Tikkun Magazine, May/June 2006

What's With the Liberal Hawks?

The Agony of Defeat

WITH THE PASSING OF THE THIRD anniversary of the invasion of Iraq this past March, it has become clear that America has lost the war. Not only has the invasion failed to achieve its stated goals of defeating terrorism and creating the Arab world's first secular democratic state, America's occupation has plunged Iraq into the modern Middle East's most violent civil war to date. With dozens of bodies being delivered to morgues on a daily basis and the estimated civilian body count over 35,000, the three-year old war in Iraq has already matched one-third of the total number of civilians killed in Lebanon's fifteen-year-long civil war.

Nevertheless, the Bush administration persists in its attempts to whitewash its failures. Even though December's parliamentary elections failed to create a national government, Bush insists that democracy is on the way. Despite the rising death toll, Bush monotonously repeats that an end to the country's sectarian strife remains within reach.

If only things were that simple. The world, however, is a complex place, and even a tightly controlled superpower could not execute its foreign policy endeavors with the same kind of ruthless efficiency that it secured for its domestic hegemony. When it came to the Fertile Crescent, the Bush administration proved to be less savvy than it is at rounding up the goodwill of America's overwhelmed citizens. Between March 2003 and March 2006, every single one of the administration's legislative, judicial, and ideological triumphs at home has been matched by an equally consistent and successive string of failures in Iraq.

It is safe to say that the Tigris-Euphrates river valley has become a graveyard for more than just 35,000 Iraqi civilians. Iraq has become the final resting place of the Bush administration's credibility. The chaos and destruction in Iraq has resulted in calls for Bush to be impeached and in an utterly abysmal approval rating matched only by Nixon's during his second term. Indeed, one might even argue that the Iraqi debacle has signaled the end of the road for the last utopianism of the twentieth century--that of the neo-conservatives--which finally succumbed to the same logic of defeat as communism and fascism.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Years away from withdrawal, we will not be able to engage in a proper post-mortem for decades to come. However, we can begin to analyze how and why Americans have become so hypnotized by the necessity of engaging in this sadistic and ultimately self-destructive imperial adventure. In this special section, Elliot Neaman, Danny Goldberg, and Max Ajl revisit the phenomena that became known during the war as "Liberal Hawks": progressive intellectuals, who, despite their misgivings about the Bush administration, found a reason to support its foreign policy in the War on Terror.

By no means a complete portrait of the phenomenon, this section nevertheless reflects a great deal of the debate about liberal hawks that has taken place at Tikkun since the onset of the war. Please feel free to add to this discussion by emailing us at editors@tikkun.org.

Future Imperfect

THE LEFT HAS HISTORICALLY TENDED towards liberal internationalism. In matters of potential conflict, war was always supposed to be a last option. And yet, from the buildup to the Iraq war, through the first year of the occupation, this consensus began to unravel. A small but nevertheless influential number of liberal intellectuals began to find something seductive about Bush's messianic rhetoric about spreading democracy through the use of force. Still moved by the 1960s-era hope for a progressive foreign policy, identifying with their Jewish neoconservative peers (many of whom still had the scent of Trotskyism about them), they broke rank with their comrades, and threw their weight behind the war.

Dubbed "liberal hawks" by the press, many of these individuals had solid progressive credentials--for example, Paul Berman, a one-time anarcho-syndicalist leader of the radical Students for a Democratic Society at Columbia, who wrote regularly for Dissent, The Nation, Village Voice, and the New Yorker. Or Tom Friedman, the New York Times foreign policy columnist, who was not exactly Noam Chomsky, but not Charles Krauthammer either. Even at the solidly liberal New Yorker, editor David Remnick and staff writer George Packer found good reasons to support the Iraq project. The list of renegades who went along for the ride goes on, from Gore Vidal biographer Fred Kaplan and human rights specialist Michael Ignatieff, to Slate columnist and Vanity Fair writer Christopher Hitchens, along with many others, including myself.

