Pro War Left - Is there such a thing

[FishForLunch]

Check out this terrific and eloquent blog by one Norman Geras, a Marxist who rejects the blanket anti-Western orthodoxy now prevalent on the British and American left. Read this whole post. Money quote about the Left's current predicament:
When the war began a division of opinion was soon evident amongst its opponents, between those who wanted a speedy outcome - in other words, a victory for the coalition forces, for that is all a speedy outcome could realistically have meant - and those who did not. These latter preferred that the Coalition forces should suffer reverses, get bogged down, and you know the story: stalemate, quagmire, Stalingrad scenario in Baghdad, and so forth, leading to a US and British withdrawal. But what these critics of the war thereby wished for was a spectacular triumph for the regime in Baghdad, since that is what a withdrawal would have been. So much for solidarity with the victims of oppression, for commitment to democratic values and basic human rights.

Similarly today, with all those who seem so to relish every new difficulty, every set-back for US forces: what they align themselves with is a future of prolonged hardship and suffering for the Iraqi people, whether via an actual rather than imagined quagmire, a ruinous civil war, or the return (out of either) of some new and ghastly political tyranny; rather than a rapid stabilization and democratization of the country, promising its inhabitants an early prospect of national normalization. That is caring more to have been right than for a decent outcome for the people of this long unfortunate country.

Such impulses have displayed themselves very widely across left and liberal opinion in recent months. Why? For some, because what the US government and its allies do, whatever they do, has to be opposed - and opposed however thuggish and benighted the forces which this threatens to put your anti-war critic into close company with. For some, because of an uncontrollable animus towards George Bush and his administration. For some, because of a one-eyed perspective on international legality and its relation to issues of international justice and morality. Whatever the case or the combination, it has produced a calamitous compromise of the core values of socialism, or liberalism or both, on the part of thousands of people who claim attachment to them. You have to go back to the apologias for, and fellow-travelling with, the crimes of Stalinism to find as shameful a moral failure of liberal and left opinion as in the wrong-headed - and too often, in the circumstances, sickeningly smug - opposition to the freeing of the Iraqi people from one of the foulest regimes on the planet.Yes. Their record is almost as bad as the Communists of the 1930s. Worse, actually. They cannot even point to another evil to justify their de facto support for tyranny.

Norm Blog

[signoftimes]

Thanks Fish,

As a liberal, it's nice of you to tell me what I think. I never realized how unpatriotic I was. I never realized I wished for the 'spectacular triumph for the regime in Bagdad'

Can't we have a new forum for all the political talk? Some of these threads are very harrassing.

[FishForLunch]

I am not telling you anything, it is a excerpt from a liberal blogger Norman Geras. One thing the liberals cant stand is freedom of expression of people you oppose their view. If you feel harrassed by views that dont conform to your ideology then you should get the moderator to ban me. Passing laws to prevent the freedom of expression of your opponents is something you liberals do well.

[u2sarajevo]

Can we stop with the labels? seriously. Let's keep this forum fun. Like it used to be.

We are here because we love the Mavericks. Let's get along on that note, and not let political leanings rip that "bond" apart.

[signoftimes]

Fish,

I'm not the one who has a problem with others ideaology. I'm not the one who is consistently posting biased articles about others political beliefs. With the litany of anti-liberal pro-conservative posts you have posted, it is you who feels threatened by others views. Otherwise, you wouldn't be posting so many inflamatory threads.

I have no problem with freedom of expression. I never brought up the issue of banning you. I only suggested that we create a new forum for these types of threads. I don't feel harassed by your views, I feel harassed by the constant and consistent posts that all have the same theme. I find these threads as annoying and useful as the word association and the counting thread.

Whatever, I just think it would be a good idea to create a new politcal forum so these thoughts can be all together.

Keep posting Fish.

Edit- 'One thing the liberals cant stand is freedom of expression of people you oppose their view'- Again. thanks fish for telling me what I think

[FishForLunch]

I guess signof times is right, just get a new category for Politics, and people you hate politics can avoid it like SARS. There liberals and right-wingers can bash the hell out of each other.

