Subject: Re: How Should the Left Respond to a U.S. War Against Iraq?
who cares what these hand-wringers think?*
(*berman excepted)
(Marshall not Paul, M.P.)
Well thren it's all settled! So EZ. Use ZSoap and wring those questions away! Here is, I presume, the wife of, "Can't tuck in his shirt, " Aronowitz...followed by a co-editor of a classic socialist-feminist anthology, Ann Snitow.
Ellen Willis
I oppose the Bush administration's drive to war on Iraq, though not without continuing internal argument. Should Saddam Hussein fail to comply with the Security Council's resolution, I would have to rethink my position. In the event of a popular democratic revolt against Saddam, I would support various forms of U.S. intervention, including sending troops, if necessary. And I am moved by Kanan Makiya's conviction that only the U.S. military can install democracy in Iraq, even as I believe he is investing his hopes in the wrong cast of characters. But at this moment I find it impossible to disentangle the call for war from the larger vision of international relations it is meant to test. Iraq has been a chronic problem, but the current crisis is a manufactured one. The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz gang has seized on September 11 as an excuse and a cover for an agenda that long predated it: taking advantage of the power vacuum supposedly created by the fall of the Soviet Union to wage a forceful campaign for world domination. To say that the Bush policy is one of preemptive war is misleading. If we have information that a country is preparing to launch an imminent attack on us, and we attack first, that is a preemptive strike-arguably an act of self-defense. Attacking a specific weapons cache or factory, as the Israelis did with their bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor (doing the world a favor, in my view), might also be justified on defensive grounds. But the Bush doctrine goes much further, claiming our right to make war on any nation we, in our sole judgment, perceive to be a threat to us or a hostile competitor for military power. It discards the principle that the only legitimate war is one that defends against aggression. While we as well as others have often honored that principle in the breach, openly flouting it invites others to do so and encourages wholesale contempt for international law. The Bush doctrine is also a recipe for permanent war that threatens incalculable devastation abroad while wrecking democracy at home. In its delusions of unchecked American power it's a fantasy of lunatics. In reality, the post-cold war power vacuum has been filled by transnational capital, which will not passively allow its own goals-global stability and the spread of neoliberalism-to be undermined by American dreams of a new imperium: it's safe to conclude that the reason Bush felt forced to go to the UN, finally, was not the sheer eloquence of Colin Powell's arguments! It's unclear at this writing whether Saddam's agreement to admit inspectors is a transient glitch or a major roadblock in the path to war (in which case the administration may turn its attention to new targets). Ironically, if the UN's efforts are successful, it may well be because Bush's belligerence convinced Saddam that he had no choice but to comply; it could be argued that, after all, someone needs to play "bad cop" in this kind of situation. The problem, though, is that the United States is not acting a part. The administration hawks don't want disarmament, they want conquest; and whether or not they get to pursue it in this case, their overall objectives will not change. What we're seeing is the first sally in an open-ended power struggle: the battle will be joined, and deals will be made, between Bush's ultranationalism and the amoral realpolitik of the corporate globalizers. In this scenario, democratic values have no place. Although the Iraq campaign is billed as the linchpin of the war on terrorism, it is actually a substitute for a serious effort against the far more immediate threat of radical Islamism in general and al-Qaeda in particular. The administration's lack of urgency on this front is a scandal. In Afghanistan, the United States mismanaged the war by letting the Northern Alliance fight our battle, with two unsavory results: al-Qaeda leaders and fighters escaped en masse, and thuggish fundamentalist warlords took over much of the country. We have mismanaged the peace by refusing to provide security outside Kabul or spend real money on reconstruction. (According to a New Republic article, we are even depriving Hamid Karzai of his Special Forces bodyguards, turning the job over to private mercenaries- a move that like so many Republican policies seems designed to deprive satirists of material.) At home, the administration's main antiterrorist program is seizing every possible opening to dismantle civil liberties. Otherwise, national defense has been entirely subordinated to corporate desires for low taxes, cost-cutting, and deregulation as usual: airport security remains a joke; nothing has been done to protect our ports from smuggled bombs; the Indian Point nuclear power plant still presents an inviting target thirty miles from New York City; and so depressingly on. Assuming nothing happens to change the above assessment and we do go to war in Iraq, I will participate in antiwar activity, but not as part of an "antiwar movement." In analyzing my objections to the current actually- existing peace movement, I've come to see the basic