Welch on Manufacturing Dissent

War Blogger extraordinaire Matt Welch takes Noam Chomsky and other monolithically-defined “anti-war leftists” to task in a recent article in the National Post.

As always, Welch’s writing suggests that he is a no-nonsense presenter of facts, avoiding the “ridiculous exaggerations” which, “regrettably, become commonplace among the more persistent critics of U.S. foreign policy.”

Whatever. This article is really just old hat. Welch seems to drape out the same tired attack on Chomsky that has become "commonplace" over the years and, especially, recent months. Most notably, Welch ridicules Noam for his prediction of a “silent genocide” in Afghanistan. He doesn’t bother to refute Chomsky – except by saying that events haven’t borne out that way – or even concede that Chomsky was basically quoting the NY Times, relief agencies, and people like Mary Robinson, the UNCHR chair. Thankfully, one of the commentators at Welch’s site notes this (go here, and scroll down to the entry from "southpaw" on June 10, 2002 12:28 PM), essentially echoing the crappy "debate" I endured at Frontpagemag.com following a Ronald Radosh column in January.

After briefly scolding Chomsky, Welch attacks the usual targets: Mark Herold and the variety of activist voices in the collection September 11 and the U.S. War: Beyond the Curtain of Smoke. Of particular interest, he goes after essays from Arundahati Roy and Eduardo Galeano. He predictably raises the old red-herring - the “moral equivalency” implication in Galeano’s case - and writes of Roy:

Arundhati Roy's essay "War is Peace," which alleges that "centuries of jurisprudence" were "carelessly trashed" by the bombing of Afghanistan, was challenged by San Diego blogger Steven Den Beste, who argued that "This is both false and irrelevant; the nations that saw the evidence (such as Pakistan) announced that it was sufficient to indict, and in any case this is war, not law enforcement."

Funny, the quote from Den Beste is irrelevant, too. The fact that he is suggesting we should believe Pakistan for finding this evidence “sufficient” is laughable. As if that nation wasn’t completely bending over backwards for the US and exploiting the “war on terrorism” for their very own internal political problems…but anyway…as I and others have said: if there was convincing evidence of culpability for 9/11, we would have had it shoved in our face.

Eventually, Welch reaches something resembling an argument:

This is what much of the anti-war Left has come to: No hypothesis is too sketchy, no fact too unsubstantiated and no emotive novelist is too under-qualified, as long as they all make the United States (and the U.S.-led globalization project) look bad.

And continues:

Chomsky, however, is far less sloppy with the facts than the contributors to Beyond the Curtain, unless you count the many facts he chooses to leave out. As a result, it's his conclusions that are suspect, such as this reductive explanation of U.S. involvement in Yugoslavia: "In the early 90s, primarily for cynical power reasons, the U.S. selected Bosnian Muslims as their Balkan clients, hardly to their benefit."

Which paragraph above is more absurd? Painting the commentary of the anti-war left with the brush of a scarecrow without going to any reasonable effort to refute arguments? Or lamenting the fact that Chomsky, et al. bring up inconvenient facts, leaving what he perceives to be "relevant material" out of the discussion? Amusingly, as I have noted, Welch has done the exact same thing he is criticizing Chomsky for doing.

Basically, Welch is enraged that these damn leftists don’t focus enough on the conventional narrative and keep bringing up those pesky little incidents of historical amnesia that we should “leave out” of any serious or rational debate on the war or terrorism.

I don't say this often, although perhaps I should: this article is worthless and ridiculous. It’s nothing more than a thinly veiled ad-hominem. If you’re going to attack people, at least do it with something more than name calling or statements that essentially say, “I disagree,” but with little context.