Andrew Sullivan poses questions to the left
I find myself reading Andrew Sullivan's blog more and more. Once he discovered the war was FUBAR it was a lot easier to explore how much sense he made on other issues as well.
Today he has posted an entry quoting Nick Cohen of The Guardian:
Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal left is against come from the liberal left? Why will students hear a leftish postmodern theorist defend the exploitation of women in traditional cultures but not a crusty conservative don? After the American and British wars in Bosnia and Kosovo against Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansers, why were men and women of the left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps? As important, why did a European Union that daily announces its commitment to the liberal principles of human rights and international law do nothing as crimes against humanity took place just over its borders?
Why is Palestine a cause for the liberal left, but not China, Sudan, Zimbabwe, the Congo or North Korea? Why, even in the case of Palestine, can't those who say they support the Palestinian cause tell you what type of Palestine they would like to see? After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington why were you as likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of Jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a superior literary journal as in a neo-Nazi hate sheet? And why after the 7/7 attacks on London did leftish rather than right-wing newspapers run pieces excusing suicide bombers who were inspired by a psychopathic theology from the ultra-right?
In short, why is the world upside down? In the past conservatives made excuses for fascism because they mistakenly saw it as a continuation of their democratic rightwing ideas. Now, overwhelmingly and every where, liberals and leftists are far more likely than conservatives to excuse fascistic governments and movements, with the exception of their native far-right parties. As long as local racists are white, they have no difficulty in opposing them in a manner that would have been recognisable to the traditional left. But give them a foreign far-right movement that is anti-Western and they treat it as at best a distraction and at worst an ally.
Sullivan adds:
Good questions. The right has a lot to answer for these past few years. But so too does the left.
I'll take a crack at it.
Regarding militant Islam: Maybe I missed it on CNN, but I haven't see legions of liberals marching to defend militant Islam. Militant Islam is clearly a threat, especially in places where it is tolerated for the sake of political expediency, such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. What I find hard to understand is why the right insists that waging war in Iraq is waging war against militant Islam. Iraq was a brutal dictatorship, but it had nothing to do with militant Islam. Militant Islam breeds in the madrasas of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. But we don't get tough with those countries because they are supposedly our allies. America doesn't need friends that coddle al Qaeda and whose intelligence service supports the Taliban.
Regarding the exploitation of women in Islamic societies: I also don't hear any loud chants in favor of this from the left. Can anyone name a leading figure on the left who makes excuses for Islamic exploitation of women? It's appalling. The Taliban treat women like cattle and the Saudis are just as bad. And female genital mutilation and the stoning of adultresses is just barbaric.
Regarding Serbs and Kosovo: I cheered when NATO intervened in Kosovo. It was the right thing to do and it was well-executed. Not a single American lost his life in combat. Milosevic was a thug and a murderer. He should have been hanged from a lamppost like Mussolini. And as far as people denying the existence of concentration camps, I've never read that. But if there are such people, they're fools.
Regarding the EU sitting on its hands: Clearly shameful. Just as shameful as our refusal to intervene to stop the genocide in Rwanda and our refusal to intervene to stop Liberia, a nation modeled after our own, from descending into chaos and the world's refusal to lift a finger to stop Robert Mugabe's rape of Zimbabwe.
Regarding 'why Palestine but not other places': Does Palestine deserve more attention than North Korea or Sudan? To the extent that it affects us more than Sudan, yes. From a moral perspective, no. The genocide in Darfur is appalling. How can the Bush Administration admit that genocide is going on and yet not step in the stop it? How much would it take to get the attention of the Sudanese government? A barrage of cruise missiles taking out Sudanese government and military installations would be a good start.
Regarding what kind of Palestine the left wants: Good question. I have my own peace plan for the Middle East, for what it's worth, that includes a demilitarized Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza, Jerusalem as a sovereign city governed by the U.N., a Marshall Plan for Palestine funded by the entire international community, Israel returning to its pre-1967 borders with a few adjustments, Israel joining NATO and the EU, Syria regaining a demilitarized Golan Heights, all Arab nations and Iran recognizing Israel and a treaty banning nuclear weapons from the entire Middle East -- Israel and Iran included. Sure, it won't happen, but the question was what would you like to see.
Regarding 9/11 conspiracy theories: There are just as many tinfoil hats on the right as there are on the left. They all need to get a life. But conspiracy theories and the people who push them are not about to go away. Just a few years ago President Zachary Taylor was dug up and his remains analyzed because some people claimed he was poisoned with arsenic.
