A Response to Ted H.
I see that Diachronic Agency has moved, and that its author has abandoned his former semi-anonymity. But for old times' sake, I'll keep referring to him as Ted H. If you want to know his real name, just visit his blog and follow the link to his academic page.
His blog has just undergone another major revision, occasioned by Ted's discovery that he lacks political allies. I'll let him explain:
In politics you lose if no one agrees with you. And no one has agreed with me over the past two years. As one fellow blogger put it in an elegiac email, my political position was "really original." I didn't think it was. I thought it was what we all used to think -- all of us left-liberals who grew up in the 1980s and hated coldwar realpolitik. I thought I was merely applying the principles that the liberal left has always applied. Why did no left-liberal agree with me then? I didn't need many to agree, merely a few. I wanted to see signs that others were thinking along similar lines. And some are -- in the UK. But not in the States. Stateside you either went over to Bush or you viewed everything Bush has done with absolute horror. That I searched for an alternative to these over-personalized reactions pushed me off the political map.I hope it's not unkind of me to say that this strikes me as a bit exaggerated and melodramatic. Here's why.
The political position that Ted is talking about is his initial, and somewhat equivocal, support for the Iraq war. Speaking very broadly, he supported the war because he believed that Saddam Hussein was a horrible dictator, a mass murderer and torturer, in violation of UN resolutions, and a threat to regional peace and stability. What's more, the United States was complicit in Hussein's actions, having once supported him (and armed him) in pursuit of cynical realpolitik. Ted believed that a moral and just US foreign policy would seek to remove Hussein from power by the most effective means possible, which term did not refer to the economic sanctions in place since the first Gulf war. Ted believed that this was a perfectly reasonable position for a left-liberal to adopt, given leftists' and liberals' presumptive devotion to human rights, defense of the helpless and weak, and the preservation of the United Nations as an international peacekeeping organization. (In the unlikely event that Ted ever reads this, I invite him to use the comments section to correct any mistakes in my description of his views.)
To Ted's shock, he found that virtually all leftists and liberals he met, and particularly those working around him in academia, were dead set against the Iraq war, and uninterested in engaging seriously with his arguments or even granting them the minimum respect of a fair hearing. He worried about keeping his job. He worried about maintaining amicable relations with his family. And his feelings of alienation from his erstwhile political allies continued even after his position changed to a subsequent, and somewhat equivocal, opposition to the war, largely because of Bush's incompetent management of the war and its aftermath.
I think that Ted has overstated his case, particularly his isolation from the rest of the country. Recall that he says "Why did no left-liberal agree with me then? I didn't need many to agree, merely a few." Is this true? Did no left-liberal agree with him? It's not hard to think of quite a few left-liberals who argued along similar lines. Christopher Hitchens is probably the most obvious example, but one shouldn't neglect someone like Paul Berman. And stepping outside the realm of academics and journalists, consider the case of John Kerry. He cast his vote in favor of the war, then later changed his mind about it, largely because of the appallingly bad execution by Bush and Rumsfeld. He seems to have put a great deal of thought into these decisions, no doubt considering many of the same arguments that made sense to Ted. How isolated is Ted's position, really, when it bears that much similarity to the position of last election's Democratic presidential candidate?
I suspect that Ted is reacting, overreacting, to his own particular circumstances, by which I mean working in academia. Humanities professors very well may be a solid bloc of opposition to the war, hegemonic and intolerant of dissent. Is there any other major professional class for which this is true? (Yoga instructors, perhaps?) I suspect that if Ted was a doctor, or a lawyer, or a dentist, or a mid-level business executive, or what have you, he'd have a very different perspective on the breadth and variety of public opinion on the war. Many voters took positions similar to his, in outcome if not in argumentative detail: they accepted the president's word that Saddam Hussein was a very bad man, that his government was a threat to the United States, and that this justified the US in taking action. I'd wager that a majority of voters still believe this, whatever their feelings about the way the war was carried out.
