The Pro-War Left

Eric Alterman recently opined, rather innocently, that he supported "the war against Al Qaeda" and contrasted it with his lack of support for a "proposed war against Iraq." Maybe I just missed an internal memo, but as far as I know, the US has been engaged in a purposefully amorphous "war on terrorism," not, as Alterman suggests, a war on Al Qaeda. This is not just a slight of rhetoric -- this distinction has a very significant meaning.

For some time now, I’ve found it remarkable that we had people on the left signing up for the war on terrorism when, from my perspective, they had to realize that it would be exploited and used to justify a militarization of society that threatens to shred the Constitution as well as the voice and well-being of the democratic polity. I find it terribly ironic that these same folks have been the harshest critics of such troubling developments, and still pledge their support for the war. It’s as if there’s a complete disjunction in thought; there’s a failure to see that both phenomena are linked at the hip.

If you recall, people ridiculed Marc Herold for having the audacity to come up with a body count in Afghanistan. Critics absolutely excoriated him for reducing the war to a simple-minded, utilitarian "numbers game" in order to demonize the Afghan campaign. He admittedly screwed up his analyses, but most people, I think, did not grasp the significance of his efforts: his research proved that no one else was showing any similar sense of interest in holding the Afghan campaign accountable. Virtually everyone rejected "judging" the war based on a simple comparison of casualties, but hardly anyone took the next step and were willing to evaluate the effects of the bombing on their own accord. Remarkably few analysts seriously addressed whether setting the dangerous precedent of attacking a sovereign nation, purging it of its political leaders, and, yes, terrorizing much of its population for the evil deeds perpetrated by a decentralized political entity that had about as much to do with that nation (Afghanistan) as it did with the United States was, in any sense, justifiable. Richard Falk probably laid forth the best attempt, but, as Steve Shalom pointed out, it was riddled with inconsistencies and non sequiturs.

Also, the threat of a humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan drew nary a blink from this same pro-war intelligentsia. We now presume that the dire predictions of "millions" of potential fatalities have not come to fruition, although nobody says (knows?) how many people perished because of an even partial cutoff in food and relief supplies last winter. Jonathan Steele of the Guardian estimated up to 20,000 casualties as a result. That figure seems to have been rejected, but I haven’t seen someone else put forward a different one to discredit it, or perhaps support a different conclusion.

One then might turn to the random tantalizing snippets in places like the NY Times, which dropped this assertion without, as Norman Solomon noted, anything resembling a follow up:

Classified investigations of the Qaeda threat now under way at the F.B.I. and C.I.A. have concluded that the war in Afghanistan failed to diminish the threat to the United States, the officials said. Instead, the war might have complicated counterterrorism efforts by dispersing potential attackers across a wider geographic area.

What all of this points to is that there are many disturbing and glaring questions on the table about the utility, effects, and morality of the war against Afghanistan. To my knowledge, the larger questions raised here have not been resolved and several questions about the current and future status of Afghanistan's internal situation are, indeed, far from settled.

So again I ask, quite seriously, what good has the Afghan war brought? And why haven’t pro-war leftists seen the seeds of Iraq in that very campaign? For the past year, there seems to have been this paralyzing idea amongst prominent factions of the left that rejecting the Afghan war would have meant doing nothing to address the threat of terrorism. Were there simply no other alternatives? I do not think so, even though many disparaged the post 9/11 calls for some sort of "police action," as well as conducting a campaign against terrorism via an international body, probably the UN. Looking back on things, the latter route, while difficult, would have been much better than the course of action taken: leaving the "war on terror" in the hands of -- let’s be honest now -- an American kleptocracy that, predictably, is exploiting it to satisfy its own desire for power and domination.

We are reaping the bitter fruits of the "war on terrorism" now with the sham debate about whether we should invade Iraq. I say, "sham," because as we all painfully know, there is no debate. The "war on Saddam" is predicated on gaining popular support for it via any means possible -- propaganda, scare tactics, wanton accusation, disinformation, whatever -- not by engaging the public and then making a careful decision about whether such an act is in the interests of the United States, the Iraqi people, or the rest of the world. A decision has already been made; it is just a matter of time before the public will either be scared into accepting the need for an attack, or, simply, ignored.

In 1939, George Orwell observed that "a left wing party which, within a capitalist society, becomes a war party, has already thrown up the sponge, because it is demanding a policy which can only be carried out by its opponents." I surely hope that several of the folks on the pro-war left eventually begin to reflect critically on not only the fallout of the "war on terrorism," but also the underlying assumptions behind it. Until that happens, it is my belief that the left will continue digging its own grave -- politically, as well as morally.