Columnist Nick Cohen has two excellent pieces (here and here) describing the disintegration of the principled left.
Cohen is no neoconservative. He was raised by liberal-left parents who saw each purchase as a political statement (no oranges from Spain because of Franco, no Disney because it was a "Hollywood corporation"). Indeed, Cohen states emphatically that growing up he believed that to be good meant being Left. This included opposing fascism while embracing communism, even when its warts were so obvious.
Consistent anti-fascism added enormously to the left's prestige in the second half of the 20th century. A halo of moral superiority hovered over it because if there was a campaign against racism, religious fanaticism or neo-Nazism, the odds were that its leaders would be men and women of the left. For all the atrocities and follies committed in its name, the left possessed this virtue: it would stand firm against fascism. After the Iraq war, I don't believe that a fair-minded outsider could say it does that any more.
That is Cohen's condemnation of the Left: while there has been plenty a good lefty could oppose about the American and British approach to the Iraq War, it is patently hypocritical for the Left to villify Saddam in the 1980s yet oppose his ouster in 2003. Cohen is dead-on in this description of the unprincipled Left.
The protests against the overthrow of a fascist regime weren't just a European phenomenon. From Calgary to Buenos Aires, the left of the Americas marched. In Cape Town and Durban, politicians from the African National Congress, who had once appealed for international solidarity against South Africa's apartheid regime, led the opposition to the overthrow of a fascist regime. On a memorable day, American scientists at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica produced another entry for the record books. Historians will tell how the continent's first political demonstration was a protest against the overthrow of a fascist regime.
For those of us on the Right, who have to deal with our own excesses and histories, this is not a shocking statement. I do wonder, however, how this blunt revelation sounds to those on the Left (read through the comments of this thread at CSPT, for example) more concerned with American hegemony than with the persecution faced by Iraqis.
According to Cohen, there were people who saw the disgusting irony on display of Lefties who had fully supported interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan but couldn't agree with intervention in Iraq.
The South American playwright Ariel Dorfman, who had experienced state terror in General Pinochet's Chile, published a letter to an 'unknown Iraqi' and asked, 'What right does anyone have to deny you and your fellow Iraqis that liberation from tyranny? What right do we have to oppose the war the United States is preparing to wage on your country, if it could indeed result in the ousting of Saddam Hussein?'
His reply summed up the fears of tens of millions of people. War would destabilise the Middle East and recruit more fanatics to terrorist groups. It would lead to more despots 'pre-emptively arming themselves with all manner of apocalyptic weapons and, perhaps, to Armageddon'. Dorfman also worried about the casualties - which, I guess, were far higher than he imagined - and convinced himself that the right course was to demand that Bush and Blair pull back. Nevertheless, he retained the breadth of mind and generosity of spirit to sign off with 'heaven help me, I am saying that I care more about the future of this sad world than about the future of your unprotected children'.
Cohen doesn't pull any punches in his criticism of American and British policy in Iraq, either. He describes the ineptitude, corruption, and skullduggery associated with the worst parts of the post-invasion season and states that those things should be condemned. But that's not the same as opposing Iraq's liberation.
When a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein came, the liberals had two choices. The first was to oppose the war, remain hypercritical of aspects of the Bush administration's policy, but support Iraqis as they struggled to establish a democracy.
The policy of not leaving Iraqis stranded was so clearly the only moral option, it never occurred to me that there could be another choice. I did have an eminent liberal specialist on foreign policy tell me that 'we're just going to have to forget about Saddam's victims', but I thought he was shooting his mouth off in the heat of the moment. From the point of view of the liberals, the only grounds they would have had to concede if they had stuck by their principles in Iraq would have been an acknowledgement that the war had a degree of legitimacy. They would still have been able to say it was catastrophically mismanaged, a provocation to al-Qaeda and all the rest of it....All they would have had to accept was that the attempt to build a better Iraq was worthwhile and one to which they could and should make a positive commitment.
A small price to pay; a price all their liberal principles insisted they had a duty to pay. Or so it seemed.
The second choice for the liberals was to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. To look at the Iraqi civilians and the British and American troops who were dying in a war whose central premise had proved to be false, and to go berserk; to allow justifiable anger to propel them into 'binges of posturing and ultra-radicalism' as the Sixties liberals had done when they went off the rails. As one critic characterised the position, they would have to pretend that 'the United States was the problem and Iraq was its problem'. They would have to maintain that the war was not an attempt to break the power of tyranny in a benighted region, but the bloody result of a 'financially driven mania to control Middle Eastern oil, and the faith-driven crusade to batter the crescent with the cross'.
They chose to go berserk.
This analysis of the Left is chilling in its accuracy. I look forward to reading Cohen's book.
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