[Evilmav2]

Liberal Democrats' Perverse Foreign Policy

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, July 11, 2003; Page A21


It was the left that led the opposition to war in Iraq. Now it is the left that is most strenuous in urging intervention in Liberia. Curious.

No blood for oil, it seems, but blood for Liberia. And let us not automatically assume that Liberia will be an immaculate intervention. Sure, we may get lucky and suffer no casualties. But Liberia has three warring parties, tons of guns and legions of desperate fighters. Yet pressure is inexorably building to send American troops to enforce a peace.

There are the usual suspects, Jesse Jackson and the New York Times, but the most unapologetic proponent of the no-Iraq/yes-Liberia school is Howard Dean, Democratic flavor of the month. "I opposed the war in Iraq because it was the wrong war at the wrong time," says Dean, but "military intervention in Liberia represents an appropriate use of American power."

Why? In terms of brutality, systematic repression, number of killings, relish for torture and sum total of human misery caused, Charles Taylor is a piker next to Saddam Hussein. That is not to say that Taylor is a better man. It is only to say that in his tiny corner of the world with no oil resources and no scientific infrastructure for developing instruments of mass murder, Taylor has neither the reach nor the power to wreak Hussein-class havoc. What is it that makes liberals such as Dean, preening their humanitarianism, so antiwar in Iraq and so pro-intervention in Liberia?

The same question could be asked of the Democratic Party, which in the 1990s opposed the Persian Gulf War but overwhelmingly supported humanitarian interventions in places such as Haiti and Kosovo.

They all had a claim on the American conscience. What then was the real difference between, say, Haiti and Gulf War I, and between Liberia and Gulf War II? The Persian Gulf has deep strategic significance for the United States; Haiti and Liberia do not. In both gulf wars, critical American national interests were being defended and advanced. Yet it is precisely these interventions that liberals opposed.

The only conclusion one can draw is that for liberal Democrats, America's strategic interests are not just an irrelevance, but also a deterrent to intervention. This is a perversity born of moral vanity. For liberals, foreign policy is social work. National interest -- i.e., national selfishness -- is a taint. The only justified interventions, therefore, are those that are morally pristine, namely, those that are uncorrupted by any suggestion of national interest.

Hence the central axiom of left-liberal foreign policy: The use of American force is always wrong, unless deployed in a region of no strategic significance to the United States. The war in Afghanistan was an exception, but it doesn't count because it was retaliation against an overt attack, and not even liberals can oppose a counterattack in a war the other side started. Such bolts from the blue are rare, however. They come about every half-century, the last one being Pearl Harbor. In between one has to make decisions about going to war in less axiomatic circumstances. And that is when the liberal Democrats fall into their solipsism of righteousness.

This is the core lunacy of Democratic foreign policy. Either it has no criteria for intervening militarily -- after all, if we're going into Liberia, on what grounds are we not going into Congo? -- or it has a criterion, and its logic is that the U.S. Army is a missionary service rather than a defender of U.S. interests.

What should be our criteria for military intervention? The answer is simple: strategic and moral necessity. Foreign policy is not social work. Acting for purely humanitarian reasons is wanton and self-indulgent. You don't send U.S. soldiers to die to assuage troubled consciences at home. Their lives should be risked only in defense of their country.

Should we then do nothing elsewhere? In principle, we should help others by economic and diplomatic means and with appropriate relief agencies. Regarding Liberia, it is rather odd for the Europeans, who rail against U.S. arrogance, to claim that all the armies of France and Germany, of Europe and Africa, are powerless in the face of Charles Taylor -- unless the Americans ride to the rescue.

We should be telling them to do the job, with an offer of U.S. logistical help. We have quite enough on our plate in Iraq and Afghanistan and in chasing al Qaeda around the world.

If, nonetheless, the president finds the pressure irresistible to intervene in Liberia, he should send troops only under very clear conditions: America will share the burden with them if they share the burden with us where we need it. And that means peacekeepers in Iraq. The world cannot stand by watching us bleed in Iraq, and then expect us to bleed for it in Liberia.


© 2003 The Washington Post Company