CenterFeud

The left's betrayal of liberal ideals

A must-read excerpt from UK journalist Nick Cohen's new book, What's Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way:

Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal left is against come from the liberal left? Why will students hear a leftish postmodern theorist defend the exploitation of women in traditional cultures but not a crusty conservative don? After the American and British wars in Bosnia and Kosovo against Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansers, why were men and women of the left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps? As important, why did a European Union that daily announces its commitment to the liberal principles of human rights and international law do nothing as crimes against humanity took place just over its borders? Why is Palestine a cause for the liberal left, but not China, Sudan, Zimbabwe, the Congo or North Korea? Why, even in the case of Palestine, can't those who say they support the Palestinian cause tell you what type of Palestine they would like to see? After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington why were you as likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of Jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a superior literary journal as in a neo-Nazi hate sheet? And why after the 7/7 attacks on London did leftish rather than right-wing newspapers run pieces excusing suicide bombers who were inspired by a psychopathic theology from the ultra-right?

In short, why is the world upside down? In the past conservatives made excuses for fascism because they mistakenly saw it as a continuation of their democratic rightwing ideas. Now, overwhelmingly and every where, liberals and leftists are far more likely than conservatives to excuse fascistic governments and movements, with the exception of their native far-right parties. As long as local racists are white, they have no difficulty in opposing them in a manner that would have been recognisable to the traditional left. But give them a foreign far-right movement that is anti-Western and they treat it as at best a distraction and at worst an ally.

Cohen grew up on the political and cultural left, which he always saw as inherently virtuous. Now, he bemoans the left's betrayal of everything it formerly stood for. Case in point, Iraq:

Journalists wondered whether the Americans were puffing up Zarqawi's role in the violence - as a foreigner he was a convenient enemy - but they couldn't deny the ferocity of the terror. Like Stalin, Pol Pot and Slobodan Milosevic, they went for the professors and technicians who could make a democratic Iraq work. They murdered Sergio Vieira de Mello, one of the United Nations's bravest officials, and his colleagues; Red Cross workers, politicians, journalists and thousands upon thousands of Iraqis who happened to be in the wrong church or Shia mosque.

How hard was it for opponents of the war to be against that? Unbelievably hard, it turned out. The anti-war movement disgraced itself not because it was against the war in Iraq, but because it could not oppose the counter-revolution once the war was over. A principled left that still had life in it and a liberalism that meant what it said might have remained ferociously critical of the American and British governments while offering support to Iraqis who wanted the freedoms they enjoyed...

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. They would still have been able to condemn atrocities by American troops, Guantanamo Bay, and Bush's pushing of the boundaries on torture. They might usefully have linked up with like-minded Iraqis, who wanted international support to fight against the American insistence on privatisation of industries, for instance. 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.

Like Christopher Hitchens, Cohen has become something of an outcast for his consistency in opposing fascism and supporting human rights and self-determination, even if that ostensibly lands him in the same camp as George W. Bush and Tony Blair. He refuses to treat politics as an us-against-them team sport, instead holding the left and the anti-war movement accountable for its betrayal of what he thought were obvious principles.

The next Holocaust

In an essay for the Jerusalem Post, Israeli historian Benny Morris lays out the depressingly plausible scenario:

The second holocaust will be quite different. One bright morning, in five or 10 years, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, a day or a year or five years after Iran's acquisition of the Bomb, the mullahs in Qom will convene in secret session, under a portrait of the steely-eyed Ayatollah Khomeini, and give President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, by then in his second or third term, the go-ahead.

The orders will go out and the Shihab III and IV missiles will take off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa and Jerusalem, and probably some military sites, including Israel's half dozen air and (reported) nuclear missile bases. Some of the Shihabs will be nuclear-tipped, perhaps even with multiple warheads. Others will be dupes, packed merely with biological or chemical agents, or old newspapers, to draw off or confuse Israel's anti-missile batteries and Home Front Command units.

With a country the size and shape of Israel (an elongated 20,000 square kilometers), probably four or five hits will suffice: No more Israel. A million or more Israelis in the greater Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem areas will die immediately. Millions will be seriously irradiated. Israel has about seven million inhabitants. No Iranian will see or touch an Israeli. It will be quite impersonal.

Some of the dead will inevitably be Arab - 1.3 million of Israel's citizens are Arab and another 3.5 million Arabs live in the semi-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Jerusalem, Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Haifa have substantial Arab minorities. And there are large Arab concentrations immediately around Jerusalem (in Ramallah-Al Bireh, Bir Zeit, Bethlehem) and outside Haifa. Here, too, many will die, immediately or by and by.

