A very interesting editorial has been published by the New York Times that originates from the International Herald tribune, by the "Globalist" columnist Roger Cohen.
In the piece, titled A Manifesto From the Left Too Sensible to Ignore, Roger Cohen provides a rather illuminating viewpoint of an allegedly centrist European position on the war in Iraq and how European liberals supposedly see it.
Try not to get too angry after following the link and reading what I consider to be a piece of rubbish. More after the fold.
I will quote from a few places and provide a quick response to each, and then sum up. This is a quick diary, just jotting my thought down about this thought-provoking piece (this is not a compliment).
This has been a bleak year for nuanced thinking. President George W. Bush likes to speak in certainties; contrition and compromise are not his thing. Among hyperventilating left-liberals, hatred of Bush is so intense that rational argument usually goes out the window. The result is a mindless cacophony.
Right out of the gate, Mr. Cohen projects behavior and attitudes onto those who oppose his viewpoint. I call this "softening the ground." It's an attempt to discredit the opposing view without having to actually refute an argument.
Bush, even after the thumping of the Republicans in November, equates criticism of the war in Iraq with defeatist weakness. Much of the left, in both Europe and the United States, is so convinced that the Iraq invasion was no more than an American grab for oil and military bases, it seems to have forgotten the myriad crimes of Saddam Hussein.
... Division is the president's adrenalin; he abhors shades of gray. Nor does it seem likely that the America-hating, over-the-top ranting of the left - the kind that equates Guantánamo with the Gulag and holds that the real threat to human rights comes from the White House rather than Al Qaeda - will abate during the Bush presidency.
The irony here is that the American left he talks about is quite marginal. Most Democrats and liberals don't see it as a simple grab for oil and money. (Not that's it's necessarily inaccurate, mind you.) Our argument is much more nuanced and detailed than that. These are two of many factors that enticed the Bush Administration into an illegal war. Just off the top of my head, I can think of:
- Grudge against Saddam
- Gaining a strategic initiative against Russia, Iran and the other Arab states in the contest for control of fossil fuel supplies in Mesopotamia. (Ok, OIL, whatever)
- Beta-testing Rumsfeld's reformulation of the military into a "lean and deadly" force by outsourcing all non-combat military functions and testing a strikingly undersized invasion force with firepower out of all proportion to its size
- An insistent belief that all Arabs are Al Qaeda sympathizers, starting with Saddam's regime
- an insistent belief that Saddam was developing more lethal WMD
I'll skip the other patronizing remarks until the end. But Cohen hails a new, fresh breath of air:
Fortunately, in the face of such hysteria, an expression of moderate sanity has emerged over the past year. Precisely because of its sanity, it has received too little attention.
I refer to the Euston Manifesto (www.eustonmanifesto.org), published last March by a group of mainly left-of-center thinkers, and the supporting statement called "American Liberalism and the Euston Manifesto," published by U.S. intellectuals in September.
Yeah, Roger. We're hysterical. You're the adult. We bow to your probity and wisdom. Shall we continue?
... The Euston Manifesto says: "We reject without qualification the anti-Americanism now infecting so much left-liberal (and some conservative) thinking."
It also declares: "Drawing the lesson of the disastrous history of left apologetics over the crimes of Stalinism and Maoism, as well as more recent exercises in the same vein (some of the reaction to the crimes of 9/11, the excuse making for suicide-terrorism, the disgraceful alliances lately set up inside the antiwar movement with illiberal theocrats), we reject the notion that there no opponents on the left."
Here is the most revealing set of paragraphs.
On Iraq, it has this to say: "We recognize that it was possible reasonably to disagree about the justification for the intervention, the manner in which it was carried through, the planning (or lack of it) for the aftermath, and the prospects for the successful implementation of democratic change. We are, however, united in our view about the reactionary, semi-fascist and murderous character of the Baathist regime in Iraq, and we recognize the overthrow as a liberation of the Iraqi people."
No one who has not lived under a rock for the last 20 years would dispute Saddam's nature. But frankly, so what? Does this justify an invasion alone? When he was not attacking us or any of our allies and was not in any position to do so?
Sorry, that's not the America I grew up in. I have a basic problem with the whole concept of invading countries just because we feel like it. OK, Saddam was a dictator. So The Hell What?
Man, I hate crusaders. I just cannot stand them - of any stripe. The crusading mentality is a compulsion mentality. It is a mentality of death, bloodshed, and human misery. Roger Cohen is a crusader. He really thinks it's America's business to police the rest of the world.
Hey Roger, It's real easy for you to cheer us on and spend our precious soldiers' lives when you don't have to do the fighting, send your son or daughter (daughter!) off to war or pay the taxes to support it.
The American supporters of the manifesto, who include the historian Walter Laqueur, several journalists from The New Republic and Michael Ledeen of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, reject "the ossified and unproductive polarization of American politics."
They deplore the tendency on the left to substitute hatred of Bush for thought about fighting jihadism. Why, they ask, is the left more incensed by America's errors in Iraq than "terrorist outrages by Islamic extremists?"
I will set against this trumped-up bunch of neocon-fellow-travelers, the simple statement from George Washington, which is in my signature:
"Avoid foreign entanglements."
Was Washington wrong? The New Republic thinks so. The signatories to this utterly irrelevant piece of toilet paper called the Euston Manifesto seem to think so. Do they think they know better?
