Historians Against the War Annual Conference - April 11-13, 2008 - Atlanta, Georgia

Panel - War and Its Discontents: Understanding Iraq and the US Empire

“The War and the Intellectuals, Revisited”

Matt Bokovoy, University of Nebraska Press

“American power can be turned to good ends or bad”
George Packer, New York Times Magazine, 2002

	In December 2002, the journalist George Packer published a feature piece describing a new breed of leftist, “the Liberal Hawks,” in the New York Times Magazine. Schooled in the “realpolitik” of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, these liberals decisively broke away from the anti-imperialist and pacifist far Left. “These writers and academics wanted to use American military power to serve goals like human rights and democracy - especially when it was clear that nobody else would do it,” said Packer, since they were  “the ones who have done the most thinking and writing about how American power can be turned to good ends as well as bad, who don’t see human rights and democracy as idealistic delusions, and who are struggling to figure out Iraq.” The liberal hawks were a diverse array of liberals and socialists across the spectrum of the Left, including Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman, Michael Walzer, David Rieff, Leon Wieseltier, and, of course, Packer himself. Reared in the civil rights, anti-Vietnam War, and student social movements of the 1960s, the civil wars of the Balkans had caused them to support U.S. intervention in protracted conflicts where human rights could be protected and to prevent massacres of civilian populations. In Packer’s mind, these skeptical liberals “advocated a new role for America in the world, which came down to American power on behalf of American ideals.”1 
	The liberal hawks positioned themselves between the neo-conservative foreign policy interventionists of the Project for a New American Century who entered George W. Bush’s administration, and the anti-imperialist and anti-war American Left, which to them, “continued to view any U.S. military action as imperialist.”2 They believed that American power and wealth could be wielded benignly, and that multilateral international politics and military intervention should be used to unseat dictators around the world. With the United States often seen as aggressive, and the Europeans viewed as complacent of monarchs and dictators in the Middle East and elsewhere, the liberal hawks’ vision constituted a type of liberal internationalism (following their youthful Marxist internationalism). The vision united the stance of the anti-totalitarian left of Cold War America inspired by Hannah Arendt’s critique of totalitarianism and the Marxist disillusionment with Stalinism. In their call for humanitarian intervention through military action, the liberal hawks, notably Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens, and sometimes Todd Gitlin, offered little more than the militaristic utopianism of the Bush II Administration.3 Their vision leaves little solace for liberals and socialists because of its morally compromised politics. The liberal hawks call for militarized, humanitarian intervention abandons the traditional anti-militaristic and pacifist ideologies of the American Left for a reformulated Cold War anti-totalitarianism. When the liberal hawks elicit criticism for their stances, they have been immune to their critics. Under critical scrutiny, the liberal hawks instead have resorted to questioning their critic’s patriotism. They mock non-violence, pacifism, and anti-militaristic solutions to global conflicts. 
	Unlike previous anti-war intellectuals like Randolph Bourne, A.J. Muste, or Louis Adamic, the liberal hawks choose a militaristic patriotism over a critical patriotism. They shun ethical theory within political philosophy to question the morality of war and state violence. The liberal hawks decided against history by ostracizing a usable past for the critique of warfare. The tradition of the American Left offers the richest ideologies of non-violence and pacifism from the Spanish American War to Vietnam and beyond. Since the liberal hawks display cosmopolitan pretensions, it is interesting they also steer clear of the rich French post-Marxism of the 1950s and 1960s represented by the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, Henri Lefebvre, and other dissident Marxist intellectuals writing during their youth. Younger left anti-war activists have found this puzzling since many found intellectual nourishment in the earlier, angrier writings of the liberal hawks. Many scratch their heads when they read the following comment on confronting radical Islamists by someone like Christopher Hitchens, “You want to be a martyr? I’m here to help you.” This statement follows the same, sickening logic as those merchants of death. For a small, influential group of public intellectuals, sound assessments and critical judgments about the war in Iraq are necessary to create confidence among politicians, policy analysts, scholars, and the general reading public. It is a wonder readers still purchase their books.4
Pacifism’s Usable Past
“Peacefulness of being at war”
Randolph Bourne, 1917

	With the Iraq War of the recent past, liberal and socialist intellectuals in the United States have been here before. The classic case is John Dewey’s support of Wilsonian intervention during World War I, which need not be told again in detail. Writing in both the Dial and Seven Arts from 1915-1919, Randolph Bourne effectively turned Dewey’s pragmatism against his colleague. He argued that during wartime “one’s pragmatic conscience moves in a vacuum. There is no leverage to clutch. To a philosopher of the creative intelligence, the fact that war blots out the choice of ends and even of means should be the final argument against its use as a technique for any purpose whatever - War is just that absolute situation which is its own end and its own means, and which speedily outstrips the power of intelligent and creative control.”5 Bourne was no idealist, but a hard-headed empiricist. He shared little enthusiasm for the war and believed little social gain would be realized from the effort, although domestically some reform came from the mobilization for war. Bourne believed this intoxication of intellectuals for war as succumbing to “the war technique.” He berated the intellectuals of his time for abandoning ethical means to achieve democratic ends, “War in the interests of democracy!” and how they happened upon their “new-found Sabbath ‘peacefulness of being at war!’” Bourne called for the responsibility of intellectuals, especially those public ones, to exercise skepticism in the face of war propaganda. Intellectuals needed precision and acuity in their judgments, but rather he found among the intelligentsia that “simple, unquestioning action has superceded the knots of thought.”  Like Dewey, even progressives like Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, and Alice Hamilton initially opposed the war but came to support it with a mix of loyalty and trepidation. History bore out that they were wrong to support the war. Given the intense carnage and destruction of WWI, the “ends” (or results) of the peace such as reparations and boundary/ethnic disputes never were realized in the “means” of Dewey’s democratic internationalism. Liberal progressives, now and then, have deluded themselves. The world was no safer for democracy through the League of Nations than the balance of power diplomacy pioneered by Theodore Roosevelt during the Progressive Era.6 
