SIDING WITH HITCHENS

By Mark Grueter

grueter4@yahoo.com

It has become fashionable in some circles to oppose a war in Iraq. Around the New School, one frequently hears somebody chanting, “No War On Iraq” or “No Blood For Oil.” For many, any conflict initiated by the United States is an evil, imperialist enterprise embarked upon solely to further the narrow, myopic interests of big business and greedy politicians. So one has the benefit of not having to think when deciding whether or not to support war.

These people, pacifists or otherwise, enjoy gathering together at demonstrations, one of which I recently attended. Ralph Nader, Phil Donahue and others were speaking outside Federal Hall. I like Nader, but he tends to attract some of the more zany elements of our society; these events are always a spectacle of sorts.  This one boasted,  among other absurdities, gigantic, inflated pigs that give it a certain Barnum and Bailey flavor. While Mark Green was speaking, a short, fat, unwashed guy with a ZZ Top beard kept screaming, “Mark Green is a phony Green!” Somebody might have told this poor heckler that Mark Green is not a Green anyway; he is a Democrat.

Self-righteous dopes, a peculiar minority wing during the Vietnam era, are now the mainstream in current protests. One gets the sense that much of the Left has been hijacked by a herd of ungrateful and close-minded pissants, trying so desperately not to conform.  

On October 30th, in spite of the sideshow, the Graduate Faculty held an engaging forum on Iraq. The three presentations all strongly opposed any conflict initiated by the U.S. or the U.N. Many intelligent criticisms of U.S. policy were made.  However, there was a conspicuous absence of any dissenting  views, either pro-war or pro-U.N.-resolution. And the case made against war in Iraq, although compelling, was insufficient.         

GF Professor Andrew Arato insisted that there exists “very little” chance of Saddam Hussein using weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) or of him providing any WMDs to terrorist groups, and that the leader of Iraq is not a threat to the world. I am sympathetic to these contentions, but one must wonder how Professor Arato can be so sure of himself. Ultimately it is a guessing game: so why should he so adamantly distrust his own government, yet be willing to place faith and trust in a man that has, for instance, murdered his own brother-in-law and used chemical weapons on his own people?        

This gives credence to what GF Professor Christopher Hitchens wrote in his going-away article for The Nation, a magazine he contributed to for 20 years: “I have come to realize that the magazine…is becoming the voice and echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden.” Professor Arato does not write for The Nation, but the troubling point remains: it seems, for many on the Left, that Bush is more dangerous or sinister than Saddam. Hitchens quit The Nation because he was fed up with the lack of debate at the magazine over the Clintons, Kosovo, 9/11, Afghanistan and finally Iraq. Some of us wish he had stayed there for this very reason, and I suspect the little sheet has lost many readers as a consequence.

Hitchens, to the disgust and astonishment of many of his colleagues and former admirers, supports a war to remove Saddam Hussein, just as he supported wars against the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and Slobodan Milosevic. He argues that these are revolutionary struggles—these are the movements the Left, in all countries, should fight for. “Islamic fascists” and brutal dictators should be opposed with everything we’ve got, even if our own governments are far from perfect. Hitchens compares what is happening now with the scene in 1939, when many British leftists opposed war with Germany because of British Imperialism in India. This strange and false logic corresponds neatly with the equally strange and false assertion that one has to be faultless in order to criticize others.

Furthermore, allowing Saddam to stay in power is a defense of the status quo, a conservative position. “The fires had not yet gone out at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a year ago, before the War Party had introduced its revised plans for American empire. What many saw as a tragedy, they saw instantly as an opportunity to achieve U.S. hegemony over an alienated Islamic world.” This was written by renowned liberal champion Patrick Buchanan, but could have just as easily been uttered by Noam Chomsky, Andrew Arato or  my own colleague Andrew Gold. Indeed, Hitchens goes so far as to contend that “The most serious opposition to the war comes, at the moment, from the Right. The Left is just making its usual noise. Nobody cares what they say. It is of no further relevance. It has no principle to it. It doesn’t take any risks. It isn’t embarking on anything radical or analytical.”

Many on the Right are afraid a war will destabilize their system in the Middle East; antiwar factions on both sides favor the policies of containment and deterrence—“the two terms most ridiculed by the Left during the Cold War.” Hitchens, on the contrary, welcomes the prospect of this war because it is effectively “dumping the Nixon doctrine. It is dumping the idea we rule through client states like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the client states that betrayed us, that shot us in the front on the 11th of September, that incubated Al-Qaeda, that resent their client status.” And this is why those on the Right like Scowcroft and even Kissinger are suspicious of this Iraqi meddling—it is potentially subversive.

