may have failed miserably in inspiring the masses to replace existing regimes with Islamic, sharia–driven states. But they have created a constituency of internet activists dedicated to spreading terrorism around the globe.

The crucial issue now is whether Iraq is the new land of jihad or of fitna – a war in the heart of Islam that threatens the faithful with community fragmentation, disintegration and ruin (my book takes its French title from the term).

Click here for the Link.

Taking and Giving

Re: Steven's claim (below, in Re: Liberal Hawks) that I give with one hand and take with the other.

Well, yes, that's the whole point. There was a massive failure on the
part of some Left Hawks including myself and we have to answer for
that. Lieven is completely correct in much of what he claims the
failure to consist in. His four points critiquing Berman's analysis are
basically fair:

(1) The approach lumps together all Muslim forces critical of the
United States and Israel into one hostile and ideologically united
camp; (2) it ignores the critically important role of local ethnic
feeling not only in hostility to the United States but in the
historical processes of democratization and modernization across much
of the world; (3) it turns a blind eye to Israeli crimes; and (4) it
treats America's allies as useful but contemptible idiots whose views
and interests need not be seriously considered.

I intend to do a better job thinking especially about points (1) and
(2). I take many of the other points Lieven makes as a major bitch slap
against those who took position like mine and I hope we are big enough
to take them very seriously indeed, especially in light of the genuine
suffering that we have gotten into cahoots with. I think I've been
fairly open about that of late.

However, Steven's claim that the Left Hawk aberration was one of the
great intellectual shames of our time, a position that Lieven clearly
shares, is absurd. The attempt by Lieven and Levine to excommunicate
those who strayed into apostasy is in itself shameful. We have a fight
here, essentially, about who the real extremists. Even the claim that
the Left Hawk position could only be explained as a falling to the
Right is offensive. Since when did fighting fascism and totalitarianism
constitute Right Wing aberrations? That is what is wrong with the hard
Left time and time again.

Many of the thinkers in Packer's volume are serious and important
thinkers and the things they are worried about SHOULD be part of Left
discourse. Certainly they (we) are in for some criticism (self and
otherwise) for having gotten so much about Iraq wrong but I think it
would be disastrous for building what Walzer calls a 'decent Left' if
the response to all this is for the Left to forget about its own
problems.

Not that Lieven or Steven are advocating such a thing. But then why the
either/or? Why the refusal to admit that there was something in the
Left Hawk impulse, the desire, as Mitchell Cohen of Dissent said, to
put the concerns about fascism before those of imperialism. Even if
many of the Left Hawks got their priorities wrong, do the authentic
Leftists like Mr. Lieven and Mr. Levine really feel that there is no
problem here?

I agree with much of what Lieven and Steven have to say. I accept much of their criticism of positions that I have held over the last several years. But I would think that a healthy Left would welcome and appreciate such a volume as Packer's, even and especially as we continue to think about American intervention, militarism, Islamic fundamentalism, and globalization.

j'accuse

Of course, it is probably true that the Bush administration would have gone to war no matter what the liberal hawks said. But let's not pretend that Thomas Friedman (chief foreign affairs columnist New York Times), David Remnick (editor New Yorker), Fareed Zakaria (chief foreigh affairs columnist Newsweek), Peter Beinhart (editor New Republic), George Packer (New Yorker), Richard Cohen (Washington Post), Jonathan Alter (Newsweek), Michael Ignatieff, Keeneth Pollack, Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman, etc. etc. have no symbolic capital. That’s some ‘splinter group’. They, along with Krauthammer, Perle, Frum, Kristol, Kagan, Podhoretz etc. etc. who in case you didn’t realize, also supported the war, make up a sizable (indeed, majority) portion of our country's policy making intelligentsia. (I leave out the Michael Moore ‘left’ and the Ann Coulter right.) The liberal hawks were not just part of a nice Habermasian dialogue amongst the left, (as if there were a left with enough strength to compel liberals to enter into dialogue), but essential elements of a hegemonic (in Gramsci’s sense) political class whose symbol capital enabled and underwrote a disastrous and reactionary policy. Of course all of these men had the best of ‘intentions’, but that means nothing to me. As Julian Benda put it in 1928, liberal hawks have committed treason against their intellectual calling. I say j’accuse with no quarter. €

