I've had a very exciting day. First, I logged onto Mydd and found that
Chris Bowers had granted my Christmas wish by being the first major blogger that I am aware of to question the concept of the "War on Terror". Than, I checked out The Nation, and I saw that one of my personal heroes, Eric Alterman, has published his
response to the notorious TNR piece, "A Fighting Faith".
Alterman's piece is outstanding for a variety of reasons, chiefly because he doesn't go for already covered territory like the Beinart's equating of Communism with what he calls "Islamic Totalitarianism." Rather, Atlerman focuses on something that has been a bit less commented on, but is far more inexcusable: his suggestion that elements of the Democratic coalition like Moveon should be "purged", an idea that at the same time conveys a failure to understand the nature of mainstream political parties and also is utterly inadvisable.
Just as the magazine did when its editors argued in favor of Bush's foolhardy war--and Reagan's Central American fantasies before that--Beinart's essay employs McCarthyite tactics in conjunction with wishful thinking in the service of a chimerical political agenda.
One of my favorite things about this debate is that it has opened the TNR up to having to face how silly and intellectually weak their "centrist" editorial policies have become.
His solution for the political problem that ails the Democratic Party fits in perfectly with TNR's own intellectual DNA structure, calling as it does for the expulsion from the Democratic coalition of MoveOn.org, perhaps the left's most energetic and committed popular organizations, in support of a combination of policies (liberal on the domestic front, neoconservative internationally) with no clear constituency in America or anywhere else. In doing so, it reproduces the failures of the Bush Administration that have destroyed the sympathy and solidarity the United States enjoyed in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks...
Beinart falsely accuses MoveOn of opposing military retaliation against Al Qaeda because its organizers argued on behalf of a strategy that spared population centers from bombing attacks. He apparently cannot conceive of an effective military response that does not include the killing of thousands of innocents. In fact, just as the liberal realists of the 1950s whom Beinart so admires opposed the excesses of conservative US foreign policy--including CIA-sponsored coups in Iran and Guatemala--so too did liberal realists argue in 2001 that the US government was not availing itself of the best approaches to fighting Al Qaeda. New Yorker reporter Nicholas Lemann surveyed a group of them and came away with a remarkably consistent--and painfully prescient--set of analyses. "Military power is not necessary to wiping out Al Qaeda," Stephen Walt of the Kennedy School at Harvard told Lemann. "It's a crude instrument, and it almost always has effects you can't anticipate.... This is ultimately a battle for the hearts and minds of people around the world. When your village just got leveled by an American mistake, the conclusions you draw will be rather different from what we'd want them to be." Stephen Van Evera of MIT concurred: "A broad war on terror was a tremendous mistake.... you make enemies of the people you need against Al Qaeda."
Indeed, the bombing campaign in Afghanistan, while supported elsewhere, did feed anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world. In a February 2002 Gallup poll of nine Muslim countries, 77 percent of respondents judged US actions in Afghanistan to be unjustifiable; only 9 percent expressed support. Even in moderate Turkey, opinion ran 3 to 1 against, and in Pakistan the ratio was 20 to 1. Needless to say, neither did the military campaign succeed in capturing its avowed target, Osama bin Laden. (I point all this out as someone who supported the attack on Afghanistan, although I would have preferred a more thoughtful response.)
Alterman next points out the unrealism of Beinart's suggested purging of the far left. Who does he believe would be replacing them in the party? Does he believe that if Moveon and Michael Moore were forced out of the coalition, everyone would jump on board with The New Republic's singular ideological positions?
Beinart argues that by expelling MoveOn for being insufficiently supportive of the Bush Administration's terror policies and embracing a platform of social liberalism and military adventurism, Democrats could enlarge their portion of the electoral pie to a degree that would enable them to wrest power from the Republicans and embark on a successful mission to democratize the Middle East. As many critics have pointed out in response, the size of the potential pro-gay marriage/pro-war constituency would probably fit comfortably around a TNR conference table.
Alterman goes on to reject the natural progression of events the kind of "muscular liberalism" TNR has and still does advocate: that, simply put, there are better ways of ending terrorism than cramming democracy down people's throats at the point of a gun.
Even more fantastic, however, and to this writer, depressing, is Beinart's belief that such a force could successfully liberate the Islamic world from the morass of religious fundamentalism, corruption and political paranoia from which it currently suffers.
Can Beinart point to any evidence that the US government possesses the knowledge, authority or cultural sensitivity necessary to perform this historically unprecedented operation? Does Beinart really believe that the Arab masses are yearning to be freed in order to catch the last episode of Desperate Housewives? Such naïve hubris about America's ability to remake other cultures to our liking at the point of a gun is what underlay the decisions that cost us 58,000 lives in Vietnam and wrought death and destruction across Southeast Asia for more than a decade. In the persons of Paul Wolfowitz and other alleged "idealists" in the Bush Administration, it has reared its ugly head again, and produced tragic results. Now Beinart wants to run the same damned movie with liberal credits at the end. Are American liberals really cursed to make this same mistake over and over like one of Pavlov's poodles?
Alterman finishes by pointing the hypocrisy of TNR, in that the reason behind Beinart even publishing such an ideological pipe dream was, in truth, their continued attempt to salvage what little credibility they had among democrats on foreign policy before they lost it all supporting the Iraq War. Beinart and his crew would be better served just shutting up about terrorism, instead of continually sucking up to their bosses at the Manhattan Institute.
However dramatic its presentation, Beinart's argument amounts to little more than a fact-challenged, intellectually garbled, ideologically motivated attempt to read his opponents out of a debate that he has already lost. The vast majority of liberals are not willing to buy into this more sophisticated version of the Bush/Cheney/Rove/Rumsfeld vision of endless war unimpeded by any form of dissent or even tough questioning of its efficacy as a means of achieving its domestic goals. Beinart is correct that we need a rethinking of how to present liberalism as a "fighting faith" that appeals to a majority of Americans. Unfortunately, he has used the occasion merely to engage in more of the same sectarian sniping his magazine has employed in the past--most often in the service of undermining the possibility of a genuine liberal alternative to the neoconservatives' ideological fantasies. Beinart's solution fails miserably as a starting point for debate about how to save America, and the world, from future decades of Republican misrule, no less than the liberal war hawks did in their attempts to steer George W. Bush in a more "progressive" direction in his pursuit of an American-led imperium in the Middle East.
Amen.
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