By BRETT WARNKE
The hardest part of writing a post about the anti-interventionist left is you have to listen to their faulty reasoning and endure the righteous crowing in which they advocate nothing. For years I have attended schools where left-isolationism is accepted, sat in editorial rooms where this trash is flung around, and I have to say it stinks. It is backward, do-nothing, lazy, complacent, in most cases negligent and almost always reactionary. The entire “antiwar” agenda is a nullity, a hole in the air a noisy gimmick. I was an intern at The Nation magazine, America’s oldest weekly, a magazine I still read and admire. But most of the interns were not animated by foreign policy and neither were the working journalists. The truth is that the magazine and the left in general are much more interested in income inequality at home, chats about minorities, condemning “Islamophobia,” and pushing a “domestic agenda” whatever that turns out to be. But since Assad’s chemical attacks on Syria (notice that the liberals and left are still referring to this crime as ‘alleged’) the left’s most vocal mouthpieces have proven themselves not just negligible—because they cannot even debate evidence anymore—but absurd. I do not say ‘marginal,’ because radical or extreme opinions can sometimes vivify a dead debate or illuminate the shadows cast by journalistic obfuscation. But since September 11, what has become known as the ‘antiwar left’ basically continued their commitment to doing nothing—nothing—about atrocities abroad and repeating anti-imperialist platitudes no matter the context.
Like pull-string puppets you can predict the recipe of Tariq Ali or Chris Hedges or Amy Goodman or Chris Hedges interview before the first question is uttered. The Independent’s eminent Robert Fisk may throw a little history in the mix (he styles himself as a historian and his gassy volumes are pretty good reading) or he’ll add a bloody flourish from one of his war stories that, I exaggerate only a little, blame the United States for everything wrong in the Middle East. To this faction of the leftist intelligentsia, behind every news story is a trapdoor to the empire where secret levers are controlled by the military-industrial complex and greedy corporations. Anyone on the left in favor of humanitarian intervention is stamped a hated ‘liberal hawk.’ And on the right, the Jews, Israel’s fifth column, that pestiferous ‘neocon cabal’ we hear so much about are plotting a fearful return!
The sad old street rebel, Tariq Ali, who spent the second Iraq war in turtleneck after turtleneck encouraging ‘the Iraqi resistance’ to fight on is still consistently wrong about everything. (Less than a week ago, from Britain, he predicted the U.K. would back Obama’s decision for retaliatory strike against Assad.) In 2005 he spoke out against elections in Iraq and did his best to muddy the reputation of Jalal Talabani, a Kurdish socialist, and first president in the post-Saddam era.[1] Interviewers are often flummoxed by Ali when he insists the “West is trying to take Syria over” or talks unironically of the West “recolonizing” the Middle East. Often relegated to anti-American networks like Putin’s echo-chamber, RT: Russia Today, no matter the question—about Syrian refugees, the goings on in the Civil War, whatever—Ali begins waffling on about the American empire[2]. One wonders how he could order coffee without screaming about neoliberalism’s effect on bean markets.
On Democracy Now! during a recent debate over intervention in Syria Ali attempted to equate the use of white phosphorous in Fallujah (the U.S. used the substance to flush insurgents out of spider holes) as equivalent to Assad’s deployment of chemical weapons in the suburbs of Damascus. “No red lines were drawn then,” he hissed, “except the red lines of Iraqi blood.” He then called the notion that Assad actually committed the chemical attack “slightly incredible.” No distinctions were made between strikes and an invasion, ground troops or a no-fly zones. Why bother? To Ali there is “war” (with the US always the aggressor) and not war, the proper state of the world without the influence of America’s militaristic hegemony. Which inspires the question, what would an Ali solution look like? A negotiated political settlement that would leave Assad in power.
Chris Hedges, notable only for giving interviewers his resume only slightly more than the unbearable Reza Aslan, was actually a New York Times reporter. (So was the eminent Jayson Blair, by the way.) Recently, when asked about Syria, like most in the isolationist wing of the left, he changed the subject:
I believe that, you know, one of the primary lessons of the Holocaust is that when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable. But there has to be an active campaign of genocide. So we are culpable by not intervening during the genocide in Rwanda, in Cambodia, when Saddam Hussein was wiping out the Kurds in northern Iraq. But to respond after that genocide is complete as a kind of punishment is for me very shortsighted, because it essentially involves the United States not in an act of preventing an ongoing or current act of genocide, but in essence taking sides in this civil war.
Reread that if you can stomach it: a country cannot prevent genocide, it must wait for it to occur. Luckily, in Libya, NATO and President Obama refused this option and identified Qadaffi’s intention to wipe out Benghazi as an unpalatable option. With Qadaffi gone and a Libya slowly, painfully piecing itself together after a civil war everyone can now admit that Benghazi was saved from bloody destruction. But ask an antiwar leftist about the campaign. All you will get is misdirection about guns in Chad, arms in Mali, and Islamists everywhere on the march because of past U.S. policy. (Islamists are those, by the way, whom they never want to fight. Islamists U.S. policy created and incubated. Islamists with legitimate grievances about American foreign policy.) Hedges went on to say, “I think morally the United States has no case to make unless they were actively stopping a delivery system of these chemical agents, i.e. intercepting the planes that were dropping them or, if they used artillery shells, which is what Saddam Hussein had, you know, the 155 howitzers or the units that were delivering those shells.” Again, with full knowledge of horrors to come, the world’s superpower must sit back and do nothing, calmly allowing people to be mowed down. And this is the man who paints himself as the moral conscience of a mainstream media gone wrong, the radical reporter who finally saw socialist revelation!