problem as the very concept of a movement organized around opposition to war-as distinct from a movement organized around a set of political principles that may, at a given moment, require antiwar activism, but at another may just as urgently require armed intervention. Aggressive wars are an emergency that must be addressed, but violence is an endemic human problem that no amount of antiwar moralizing will solve. Genuine peace can only be the byproduct of success in reducing the crushing weight of human misery-I'm speaking not only of poverty but of political, cultural, and religious oppression-that stokes human rage. That project requires politics and implies a recognition that not all wars are alike. But antiwar movements inevitably elide the distinction between a particular war and war in general and become, in essence, apolitical moral crusades. Even politically thoughtful pacifists contribute to this tendency insofar as they define peace as their goal and nonviolence as their bottom line. So, of course, do the far more numerous vulgar pacifists who are simply "against violence" as one would be "against sin." And so do self-proclaimed anti-imperialists whose politics boils down to general moral outrage against American power as such, regardless of where exercised and for what reason: Vietnam equals Bosnia equals Afghanistan equals Iraq. Though many New Left activists opposed the Vietnam War on the basis of their radical democratic principles, the absorption of the left by the antiwar movement ended up destroying it as a force for real social change. And I fear that if much of the democratic left, which at this point barely exists as an organized force, defines itself as part of an antiwar movement, the new radicalism we need will never emerge. What, in the long run, should the United States do about Iraq? What can the United States do that makes any sense in the context of a foreign policy that's altogether unprincipled? How, for instance, do we oppose Saddam Hussein while supporting the pernicious and, from an antiterrorist perspective, more dangerous regime in Saudi Arabia? In the long run, the aims of U. S. foreign policy should be to support democratic and secular movements; oppose theocracy and authoritarian nationalism; subsidize the economic reconstruction of poor countries devastated by war, famine, ecological destruction, and AIDS; and abandon our leading role in forcing neoliberalism down every country's throat. What can the left do to move America in this direction? While opposing Bush's war, I don't want to lose sight of that question. Ellen Willis'smost recent essay on international politics post-9/11 is "The Mass Psychology of Terrorism," in the forthcoming anthology Implicating Empire (Basic).
Ann Snitow Regime change now? It would be wonderful if Saddam Hussein were gone, the miserable, old-style totalitarian thug. But do we want the new-style U.S. techno-thugs, smooth and increasingly precise, to take charge? Perhaps we'll look back at communism and rogue states like Saddam's and say, "What brutish amateurs!" I am not saying that, in contrast, it's the United States, with its part-illusion of an ever slicker war machine, that is the real evil empire. That's too reductive a way to talk about the rival interests and motives that shape U.S. policy. But the United States makes no secret of its growing will and capacity to police populations at home and abroad by all sorts of mechanisms, from out-and-out war to repressive surveillance. "Regime change" and "preemptive strike" are the current Orwellian terms for the coming, expensive, overblown U.S. military buildup of the twenty-first century. I'm one of those activists-and very out of favor we are now, in public discussions on both right and left-who think that the major work of the twenty-first century is not the war on terrorism but the establishment of a demilitarized internationalism. Our beleaguered group is skeptical that violence can deliver either safety in the long run or a polity we want. "Military solution" is our latest comic oxymoron, replacing the old one about "military intelligence." Military power can never be the name of our desire. Therefore, yes to disarming Saddam Hussein-but as a first step toward a far-reaching discussion of why disarmament is so important in general. By passing its recent resolution on Iraq, the United Nations bravely refused to grant the United States the free hand it wanted to start a war. But now the UN is itself on the line. If for any reason the weapons inspections of the coming weeks fail to convince, the UN has now taken responsibility to revisit the question of force and may well have to organize an international military intervention to make Iraq disarm. But the process of making the world less dangerous can't stop with military action. Thugs and rogue states will not disappear any time soon, and violent rage, fear of attack, and the desire for revenge will continue to be the structuring emotions of our period-at home as well as abroad. So we have a choice: Gear up for continuous war or plan for confronting bullies and achieving justice some other way. If there is a war, would I join an antiwar movement? I never left. But my long-term commitment to demilitarization doesn't necessarily mean satisfaction with past or current peace movements. On November 8, 2002, an ad hoc group of seventy leftist activists met at Judson Memorial Church in New York City to "Take Back the Future." This group was urgently seeking a coherent response to the