	World War II presented a unique situation for left liberal, socialist, and Marxist activists and intellectuals to connect the fight against German, Italian, and Japanese fascism with social justice, racial equality, and social democracy at home. The totalitarian policies of first world nations gone awry presented the context for real action and political commitment. In the popular front journal Common Ground (1940-1949), the organ for the Common Council for American Unity, the war aims presented by the Roosevelt administration inspired an interracial and cross-class vision to jolt the status quo into
delivering the radical promise of American democracy. Louis Adamic, the journal’s first editor, felt uncomfortable with FDR’s call for “total defense” and preferred the term “inclusive defense” which all Americans, “all people of the country, will have to be drawn, not forced in any way, but drawn, inspired into full participation in the effort ahead, which will include armament, but also - in fact, especially - a wide-flung and deep-reaching offensive for democracy within our own borders and our own individual makeups.” He believed the left should not advance an “against program - mere ‘anti-fascism,’ mere ‘anti-totalitarianism’ is insufficient” and “may itself result in fascism and totalitarianism.” Adamic knew well his Eighteenth Brumaire. During the war, gross revocations of civil liberties occurred at home, ranging from racial discrimination in wartime employment to a revived nativism that had gone into eclipse during the Great Depression. Adamic believed this type of hysteria emanating from the war effort and anti-communism brought undo scrutiny to foreign nationals (German, Italian, Japanese) residing in the U.S. “All of these people must be considered and helped to become identified with America as a country and an ideal,” he said, “They can be aided only by education and through the inclusive enhancement of our democracy.”7 
	Particularly troublesome was the Alien Registration Act of 1940 (Smith Act) that made it mandatory that alien residents in the U.S. file a statement of their political beliefs, occupational status, and personal information. It also made illegal the advocacy of changing the republican form of government in the United States. Mere dissent and talk against the U.S. government served as a pretext for deportation. Aimed at left wing political parties, Alan Cranston (the future Democratic senator from California) believed the act had the unfortunate result of punishing foreign-born Americans, for “still others are not only barred from citizenship but are subject to deportation, because they entered the U.S. without inspection, or because they overstayed temporary visas when war prevented them from returning to homelands that by now, in some cases, have vanished from the map.”8 A.J. Muste, leader of the Christian pacifist movement during WW2, believed the war had unleashed the worst revocation of civil liberties, evidenced by the War Powers Act that gave FDR unprecedented authority to control news and information, allowed for the internment of Japanese Americans on the Pacific Slope, and allowed the government to seize the property of foreign nationals. The reorganization of American politics and culture on martial grounds was rapid and fiercely nativist. On the West Coast, besides Japanese internment, race riots against Chicano youth by U.S. servicemen erupted in Los Angeles in 1943 known as the Zoot Suit Riots. Carey McWilliams, the west coast public intellectual, saw the riots as particularly troubling, unleashed by the forces of reaction created by wartime legislation curtailing civil liberties. He indicated that there were two theories about the riots circulated by the L.A. Times, “first, that ‘subversive groups’ in Los Angeles had organized them; and, second, that ‘the gangs are the result of mollycoddling of racial groups.” The L.A. incidents touched off racial rioting in midsummer 1943 in San Diego, Philadelphia, Chicago, Evansville, Indiana, Beaumont, Texas, Harlem, and the deadly riots in Detroit on June 20-21. In the call for wartime sacrifice to save democracy from the rise of fascism, the federal government had unleashed the violent forces of nativism and militarism with few provisions for the promise of democracy at home. McWilliams warned L.A. mayor Fletcher Bowron that the racial rioting needed quick resolution since the Axis propaganda machine in Latin America would exploit the incidents. It is also no coincidence that the white and racist-inspired rioting touched off an unprecedented wildcat strike wave in the U.S. labor movement, fully conscious that the war was not for participatory democracy or racial justice, but rather the maintenance of the U.S. empire and its interests.9 
	During the social turbulence and escalation of the war in Vietnam in the early 1970s, the political philosopher John Schaar envisioned a critical patriotism in the American Review, entitled “The Case for Patriotism.” Thoughtful and with great moral compass, Schaar believed the nationalism and anti-nationalism spawned by the Vietnam War required formation of a radical patriotism rooted in participatory democracy and a non-martial ethic. The younger generation’s anti-patriotic appeals to oppose the war in Vietnam often alienated the “silent majority” and “hard hats” that would come to eventually support Richard Nixon in 1972. Student radicals, absorbed with the civil rights movements, believed Vietnam was a matter for liberals to settle while they tried to mobilize the poor to overthrow capitalism. The emerging anti-imperialist left found ways to confront both the war and the social and economic system that had created it. Increasing militancy to oppose the war rather than radicalism unnerved both student activists and civil rights leaders due to specters and incidents of violence.10 Schaar believed a new, covenanted patriotism could break the ugly martial nationalism, disguised as containing the threat of communism in East Asia, that justified the war effort. 