Left Hawks and Humanitarian Interventions

In conversation, Dr. Emile has expressed the worry (echoed by Morgan) that my attack on liberal hawks (following Lieven) fails to separate out humanitarian interventionism from left hawkdom in general. This is a legitimate worry. In my view however, humanitarian interventionist discourse, to be viable, must be grafted onto a different intellectual grid then that of left hawkdom. Indeed, this is necessary not just for intellectual reasons but for practical ones. Let me explain. Samantha Power, in her book ‘A Problem from Hell’ demonstrates that the indifference of US policy makers to genocide is not a breakdown of the political system but the logical outcome of its functioning. Her suggestion to change this state of affairs is to change civil society: if politicians pay a political price for their inaction they will act. This strategy depends upon consciousness raising and the cultivation of a certain moral economy. The problem is that in the US the type of consciousness that would be required to sustain this moral economy is lacking, at least among much of the population. And here is where the finding of Lieven concerning US nationalism is so important. To make policy makers pay a political price for inaction in the fact of genocide requires that citizens have an aspect of post-national consciousness. I say ‘an aspect’ of post-national consciousness because in my view the moral solidarity that is provide by being a member of an community is precisely that which can sustains the care necessary to address the suffering of those we do not know. Be that as it may, this type of consciousness is not dominant in the US. And until it is, Powers’ strategy will not work. Now we can understand why humanitarian interventionist discourse must be separated from left hawkdom: for left hawkdom, in its embrace of a manichian world-view positively augments the nationalist consciousness that is inimical to Power’s strategy. The point could be put this way: a viable liberalism must perform an immanent critique of itself and jettison those aspects of itself that undermines itself. Of course, we could also just call this position socialism. Yea!

The Death of Arafat

With the death of Yasser Arafat comes a myriad of hopes (Israel, America), disappointments (Palestinians) and fears (everyone), along with the cliché that Arafat was the symbol of a free and independent Palestinian state as well as the main obstacle in the process of creating one. He’s just never been able to convince the world that he really wanted to rule over a peaceful state, a state no longer requiring an identity of victimhood and violence, which would have to fight for its rights rather than its mere existence, both nationally and internationally. Rights can be pretty boring, laws less exciting than revolution.

Arafat was a man who ruled over his subjects with an autocratic and corrupt hand. It’s taking three people to fill all of the posts he held solely. He was also, in the minds of many and perhaps most Palestinians, the only one who cared about putting the plight of the Palestinian people at the forefront of world policy. He’s been offered good deals and bad deals, but has rarely been allowed the luxury of coming up with his own plan. And there have been so many. The one-state solution, for instance, which in my mind is the epitome of sycophantism and defeat, at least right now, regardless of its apparent peaceful nature. The one-state solution is akin to an adult abused as a child fighting to stay in its abusive parents’ home such that the parents will be forced to make reparations to the child. The better solution is that the abused adult is helped to gain independence with his or her own home, perhaps paid for by the parents and the state which allowed the abuse to occur. This is how victimhood can be replaced with empowerment.

Some, some editors of OTR even, have called Mahmoud Abbas, the new de facto leader of the Palestinians, a pussy. I must say, I welcome his moderate ways, and put out there that his firmness on the right of return (the most controversial issue in the so-called peaces process) shows in fact a shrewdness, a weapon that makes this previous assessment of him wrong. The right of return issue can be wielded in favor of the Palestinians and their cause if its ultimate unfeasibility is accepted.

I’m not one to cheer death, not in earnest anyway, but this is indeed a day of hope in the Middle East. Now if only the Israelis would get rid of Sharon.

Re: Liberal Hawks

Morgan, I am always amazed how you can offer a thought with one hand, and take it back with the other. You never connect the possibility that the Liberal Hawks have become, as you say, ‘hopelessly compromised’ because while they think they are doing the work of the universal they are in fact doing the work of the particular. They think they are serving internationalism while in fact serving American nationalism. This is the point of Lieven's book which takes up not just the ‘American creed’ form of nationalism that is imbibed by the liberal hawks, but also the ethno-religious nationalism that has been massively overlooked. This illiberal form of nationalism was the motor force that forwarded the liberal hawk’s agenda. This is a fact. Now that Bush has won, many of these liberals have all of sudden woken up to this fact, but it is far too late in the game. In my opinion, this has been a shameful episode in American intellectual life, one for which I have very little sympathy as you can tell. Until the American liberal can step out of the enormously powerful shadow of the ideology of the ‘American way’ they will continue to fuck up as they did in Vietnam and in Iraq.

