* * *
The narrative of the left is more tangled and more somber. But before I remark on the ways the Chomskian left has consigned itself to the dustbin of history, let me go back to those early days of hysteria and say a few words in defense of people I now disagree with: it was entirely plausible, in those first few days, to think that the United States had received some kind of global comeuppance. Bless their hearts, the diehards of the anti-imperialist left had always had the integrity and the conscience to say publicly that the United States had too often acted unilaterally and unethically in the post-1945 world, often against its own realpolitik interests as well as against its own democratic ideals. The anti-imperialists were right about Vietnam, they were right about Chile, they were right about El Salvador and Nicaragua, they were right about Indonesia in 1975 and they were right about Iran in 1953. It was not initially unreasonable for any of them to think, as the World Trade Center collapsed five blocks from my best friend's apartment, son of a bitch, someone's gotten to us at last. Such a sentiment, despite the vitriol heaped upon it by the right, implied no sympathy with the attackers; the anti-imperialist left, at its best, despised anti–democratic forces no matter where they came from. It merely registered the sorry fact that the United States had, indeed, too often given the wretched of the earth cause to hate us.
But when the narrative of the attacks became more complex, the Chomskian left did not. Slowly it became clear that for all its past crimes, the U.S. government wasn't nearly as proximate a cause of the attack as were, say, the governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, U.S. "allies" who'd been dancing a dicey pas de deux with their own Islamist radicals for twenty years in order to keep the lid on the domestic unrest created in part by their own corruption. And slowly it became clear that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda were not animated by any of the causes dear to American leftists: the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were not, it seemed, symbolic strikes against U.S. unilateralism with regard to missile defense, post-Kyoto energy policy, landmine treaties, or the rights of children. They were not cosmic payback for our support of Suharto or Pinochet or Marcos or Rios Montt or Mohammed Reza Pahlevi. They were not aimed at Katherine Harris or Kenneth Starr or William Rehnquist. Indeed, the more the West learned about bin Laden, the more we were led down strange narrative byways we hadn't even considered as tangents to the main event: he was convinced by the Somalia expedition that the U.S. was a paper tiger? He wants American soldiers, especially women, to stop desecrating the land of the two holy mosques? He speaks of "eighty years" of Arab abasement, harking back to the end of World War I?
Well, that should have given anyone pause for thought. Maybe if bin Laden had denounced the CIA's overthrow of Mossadeq, maybe if he'd jeered at our futile attempts to play Iran off Iraq and vice versa throughout Reagan's presidency, and maybe if he wasn't carrying around one of those theories about the global Jewish conspiracy, he'd have had a shred of credibility with me. But Somalia? Somalia really was an attempt at liberal-internationalist humanitarianism, and as for the eighty-year-old Sykes-Picot agreement divvying up Arab provinces after World War I, there aren't that many American leftists committed to the restoration of the caliphate, so it's hard for me to see the appeal on that count as well. In fact, as Chris Suellentrop of Slate observed, the U.S. doesn't even deserve any grief about the end of the caliphate: "It would be nice," he wrote, "if bin Laden would note that the United States objected to the Sykes-Picot agreement as a betrayal of the principle of self- determination, but that's probably asking for too much." There's no doubt that our government has committed crimes against humanity in our name. But Somalia and Sykes- Picot aren't among them.
So, faced with an enemy as incomprehensible and as implacable as bin Laden, much of the left checked the man's policy positions on women, homosexuality, secularism, and facial hair, and slowly backed out of the room. They didn't move right, as so many Chomskian leftists have charged; they simply decided that the September 11 attacks were the work of religious fanatics who had no conceivable point of contact with anything identifiable as a left project save for a human-rights complaint about the sanctions against Iraq. As Marx himself observed, there are a number of social systems more oppressive than that of capitalism. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are good cases in point.