	He invoked the words of Lincoln on the sacrifice and forgetting of the revolutionary war to preserve liberty and self-government, and the danger of those ambitious and self-interested politicians to promote historical amnesia for uncritical patriotism. Schaar believes that this type of patriotism, which is not natural but an idea and activity, “sets a mission and provides a standard of judgment. It tells us when we are acting justly and it does not confuse martial fervor with dedication to country.” As both idea and activity in a culturally diverse nation, he states that this conception of patriotism “calls kin all who accept the authority of the covenant - this covenanted patriotism assigns America a teaching mission among the nations, rather than a superiority over or a hostility toward them. This patriotism is compatible with the most generous humanism.” These are echoes of Randolph Bourne’s optimism in his iconic essay, “Transnational America.” Viewing the escalation of the Vietnam War by Nixon and the destruction of the north by the stepped up bombing campaigns, Schaar notes that America’s mission is pointless as it destroys the attachments to place held by the Vietnamese and the death of their kin, giving them no hope for the future, and breeding resentment of the U.S. He believes that Americans should be more outraged by these atrocities filtered through race, and exercise their critical patriotism at home for economic and racial justice, for “liberalism and capitalism corrupted the covenant, while racism denied it to large groups of the population.” A “teaching mission” of American democracy delivered by M-16s and B-52 carpet bombing raids will never endear a sovereign people to the United States, and Americans should be outraged and take to the streets when politicians devise such foreign policy.11
Twilight of Ideals for the Liberal Hawks
“Pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand”
Jeffrey Issac, Dissent Magazine, 2002

	The recent war in Iraq has polarized the American intellectual scene once again during the long twentieth century. The 1960s generation of neo-conservative intellectuals and New Left, liberal hawks have come to a consensus for intervening in Iraq through the “war on terror” and “humanitarian intervention.” This strange confluence of conservative anti-isolationism and liberal interventionism has collapsed the poles of traditional pro-militarism and anti-imperialism founded during the Cold War. The road to the Iraq War pulled conservatives from Nixon Era multilateralism (perfected by Henry Kissinger) and offered left liberals their own generation’s version of the Spanish Civil War. For liberal hawks, the exportation of democracy through war in Iraq serves as “other-directed” activity since they’ve given up on domestic reform. Militarized humanitarianism also re-energizes their violent, youthful fantasies of being “tough” when they idolized the likes of Chè Guevara, Mao Tse Tung, Régis Debray, Fidel Castro, the Weathermen, and the Red Army Faction among others. They are not armchair intellectuals even in their 60s, but “men” of action! For the liberal hawks, Paul Berman stands out as the leader of New Left defection towards humanitarian militarism in Terror and Liberalism (2003), Power and the Idealists (2005), A Tale of Two Utopias (1996). Christopher Hitchens and an ambivalent Todd Gitlin also join this accomplished group of public intellectuals. 
