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The Progressive War

By Salim Muwakkil

The pro-war progressives want to claim the tradition of the anti-Stalinist left of Cold War lore, but that analogy is faulty.

Among the many effects of the terrorism attacks of September 11, 2001, was the ideological shift they provoked among those on the left. Many left-leaning commentators were so disconcerted by some of their fellow travelers’ responses to the attacks, they jumped straight into bed with the neocon war party.

Journalists like Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman, Ron Rosenbaum, Greil Marcus and Dan Savage are five of the most prominent of these prowar progressives. But several others, including comedian/commentator Dennis Miller, said they too were shocked rightward by the left’s reflexive, “blame-America” reaction to 9/11.

The U.S. response to terrorism pushed me in a different direction. Sure, I was surprised, terrified and angered by the cold savagery of the hijackers and the intensity of their grievances. But I also was dumbfounded by our nation’s refusal to acknowledge its role in nurturing those grievances. The United States has thwarted democracy, inserted puppet dictators, smothered human rights, and stifled freedom in many countries in the Middle East. Did we think that our long history of ignoble intervention in the region would leave no angry aftermath?

This tendency to deny responsibility for the consequences of dubious deeds is a hallowed American tradition that is familiar to me as an African-American and a descendant of enslaved Africans. Denial doesn’t expunge the errors of history; it compounds them. Victims of those errors don’t disappear, and their quest for justice doesn’t dissipate.

When history’s victims inevitably lash out, their grievances are downplayed and they become targets of revenge rather than mediation—perpetuating the cycle. One of the roles of progressives is to connect the dots linking present disorders to past injustices. But fear of future terrorist attacks has convinced pro-war progressives to abandon that role and push for a muscular response to the present danger. But instead of discouraging potential terrorists, our military aggression likely is seeding vast fields of future antagonists, and nothing we have in our high-tech arsenal will be able to stem that hostile tide.

If we deny the historical context that connects the “asymmetrical warfare” that we call terrorism to the past, we are only postponing a necessary reckoning. The pro-war progressives know this, but they are fearful, and fear is the right’s best recruiter. The defection of Hitchens, a British expatriate and ex-Trotskyite, is perhaps the most significant of the bunch. Until recently, he was a regular Nation columnist and one of the left’s most gifted polemicists. Hitchens’ pro-war argument is fueled by a powerful strain of anti-clericalism. He frames the ongoing war on terrorism (he included the Iraq invasion under this rubric) as a seminal struggle between totalitarian theocrats (or “Islamo-fascists”) and the protectors of civil society.

“The theocratic and absolutist side in this war hopes to win it by exporting it here, which in turn means that we have no expectation of staying out of the war, and no right to be neutral in it,” he wrote in his last column for The Nation. He resigned as a columnist because he said the publication was “becoming the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden.”

Hitchens’ view is similar to that of Paul Berman, whose recent book Terror and Liberalism also urges a strenuous battle against Islamist totalitarians. By portraying the war on terrorism as a battle of liberalism vs. fascism, the pro-war progressives seek to claim the tradition of the anti-Stalinist left of Cold War lore. But that analogy is faulty.

The Arab world has legitimate grievances, and by ignoring them we are feeding the totalitarian impulse driving the Islamist cults. Were the administration more skilled in diplomacy and not dominated by the bellicose neocons that have hijacked U.S. foreign policy, it might have used the world’s sympathy following 9/11 to organize a more efficient global fight against terrorism. After all, diplomatic pressure from Libya and Egypt is what forced Sudan to eject Osama bin Laden in the ’90s. Such an approach would have put the pressure on Muslim groups to speak out more vigorously against terrorism as an affront to Islam.

What’s more, the United States could easily have helped to dry up grassroots support for Islamist cults with a tangible expression of assurance that it seeks to assist rather than destroy the Muslim world. Political gestures could have been modeled on the European Union’s efforts at the 2001 U.N. conference on racism, when it vowed to forge new relationships between the colonized and the colonizers of history.