Regarding people who excuse suicide bombers: A while ago, The Onion did a piece which quoted the 9/11 hijackers as being shocked that instead of sampling dozens of virgins in paradise they were being impaled and roasted in Hell. That pretty much sums up by attitude toward people who strap on explosives and ball bearings and detonate themselves in crowds of innocent civilians. That's not heroic. It's cowardly. It's abominable. It's whatever adjective you want to use. Some people make excuses for suicide bombers because they see them as oppressed poor people with so little hope they lash out against their oppressors by blowing themselves up. That's hardly the case. Most suicide bombers are educated and relatively well-off in their communities. Religious zealotry is a much bigger factor. Modern suicide bombing, interestingly, is not a Palestinian invention. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil in Sri Lanka claim that honor. And the first car bomb was detonated by an Italian immigrant/anarchist who used a horse-drawn cart to set off a massive explosion on Wall Street more than 85 years ago. The point being that terrorism is not unique to Palestine.
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Comments :
Sullivan's Assumptions Are Wrong
Remembering how rabidly pro-Iraq war he once was, perhaps it is his own conscience that he is trying to ease.
He has baited your liberal sensibilities........ that says the US must solve all problems in the world, or essentially be the world's "police". The US must interfere with the natural order and progress of all countries to make those countries pro-Western, without respect to their culture.
Militant Islam is a response in part to Western incursions on other cultures. The key element being the enflamed boils known as military bases (to protect economic interests) that resistance movements (not just Islam). We have seen Latin American resistance movements, but we did not choose to call that terrorism. That bin Laden learned his ways of resistance from the West is no secret.
Education is key in reducing exploitation of women. The West can set an example.
Imperical foreign policies that continue to draw up maps of how countries should or should not be...... is that such a good idea. All change must come from within. Through education and economics, not through militarism.
I agree with Jimmy Carter, that the imprisonment of Palestinians on the own land is a sordid tale. Much of this is caused by a minority of Jewish extremists who feel that it is their God given right to OWN Jersalem.
The conpsiracy theorists have lots of fun, yet I see it is a confluence of interests that coincide for economic and political reasons that have a suspicious nature. Is it conspiracy to wonder why Rupert Murdoch owns so much stake in the messaging business.
Suicide bombers are a very unsophisticated weapons delivery system that makes death extra-ordinarily personal and sensational. Dropping a bomb causes the same result just much more antispetically and the death and destruction is therefore considered more "acceptable" by western standards.
Andrew Sullivan is a bit of an over emotional fool.
The left is not making excuses for fascism they are trying to stop the trend toward fascism they say in their homeland. Alberto Gonzales removal of DA's and his persistant efforts to give more power to the executive are a testament to that.
I would ask Andrew why he is not more concerned about the push to put more power in the Executive Branch at the subversion of the will of the people. I would ask Andrew why he has been a part of the propagandists "feel good" noise machine that allowed that to happen in the first place.
I would also refer to the Prime Directive
The US hardly followed the prime directive relative to the native Indian culture and that culture has now largely disappeared.
The paradox is that while conservatives advocate for the poor in the US to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps", when it comes to other countries we insist that US interferance is the best policy, an utter and complete contradiction. The only constant is that both policies are seen to benefit business. The first for cheap labor, the second for securing resources.
To find the answers he is looking for Sullivan needs to ask a different question. Instead of looking to blame liberals......, a childish excercise at best, he should ask himself what part did he play in a world he now views as "upside down"? And will he play a part in getting it right, for once? I doubt it.
It is the economy, stupid.
How are Kosovo and Iraq different?
That is, other than the scale of the operation (and resultant screw ups), what significant difference is there between our unilateral intervention to depose a tyrant in easter europe and our same effort to do the same in the Middle East?
In both cases we proceeded without UN approval. In both cases civilians have been killed. In both cases the military has made some gawd awful %$^&-ups (anyone remember the Chinese embassy getting bombed in kosovo?). In both cases war profiteering companies have been allowed to commit heinous crimes with little or no oversite (dyncorp anyone?).
Obviously Iraq is a bigger disaster, but at the root both adventures were mistakes.
I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
Iraq and Kosovo are quite different
Kosovo was not a unilateral intervention. It was a NATO operation.
In Kosovo, not a single American soldier died in combat, although there were some fatalities from accidents.
Kosovo today is stable and calm.
The Kosovo intervention led to Serbia's ouster of Milosevic and his handover to The Hague for trial.
Failure to act in Kosovo would have been yet another example of the West turning its back and doing nothing to stop genocide.
qui tacet consentire
Can't agree.