	A gifted, indeed brilliant, essayist and polemicist, Berman charts a path in his trilogy from the radical democratic, anti-totalitarianism of Eastern European dissidents like Václav Havel, the differing political legacies and styles of Bernard Kouchner and Joschka Fischer regarding youthful activism first and political intervention in the Balkans and Iraq, to the rise of the radical Islamist movements based on the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the origins of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and the aesthetics and politics of Islamist terror represented by al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam. His corpus of work contains a generational tone, a kind of “bummer” logic, that the 1960s social movement activism didn’t quite work out as well as those student activists had hoped. His judgments in A Tale of Two Utopias makes one feel guilty to still believe in political activism let alone Marxism or socialism because all activisms are extremisms, and all Marxisms are totalitarianisms riven with a cult of violence (notably Mao and Chè). Questions of identity both racial and gay cannot create a universal sense of social justice. And political radicalism in the United States masquerades as mere commodious therapy compared to the deprivation and persecution of the Eastern Bloc dissidents until 1989-1992. Berman believes, overall, that “along with the cultural transformations came, almost everywhere, a feeling of bafflement. There was bafflement that a movement so grand and touching in its motives as the student leftism of the 1960s could have degenerated and disappeared so quickly.” In his view, idealism turned to ideology, radical visions to radical extremism, and freedom to violence. In most ways, this is far from the truth about the legacy of 1960s social activism.12 
	Berman continued his exploration of “The ‘68'ers” with Power and the Idealists, Or The Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath, exploring the impulses for humanitarian intervention between two typical 68'ers, the German Green Party’s foreign minister and vice chancellor Joschka Fischer, and the maverick physician Bernard Kouchner. Berman gauges their responses to totalitarian regimes and human crises in the post-Cold War World, namely Bosnia, Kosovo, and the recent war in Iraq. What emerges is a portrait of student radicals, reared in the working class youth movements of postwar Europe, who chose different paths to activism. Fischer flirted with the revolutionary, direct action guerilla politics of 1960s and 1970s Germany, with its militant antiwar politics. His past was revealed by the “Fischer Affair” that showed a photograph of the foreign minister as a working class street fighter beating a policeman during a demonstration in 1973 and his links to firebombings in Frankfurt in 1976. Berman paints Kouchner as a saint, where the young French doctor dropped out of radical politics to join the Red Cross in the early 1970s, eventually founding Doctors Without Borders, and emerging as the United Nations administrator in Kosovo in 1999. When the United States indicated its intent to invade Iraq in December 2002 through March 2003, Kouchner came to support it, with reservations, and Fischer expressed Germany’s unwillingness to join the invasion, opposed to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s plans. Why would Fischer at this juncture refrain from committing Germany to the invasion? Berman explains that the 
upsetting point, to Kouchner, was mostly a matter of principle. How could it be, after all, that Fischer had responded to the Iraq crisis the way he did? - Fischer: a man with an upstanding background as revolutionary militant. A man who had lived his life by asking, résistant or collabo? A man who had learned about Srebrenica and had firmly responded by saying, “No more Auschwitz,” and had pushed Germany to take action. From Kouchner’s point of view, it was hard to understand why this same Fischer would have turned against the interventionist logic now, in the crisis over Iraq - Fischer of all people, the impudent rebel against despots and dictators of every sort. Kouchner suspected that, like Tony Blair, Fischer had kept his eye on the polls, and this was natural. But there had to be more to Fischer’s response than political opportunism, there was obviously more, the tremble in his voice at Munich made this indisputable - and none of this was mysterious, not really.13
	 
Unlike Kouchner’s call to a “higher power” for humanitarian intervention, Fischer worried about myriad issues, including multilaterialism and its meaning, the United Nations, international law and state sovereignty, American economic interests, and the human misery that would result from an invasion of Iraq. After all, unlike the Balkan civil wars, there was no civil war in Iraq until the American occupation. 