Instead, the Bush administration launched an illegal military invasion of Iraq for what now appears to have been a fraudulent pretext; appointed Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, an open admirer of Israel; Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, to head up Iraq’s reconstruction effort; nominated the well-known Islamophobe Daniel Pipes to the U.S. Institute of Peace; and continues to act in a way that seems designed to produce exactly the hatred of the United States that the radical Islamists want to provoke.

If pro-war progressives truly seek to limit the allure of Islamo-fascism, they’ve chosen the wrong bedfellows.

Salim Muwakkil is a senior editor of In These Times, where he has worked since 1983. He is currently a Crime and Communities Media Fellow of the Open Society Institute, examining the impact of ex-inmates and gang leaders in leadership positions in the black community.

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  • Reader Comments

    Now we have a huge amont of anti arab racism to deal with. Racism is totally rooted in fear. Fear that has been kept simmering by the Bush administration to maintain support for this assinine attack. If americans live with these feelings of fear, the terrorists are achieving their goals. Refuse to be afraid. Chose to respect and understand. This is the key to defeating terrorism. Respect and understanding make for boring T.V. however. 

    Posted by Mike on May 10, 2003 at 10:27 AM

    “The Onion” had a funny bit in the run-up to Iraq. A fictitious pedestrian said “Has anyone explained to the [reticient] Germans that Iraqis are semites?” I ask… Has anyone explained to all the Jews voting hawkishly, that Iraqis, Arabs, and Islamic culture is Semitic? It is perhaps absurd to say that militantly anti-Arab sentiment amongst Jews and in Israel is anti-semitic. But when people who are not Jewish are anti-Arab, call a spade a spade, it’s anti-semitism. I hope some litigators out there are smart (and committed) enough to use laws against anti-semitism, against the genocidal-sounding Anti-Arab rhetoric being spewed in the media and on the streets. I’m all for freed speech, but as long as it’s being restricted it should be restricted fairly. The best defense against totalitarian legislation is showing how it can hurt both sides of any issue.

    Posted by Joseph Howell on May 12, 2003 at 12:04 PM

    “The United States has thwarted democracy, inserted puppet dictators, smothered human rights, and stifled freedom in many countries in the Middle East.”

    Gee, has any of this been true since most of the hijacker-terrorists were born?

    To accuse the US of “thwarting democracy” in the Middle East is patently absurd.  We support the existing democracy in the Middle East, Israel.  This same writer would have the US reject Israel infavor of the PLO, run by the dictator Arafat for 30 years.

    Posted by Nus on May 12, 2003 at 2:23 PM

    We need to do a better job at identifying who has supported despots and tyrants—not the United States, but some agents of the United States government. It’s an important distinction, especially as we’re trying to earn support from people who are justifiably proud of being an American but are open to learning about the atrocities that some of the men in high government positions have committed with our tax money. The vast majority of the American electorate is horrified by the thought that our money and military is used, usually secretly, to support the worst thugs and murderers in the developing world. But we lose people when we blame ‘us’ or ‘the United States’ for these crimes, instead of the true perpetrators—men in powerful government positions who lie about their secret missions. We don’t blame America for creating a backlash against the United States—we blame the government officials who secretly bomb and kill innocents in far-off lands with neither our permission nor our knowledge. We, the majority of Americans, leftist, centrist and conservative, are united against the foolish and dangeous crimes committed by a few at the highest levels of our government. That langauge is less likely to alienate and more likely to earn support, and I think Mr. Muwakkil’s well-reasoned argument would reach a larger audience with more tactical framing of the enemy.

    Posted by Dan Johnson-Weinberger on May 12, 2003 at 3:16 PM

    I do not mean to imply in any way that Bush is actually making the important decisions in his administration, but it scares me that he is the most arrogantly ignorant president we have ever had.  We have had arrogant presidents; we have had ignorant presidents.  Bush’s combination of the two allows the worst elements in the Rep. party to take us where none of us want to go.

    Posted by Bob Schneider on May 12, 2003 at 4:34 PM

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Appeared in the June 9, 2003 Issue
Also by Salim Muwakkil
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