And Iraq has the "coalition of the willing". Come on, in both cases a very small group (basically just the US and whomever we could strongarm into it) acted without any international legitimacy.
I don;t see how that matters except in the scale of the cluster*&^%, which I already said was quite different. It doesn't go to the essence of the conflict which is identical.
Yeah and it's quite possible that seven years after we're out of Iraq things will be pretty quiet there too. Again how does that matter? In the immediate aftermath of the war the area was a bloody shambles with hundreds of thousands of refugees, thousands of casualties, and a lot of infrastructure damage.
Okay I'll grant you that one. That is one place where they did much better than the current idiots.
No failure to act with a clear UN mandate would have been another example of the west ignoring genocide. But we never had that. So instead what we got was the US once again unilaterally invading sovereign countries to tell them what to do and how to do it. Why? because we have big guns and a large industrial base that finds war very profitable.
To fete Kosovo while denigrating Iraq is a huge double standard.
I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
Baloney
First, to suggest that NATO has no international legitimacy is ridiculous. And even if the UN had approved it, it still would have been the same folks fighting it -- i.e. us.
Besides, the UN would have never approved it, even if Milosevic was personally executing Albanians in the streets because the Russians would have vetoed it. Should Russia be able to veto any intervention anywhere? Or China?
Second, the lack of combat deaths matters a great deal, I'm sure, to the folks who didn't die.
Third, without the intervention Serbia might still be ruled by Milosevic or one of his thugs, mass killings might still be going on in Kosovo and Serbian civilians would still be subjected to crippling economic sanctions.
qui tacet consentire
Heh.
NATO is a self defense organization that was created to oppose the warsaw pact. It has ZERO legitimacy as far as deciding to invade a nation that has not attacked a NATO state. There is a reason we have a UN, you know?
That's like saying "well even if Bush had gotten FISA warrants it still would have been the same people doing the wire tapping- the NSA." Well, yeah, but there is just kind of a difference between doing a thing with proper authorization and doing it without.
And you think the right wingers don't use these same arguments about Iraq?
Look if you want to try to get rid of the permanent security council member's vetos I'm with you. If you want to suggest that the UN needs reforms I'm willing to grant that. If you want to say that the UN should be abolished I'll probably disagree but I'll listen to the argument.
But if you want to feel free to run off and start bombing people without the express permission of the one governmental body that has jurisdiction then I have to ask how you are any better than the neo-cons? You know they think they are doing the right thing too, right?
Again, we made the UN for a reason. Ignoring it isn't helping the problem. Doesn't help when the republicans do it, AND it doesn't help when the democrats do it.
For god's sake, quaoar, are you trying to imitate right wing talking points? Haven't you read fifty thousand "Iraq isn't vietnam because fewer of our men have died" screeds from right wing hacks? Or "Iraq isn't in a civil war because our civil war killed a lot more people."
You are making the same argument here. Or to put it another way, how many people had to die before it mattered that the war was wrong? Apparently thousands isn't enough but a couple hundred thousand is. Where exactly is it you draw that line between an illegitimate war being a good vs. bad thing?
Quite possibly. And? Are you really arguing that the Milsevic was worse than Saddam? Do such comparisons even make sense? Are you really willing to justify us illegally invading a country this time but not the next? And on what grounds then?
Iraq is a blunder of epic proportions. Serbia was the same blunder just on a much smaller scale. The same crappy rationales. The same lousy execution. Just a smaller bang. Fewer deaths. Less CNN coverage.
No that doesn't make it better, and it certainly doesn't make it good.
I would have been very happy to have seen Clinton impeached for Kosovo, just as I'd like to see Bush impeached for Iraq. And for exactly the same reasons.
I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
I'll bite...
The Iraq war was started on false pretenses; Kosovo wasn't. The Iraq war was prefaced by the largest protests ever against it; Kosovo wasn't. Milošević was engaging in ethnic cleansing and genocide at the time; Hussein wasn't. Intervening in Kosovo at the time would have been much more like intervening in Darfur in 2003 instead of intervening in Iraq in 2003.
there were protests?
Where?
"To discuss evil in a manner implying neutrality, is to sanction it." AR
Everywhere
And big ones too. Here is a list
of some of the dates and places the protests occurred. Not everyone was cheering before the war.
February 15, 2003
is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest global protest ever, all before the invasion.
That you are unaware of this
would in fact suggest that the media does NOT have a liberal bias.
If it did these protests would have been all over you television screen, and in the papers!
I was wholly vexed that this got so little coverage.