	Berman’s prequel Terror and Liberalism (2003) reads almost as an interim piece, incomplete, and makes the obvious point that radical Islam is both primitively anti-modern and exists as a cult of death and martyrdom. Nonetheless, Berman erroneously likens the Iraq of 2003 with the Germany of 1938, and claims he “proposed a policy that was not diplomatic or pacifist, and not Nixonian, either. I proposed an anti-totalitarian war - an “anti-fascist” war - a war with “progressive” goals, echoing his generation’s fascination with the great 1930s popular front support for the socialists during the Spanish Civil War. It was a “war about democracy” to him, where Berman’s “stouthearted comrades of the democratic left and some of the liberals - those people tended to oppose the war altogether. Opposition was instinctive for them. They worried about America’s imperial motives, about the greed of big corporations and their influence on White House policy; and could not get beyond their worries.” History has proven Berman wrong, of course. However, he remains a widely read public intellectual despite his lack of analytical acuity regarding the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He merely decants the old wine of war intellectualism of Randolph Bourne’s generation into new bottles of militarized humanitarianism. He repackages older concepts of “savagery and civilization” (since he accepts Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis) and Cold War Era anti-totalitarianism. Their “project” promotes militarism and state-sponsored violence in the name of replacing militarism and state-sponsored violence. The enlightened democracy they so cherish eludes them under the Bush II administration.14 
	Yet more liberal hawks like Christopher Hitchens (with his love of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia) and David Rieff fought their own private Spanish Civil War. Writing in Dissent in Winter 2002, Rieff believed Western hesitation to intervene in Bosnia instigated atrocities, likening the situation to Western appeasement in the League of Nations and the Sanctions Committee during the Spanish Civil War. He said, “I will go to my grave not simply believing that these people were wrong, but that their commitment to this brand of impartiality was a species of appeasement that cost 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica their lives and led ineluctably to the Kosovo crisis.”15 After 9/11, Hitchens departed the ranks of the far left and his column at The Nation to return intellectually to the 18th century fight between the secular Enlightenment and medieval religious tyranny. “After the dust settles, the only revolution left standing is the American one,” said Hitchens in the New York Times, “Americanization is the most revolutionary force in the world. There’s almost no country where adopting the Americans wouldn’t be the most radical thing they could do.” In his personal make-over, Hitchens explained that “I’ve always been a Paine-ite.” Writing a column in Slate, Hitchens published them in A Long Short War: the Postponed Liberation of Iraq in June 2003, a “Paine-ite” tract of 104 pages intended to generate support and justification for the impending war in Iraq. Hitchens believes “one cannot hope to write as a historian about the present, but one can hope to contest, as an essayist, the dishonest, ahistorical view that some events and tendencies that followed the intervention would otherwise never to have occurred - and those who kept alive the dream of a free Iraq must accept the responsibility of the logical and probable consequences of their demands.” Intended rightfully so as a polemic situated between Wolfowitz’s hawkism and the desire to expose the regional machinations of the Saudis, Hitchens’ pamphlet still argues that American power will be used for good, in the end, in Iraq. After the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, Hitchens wrote of antiwar protestors: “At the meeting or debate, the person concerned would get up and  - without loss of time - announce that of course we’d all be better off without the bad guy Saddam Hussein. Having cleared his or her throat in this manner, the phony would go on to say what the real problem was - None of the hysterical predictions came true, of course, but now I can’t open a bulletin from the reactionary Right or the antiwar Left without being told that Iraq is already worse off without Saddam Hussein.” Indeed, Iraq is worse off than Hitchens’ wildest dreams. Christian Parenti and the film makers Garrett Scott and Ian Olds have revealed from the trenches a country descending into civil war, staggering civilian casualties, the ineffective U.S. rule through cultural mis-communication, and intense political corruption within the Iraqi government and among foreign contractors rebuilding Iraq. One wonders if Hitchens, in George Packer’s words, drank “Champagne with his comrades around Valentine’s day” in Baghdad?16   
	Nonetheless, liberal hawk, public intellectuals like Berman and Hitchens have found scholarly supporters on the Left to give their ideas the academic sheen of respectability. The polarization of the American Left elicited verbal broadsides against the pacifist and anti-imperialist left from Todd Gitlin and Dissent magazine writers like Michael Walzer, Michael Kazin, Mitchell Cohen, Jeffrey Issac among others, creating brisk debate among leftist intellectuals about the role of the U.S. in the post-Cold War World. Gitlin wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times in September 2002, where he criticized the far left for standing behind anti-imperialism in the war in Afghanistan. He explained they believed “responsibility for the attacks had, somehow, to lie with American imperialism, because all responsibility has to lie with American imperialism.” Overreaching his case, Gitlin’s charged emotions implied that “intellectuals and activists on the far left could not be troubled much with compassion or defense,” questioning whether anti-imperialist leftists exhibited proper patriotism and compassion. “Liberals should affirm that American power, working within coalitions, can advance democratic values, as in Bosnia and Kosovo - but they should oppose this administration’s push toward war in Iraq.” That much is true, however, American intervention rid Afghanistan