>Nathan, you're drifting rightward, and I am starting to fear you're going
to
>flip. It's the logic of your position...You invite Luke's response, strike
now
>and get it over with. Unfortunately there was no effective nonviolent means
>of getting rid of SH's govt in the foreseeable future, no mass movement of
>nonviolent Iraqi trade unionists and activists, etc.
Justin, I'm not drifting anywhere. Remember, I supported intervention in Haiti and Kosovo, so my position of conditional support for intervention against bad regimes is hardly new. The more interesting issue is why I opposed the war in Afghanistan and Iraq-- and I unsurprisingly think I have greater insight on how to convince those of the broad progressive side who supported "humanitarian interventionism" but should not use the same logic in Iraq.
Luke's position is exactly the one the left failed to address, not necessarily on the Right's terms but on the substantive values that Luke and I and you and most progressives share. What is needed is to address those values and posit an alternative version of events.
>If you are going to oopose the war, you have to do it on the grounds,
>not that you have a better method of achieving the annoumced goals of
>the right, but on other grounds, such as that these are not their real
>goals, which are rather a grab for oil and power and a next step
>in an attempt to achieve world domination.
But the best way to convince people of bad motives is to articulate the idea that an alternative does exist and the very fact that the Bush administration ignores that alternative is best proof of those bad motives.
Here you had a situation where the whole world was united in deepening inspections. Such inspections could have been continued in a way to support human rights, even with additional mandates on Iraq and protections from UN peacekeepers. Instead of working to push for pressure on the Iraqi regime through human rights mandates and pushing for democratic protection of its minorities, the Bush administration UN mandates focused only on weapons inspections-- notably quite different from the UN negotiations that led up to the Kosovo intervention.
And of course my analysis was that the left could not have fully engaged this alternative by starting last year but needed to have been articulating it and organizing around it for the last decade. Its failure to do so meant that its moral capital to credibly argue for an alternative was close to non-existent, especially with pro-Hussein groups like the WWP in leadership of antiwar rallies. At best, as you note, most antiwar activists were articulating a "none of our business" message, which I found incredibly unattractive. If I didn't have such a well-developed alternative critique of the war, I would never have participated in the antiwar rallies given their message, so I am unsurprised that progressives with less developed political views than myself but similar values sat out the protests and were even nudged over to the pro-war position.
The "Win Without War" folks somewhat took on this challenge but it was by the time it was organized a bit too little too late. The neoconservative warhawks had been doing their intellectual outreach for years, publishing books, holding policy conferences, organizing at their grassroots, to solidify a, yes, moral basis for their position (even if its a disingenuous position), while the left was largely throwing its critique together on the fly.
The Left was flatly outorganized on this issue and not because they had fewer resources but because they just didn't even do the organizing necessary or engage in serious intellectual engagement. Which is why it was claimed that the only "unity" position possible was the simplistic "no war" message and thus anyone, including pro-Hussein propagandists like the WWP, could speak in the name of that antiwar message. It was too thin a message and failed.
-- Nathan newman