Yet more Rieff

[Carl Remick]

>From the current Slate:

The Making of a Liberal Warmonger

By A. O. Scott

If "intellectual" were a title like "baron" that could be inherited, few
people would have a stronger claim to it than David Rieff. His father is
University of Pennsylvania sociologist Philip Rieff, the author, most
notably, of Freud: The Mind of A Moralist. His mother is essayist,
novelist, filmmaker, and political activist Susan Sontag, as iconic an
intellectual as our resolutely anti-intellectual culture is ever likely
to recognize. 

David, the only child of their brief marriage, may well prove to be the
most influential member of the family. He is certainly the most visible,
holding forth in the pages of everything from the Wall Street Journal to
the New Republic to Salmagundi. More than any other journalist, Rieff
has tried to mold the lessons of Bosnia and Rwanda into a coherent
worldview. For him, these wars exposed the political bankruptcy and
strategic incompetence not only of Western governments but, even more
starkly, of the international do-gooder establishment--the United
Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the
proliferating nongovernmental organizations that provide relief on the
ground in times of emergency.

Rieff has relentlessly argued that the prevailing paradigms of
humanitarian assistance and international law are inadequate to the
brute realities of the post-Cold War world. A willingness by the Western
powers--in particular the United States--to intervene on one side in
military conflicts rather than treat them as quasinatural disasters is
the only way to advance the causes of democracy and human rights. While
his response to NATO's intervention in Kosovo has been, as we shall see,
ambivalent, the decision to intervene is evidence that Rieff's arguments
have, for the moment, prevailed.

There is an obvious irony in the fact that the son of one of the most
implacable critics of American imperialism in the '60s should emerge as
one of its most vocal champions in the '90s. More amazing still is that
Rieff couches his saber rattling in the language of dissent. He takes
strong, uncompromising positions that leave him curiously unaccountable.
When his mother went to Hanoi in 1968, she returned with the conviction
that a North Vietnamese victory was the best outcome for Vietnam, for
America, and for the world. In the decades since, she has had to grapple
with the consequences of that position. Rieff's interventionist stances
on Bosnia and Rwanda evade such reckoning. He is always ready to take a
position on what should have been done.

Rieff has also short-circuited criticism by making arguments that, if
they are not flatly self-contradictory, can only be the stages of a
grand dialectical work-in-progress of Hegelian complexity. He has hailed
those who work for NGOs as heroes, while decrying the NGOs themselves as
"feudal lords" of "the new medievalism." He has heralded the end of the
nation-state and dismissed rumors of its death as exaggerated. He is a
self-described "Neo-Wilsonian" who is skeptical of liberalism, hostile
to the United Nations, and suspicious of empire. He has called the
advocates of civil society "the useful idiots of globalization" even as
he has co-edited a new book--Crimes of War: What the Public Should
Know--that seems to rest its hope for a humane international order on
the shoulders of transnational, extra-governmental institutions. The
only position he consistently advances is that he is right and everyone
else is wrong.

Before he became the intellectual conscience of the new world order,
Rieff was an editor, reviewer, and travel writer. His first two books,
Going to Miami: Exiles, Tourists, and Refugees in the New America and
Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World, relate his discovery that the
cultural geography of American cities was being transformed by a new
wave of immigrants from the Third World. Apparently, he made the
discovery all by himself. The nonimmigrant residents of Miami and Los
Angeles appear in Rieff's books to be, if not entirely clueless about
what's going on around them, then at least hopelessly unable to explain
it. "Everyone I knew was taking the transformation of their own country
in stride," Rieff marvels in Los Angeles. Not him: "Often, I would sit
in a restaurant and be literally unable to follow the conversation going
on around me, so mesmerized was I by the Laotian busboy, or the Peruvian
parking lot attendant, or the Haitian dishwasher--our new fellow
countrymen. Who are they? I thought. Who are we? I thought." What the
hell are you looking at? thought the Laotian busboy. 
Even then, Rieff was thinking on a global scale, pondering the decline
of the nation-state, the transformation of the international economy,
and the obsolescence of New York City. He was also indulging his taste
for grandiose pronouncements: 

"The great lesson of New York's decline was that the curtain comes down
just as surely on historical periods as it does on individual lives. ...
And what could be said about New York seemed to me to apply also to
America as a whole. In retrospect, Reaganism had been less a period in
which the United States reassumed the mantle of empire than one in which
new empires--Japanese finance, the European Community--began to take
their proper role in the world."