of the Taliban even though not all is perfect. But the personal and intellectual support or lack of support for war is a question of conscience. Persecution of conscience is not a platform for ethical criticism nor moral argumentation. The fringe left pointed out by Gitlin hardly characterizes the position of the American left (unless Ward Churchill, Richard Berthold, and silly literary scholars attached to South Atlantic Quarterly constitute the “far left”). Some leftist scholars questioned why Islamic fundamentalists would attack America, others embraced pacifism as a principle for lack of retaliation, while others saw the revocation of civil liberties on the horizon. Some predicted the cycle of violence unleashed by 9/11 would rachet up in interest repaid the number of war dead in Afghanistan and eventually Iraq. Mike Davis, the prosaic Marxist critic, revealed that “As if the anger in the refugee camps were not enough, we propose to bomb the most broken country in the world, Afghanistan.” To Baltasar Garzón, one of Spain’s leading jurists, it was the “pledge to unlimited support for the hypothetical bombardment of nothing; for the massacre of poverty.” Violence would beget more violence. However, Gitlin’s position on the war in Iraq has been consistently opposed to the Bush II administration in a number of publication venues, the only high-profile boomer, public intellectual to lend support to the antiwar movement.17
	The righteousness of conscience on the boomer left, found prominently within the pages of Dissent, likely had luminaries such as Randolph Bourne, Charles Beard, Jane Addams, and Merle Curti rolling in their graves. Jeffrey Isaac likened the stance of anti-imperialists and pacifists on the far left as “a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice - pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand.” In a rebuttal in the arguments section to an article on the peace movement, he retorted “None of the nine pieces I’ve written since September 11 have idealized violence or war: their point instead is that all politics must pragmatically attend to questions of means and ends, and that such consideration must include the possible use of violence,” although his explanation is not sufficient. Michael Walzer castigated in disingenuous fashion the supposed unsympathetic response of the far left to 9/11. “Maybe the guilt produced by living in such a country and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics,” he said, “Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger and self-hate are the inevitable result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power” without critiquing the position of one, single writer. Michael Wreszin, the biographer of Dwight Macdonald, argued against this agony of the liberal hawks, noting “Walzer, among others, decries the ‘indecent’ left’s lack of sympathy for the victims of terrorist attacks. There is something drastically wrong with a political analysis that judges whether one has shown enough concern for the victims.” With Dissent writers strong on polemic but short on insight, Wreszin lamented, “From the offices of the White House to the chambers of Congress, we now hear demands that Americans speak with one voice. If that should happen, all is lost.” Michael Kazin responded: “A left that followed Wreszin’s lead would continue to be essentially what it was in the months right after the minions of Osama Bin Laden smashed into our lives: a movement of bitter iconoclasts and moral cynics.” History has proven Dissent wrong, of course. No matter, they will rewrite their former positions in future issues of the magazine.18 
	And they certainly did. Both before and after the events of March through July 2003, liberal hawks like Walzer, Mitchell Cohen, and Michael Kazin rooted their appeals in a pragmatic idealism that proved ineffective to sway the public mind and define a critical patriotism on par with previous pacifist and antiwar intellectuals. As public intellectuals, their analysis of the road to Iraq had failed, indicating a lack of critical acuity in writing about the war on terror. Walzer, like Berman, erroneously conflated the nature of the Iraqi regime with the Nazi Germany of 1938, explaining, “I could not support a peace movement whose purpose or effect is the appeasement of Saddam Hussein” while opposing the security policy of the “Bush Administration and its doctrine of preemptive war.” How can one support both viewpoints? Is the call for further diplomacy on the left equal a policy of appeasement? Mitchell Cohen stated that the “threat of terror is real. Anyone who scoffs at it will lose moral and political credibility - and ought to.” Michael Kazin appealed to political populism to define a “patriotic left,” without acknowledging the reactionary legacy of populism, especially today. He said it consisted of America’s “civic ideals - social equality, individual liberty, a populist democracy - and the unending struggle to put their [its] laudable, if often contradictory, claims into practice.” The left should espouse its own brand of critical patriotism and it has done so before. “Populist democracy” today conjures images of the conservative ascendence since the 1960s. Republicans own “patriotism” since the Democrats declined to define their own brand after 9/11. After all, Bush had declared “Mission Accomplished” on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003 off the coast of San Diego, stating “And now our coalition in engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.” Liberal hawks must have been glowing that American power had been used to promote democracy in Iraq. Since the president said it, then it must be true.19
In Defense of Humans, Freedom Without Violence
“In defense of humans, lay down your sticks and stones, weapons and violence, are better left alone. You don’t rise when people fall”
Ian MacKaye, “In Defense of Humans,” Dischord Records, 1989