So the discredited losers- er, neolibs from the New Republic "reject without qualification" our alleged Anti-Americanism, huh? Good for them. For my part, I reject without qualification any effort to ascribe to me and to anyone else on this site, which lately has done so much to reshape the American political scene, a pacifist, anti-American attitude.
How dare they? Who does Roger Cohen think he is? He knows nothing about us.
After all, faking a casus belli is one of the things we're most angry about. How about Abu Ghraib? Apparently, Cohen thinks this stuff is no big deal, even though the torture techniques used there and at many other places are very similar to what the Soviets used in the Lubyanka. Oh, let's not forget the extraordinary renditions. I guess this allegedly centrist crowd thinks this is no big deal either, particularly when innocent people are snatched off the street.. I give you Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
"They didn't let you sleep? After all, this is not supposed to be a vacation resort. The Security officials were awake too!" (They would catch up on their sleep during the day.) Gulag Archipelago, v.3, p. 112
And again:
"As everyone knows, a blow of the fist to the solar plexus, catching the victim in a middle of a breath, leaves no mark whatsoever." Ibid, p. 116
Let's not forget about waterboarding, the provenance of which has been so thoroughly gone over that simply mentioning it brings nods of recognition from across the room.
So, Mr. Cohen, what IS it that makes the Bush administration such a shining light? It wouldn't be the Military Commissions Act, would it? It wouldn't be the brutal treatment meted out to Joseph Padilla? You know, the Latino who was locked up for a couple years without access to a lawyer and with no charges filed?
OK, Mr. Cohen, I guess I can barely bring myself to scan the last two paragraphs of your oh-so-mature-and reasonable manifesto:
Taken together, the two statements set out core principles of the Anglo-American liberal tradition, bringing Europe and the United States together at a time of apparent ideological divergence. As the U.S. signatories note, the Euston Manifesto hews to "the traditions of American liberal anti-fascism and anti-totalitarianism."
If you're tired of sterile screaming in the wilderness, tired of the comfortably ensconced "hindsighters" poring over every American error in Iraq, tired of facile anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism masquerading as anti- Zionism, try the Euston road in 2007. It might actually lead somewhere.
It adheres to no tradition except that of accommodating evil.
Decrying "hindsighters" is another way of saying that responsibility for this horrible mess should not be meted out. Accountability is irrelevant. Squandered blood and treasure is irrelevant. Lies about causes of war are irrelevant. Incompetence is not to be investigated and punished. The repeal of Habeas Corpus is irrelevant and meaningless.
Sterile screaming in the wilderness?
Um, I hate to tell you this, buddy, but we just took back Capitol Hill - both houses. Our screaming, if one could call it that, which I wouldn't, is hardly sterile. Just wait a couple of years and we'll expand our majority.
Cohen has no idea who we are. Being an Englishman, it's pretty obvious he really does not understand us in the blogosphere and in the Democratic Party, and actually quite resents us for our presumption that Bush and his cronies actually screwed up and should be punished.
Despite their noises about loving democracy, it is very clear that the signatories to the Euston document have absolutely no clue how a constitutional republic is supposed to work, and about what our deep history is. For Cohen and his cronies, it's simply all about defending their prerogatives as correctly educated members of the media elite. (Now I sound like a right-winger. Hey, this is fun!)
Let's get one thing straight. I do not care about so-called Islamofascism. This creed has existed for somewhere around 1000 years and was responsible for strangling the great flowering of Arabic culture in the 1100s. It is not going away anytime soon. Going out and trying to fix it is insanity. Going into Afghanistan to get rid of the Taliban? That I get. They attacked us. Iraq did not. End of story.
Hussein was not an Islamofascist. He was simply a tinpot dictator who perhaps had another ten years before getting offed by someone. Ten years we really could have used to formulate a strategy for dealing with the Middle East and Mesopotamia post-Hussein in the meantime - such as finding a way to fix what you Brits, Mr. Cohen, fucked up so thoroughly in 1920 by dividing Mesopotamia into arbitrary borders without taking tribal and religious boundaries into account.
Ten precious years to formulate a national strategy for dealing with our dependence on fossil fuels and foreign sources of oil. All that is now squandered.
Whether he knows it or not, Cohen's rhetoric matches Hannity and Limbaugh. The Euston Manifesto was dead before it was published. Attempting to resuscitate it now simply animates a corpse. You'd have as much luck reanimating Gerald Ford. (Who, by the way, had serious problems with Bush and probably identified with George Washington's statement above, since he was President and all.)
Screw the "Easton road." We can handle things ourselves, thank you. I won't even concede that this advice is "well-meant," as it is simply warmed-over neocon bullshit.
After all, Mr. Cohen, it's not as if you bunch of overeducated Oxford shits have achieved anything whatsoever of note in your foreign policy over the last century or more.
You are the latest in a long line of British empire-builders. Now you want us to do the dirty work, cleaning up the mess your fuckin' country created in 1920.
I say no. Enough is enough. The Easton Manifesto is mendacious garbage of the worst sort.
And as for anyone such as Mr. Cohen who downplays or implicitly condones the use of torture, I simply do not consider them quite human. Their arguments are simply inarticulate noises resembling those from an animal in the last stages of a failed evolutionary experiment.