Concerning the point that the salutary aspects of liberal hawkdom will be drowned out by loony left idiocy, I say they have no one to blame by themselves. For it is they who by moving right vacated the space that separated the loony left from the neo-cons. They took on an overtly imperialist policy and said to everyone that did not agree that they were hysterical extremists. This was your basic pattern of argumentation as well. When one does this, one abandons the middle ground which is the type of ground in which the salutary aspects of the liberal hawk agenda could have been be cultivated. They threw it away and with it their credibility. (Of course, they will keep their cushy university and think tank jobs. No one every pays for telling those in power what they want to hear.)

Liberal Hawks

Despite Steven's fascination with a so-called American creed, the Liberal Hawk tradition as espoused by the writers in Packer's book is internationalist and post-national in fundamental ways. Steven needs to take this more seriously and spend more time actually reading the thinkers he attacks using analysis borrowed from speculative scholarship on the nineteenth century.

Secondly, Lieven's review gets many things right. His basic premise, that Liberal Hawkdom has a tendency to become hopelessly compromised, is perfectly on target. His claim that the complexities of history and context are lost on those who simplify struggles to a conflict between democracy and its other is well taken. The references to Vietnam, at this point, consistently strike their mark. Lieven has much to say about how, where, and why Left Hawks got things wrong, which they (we) did.

Where Lieven's review sounds a little sanctimonious is in its silences. Lieven never achnowledges that the Left Hawks were trying to fill, however poorly, a rather troubling lacuna in Left thinking. Lieven acknowledges again and again that Saddam's Iraq was some form of quasi-fascist nightmare. But he doesn't take his own Left to task for having little to suggest in what to do about it. If the Left Hawks can be accused of insipient imperialism, Lieven does nothing to allay fears that his Left veers toward isolationism. The Left Hawks, as a whole, cared deeply about liberation, and the liberation of peoples far from their own homes and immedaite concerns. To belittle this concern as readily as Lieven does suggests that his brand of Leftism has all the answers. But it does not. Lieven ought to know that.

The Vietnam War was a tragedy for this country and a thousand more times a tragedy for Vietnam. But The Nation magazine, for which Lieven wrote his review, was happy to publish apologetics not only for the rather disastrous Hanoi government of Vietnam but for the genocidal reign of Pol Pot in Cambodia.

I won't be happy until Left Hawks learn their lessons without having to accept that the Left in general has nothing to learn about opposing tyranny and totalitarianism. There is a troubling history here, and Lieven is only telling part of the story. And if Steven is a Hegelian, he will recognize the lack.

Brave New War Theory

Theo’s argument here sounds an often lot like CIA analyst Mike Scheuer, who, writing as “Anonymous” in his Imperial Hubris: Why the West IS Losing the War on Terror, claims that America has won every major war, since the Civil War, through total war and that America’s incomplete victories in Afghanistan and Iraq are due to partial war strategies in which the US military has repeatedly failed to fully engage and annihilate the enemy. Al-Qaeda slipped away from Tora Bora and without the 3rd Infantry Division sweeping down from Turkey, significant cadres of die-hard Baathists, the Republican Guard and Saddam’s Fedayeen fled north to the Sunni Triangle once Baghdad fell.

Theo is quite wrong, however, to assert that US forces are not “encountering” the enemy. From the start of this invasion much of this combat has been in close urban combat, even hand to hand (e.g. Silver Star winner, Master Sergeant Anthony Pryor). American tactical superiority in these encounters has triumphed despite the harsh urban battlefields of Baghdad, Falluja and Najaf. Judging from deaths listed in major media sources (caveat), US forces appear to be inflicting 50 to 1 casualties, which are consistent with the urban fighting in Somalia, perhaps with similar results. Compare the American death rates, with their superior training, firepower and Kevlar during the past 19 months with the Russian casualties suffered during the first two days of the siege of Grozny in 1995. The “Maikop” brigade lost about 800 men in the first 40 hours of fighting . . . now that’s a stunning defeat of an imperial power. If American troop levels consistent with total war were deployed in Iraq then a total defeat of the forces arrayed against would be far more likely, but they weren’t and I doubt they’re going to be now. Will leave to the List a discussion of whether America has the political will to inflict a total defeat during what it claims is a war of liberation.