	After five years of combat in Iraq, the civilian casualties number roughly 100,000 deaths, with over 4000 U.S. service people killed (one 2006 study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University estimated over 650,000 “excess” deaths from violence and disease).20 The neoconservative foreign policy establishment of the Bush administration and liberal hawks have to ask themselves, “was the invasion and occupation worth it?” To this, they can offer few answers. Mike Davis has recently written numerous works that propose the need for a “universal empathy” and “decommissioning of minds” to end the cycle of global violence stemming from the hijacking of U.S. foreign policy from American citizens by corporate interests and the foreign policy establishment to envision an enduring American empire. It is an empire based on maintaining the resource base to underwrite the U.S. standard of living. His call is also to fellow American citizens to exercise their critical patriotism in the way John Schaar asked over 30 years ago, as both idea and activity. Writing about the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Davis believes it was “a complex history of oil, Zionism, and CIA ‘ghost wars,’” where “the lives of thousands of New Yorkers were consumed in an inferno of volcanic grandeur and supernatural terror.” In the most terrible way, he believes Americans “became citizens of a world where one atrocity is repaid with interest by another; where the price of oil is the slaughter of innocents.” Davis describes the humanistic writing of Egyptian journalist Hani Shukrallah, who enlightened readers about the ultimate moral horror of 9/11 by envisioning the last moments of a woman holding her 4-year-old child as her plane approached the World Trade Center. Shukrallah wondered how the living could understand her anguish, and pondered the monstrous politics that used children as suicide weapons. The Egyptian journalist also wrote of other terrified and helpless children, Palestinian youth in the occupied West Bank and the 500,000 dead Iraqi children from US-imposed sanctions from 1991-2003. Davis notes that Hani Shukrallah reminds those in the West and Middle East of one important fact, that empathy - “that innate capacity that makes us worth of the self-designation ‘human’ - must be a consistent principle.” Crimes against humanity are the same, no matter whether they happen in the North Philadelphia slums, the streets of Tel Aviv, or in Baghdad. Ordinary people of every country are usually the sacrificial lambs for the interests of their national states. We die or suffer or sacrifice as elites prosper. “We are now offered as responses to al-Qaeda extremist versions of the same policies that have proven so catastrophic to human rights in the past,”concludes Davis, “we are harangued that war, relentless and unending, without boundaries or time limits, is our salvation.” Davis’ recent and impressive literary production extends a universal empathy rooted in social and economic justice to the world’s megacity slums and to the disturbing phenomenon of the car bomb. His proposals imply the need for people to disaffiliate themselves from their nationalisms, and rally around a strong anticapitalist and internationalist human rights sensibility both as mass protest movements of dissent and as internationalist based political movements.21
	The liberal hawks like Berman, Hitchens, and others have no answers for the debacle in Iraq except that the Bush administration did not meet their initial expectations. Which is no answer at all, the intellectual equivalent of channel-surfing on the couch. The neo-conservative foreign policy establishment devised the strategies and visions, through their conservative think tanks, for the United States to maintain its power in the world. It is a cynical politics of state violence without the necessary universal standards of empathy and humanity, despite their proclamations that US democracy furnishes such a universal.22 Why did some of the socialist left, former 68'ers all, invest so much faith that the far right of the Republican Party would intervene with the best intentions? The liberal hawks believed their ideas would carry weight in the world of events and the marketplace of ideas. And it was wishful thinking. Their self-declarations of “realpolitik” make them both an historical anachronism and callous to the “actually existing” human miseries created by the invasion and occupation of Iraq. How could they not believe that a sovereign, state revolution to topple a dictator is preferable to a foreign invasion, granting legitimacy to the nouveau régime? There is not one example in modern history of a foreign invader endearing the sovereigns to their cause. Perhaps Berman’s November 2007 exchange with Ian Buruma in the New York Review of Books summarizes the mea culpa of the liberal hawks, where he responded “I have tried in my writings to do what I think everyone ought to have done, which is to look for ways to compensate for Bush’s blunderings - to salvage whatever successes might be salvageable from the wreckage of Saddam’s overthrow  - I condemned the [Bush] doctrine’s every aspect - except for the elements that might better be described as ‘the Franklin Roosevelt Doctrine of the Four Freedoms.” Buruma replied that his “point was the question whether it was right to go to war in Iraq to fight ‘Islamofascism,’ - I see no difference between the neocons and the neo-left.” Buruma noted that in 2004, Berman had cold-heartedly drawn a line in the sand in a mediocre fictional piece in Dissent entitled “A Friendly Drink in a Time of War,” where he stated “Antifascism without international law; or international law without antifascism. A miserable choice - but one does have to choose, unfortunately.” Of course, a universal empathy and a daringly independent critique of foreign policy and war misery do not suffice. One wonders how many nights Berman had been commiserating over Buruma’s criticisms.23 