In retrospect, this is nonsense, but at the time it no doubt seemed
prophetic. Rieff might have reread these passages before he wrote a
scathing review of Thomas L. Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree for
the Los Angeles Times last month, in which he ridiculed Friedman for
just this kind of naive extrapolation of the future from the present.
Friedman may be guilty of the fatuous contention that no two countries
with McDonald's franchises have ever gone to war with each other, but
Rieff, in Los Angeles, indulges in some fast-food mysticism of his own
when he sees a harbinger of our globalized, miscegenated, Third World
future in the advent of the pita fajita. While Los Angeles aims an
occasional rhetorical jab at the left, Rieff's second book on Miami, The
Exile, was an act of defiant apostasy, sympathetic to the Cuban émigrés'
sufferings and aspirations, and contemptuous of the Castro regime. In
the precincts of the American left that still dream of Fidel and Che in
the Sierra Maestra, Rieff's book was greeted with murmurings of
disapproval--the kind of murmurings that had greeted Sontag's famous
Town Hall declaration of the moral equivalence of communism and fascism
some years before.

In 1992, Rieff went to Europe to explore the transformation of its
cultural geography by Third World immigration. He ended up, fatefully,
in Sarajevo, just as the first details of the Bosnian genocide were
becoming known. His experience in Bosnia awakened his conscience, and
made his career.

The book that resulted, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the
West, is an unrelenting indictment of the international community's
inability--or unwillingness--to step in and stop the killing. It is an
odd piece of reportage, with no interest in the evocation of place. This
is post-traumatic journalism--repetitious, impatient, and emotionally
raw. The Bosnians--in whose name Rieff brings his indictment against an
indifferent world--function as a kind of abstraction. We see very little
of their lives, and only rarely hear their voices. They are the Laotian
busboy, only more like us. At the heart of the book is the claim that by
treating a political cataclysm in strictly humanitarian terms, Western
governments and the United Nations assured the destruction of a
democratic, multicultural nation in the middle of Europe and abetted the
cause of Serbian fascism. Those who protested NATO's action in Kosovo
because it lacked a U.N. mandate should read Slaughterhouse to see what
an earlier mandate produced: ethnic cleansing superintended by men in
blue helmets.

Even though Kosovo was the West's attempt to compensate for the failures
outlined in Slaughterhouse, as recently as last September Rieff opposed
military action against Serbia in an op-ed, calling such intervention
unwarranted because the sufferings of the Kosovars "pale in comparison"
with the starvation of refugees in southern Sudan and Sierra Leone.
"Unless one believes that the lives of Europeans are intrinsically more
valuable than those of Africans, the humanitarian justification for
military intervention is unsustainable," he wrote.

Does David Rieff contradict himself again? Has he already forgotten that
Slaughterhouse castigates former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros
Boutros-Ghali for making a similar formulation, describing as "racist"
the world's attention to Bosnia and disregard for the sufferings of the
Third World? Didn't Boutros-Ghali earn Rieff's undying scorn when he
told the besieged Sarajevans he could name 10 places in the world where
things were worse?

But last autumn's dove became a hawk again this spring. Shortly after
NATO's bombs stopped falling and Milosevic capitulated, Rieff assessed
the lessons of Kosovo in a short Newsweek piece that made the case--from
the safety of retrospect, naturally--for ground troops. The question of
ground troops was not strategic, but moral. "Had the West been willing
to unleash a ground war to secure its military, humanitarian and
human-rights objectives," Rieff argued, "there would be more room for
optimism." So much for southern Sudan.

Rieff's Newsweek piece did allow that, in spite of having "to fight a
just war with one hand tied behind its back ... NATO actually succeeded
to a greater extent than might have been predicted." "Might have been"
is either disingenuous or overly modest, since Rieff himself had, almost
from the start, pronounced NATO's action an unambiguous failure. In a
cover story in the New Republic in May, Rieff painted a grim picture of
"lost Kosovo." "The real question," Rieff insisted, "is whether the
refugee emergency is going to be permanent ... or whether NATO actually
intends to fight a war that will allow the refugees to return to
Kosovo."

If that question has, for the moment at least, been answered, you won't
hear it from David Rieff. Don't expect to see him marching in any
victory parades. But don't look for him at any protest marches either.
In the months ahead, you'll most likely find him in the pages of the
opinion journals or across the table from Charlie Rose, heaping scorn on
the U.S. government, NATO, the United Nations and, of course, the left,
whoever they are. He will continue to lecture us on the importance of
choosing sides, and of fighting to win. He will remain passionate,
eloquent, and sure of himself. But I, for one, can't read him without
hearing the strains of an old marching song from my own left-wing
childhood. Which side are you on, David? Which side are you on?

[end]

Carl