Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
Now when will Nader, Moore, Steinem, Chomsky -- and the other leftists who were monumentally mistaken about the war in Afghanistan -- join me in admitting it?
Jan 31, 2002 | We were on our feet and roaring. It was supposed to be a memorial in honor of 3,000 fellow Americans who had died a scarce week before. Instead, the packed auditorium of San Franciscans had just soared through the grieving stage into the angry one. But we weren't outraged about Osama bin Laden's diabolical attacks. We were too busy endorsing the idea that our fellow Americans were murdered because we hadn't signed the global warming accord in Kyoto.
"America, is there anything you did to set up this climate?" the Rev. Amos Brown, a left-wing preacher and former San Francisco supervisor, brayed from the podium. "In Central America, in Africa where bombs are still blasting ... in the global warming conference ... at the world conference on racism, when you wouldn't show up?"
To my shame, I was part of the ovation that followed. Even worse, as it turned out, Brown's tirade deeply offended one of the service's honored guests: Paul Holm, the former partner of Mark Bingham, one of the heroic resisters aboard Flight 93.
"This was supposed to be a memorial service," he told a nearby politician. But not to most of the left-wing audience. The familiar brief against America had been read, and that was our cue to rise.
The Rev. Brown's statements and our responses to them were appalling, absurd. But many more were to come, largely from a loose coalition of antiwar activists on the left, who were marshaling protests even before the first U.S. ordnance was dropped on Afghanistan. That was September. Since then, virtually every single theory and criticism they raised in the following months have proved wrong. Where their placards talked of a "racist" war and predicted a backlash of hatred against Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans, at home, relations with our fellow Islamic citizens have (with some repugnant exceptions) been vastly improved. Where they promised millions of dying Afghans, cut off by American bombs from critical humanitarian aid, the life-saving convoys are now thundering in. Where they were confident that bombing would provoke Muslim rage on Middle Eastern and Pakistani streets, those streets are silent. Where they advocated an inept alternative to U.S. military intervention -- something to do with world courts and increased domestic security -- the agile assault, combining U.S. air power with local militias and U.S. Special Forces on the ground, quickly dismantled the terrorist cabal that had enslaved the nation and menaced the world, interrupting mass murder plans in active preparation, and yielding evidence against terrorists already ensconced within our borders. Above all, where the antiwar crowd begged Americans to contemplate the role of our Middle Eastern policy in provoking the attacks of 9/11, the videotape confession of Bin Laden and the text of the hijackers' plans conclusively demonstrate its near-total irrelevance. In their private moments, al-Qaida members don't fret over the plight of the Palestinians, or the Iraqis. Those political grievances were aired only for public consumption, to wheedle sympathy from Arab populations -- whose knowledge of U.S. foreign policy is often grotesquely distorted by their state-controlled media, anyway -- and to disorient the kind of people in the West who were willing, like me, to turn a funeral wake into a mob of cheering ideologues.
My only slight consolation is that I have, since that memorial, parted company from this pack and its unexamined assumptions about the war. But even as a tentative peace spreads over Afghanistan, the silence from that quarter is telling. After months of expressing solidarity with the Afghan people during the bombing, the Web sites that aggregate antiwar protest opinion-- Indymedia, Alternet and Common Dreams, for instance -- seem to be quietly withdrawing their focus on the region. (The number of Alternet pieces on Afghanistan and Central Asia, by my count: in November, six. In December, three. In January, two.) After our government liberated the country and began taking steps to rebuild it, you could sense the antiwar left's waning interest. All that conditional compassion was revoked; the revival tents folded up; the caravan gone in search for another flash point of misery (preferably one for which America could be plausibly blamed).
One thing you won't find anywhere on those sites, as their focus flits away: the words "We were wrong."
For the most part, it has been conservative commentators who have made an issue of the antiwar left and its galling behavior, but there are exceptions: New Left veteran Todd Gitlin has been particularly eloquent, as has fiery Nation columnist Christopher Hitchens. But Gitlin, a cultural studies professor at New York University, lacks the cachet on the left of his fellow academic Noam Chomsky, and most leftists excommunicated Hitchens long ago for his rolein the Clinton impeachment.
To mainstream liberals, the failings of the antiwar left seems a nonissue. "Of course those opposed to the United States defending itself against terrorism are wrong," Jacob Weisberg wrote dismissively in Slate last month.
"They also happen to be totally irrelevant."
Untrue. The war in Afghanistan and the protest against it have smoked out the most divisive, self-destructive contingent of the left. They are small in number, but disproportionately influential, and retain the power (and willingness) to shred any chance at creating a coherent liberal agenda. Conservative attacks on the antiwar left from the likes of Andrew Sullivan and David Horowitz are easily dismissed by hardcore leftists -- after all, they're the enemy. Instead, it is liberals themselves, joined by members of the honorable left, who should now aim their rhetorical fire at the retreating leaders of the refuted antiwar left. Their past sophistries on Afghanistan and terrorism should be publicized, their future credibility permanently damaged. Ignore them, fail to address them, and I fear their imminent return, out to initiate further guerrilla attacks on the slow advance of meaningful social progress. I should know. I was one of them.
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