threatening post-September 11 world. We were all, also, trying to come to terms with our invisibility in public discourse, particularly after the sweeping victories of the Republicans in the mid-term elections just three days before. The church was all echoes, and the left was lonely. But by the end of our second meeting a week later, discussion was more focused and energy was returning. We began to rethink how to represent anti- militarism to people who are justifiably afraid in the rush of new realities. There was general agreement that right now we have, on one side, the militarist strategies of Bush and Company and, on the other, a peace movement that is too supine, or running on automatic, or not alert enough to the problems of post-cold war internationalism. As the group's initial conveners, Drucilla Cornell and I proposed the following list of caveats for a revitalized peace movement: First, no to anti-interventionist talk. As the most powerful and richest country, the United States has enormous responsibility, which it has refused to shoulder. For example, we need peaceful U.S. participation in the Middle East and in the rebuilding of Afghanistan. An isolationist United States is selfish, ignorant, and dangerous. Rather, the United States must work toward more reciprocal relationships. Instead of "Hands Off," we need a rhetoric of care, service, rescue, exchange, and mutual support. Although "aid" has been an instrument of U.S. business interests in the past, U.S. wealth might function quite differently in more collaborative economic partnerships. Does such a shift toward partnership seem unlikely, given the power of the right and the track record of the imperium so far? Yes. But international cultural and economic cooperation is the only long-term strategy for security. We must struggle toward it if we are to have safety in the future. Second, no knee-jerk anti-Americanism. Since the 1970s, it has been a common stance of U.S. peace movements to hate America as the key source of all injustice. This automatic rejection of U.S. values as hypocritical or in bad faith has sometimes led to the romanticizing of repressive regimes elsewhere, as if all that is bad comes from us and from nowhere else. There's an ethnocentrism in this idea, in spite of the terrible truths of U.S. world hegemony. And so we come to the odd present moment. For multilateral relationships to work, some international agreement about shared values will be necessary. But George W. Bush's Patriot Act cancels those basic values Americans hold dear. Rather than reject U.S. ideals as hopelessly compromised by our amoral exercise of power, the peace movement needs to fight against the loss of our traditional rights-habeas corpus, freedom from search and seizure, freedom of speech and assembly. However unequally they have been applied, these basic rights are American achievements, and loyalty to them is a passion broadly shared by Americans. This sort of patriotism is a precious resource for all resistance, not to be recklessly tossed aside. Third, no return to macho-style radicalism. The left has mostly squandered the cultural capital of the mass feminist movement by not taking its insights seriously and not carrying them forward into current crises. For example, there's little conceptual space now for building a practical, hard-headed peace movement that actively confronts the great pressure being put on masculinity since September 11. The U.S. fear of seeming weak receives no adequate critique. In our anxiety, rational assessments of Saddam's strength become challenges quite beyond us-from left to right. The enemy strong man looms to an irrational size, an unknowable boogey man, while the U.S. strong man seems solid and necessary, a bulwark against humiliation. Gender stereotypes sharpen during any time of threat, and women and men who fear or criticize war are named cowards, irresponsible, cozily hors de combat, or beside the point. Buried in this patronizing response is a sort of demotion of feminist thought that has happened in other times of war. Feminist analysis-say, about bullies and why we all love them, or about why sexual freedom makes everyone so anxious-gets dropped out of public debate and is belittled as only relevant to the dynamics of private life. Calls for multilateralism, respect for difference, criticism of repressive patriarchal institutions, defusion of false fears, rational long-term planning to address appropriate fears-all are labeled utopian, soft, a failure to face the hard truth of a new world order. But, on the contrary, so-called soft, creative rethinking is our best hope for security. This list of correctives to various, current peace movements could continue, but it is not meant to discourage engagement with those movements. On the contrary. A critical-and self-critical-left should work to develop alternative movement strategies. (This is what Take Back the Future and hundreds of other fledgling groups demonstrating in the streets and on campuses are seeking to do.) An entire discourse is missing, an imaginative description of the range of institutions needed to support a genuine multilateralism. These new initiatives would establish a variety of respectful relationships to some of the very nations our public discourse is demonizing now, relationships that the UN and other international movements have been developing for fifty years. Ann Snitowis a feminist activist who teaches literature and gender studies at New School University.
Michael Pugliese