For almost a month, the dispute between the Chomsky left and the Hitchens left was largely a theoretical affair, featuring a sweetly pointless debate in the Nation over whose condemnation of Clinton's 1998 cruise-missile strike against the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan was more thorough and/or courageous; then the bombs started dropping on Afghanistan, and the camps hardened into place, with leftists who'd denounced the Taliban steadily for five years now denouncing a military action designed to remove the Taliban from power. This is perhaps the most important episode in the many narratives of September 11, because it represented the earthquake that had been building along a fault line in the U.S. left dating back to the first Bush Administration's operations in Panama and Kuwait, and because it has ramifications for the future of U.S. foreign policy for decades to come.
A large part of the split had to do with the simple fact that bombs were dropping. For U.S. leftists schooled in the lessons of Cambodia, Libya, and the School of the Americas, all U.S. bombing actions are suspect: they are announced by cadaverous white guys with bad hair, they are covered by seven cable channels competing with one another for the catchiest "New War" slogan and Emmy awards for creative flag display, and they invariably kill civilians, the poor, the wretched, the disabled. Surely, there is much to hate about any bombing campaign.
Yet who would deny that a nation, once attacked, has the right to respond with military force, and who seriously believes that anyone could undertake any "nation-building" enterprise in Afghanistan without driving the Taliban from power first? Very well, some of my post-September interlocutors said, the Taliban must go, but not by force. A curious answer: for why would any clear-thinking leftist believe that the Taliban could be removed by persuasion alone, as if, like Al Gore after the Supreme Court's supremely corrupt decision in Bush v. Gore, they would smile wryly into the cameras and say, "It's time for us to go"?
The arguments against military force started flooding the left-leaning listservs. One, the link between the attacks and the Taliban was not strong enough to justify bombing. Two, we had supported bin Laden indirectly back when he was one of the mujahedeen fighting the USSR. Three, the terrain and the enemy would quickly lead us into a quagmire. Four, the bombing of Afghanistan was the moral equivalent of the September 11 attacks--or even worse, since the U.S. was attacking from a position of wealth and strength. Five, there would be no "nation-building" after the ouster of the Taliban--just more bombing, this time in some other impoverished nation. Six, the U.S. had been a global aggressor for so long and with such impunity that it had no moral ground from which to operate even after being directly attacked.
These are the arguments that have insured the Chomskian left's irrelevance to foreign policy debate for the foreseeable future, and I confess I am not always sure why anyone would make them in any case. Arguments three and five are relatively innocuous, being merely predictive, but the rest range from merely illogical (one, two, six) to morally odious (four). For instance: the fact that a U.S. government was once foolish enough--or Zbigniew Brzezinski was once cavalier enough--to fund the Arab "Afghanis" in the 1980s does not mean that a U.S. government is barred from opposing any of their progeny now. The Chomskian left has been playing this tune for some time now--today's public enemy was yesterday's CIA darling--and while it does serve a heuristic function, in that it reminds amnesiac Americans that baddies such as Saddam and Noriega and Suharto didn't appear on the world stage out of nowhere, it doesn't serve any substantive function except obfuscation. Would the Chomskian left seriously prefer that the U.S. stick by its totalitarian ex-clients no matter what, as the Cold Warriors of the right once urged us to do?
The argument about our past dealings with bin Laden is thus a smokescreen, as was Chomsky's argument in 1999 that our intervention against Milosevic in Kosovo could not be motivated by "humanitarian" concerns because if we were serious about humanitarianism we would also have intervened in East Timor. Even Chomsky's fans will recall that this argument was not a clarion call for wider U.S. interventions around the world beginning in East Timor; it was an argument designed to obfuscate the issue at hand in Kosovo, namely, allegations that the Serbs were engaged in genocide. Similarly, in addressing the question of whether the U.S. had the right to respond militarily after September 11, Chomsky offered more smoke: "Congress has authorized the use of force against any individuals or countries the President determines to be involved in the attacks, a doctrine that every supporter regards as ultra-criminal. That is easily demonstrated. Simply ask how the same people would have reacted if Nicaragua had adopted this doctrine after the U.S. had rejected the orders of the World Court to terminate its 'unlawful use of force' against Nicaragua and had vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states to observe international law." Very well; with regard to Reagan's contra war and the mining of Nicaragua's harbors, Nicaragua and the World Court were in the right, and the U.S. acted like a rogue nation. How exactly does this prove that "every supporter" regards the use of force as "ultra-criminal" with regard to September 11?