Arrayed against America's "New War Theory," which Theo correctly posits as a partial war as opposed to the total war of the past, is the Bazaar of Violence waged by Jihad International (or as John Robb puts it the "Global Guerillas"). As he describes it:

“A bazaar of violence is a hallmark of global guerrilla warfare. When a state collapses, as it did in Iraq, global guerrillas quickly arrive with money and violence. Through this funding, terrorist violence, and infrastructure disruption; global guerrillas create conditions ripe for the establishment of a bazaar of violence. In essence, the bazaar is an emergent property of global guerrilla operations within a failed or collapsed state. Once established, it builds on itself and creates a dynamic that is almost impossible to disrupt."

If Robb's analysis is corrrect, and I think it has much to recommend it, then how does one build a new state in a foreign land under such horrific opposition and suspicion? If state-building is out, then how can the US win in Iraq? What are the objectives for victory outside of state-building?"

As an addendum, Theo should check out the new face of war as revealed with Big Dog. I talked to one of the designers of Big Dog in Cambridge this Summer and quickly zeroed in on the fact that Big Dog could easily function as a WEAPONS PLATFORM. Said designer really could've cared less, volunteering, in fact, that BD should be stable enough to mount a squad light machine gun (5.56mm) or even a .50 MG (12.7mm). I'm sure there will be benefits for the civilian sector at some point (hardy, har), but for the near future BD could be another component in "new war theory", especially when combined with the next generation of smaller, more efficient, better armed Predator drones. Oh Brave New World, I see your shape and color!

New War Theory

Americans invented a new concept of war. I am speaking of the war at a distance, made possible by the superiority in guided weapons, etc. The soldiers against whom such wars are unleashed describe them as cowardly, as wars in which the face of the enemy is forever unseen. But there is another aspect of these wars that makes it a necessary fact that such wars become 'wars against terror'. The winning of a war in the old days involved two episodes, one physical another mental. It involved defeat. Defeat is not a purely physical concept, it cannot be explained solely as the loss of such and such a number of men and machines of war. It involves a psychological component of resignation. The treaty of peace, the act of capitulation, are outward signs consequent on defeat in its two components: physical and psychological.What of the new wars? They are increasingly efficient in achieving the first component of defeat -- the physical one. But they are clearly incapable of securing the second, which plausibly can only result from an encounter with the enemy, an encounter that the new war avoids at all costs. The inevitable result is that the new war is incapable of securing defeat of the enemy. As a consequence, it is also incapable of ending the war. The new war is like a pain-killer to the pain: it makes it go away temporarily, and if the pain comes back, requires more medication. If the pain ever goes away for good, we know it was not the pain-killer that did it.Terror is the condition of fighting against pain-killers: its primary weapon is, understandably, pain and infliction of pain. The new war thus gives rise to terror by its very nature.
-- Theo

Populism for US

I can only agree with Dr. Emile's post that for the Democrats to win requires conviction and sincerity. But here's the problem: what do the Democrats have conviction about? It is difficult to win with the slogan: we are reasonable face of the Republican party. For that, in essence is what their position was in this election. (By saying this I am not making the stupid argument that the parties are basically the same for the simple reason that the reasonable face of the Republican party is quite a distance from the type of Republicanism which supports the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions.)

Here is where Thomas Frank’s work is essential. If one is to combat the virulent nationalist populism that the Republican party has to offer, one has to counter with a vigorous economic populism. In fact, one has to be downright demagogic about it, demagogic I say. This, of course, will offend the pundits (this is class warfare, it's so immoderate, etc.); but so what. They thought that Gore’s espousal of economic populism was a huge tactical mistake but they forget to mention that Gore, who was a far worse candidate then Kerry, actually won.

Karl Rove offends good sense and sobriety and guess what, he keeps winning. That’s what we have to do. You don’t soak the rich per se, you just keep reminding people that they are getting screwed, that it’s not an even playing field etc. etc. Play to their resentments, Goddamn it, it works.