	Like their 1960s idealism for the cult of militancy, the liberal hawks’ have always been hypnotized by power fundamentally. By proclaiming that egalitarian (or democratic) governance cannot emerge organically from Muslim culture (that Islam and secular rule cannot coexist) exposes the inherent racialism of their vision. Cornelius Castoriadis explains that the definition of the self and the nation requires that the “other” and “the foreign” will necessarily be devalued as inferior, in order that the individual psyche and homeland can be validated on its own terms. It is the dialectic that “institutes” society. He stated, “Rejection of the other as other: this is not a necessary, but an extremely likely, component of the institution of society. It is ‘natural’ in the sense that a society’s heteronomy is ‘natural.’ Overcoming it requires a creation that goes against one’s inclinations - therefore, a creation that is unlikely.” In his words, and this applies to the invasion of Iraq, “For racism, however, the other is inconvertible.” One can’t support a universal ideal of human rights and advocate the radical difference of human cultures that forbids value judgements. “Human rights discourse has, in reality, relied on the tacit traditional hypotheses of liberalism and Marxism: the steamroller of ‘progress’ was to lead all peoples to the same culture (in fact, to our own - which was of enormous political convenience for the pseudo-philosophies of history),” said Castoriadis, “The questions I raised above [on relativism] would then be resolved automatically - at most after one or two ‘unhappy accidents’ (world wars, for example).” Despite the global embrace of Western materialism, notes Castoriadis, the “planetary victory of the West is a victory of machine guns, jeeps, and television, not of habeas corpus, popular sovereignty, and citizen responsibility.” Writing about “challenge and mistrust” during the Cold War of the early 1960s, Henri Lefebvre believed peaceful coexistence, between classes and nations, could emerge in the world without ulterior motives through the hard work of “challenge,” which would reduce both fear and mass destruction. He reminded that “challenge puts the solidity of existing structures permanently to the test, and at the same time it tries their ability to adapt to circumstances. When it is explicit, challenge resembles intimidation; when it is covert, it resembles tolerance and understanding, and therefore flexibility” (an obvious reference to the French Algerian War and Vietnam).24 
	This covert “challenge” and “creative overcoming of one’s inclinations” in the antiwar movement offers a more thorough empathetic, global humanitarianism defined by anti-militarism than the misidentified “antifascism” and “militarized humanitarianism” of neoconservatives and liberal hawks. Most of the antiwar writing has appeared in venues such as The Nation, and the writings of Mark Danner, Joan Didion, and Tony Judt in The New York Review Books since Winter 2002. Writing about social justice in the “postmodern world” before the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, Agnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér advocate that “We can raise claims concerning rules of international cooperation, for rules, once accepted, would permit resolution of international conflicts by negotiation and discourse, rather than by force (war). We can also recommend that all people, irrespective of their history, cultural traditions, and the like, should enjoy political freedom, and the members of all countries should have equal political rights.” This body of ethical thought on freedom, humanism, and autonomy only received a sneer from a hawk like Berman as “the purest of the pure on the radical left - they had never entirely gotten over the need to proclaim themselves truer and more orthodox than everyone else.” One wonders why Berman and his generation never found inspiration in this body of post-Marxist thought during their own youth and adulthood, since it existed alongside Debray, Castro, Guevara, Mao, and other militant revolutionary Marxist thinkers.25 One can only guess that its inherent nonviolence proved not to be exhilarating enough for these men of action. Maybe Berman’s cohort hadn’t made it to French literature in the university at the time. Likely its radicalism hadn’t appealed to the youthful rapture for militancy and the eroticism of violence.
	 If the liberal hawks found their own private Spanish Civil War in the invasion of Iraq, Rieff, Hitchens, Berman, Wieseltier, Walzer, Isaac, and George Packer all, perhaps the under reported U.S. air war in Iraq, with its heavy civilian casualties, might have fomented their righteous indignation. History showed they were on the wrong side of their Spanish Civil War. Writing in The Nation in February 2008, Tom Englehardt noted that in a ten day period, the U.S. had dropped 100,000 pounds of ordinance on Arab Jabour, south of Baghdad, and that “those 100,000 pounds of explosives that US planes dropped in a small area - was simply an afterthought” to the media, but was “undoubtedly the most extensive use of air power in Iraq since the US invasion of 2003.” 100,000 pounds of ordinance, said Englehardt, should ring a bell, since this figure was the same as the German saturation bombing of Guernica, Spain on April 26, 1937, which killed over 1600 civilians, of which the “self-evident barbarism of the event - the first massively publicized bombing of civilians - caused international horror.” However, the history of saturation bombing, Dresden, Japan, North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, has made people immune to the carnage of these civilian atrocities and “one hundred thousand pounds of explosives is now a relatively modest figure,” said Englehardt, while “the military was proud to publicize that fact without fear of international outrage.” Devastating results of the air war are deemed “collateral damage” by the Pentagon and the U.S. media, explains Englehardt, and that “In our world, what was once the barbarism of air war, its genuine horror, has been transformed into humdrum ordinariness.” Similar to John Schaar’s understanding of loss and enmity among the Vietnamese thirty years ago, the “good” of democracy delivered through 50 tons of ordinance with heavy civilian casualties has little chance of endearing the Iraqi people to the American system. With the loss of kin and home, Iraqis have nothing to lose in opposing the U.S. occupation. In the words of Christian Parenti, “clearly sovereignty remains fragmented, localized, ephemeral - and mostly imaginary. Neither Iraqis nor the Americans have control. The new prime minister, Iyad Allawi, threatens to declare martial law. How he might impose martial law and how it would differ from the current methods of the occupation are difficult to envision. In the new Iraq, only chaos is truly sovereign.”26
	Perhaps such carnage would cause the liberal hawks to drop their pens, and find the inspiration to create a humanitarian work as powerful as Picasso’s infamous painting, Guernica. It is doubtful.