The initial success of the invasion emboldened these new radicals, whose newfound friendship with neoconservatives seemed to have been vindicated. But after inexplicable missteps by the Coalition Provisional Authority, the welcome overthrow of a bloody dictator turned into a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites, while the Kurds retreated into a guarded autonomy to wait out the storm. After a thousand days of this chaos, many of the chastened liberals now claim that the Iraq dream could have become reality had the Pentagon not disbanded Saddam Hussein's army, made domestic security a top priority, put many more American troops on the ground, sealed the borders to incoming insurgents, and more. No one could expect, they cried, that the Bush Administration would screw up so badly something that was obviously in their self-interest to pull off. This understanding of the events is plausible and explains both our initial enthusiasm and our eventual disillusionment.

But something deeper is at play here, There is still a good chance, though perhaps not better than fifty/fifty, that the outcome in Iraq will eventually produce a stable government and a brokered peace deal between the country's ethnic and religious groups. Control of Iraq's vast oil wealth keeps the stakes high and puts pressure on all sides to come to the table. But whatever happens, the future is not going to look like the neoconservative fantasy of a secular democratic state, and Iraq is certainly not going to be a model for the rest of the Middle East to follow. It is already clear that Iran will come out ahead, with its nuclear ambitions strengthened and its anti-Israeli and anti-American hardliners emboldened. But for many liberal hawks, the result will most likely not be a return to their former, pre-war ideological selves.

The primary lesson of the failure in Iraq may be to teach liberal hawks that it is impossible to impose human rights and democracy on cultures that lack traditions of liberty. But liberal hawks will probably not return to liberal internationalism, because even though American rhetoric about freedom often comes across as suspicious, the real reason for rejecting it is that given all the options, many modern societies still choose fanaticism or fascism over real transformation. This is a sobering thought that should give pause to anyone interested in the age-old hope of peace.

Elliot Neaman is Associate Professor of modern European history at the University of San Francisco and has been a member of the editorial board of Tikkun Magazine since 1993.

George Packer's War

GEORGE PACKER IS THE BEST POSTERCHILD that liberal hawks have. He has the imprimatur of the New Yorker, which regularly publishes him. Packer's writing is at its best in the chapter of his widely praised book Assassins at the Gate, in which he describes in nuanced detail the anguish of Chris Froheiser, whose son Kurt was killed in Iraq in 2004. However, Packer remains in stubborn denial about the depth of the mistakes made in going to war in Iraq and remains in the grip of a sullen hostility to those who opposed it.

Packer criticizes Bush without criticizing the Bush doctrine. The problem with Bush's foreign policy, he thinks, is not the policy itself but the way the Bush administration has executed it. Echoing Michael Dukakis's ill-fated Presidential campaign, Packer believes that the problem with Bush's foreign policy is not its ideology but its lack of competence.

For a writer purported to be intellectually rigorous, Packer is remarkably resistant to giving voice to dissenting ideas. There are no summaries of the arguments of the twenty-three Senators and the one hundred and thirty-three House members who voted against authorizing the war. Nor is there any mention of former UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter, who with uncanny accuracy predicted all the woes of the actual war before it happened, nor of the careful but unmistakable opposition from Brent Scowcroft, National Security Advisor to the first President Bush.

What is the psychology that prevents liberal hawks from logically and fairly discussing, even now, the enormous risks and costs of the war? When the subject is antiwar opinion, Packer's usually nuanced writing is replaced by thuggish smears. Regarding those who supported far less costly interventions in Bosnia and Haiti but opposed the Iraq War, he writes "Perhaps the fact that the United States had strategic interests in the region (oil) and that the issue of Iraq involved unconventional weapons as well as mass murder, made the war more complicated for airy humanitarians." Of course such straw men do not exist in real life, but only in the desperate defensive imagination of those who cannot bear to admit that they were wrong.

Similarly, Packer writes that Eli Pariser of Moveon.org "seemed to exist so that the rest of the country couldn't dismiss the antiwar movement as a fringe phenomenon of graying pacifists ..." The word "graying" is not usually a pejorative in describing foreign policy thinkers. The word "pacifist," although associated with an intellectual tradition that deserves more than a cartoon-like reference is not, in fact, an apt description of millions of middle aged and older people who opposed the Iraq War but who supported other wars. The obvious examples are those millions who opposed the Iraq War but supported the invasion of Afghanistan.