In my view the Dems are actually very close to being a dominant party. Why? Because their solicitation of the working class through economic populism would not for the most part turn cultural Democrats into Republicans. This is where cultural backlash politics could be a wedge against the Republicans insofar as many highly educated urban Democrats could in the past have defected to a moderate Rockefeller style Republicanism, but no more.

This is why the Democrats could focus heavily on winning not all, but some of the white working class with economic populism and not lose the rest of its coalition. The Democrats have been unwilling to pursue unabashedly this type of politics because of the structure of their party as a collection of interest groups, as well as their fundraising base. But here is where the significance of Howard Dean lies for the Democrats: they no longer need to rely strictly upon special interests for their party funding. Indeed, in the last cycle, most of their funds came from a grass roots network that is more liberal then the party in Washington where Terry McAuliff and Co. still (for the time being) reign. This gives the Democrats a historic opportunity, lets see if they take it.

Re: Right Wing-Populism

A response to Steven's post "Right Wing Populism." Thanks for this post-election provocation. In an election where the largest concern was supposedly "moral values," this hits home. It seems to me that exposing the putative contradictions of the conservatives isn't enough. Isn't it possible that, just as liberals such as myself want capitalism of a regulated form in which basic values such as health, the environment, and labor practices are protected by law, conservatives actually desire a form of capitalism that protects their "values"? Agreed that what they say they want has its contradictions.

But more vital, I would argue, is taking the ground they currently occupy by defending liberal concerns as moral values themselves. As you note, the energy driving the right is indefinite - for the same reason that the anti-modern movement in the Islamic world will be indefinite: because modernity can never end, so there is always something to fight. The trick is to do in America what some Islamists have done and which liberal theologians have always done, which is to reconnect the basic teachings of the tradition to the core progressive moral values. This is what Zizek is getting at in his The Fragile Absolute: Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For.

The soul-searching the Dems are going through right now is all to the good. What they need to do is stop pandering and being ashamed of what they believe. I'm ready to see a Dem quote scripture explaining why moral condemnation, greed, and busybodyism are not Christian moral values. Americans get a "gut instinct" off a political figure that doesn't have a ton to do with their policies and everything to do with their appearance of sincerity and authenticity. It is an absolute requirement for a successful national candidate in this country that Kerry, for all his other virtues (he grew on me, I admit it), simply did not possess. Don't you think?

Right-wing Populism

In the past there have been many discussions about the contradiction in the conservative movement between a full-fledged support for hyper-capitalism and their worrying about moral decay. Daniel Bell encapsulated this 'contradiction of capitalism' thusly: consumerist forms of capitalism and the hedonism it engenders undermines the protestant work ethic leading to a motivational crisis vis-avis the productive side of capitalism. Many argued from the left (including Habermas in his book 'legitimation crisis') that this signaled that the contradiction of late capitalist society were to be found in the super-structure and not the base. Zygmunt Bauman has recently argued, plausibly in my view, that this type of crisis theory is misguided. It is misguided because 'liquid modernity' (second modernity, late modernity etc.) has instituted, for the advanced industrial countries, a stable social system based on a consumerist and not productivist form of integration.

The reason I bring this is as a prolegomena to understanding right wing populism in the US. The basic point I would like to make is that right wing populism is a form of identity politics whose energy and rage is based upon the contradiction of accepting this late capitalist consumerist form of social integration and a highly moralistic (and religious) form of personality integration. This contradiction, which generates enormous and continual psychic energy (because as a standing contradiction it cannot be 'solved') is based upon a form of misrecognition, a misrecognition that had its start in Nineteenth century Populism (if you look the red states basically overlap with the states that supported William Jennings Bryant) and was continued powerfully by Neo-con new class theory. This misrecognition says that it is not capitalism which is corroding our semi-traditional life world, but the ‘avant-guard’ culture pervaded by the eastern and Californian elite. And of course, this diagnosis is partly right. The east and west coast does have a different culture (not totally different, but different) and we are the one's who dominate the national culture. This leads to the sort of embattled victimization on the part of conservatives that is so mystifying for a movement that controls all three braches of government and a majority of state governments. But this is not enough. They want to overcome the new deal and the rights revolution of the sixties. But this is not going to happen in most of the country because the life world of the coasts is structured around the FACT of pluralism, the FACT of living together in close quarters etc. As such, we can expect the energy that has fueled rightwing populism