The fissure on the left that began in 1989-90 and became visible in Kosovo is now a chasm. In retrospect, Kosovo didn't have quite the impact on the left it might have, partly because conservatives also opposed that operation on the grounds that Clinton had ordered it (by 1999, Clinton could have launched a campaign against childhood diseases and House Republicans would've responded by declaring measles a vegetable and bundling it into school breakfast programs), partly because of Monica, and partly because it was shrouded in murk from Srebrenica to Rambouillet. But many of the most vocal opponents of the U.S.–led NATO intervention in Kosovo are now the most vocal opponents to the U.S.–led intervention in Afghanistan, which suggests two things: first, that the fact of civilian deaths on U.S. soil is in an important sense immaterial to their position on U.S. policy, and second, that on the grounds they offer today, they will never support another American military action of any kind. Permanently alienated by Vietnam, by Chile, by Indonesia, or by Reagan's deadly adventures in Central America, they're gone and they're not coming back, not even if hijackers plow planes into towers in downtown Manhattan.
The right is just gleeful about this, of course, because it needs the Chomskian left for effigies, hate minutes, election-year fundraising and general vituperation. Christopher Hitchens seems pretty happy as well, since he gets to settle a bunch of old scores and coin acerbic new phrases like "the Milosevic left" and "the Taliban left." But for all my sympathy with Hitchens, I cannot share his sense of exhilaration; instead, as I watch that shard of the left sailing away, I modulate between relief and sorrow. Relief, because the break is decisive and clarifying, highlighting all those who cannot use the word "heroes" without scare quotes, all those who cannot bring themselves to utter anything about freedom and democracy if doing so will make them say words that might also have come from the mouth of a conservative. Sorrow, because there will soon come a time when I am going to miss these people, when I am going to wish they had some clout in domestic politics. Not because I will agree with them, necessarily, but because--unlike liberals--they do not make compromises, and they know how to get mad. Liberals are good at patient deliberation and stress abatement in the Mister Rogers mode, which is why conservatives simply tear them from limb to limb whenever anything important--like, say, a Presidential election recount in southern Florida--is at stake: while the liberals hold a seminar on the lessons of 1876, Tom DeLay flies in a bunch of goons to stop the recount by force. Liberals like that image of themselves: so what if those firebreathing yahoos run the country? At least we've got our sanity and our Birkenstocks. But for precisely this reason, liberals are not very good at organizing demonstrations and mass protests when the President announces the creation of military tribunals or the abrogation of client-attorney privilege in cases where the client has an Al- in his last name. How many liberals stood up and shamed John Ashcroft when he appeared before the Senate on December 6 and impugned the patriotism of civil libertarians? How many liberals voted against the USA-PATRIOT act? How many liberals took to the streets when Bush issued Executive Order 13233, overturning the Presidential Records Act and closing the archives on the Reagan-Bush years? Who's kidding whom? This is just not the kind of thing liberals do these days.
But there's still plenty of mobilizing to do on the domestic front for everyone who prefers democracy to mild totalitarianism, and this should include everyone from William Safire to Katha Pollitt. The narrative of that struggle will doubtless be experimental and self-reflexive and full of postmodern historiographic metafiction in the mode of Ishmael Reed and E. L. Doctorow, but if it's going to be a narrative any of us will want to tell our children at night, first we're going to have to remind liberals how to get good and mad. And we should do it sooner rather than later--that is, before rather than after Ashcroft sets up those new-for-2002 Preventative Detention Camps to keep track of people who show signs of dissenting, demurring, or otherwise disparaging the Department of Justice's good-faith efforts to ensure domestic tranquility. Because by that time, we won't even be able to tell our stories to our lawyers.