It is doubtful whether such a mass killing of fellow Muslims will trouble Ahmadinejad and the mullahs. The Iranians don't especially like Arabs, especially Sunni Arabs, with whom they have intermittently warred for centuries. And they have a special contempt for the (Sunni) Palestinians who, after all, though initially outnumbering the Jews by more than 10 to 1, failed during the long conflict to prevent them from establishing their state or taking over all of Palestine.

Besides, the Iranian leadership sees the destruction of Israel as a supreme divine command, as a herald of the second coming, and the Muslims dispatched collaterally as so many martyrs in the noble cause. Anyway, the Palestinians, many of them dispersed around the globe, will survive as a people, as will the greater Arab nation of which they are part. And surely, to be rid of the Jewish state, the Arabs should be willing to make some sacrifices. In the cosmic balance sheet, it will be worth the candle.

Read it all. With Iran on track to realizing its nuclear ambitions and Ahmadinejad confidently predicting the end of the "criminal zionist regime", does anyone doubt this is the likely scenario? Will any country, even the US, move pre-emptively, or even after the fact? Can Israel?

Taking their cue from the successful IAF destruction of Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, the Iranians duplicated and dispersed their facilities and buried them deep underground (and the Iranian targets are about twice as far from Israel as was Baghdad). Taking out the known Iranian facilities with conventional weapons would take an American-size air force working round-the-clock for more than a month.

At best, Israel's air force, commandos and navy could hope to hit only some of the components of the Iranian project. But, in the end, it would remain substantially intact - and the Iranians even more determined (if that were possible) to attain the Bomb as soon as possible. It would also, without doubt, immediately result in a world-embracing Islamist terrorist campaign against Israel (and possibly its Western allies) and, of course, near-universal vilification. Orchestrated by Ahmadinejad, all would clamor that the Iranian program had been geared to peaceful purposes. At best, an Israeli conventional strike could delay the Iranians by a year or two.

IN SHORT order, therefore, the incompetent leadership in Jerusalem would soon confront a doomsday scenario, either after launching their marginally effective conventional offensive or in its stead, of launching a preemptive nuclear strike against the Iranian nuclear program, some of whose components are in or near major cities. Would they have the stomach for this? Would their determination to save Israel extend to preemptively killing millions of Iranians and, in effect, destroying Iran?

This dilemma had long ago been accurately defined by a wise general: Israel's nuclear armory is unusable. It can only be used too early or too late. There will never be a "right" time. Use it "too early," meaning before Iran acquires similar weapons, and Israel will be cast in the role of international pariah, a target of universal Muslim assault, without a friend in the world; "too late" means after the Iranians have struck. What purpose would that serve?

I am unable to see any realistic alternative scenario. Even if Israel were able to successfully launch a pre-emptive strike to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities, the Iranians would then retaliate and the world would condemn Israel as the aggressor. And if missiles were launched, Israel's anti-missile defenses would need to achieve a 100% success rate, a virtual impossibility.

Can anyone offer an alternate scenario not based on wishful thinking?

Hat tip: Pajamas Media

"George Bush, true Democrat"

Victor Davis Hanson points up the irony of how the US public, and particularly Democrats, have come to view Iraq: "If we fail..."

Prior to Iraq, there was some American guilt over past realism, whether stopping before Baghdad in 1991, playing Iran off Iraq, cozying up to dictatorships, or predicating American Middle East foreign policy solely on either oil or anti-Communism. Read the liberal literature of the 1990s and it was essentially a call for what George Bush is now doing — and being damned for. Then the liberal bogeyman was not Paul Wolfowitz, but Jim Baker (“jobs, jobs, jobs”/”F—- the Jews”). Now the latter is the model of Republican sobriety.

Arab intellectuals and much of the Western Left once decried Bakerism and called for a new muscular idealism that put us on the side of the powerless reformers and not with the entrenched authoritarians. But if we fail in Iraq, then again, fairly or not, the verdict will be far more sweeping than simply the incompetence of the Bremer proconsulship or the impotence of the Maliki government.

Rather, the conventional wisdom will arise that an infantile Middle East ipso facto — whether due to Islamism, tribalism, gender apartheid, sectarianism, engrained dictatorship, or corruption — is simply incapable at this time of consensual government. Anyone who seeks such reform, whether in the Gulf, Palestine, Lebanon, or Egypt, is to be written off not only as naïve, but as reckless as well. A Libyan dissident, a feminist writer in Egypt, or an Iraqi intellectual who decries Western indifference to their plight or American tolerance of regional dictatorships will be told to quit whining and get a life, by a been-there/done-that American public.