There's also an air of unreality to Ted's arguments, though less so than in earlier versions of his blog. In the new version, he has largely excised the substantive posts from 2002 and early 2003 that sought to justify his position on the war. Those posts were remarkable in that they rarely grappled with the way the actual war was actually being promoted. Relatively little, if any, attention was given to the Bush administration's constantly shifting and mendacious rationales for the war; to the lies and distortions that were advanced, repeatedly and shamelessly, by the war's chief proponents; to the faulty intelligence that was used, and the damage to the integrity of the country's intelligence services; to the blinkered optimism of the Pentagon civilians who planned the war; or to the vitriol that was hurled at anyone with misgivings. Ted's primary worry was that no one was taking his arguments seriously.
He may have been right. Left-liberals may not have agreed with Ted's views, but I doubt that most of the war's supporters agreed with them either. The real hard core of support for the war was not on the basis of Ted's humanitarian ideals. In the real world, most of the Republican right wing supported the war because of a general enthusiasm for using American military power to control and intimidate other countries; because they wanted to take revenge for September 11; because the war was presumably good for Israel; and (in large part) simply because Bush wanted it, and they were eager to fall in line and do rhetorical battle against anyone who opposed it.
In this context, Ted's complaints are academic ones, and not in a particularly complimentary sense of that word. Perhaps in some Empyrean realm of pure reason, there were good arguments for the war, arguments that left-liberals would have adopted in time. Perhaps a future Democratic administration might have seen the virtues of high-minded confrontation with Saddam Hussein. But what relation does this have to the headlong rush to war that took place in 2002-3? We weren't faced with a choice between craven appeasement and a carefully justified and executed war of liberation. Rather, we were being asked to abandon an established policy of containment (that could have extended for at least another decade) in order to undertake a war originating in bad motives, promoted with lies and incendiary political attacks, and executed in great haste by incompetents. In those circumstances, it is perhaps excusable that left-liberals were not terribly interested in Ted's well-argued justifications of something else entirely.
One of the recurring themes of my blog is that bipartisanship is a lost cause as long as the Republican party continues in its current state of ideological rigidity and partisan fervor. So it's not surprising that I'm not terribly sympathetic to Ted's bewilderment. He was hoping for a calm, rational, morally grounded debate, and instead he got partisan shrieking and posturing. I agree with him that this is a bad situation; I just think he ought to consider more carefully what brought us to this pass, and what needs to be done about it.
Diachronic Agency 3.0
2 Comments:
Joe,
How interesting. I have no idea who you are, and yet you clearly did bother to read my arguments on the old blog. Many thanks for that.
Much of what you say is sensible and fair. You've summarized my evolving position accurately. (Except you have the time line wrong: I didn't blog in 2002, and I opposed the 'drumbeat of war' till roughly February 2003. I didn't start blogging till the end of March, when the war was well underway.) Moreover I can't deny the change of melodrama -- I'm all too painfully aware of that (and, yes, that's more melodrama).
Obviously, saying that 'no' left-liberal agreed with me is an overstatement -- though not an enormous one, given that I explicitly restricted my scope to the US. The case of Kerry is interesting, since it was hard to think of him as taking principled positions. Was the 'change of mind' in the late summer of 2003 really a response to Bush's mismanagement of the war, as opposed to a capitulation to the anti-war-from-the-start position that seemed to have taken over his party? Kerry's position, after all, did become 'this was the wrong war to fight' -- and not merely because we couldn't trust the Bush administration to fight it competently. So I don't think my position was very close to Kerry's (though I voted for him anyway).
Berman, yes -- he's the one example you could cite. Though I didn't agree with lots in Terror and Liberalism, his view and mine are in the same ballpark. The main difference is that I was more concerned about the US's responsibilities as a former enabler of Saddam than Berman appeared to be. I was also less worried about Saddam's status as a threat to the US (the WMD issue was pretty far down on my list of good reasons for war, even before we discovered it was no reason at all).