Packer appears certain that only a select group of insiders are worthy of inclusion in foreign policy discussions. In an Op-Ed piece in the Los Angeles Times written to coincide with the publication of Assassins at the Gate, he said that "In the winter of 2003, what you thought about the war mattered less to me than how you thought about it.... In those tense months, the mark of second-rate minds was absolute certainty one way or the other."

What you thought about the war mattered less than how you thought about it. Those who predicted with painful accuracy the perils of the war were presumably "second rate" intellectually compared to those like Packer, who writes without irony that "democratic idealism" was a plausible motive of the likes of Dick Cheney.

Danny Goldberg is the former copublisher of Tikkun, the author of the book How the Left Lost Teen Spirit, and a contributor to the anthology Proud to Be Liberal.

Taking Flight

WRITING ABOUT POST-COLD WAR American foreign policy, liberal interventionist David Rieff states that "most of the interventions in the 1990s," particularly those in Haiti, Kosovo, Somalia, and Bosnia, "were undertaken under the banner of preventing human rights abuses or righting humanitarian wrongs." The analysis is accurate, and also applies to interventions of the new millennium, as the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, carried out under the veneer of moral messianism, have reminded us.

However, it was only during NATO's 1999 intervention in Kosovo that this banner was fully unfurled--not primarily by the State Department, but chiefly by liberal intellectuals seeking to direct American military power toward halting the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. Fragments of the Left that until then had been rigidly opposed to American militarism underwent a radical transmutation into fierce interventionists. No longer was the abattoir of Indochina to be the touchstone of American liberalism; instead, these "Bosnian-generation liberal intellectuals," as George Packer called them, having seen the horrific effects of American inaction in Bosnia were drawn "to use American military power to serve goals like human rights and democracy."

Liberals advocating for the use of force inscribed a new message in the ideological record: America was willing to use its military in the service of humanitarianism. What's more, this militancy was cast as the necessary fulfillment of the most profound of moral obligations: that when people are being murdered, the murderers must be stopped. One can understand why so many liberals found this concept deeply seductive. Through a wholesale reorientation of American foreign policy--from capitalist mercenary to moral conservator--the willingness to marry force to humanitarianism offered the possibility of finally transforming the state according to the highest ideals of democracy and multiculturalism.

Thus, Thomas Friedman wrote that a "sustained bombardment could achieve" America's "basic objectives," among them "the return of Kosovo Albanians to their homes, with self-rule," thereby offering legitimate "military resistance to Serbian racism and aggression," as Christopher Hitchens advocated. When NATO's bombing campaign failed to dislodge the Serbian military and caused a massive refugee crisis for the province's Albanian population, Friedman advocated a savage increase of the bombing, dictating that "it should be lights out in Belgrade."

Despite the disastrous results of NATO's bombing campaign, liberal hawks continued to maintain a posture of intentional ignorance, invoking quasi-theological mantras attesting to the fact that "the NATO allies were well-intentioned," as they always are, and that "they clearly did not anticipate ... President ... Milosevic's mendacity and ability to drive out thousands of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo," to quote Friedman. Problematically, facts intrude on doctrine: NATO did foresee this happening and was quite forthright about it. Then-Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark claimed that the ethnic cleansing that undeniably accelerated under the NATO barrage was "entirely predictable." Nevertheless, just-war theorist Michael Walzer, while agreeing with Clark that ethnic cleansing was "partly [the] consequence" of the air campaign, still lauded the not-so-efficient air assault as ultimately just. Clearly, such sentiments are not far removed from Donald Rumsfeld's panegyric five years later to the ruin of Iraq: "the carnage was horrendous, and it was worth it."

The question is why this ruin had to happen at all. Perhaps the only answer is that it is nothing new for powerful states to set off fireworks as an attempt to obscure the realities of imperial aggression, and for subservient intellectuals to mouth constructions that ideologically legitimate state violence. These may come enveloped in a rhetoric of humanitarianism, but the truth lies within, recognized even by exponents such as Rieff, who noted after the war that "you send your F-15 to help the Kosovars and what it does is it blows up a bunch of children in a hospital. That's what war is." Indeed.

Max Ajl is a freelance writer and independent scholar working out of Brooklyn, NY. His research and writing interests include American foreign policy and political culture, Israeli foreign policy, and Latin American politics.