Yet, beware, reader, The United States, in the anti-interventionist’s mind is trying to be “the world’s policeman.” (What policeman by the way prevents genocide? Responds to chemical attacks with military assaults? Seeks international mediation and coalition for humanitarian action? No matter the cliché remains.) But when such a trite argument falters, Hedges will argue that the U.S. has no credibility to do, well, anything. Ever. Why? Because Indians were mistreated by Andrew Jackson. Or slavery was baked into the Constitution. Or the CIA toppled Arbenz in Guatemala. Or any other excuse to confound the news of the day with historical clippings of state crime. This is not a new tactic, it is part of the Zinn-Chomskian worldview that America can never, or at least has never, intervened as a moral actor. The republic’s history is simply one long nightmare of state crimes and injustices. If excerpting history won’t work Hedges and Co. will move to conspiracy: Behind every foreign policy action are the corporate puppeteers! Hedges has said that Halliburton and Raytheon and Boeing are not just profiting from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (which is true) they are “fueling these conflicts” as a “sort of unseen engine behind a lot of this.” One can, as Senator McCain and Niall Ferguson have done, criticize President Obama for fiddling while Syria burned, a moderate vague domestic agenda his true aim. But to argue that responding to Assad’s chemical attacks is a corporate plot is slanderous, lazy, boring, and entirely without merit or evidence.
The most serious of the anti-interventionist faction is Amy Goodman, the breathless anchor of the independent news broadcast Democracy Now! who, having seen America green light Suharto’s slaughter in East Timor first-hand as a reporter, believes in Martin Luther King’s labeling of the U.S. as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” If Goodman is a true journalist and not sloppy like Hedges or as wrong-headed as Tariq Ali, she is guilty of peddling fantasies as if they were policy suggestions and then getting self-righteous when the world operates in reality. The Nation, whose reporters frequently appear on Goodman’s show, recently produced an editorial with suggestions similar to Goodman’s regarding Syria. They are, as well as being horribly constructed sentences, utterly fantastical:
[President Obama] should re-engage Russia and China—and, through them, Iran—to restrain Assad, while using Washington’s considerable influence with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to restrain their military support for the rebels—especially for jihadi extremists. (The recent agreement between Russia and the United States to hold an international conference on Syria is a hopeful move in that direction.) And Obama should restrain Israel from provoking war with Hezbollah.”
Sure. Perhaps he could also get on that matter of stopping the oceans from rising while he’s at it.
On Chris Hayes’s show Goodman argued that America needed to “wage peace” after Assad’s chemical attacks. She then firmly stated that all could be solved if Obama just sat down with Putin for a chat, give diplomacy a chance and all that. Interestingly, Goodman finds time in nearly every discussion of Syria to refer to the “alleged chemical attack” or mention an “attack on Syria” (rather than the Assad regime or its military) and repeatedly invokes the Reagan administration’s possession of “firm evidence” of Iraqi chemical attacks on Iran. Again, this is intended to defang any attempt at responding to Assad’s crimes and constructing an equivalency between the deliberate murder of civilians and U.S. foreign policy. But, if after suffering through the anti-imperialist soliloquies of her program’s “experts,” it is nice to hear Goodman admit that Iraq had chemical weapons and used them. She has spent a decade repeating that Americans were lied into the “war on Iraq” with false evidence.
The most notorious fool and liar and loudmouth in the anti-interventionist quarter is the Oscar-winning filmmaker, Michael Moore, famous for a “documentary” that could expire a fleet of fact-checkers. In a jabbering, disgraceful video message to Syria Moore reveals himself to be not only indecent and cold but utterly ignorant of what is happening in the country’s civil war. Moore speaks directly to Assad. He does not like the way Assad is running Syria. “I want you to stop right now,” he commands, even urging Assad to step down “like the Botha regime in South Africa” who “won a Nobel Prize for it.” (It was de Klerk.) But fear not Syrians! “Be brave! Don’t give up! Every dictator has gone down in flames…” he says ignoring the 20th century. And then the great filmmaker proceeds to lecture Syria on America’s Revolution: “Sometime freedom isn’t something that is handed to you on a silver platter…sometimes people have to give up their lives.”[3]
Moore is soulless clown, of course. But his argument that some people have to die so that regime change can be “organic” is the story of the anti-interventionist left. A faction whose isolationism and condemnation of America has prevented it from supporting virtually any military activity abroad even when children are gassed on city streets or aggressive nationalists absorb territory in Europe. The left’s great hope, the United Nations, gives cover for their do-nothing policies because the institution is a crippled ruin. Somalia, Sudan, Congo, Rwanda, Iraq. How many horrors will a bodybag-left allow before it tempers its sole message of anti-imperialism? One could call such an ideology pacifism if there was not so much awe in their talk of the “Iraqi resistance” and the like. They would have peace at any price as long as America stayed home. Perhaps they’ll get their peace. But it will be the peace of crows sitting atop a bare tree above another mass grave.
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