It is the economy, stupid.
Nibbled.
There was some *ahem* creative exaggeration to the claims at the beginning of Kosovo. Much like the "Iraqi troops threw Kuwaiti infants on the floor and stepped on them" BS from the first Gulf War.
There were protests against kosovo:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_War
That these protests were fairly small is an indictment of the left, not a support for the war. Many on the left were willing to give Clinton a pass for no good reason.
And? Does the US magically get to ignore the law when someone else does? If your neighbor steals are you then allowed to kill him?
The answer is, in both cases, "no."
If we chose to attack darfur illegally, then yes it would be exactly the same. Let's be crystal clear here: without a specific UN resolution we have absolutely no right to interfere in Darfur, and if we should try we are in the wrong. It does not matter what is happening there. If they do not attack us and the international body that has sole discretion in determining when outside intervention is needed does not find for it, then we absolutely have no right to interfere. None. At. All.
We are not the world's police man.
I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
I think you're missing
one key element in the Iraq-Kosovo comparison, and it has to do with the UN. Keep in mind the context of the Kosovo decision: the UN was busy intervening and failing to prevent ethnic cleaning in next door Bosnia Herzogovina. Srebrenica - site of the largest post-WWII genocide in Europe's history - happened under the UN's watch and with the UN powerless to prevent it. When the tensions in next-door Kosovo began to rachet up, the UN's failure was on everyone's minds, especially since the (mostly) same ethnic groups were involved. The options seemed, at the time, to allow the situation to develop on its own, to allow the UN a second failure, or to intervene.
I understand where you're coming from when you argue that the latter is illegal and we have no right to make those kinds of decisions - I do. But I hope you can see why enough people lost faith in the UN's ability to prevent a repeat situation in the former Yugoslavia and felt something needed to be done.
Saint, n. A dead sinner revised and edited. - Ambrose Bierce
Back to the Original thread.
On the Kosovo-Iraq Hijack Pico nailed it, but add the UN's recent failure in Rawanda, to his point as well. And clearly this was a case of Clinton, and Gen. Clark kicking the EU off of its hands and doing something in what just as clearly has to be a part of the EU eventually, or be a hole in its middle.
Re Islamists and Women- It was my contention that we should have used the abuse of women in Afganistan as a wedge to get both Taliban and AlQueda. RAWA was an effective organization opposed to both the Northern Alliance AND the Taliban and fighting for equal rights for women.
If we had helped train and support them, they could have used the chador to make every Islamic wish the thing had never been invented! You could hide anything in there, and be totally anonymous.
What more would you need to remake Afganistan than to empower it's women? If even the women in one's own household could be secret RAWA agents, the whole of the ME would be permanently transformed.
RE: the Onion and Suicide bombers, the much better joke I heard was that indeed the bombers would find themselves in a garden with 72 permanent virgins, but that the small print they did not read was that the sexes would be reversed.
Regarding 'why Palestine but not other places': Other places like Sri Lanka , Tibet, Darfur, much of the rest of Africa & Indonesia all deserve attention on humanitarian grounds if not many more. An intelligent thoughtful mastery by professionals knowledgeable in the language and intricacies of each case is vitally needed. Unfortunately that is not how this administration works. Even as there are many on the left who are fighting to have those problems heard, even as the Machiavellian plan unfolds to create more messes than there are people who can effectively clean up each one.
Regarding 9/11 conspiracy theories: The classic fact of secrecy is that with the facts hidden, people will assume the worst. When a Nixonian "Damn" was deleted everyone just assumed it was "sh*t" or worse. A person may be presumed innocent until the facts are presented but if they are seen hiding facts, it will be presumed that the hidden facts will prove them guilty.
There is also an Orwellian propaganda technique, more insidious than most, that when hidden facts are winkled out, you throw a astroturf group out to make up a crazy scenereo that involves some of those winkled facts, but includes lots of weird science that will discredit astroturf and legitimate investigations alike, and at the very least muddy the water.
I suspect "loose change" of being such a group, and another that is weirder yet, all with names similar to the work done by the "Jersey Girls" with more easily debunked astounding and weird charges, but less attention to reality, and in the end, unnecessary to the "Jersey Girls" foundation of documented fact that it is ALL the Right wing that threatens, and helping either RW side helps both.
And this of course is Sullivan's real objective, to try and invent an equivalent insanity on the left that is the mirror of the insane right, when research shows that there clearly is not and that there is nothing on the left that is even a rough equivalent of Straussian or Islamist thought.
The Self Made Man is just not admitting where he got all the parts.