Hitchens has been communicating and working with opposition groups in Iraq for three decades; he views the issue, in part, as a matter of loyalty to his Iraqi comrades: “When I first became a socialist, the imperative of international solidarity was the essential if not the defining thing, whether the cause was popular or risky or not.” By displacing the Baathists, the U.S. government will provide a real opportunity for the Iraqi and Kurdish peoples to liberate themselves. This is true even if it is not what truly motivates Bush’s policy. An unintended result of the first Gulf War was the partial liberation of Kurdistan. In this autonomous enclave in northern Iraq optimism has spread regarding what appear to be the signs of pluralism, freedom and overall development. Lastly, dissident groups in Iraq recognize that the removal of their despot will also mean the end of U.N. sanctions, which have wreaked havoc on the poor and defenseless since 1992 (the fault of both Saddam and the U.N.).

Oil is an additional reason to wage war, not one to oppose it—unless we would rather continue to have its distribution controlled by Saddam than by a (potentially democratic) government friendly to both the international community and the United States. “It is not completely idealistic,” writes Hitchens, “but with Iraqi oil back on stream and anything like an open society there, you don’t have to depend on Saudi Arabians anymore. You can say to the Saudi, your monopoly means nothing to me.” This does not, of course, mean that we shouldn’t be putting more time and money into the development of alternative sources of energy (while beginning to employ existing technologies on a large scale). Everybody knows oil is finite. However, it is just as unwise to shun the practical politics of oil in the meantime, as many on the Left would have it.

Most of the same people that oppose a war against Saddam opposed the war in Afghanistan, as well as the war on terrorism in general. And they are making very similar arguments in all cases, which, when simplified, amount to something like, “a war will do much more harm than any good.” However, their dire predictions about Afghanistan were shown to be false. The campaign did not create a humanitarian catastrophe, scores of people did not starve to death (6 million was the estimate); millions of refugees did not pour over the border; it did not become a “quagmire.” (Refer to any of the literature coming out of the Left, in September and October 2001 especially, for examples of these claims). Civilian casualties were avoided whenever possible, in part because of the precision technology mastered over years of massive military budgets. Noam Chomsky and his co-thinkers like to cite a former professor of mine, Marc Herold, who calculates that U.S. bombings have killed 3,000 Afghani civilians (“at least”) and counting. Herold derives this figure from a collection of European and Arab newspaper reports. The presumed—and often stated—objective is to demonstrate moral equivalence between the 9/11 incident and U.S. retaliation.

All other non-Pentagon, usually left-leaning efforts to add up the numbers have yielded much lower results (approximately 1,000 was the highest). And there is an important moral and intellectual distinction between premeditated killing, which is murder, and unintentional killing, which is not (although Herold claims that much of the civilian destruction was deliberate). The long-term effect of the raid will almost certainly end up saving many more lives (and provide improved lives for millions more) in the long run than those that were taken away. This is grim business for sure, but as long as the hard-line Left refuses to engage in this complex yet necessary debate, it cannot have an impact on actual policy. Hitchens is correct—the Left has indeed become “irrelevant.”

The results of the bombing campaign in Afghanistan were largely encouraging: the war was over quickly, we made significant headway in debilitating Al-Qaeda, Afghanis took to the streets to cheer, music was back on the airwaves in Kabul. By smashing the Taliban, the U.S. obliterated the largest impediment to that country’s progress. It remains to be seen how things will eventually unfold, but we can now at least hope that something resembling an open and just society will emerge. According to Hitchens, Afghanistan was the first country ever to have been “bombed out of the stone age.”

“As someone who has done a good deal of marching and public speaking about Vietnam, Chile, South Africa, Palestine and East Timor in his time (and would do it all again), I can only hint at how much I despise a Left that thinks of Osama bin Laden as a slightly misguided anti-imperialist,” writes Hitchens.

It is interesting to note that bin Laden, who is allegedly revolting against imperialism, is himself an imperialist. He condemned the U.N./Australian rescue of East Timor, a liberation that is almost certainly connected to the recent vengeance bombing in Bali. So bin Laden is not above supporting everything he is alleged to be reacting against. Indeed, Noam Chomsky’s work for the cause in East Timor is worthy of awe, which render his wooden comparisons between bin Ladenism and Western depredations all the more disappointing.  

It seems as though the Chomsky Left of today cannot move beyond the Cold War mentality. It assumes, in part because of America’s brutal war in Indochina, that the U.S. Government, particularly a Republican administration, is incapable of effecting constructive change abroad. But the whole dynamic has changed over the last decade. As Nation writer Adam Shatz concedes, “I never saw the Soviets, the Cubans, the Sandinistas or the ANC as enemies. Al-Qaeda is another matter altogether.” And so is Saddam, I might add. So, writes Hitchens, “instead of internationalism, we find now among the Left a sort of affectless, neutralist, smirking isolationism.”

The past does not always predict the future. It is a logical fallacy to conclude (as almost all antiwar advocates do) that because the U.S. government propped up Saddam and bin Laden in the past America has no credibility to oust them now. As Hitchens points out, the fact that the U.S. did support these two awful individuals only increases its responsibility to dispose of them now. And actually, as Americans, it is our responsibility.