Both carping hothouse Arab intellectuals and Western liberals should be put on notice of this change to come. However imperfect, however flawed, however improperly explained our efforts in Iraq were, they nevertheless represented a costly American about-face to offer something in the Middle East other than theocracy or dictatorship — something we are not likely to see again in our lifetime.

Democrats and liberals should likewise realize that for all their hatred of George Bush and the partisan points to be gained by coddling up to the libertarian and paleo-conservative Right, George Bush’s embrace of freedom was far closer to their own past rhetoric than almost any Republican administration in history.

There is definitely a sense of having slipped into some alternate reality from the one I knew pre-9/11. I remember in early 2001 a sense of foreboding that, with the Republicans having won the White House, there would be a shift back to the realpolitik of Bush I and James Baker. The warnings of the Clinton administration about the strategic threat posed by Saddam Hussein and the urgent need to push for regime change in Iraq would be ignored, and we would continue to treat the Middle East as, in the words of Thomas Friedman, "a big dumb gas station". I fully expected the Republicans to stick to their traditional script, and ignore democratic reformers in the Middle East in favor of the usual dictators, tyrants and strongmen.

I didn't figure on George W. Bush, the most unlikely figure in the world to make democratic reform a centerpiece of Middle East policy. In a post-9/11 world, he concluded that there was no safety in the old "stability", only societies forced to choose between rule by thugs or theocrats, who would continue to demonize the West in order to redirect the anger and resentment of their people against an external "other", i.e. "decadent" democracies. Something had to be done to change that dynamic, otherwise it was only a matter of time before we were confronted with an alliance of terrorist networks equipped by their state sponsors with terrifying weapons that could kill hundreds of thousands and wreak social and economic turmoil. He concluded that confronting dictatorial regimes that were actively pursuing such weapons would be far less costly than fighting them when they had achieved their aims and had become emboldened.

It has now become fashionable to deride the so-called "neocons" as Machiavellians ruthlessly plotting global American hegemony, but an objective reading of their writings reveals an idealism rooted in the belief that America should stand with the forces of democratic reform and liberalism in places like the Middle East. Given a choice between coddling dictators and championing rule of law, the equality of women, and a free press, we should be unapologetically in favor of the latter. That support would not necessarily have to be military in nature, but diplomacy must to be backed with a credible threat of force or else it is ineffectual, especially in dealing with despotic regimes.

Now, with the neocons discredited and the general consensus that post-Saddam Iraq is ungovernable, we are back to a weird nostalgia for the dictators. James Baker is suddenly considered the voice of reasonableness by his erstwhile Democratic critics, even as he urges cutting deals with the likes of Iran's Ahmadinejad and Syria's Assad, who he assures us with a straight face have a long-term interest in a stable Iraq. Meanwhile, Iraqi democrats who risked their lives to elect a representative (if flawed and ineffectual) government are to be ignored. And bizarrely, Israel, the only true democracy in the region, is treated as a bargaining chip as we pursue the delusion that a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the magic key that will resolve Sunni-Shia bloodletting in Iraq and cause Iran to abandon its nuclear program and ambitions to dominate the region. And these are the "realists"!

And in the midst of all of it, there's George W. Bush, his popularity in the toilet, his credibility losing altitude by the minute, his every statement second-guessed, his war-fighting strategy undermined -- and yet he keeps at it, sending in yet more troops to take on the militias and terrorist gangs that are determined to impose their will on post-Saddam Iraq and make it a base for jihad against the West. Many of us have checked out, having concluded this war is already lost and not worth a single additional American life. Others want it to be lost if only to repudiate George W. Bush, whom they despise more than Saddam Hussein, the late Abu Musab Zarqawi, or Moqtada Al-Sadr. Ironically, Bush remains a "true democrat" while his critics on the left and right seem to have retreated to the comforts and illusions of the old realpolitik.

But whether the so-called "surge" turns the tide or represents yet another failed attempt to stabilize Iraq, we should all be desperately hoping it succeeds. Because to hope it fails, or to express ambivalence -- as apparently one third of Americans do according to a recent poll -- is to objectively side with religious zealots, Ba'athist thugs, and ethnic cleansers against the majority of Iraqis who want to live decent lives, just because you don't like Bush and want him to go down. If, like me, you retain the liberal idealism you grew up with, that realization should make you shudder.

UPDATE: In a must-read essay on America's checkered history with Iraq and the choices the US has made over the years, Neo-neocon makes a similar observation:

The funny thing about the whole thing (and I mean funny-strange, not funny ha-ha) is that it is the neocon philosophy that represents one of the only strategies offering a possible way out of the realpolitik dilemma. And yet those who criticize our realpolitik decisions to back dictators also criticize our neonconnish decisions to overthrow them and try to institute a better and more democratic form of government. Odd, isn't it?