And Hitchens? Well, he's effectively gone over to Bush, no? (Even if that Slate piece in which he said he'd vote for Bush if he could was fraudulent.) Anyway, Hitchens is a quasi-left quasi-libertarian -- not a left-liberal of the usual sort.
Of course it wasn't hard to find allies in the UK. I've learned much from Johann Hari, for example, and I find many of the polemics at Harry's Place congenial. And yes, I know that at least one of the bloggers there is American, as are many of the commenters. Still, it reveals something that that's where an American has to go for this sort of dicsussion.
But let me say flat out that you're absolutely right to note that I'm responding primarily to the rhetorical context of academia and particularly of the academic humanities. I don't see how I can be criticized for that. It's the world I know, and the pespective I'm expressing is a perspective from here.
On your substantive criticism, that I've been ignoring the actual rationales for war and how the war was actually fought, let me say this. One way to express my main complaint is that that was all anybody else on the left -- in academia, at least -- was attending to. It's not as if I wanted us to ignore the actual Bush administration or the actual war. I merely wanted us also to debate the war itself, i.e. its justice, without at each turn falling back on the tired trope that the administration lied about WMDs, etc. It was true that they lied (though I think that truth was often overstated), but it was also a trope that stood as an obstacle to serious discussion of the war. The administration's duplicity was in the second half of 2003 and 2004 the most popular topic of discussion on the left. I had nothing to add, except to point out that much of it was mere shrieking and a distraction from important things that were hardly being discussed at all.
So yes, I wanted an 'academic' argument about the war. I wanted people to think harder about its justice from both sides -- at a minimum, to concede that there was another side. What's wrong with that? If that had been common among academics, and if they'd as a result been insensitive to reality in the ways you criticize, then I'd sympathize with the criticism that this was 'merely academic.' But it's not merely academic to try to get academics to be a bit less nakedly partisan and a bit more, well, academic.
The unlikely happened! And in only a few days. Those Internets: they'll surprise you.
Sorry about my mistakes in chronology. I'd have gone back and checked, but I couldn't.
Anyway, Ted, these comments clarify things a great deal, and make your case considerably more plausible (to me, at least). Your previous blogging has real traction when understood as a protest against the knee-jerk antiwar stance of left-wing academics, and the refusal of left-wing academics to confront serious liberal-minded arguments in favor of invading Iraq. I do think, though, that my confusion was understandable, since you didn't put a lot of emphasis in the blog on who, exactly, you were reacting to. It was odd reading so many criticisms of people's refusal to listen to the pro-war side when, in Congress and in the country as a whole, the war's proponents won every political battle they fought.
As for the absence of a proper academic debate about the war's larger merits: since I am not in academia, I don't really have first-hand impressions about this. So I'll take your word for it. (I would guess, but don't know for sure, that there must be some substantive debate in the appropriate departments: International Studies, perhaps?) In partial mitigation, I'll note that following:
1) Virtually every left-liberal commentator I've read has said clearly that Saddam Hussein was a dreadful tyrant, a mass murderer, and someone we should all be happy to see out of power. Nonetheless, they questioned whether it was appropriate for the US to be overthrowing him now, by force, and without the kind of casus belli that has traditionally been required for a just war.
2) Academic debates require careful deliberation, and careful deliberation requires time. But Bush's plans for the war did not allow sufficient time, either for a satisfactory international debate, or for the UN weapons inspectors to do their job. It should be understandable that academics reacted negatively to a war that was being pursued at a pace that had seemed to have much more to do with Bush's re-election than with any real emergency requiring immediate action.
3) It should also be understandable that academics reacted badly in the polarized climate of these days, where anyone calling for caution or second thoughts or indeed any divergence from the administration's timetable was accused of being a Saddam-loving, anti-American traitor. The temptations to partisanship are just as strong for academics as for anyone else, and the right wing was doing its utmost to heighten partisan fervor.
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