Undoubtedly, there are some strong reasons to question a war in Iraq. Hitchens writes a concise summary of causes for concern:

Only a fool would trust the Bush Administration to see all of this. I am appalled that by this late date no proclamation has been issued to the people of Iraq announcing the aims and principles of the coming intervention. Nor has any indictment of Saddam Hussein for crimes against humanity been readied. Nothing has been done to conciliate Iran, where the mullahs are in decline. The Palestinian plight is being allowed to worsen. These misgivings are obviously not peripheral.

As I am writing this, an indictment against Saddam is finally being drawn up. Hitchens has been one of the most prominent and effective left-wing critics of U.S. foreign policy over the last twenty years. He is well aware of America’s inimical capabilities—that is why his defection of sorts is so significant.   

Nothing will persuade the antiwar Left (or the antiwar Buchanan Right) that a campaign to remove Saddam and free the Iraqi people is justified. There will always be an excuse to oppose it. At first, the complaints were that the U.S. intended to strike Iraq unilaterally, that everybody in Europe, Russia, China and the Arab world was against Bush, and that there existed no evidence of Saddam possessing WMDs. Now that those critiques have been answered and Bush has voluntarily (and shrewdly) gone through the United Nations, graciously agreeing to afford Saddam one last chance with inspections, the argument has changed: the Left now claims that by attacking Iraq, Saddam is likely to use his WMDs (the same ones he never had in the first place) against us or Israel. Hitchens calls this game “subject change.” When every other peace marcher was demanding that Bush provide proof of Saddam possessing WMDs, Hitchens wrote, “It is obvious to me that the ‘antiwar’ side would not be convinced even if all the allegations made against Saddam Hussein were proven, and even if the true views of the Iraqi people could be expressed.” And because of this there is no incentive for anyone in power (or anyone at all) to take the Left seriously.

Another example of this evident implacability: GF Professor Robin Blackburn believes the U.N. has no credibility because it gives too much power to the five permanent members of the Security Council, and has become thoroughly corrupted. He dismisses the new multilateral approach to Iraq, and he is certain we will go to war no matter what because there is a “crisis of capitalist institutions” and the U.S. has to exploit the oil reserves in Iraq in order to save the system. Everything has already been pre-determined.

The most cogent Chomsky/ Blackburn/Arato critique runs something like this: “It does no good to talk loosely about a new humane foreign policy of helping to emancipate the downtrodden and targeting oppressive dictators when that is not really what our governors intend to do. Why should we believe Hitchens, who all the sudden claims that the U.S. can truly stand as a beacon of freedom, despite all of the crimes that were committed in the past and are currently being committed? Bush hardly even affects concern for the downtrodden—the declared pretense for targeting Iraq is self-defense.” (And we can agree that commercial interests are another reason). “The motives will always be based on crass self-interest.”

Admittedly, these are not easy questions to resolve. But we can point to the success of NATO operations in the Balkans during the 1990’s (better late than never)—what vital U.S. interests were at stake there? These were largely humanitarian interventions spearheaded by Tony Blair and the commanders in the field who were horrified by what they saw on the ground. Another sign of U.S. willingness to promote decency is, of course, Afghanistan. The terrible events of September 11th have further altered geopolitical realities, potentially allowing international intervention to take on new forms.

I contend that it is in broad U.S. interests to pursue a morally driven foreign policy (or, at the very least, it is not against our interests), alongside a policy of self-interest/self-defense. There is a great deal of overlap between the two at the moment. The time is right to synthesize humanitarian interventions with more conventional forms of intervention; the Left can either help forge this process for the better, or continue to play the role of malcontent, sitting on the sidelines of history, smugly feigning superiority to it all.

Ultimately, for or against this campaign in Iraq, the Left needs to open itself up to the possibility of military intervention as a constructive and progressive endeavor. It needs to re-examine its positions, to carefully consider each new situation as it arises instead of always cynically assuming the worst. The Left is becoming more and more alienated from mainstream America and increasingly marginalized within the political process (this is scarcely surprising, considering that well-known lefties like Gore Vidal are, for example, now claiming that Bush knew about the September 11th attacks and could have stopped them, but deliberately chose not to). A recent poll found that only 2% of Americans would oppose a Security Council resolution to inspect Iraq first and then authorize a strike on a condition of non-compliance. The message: we need to give George Bush and our allies a chance, just as we are giving Saddam Hussein another chance.

Even though I obviously trust Christopher Hitchens’ instincts and arguments over everybody else’s in regards to Iraq, I cannot know for sure that he is right, either. I side with Hitchens primarily because, unlike his adversaries, he is challenging the way we on the Left think. He has the ability to turn inwards and re-evaluate old positions and tactics; he understands the connection between open debate, conflict and progress, in all aspects of political life. Has Chomsky ever second-guessed himself? As a result of his experiences, Hitchens possesses a unique and genuine understanding of the nature of the threat we are now faced with. His critical insight and analysis in this post-9/11 era should serve as a wake-up call to those who have been resting on their laurels for far too long. Anyone interested in making the Left “relevant” again would do well to start paying attention.