From Z Magazine, November 2002
THE CRUISE MISSILE LEFT
Edward S. Herman
A prominent set of commentators claiming to speak from the left
have aligned themselves with the national leadership in support of
an aggressive military interventionism and projection of power
abroad. This is by no means a genuine left--that is, one that
opposes the powerful in the interest of the non-elite majority. I
call them a "cruise missile left" (CML) because of their alignment
with power and their eager support of external violence, which is
a very important component of their intellectual labors. One of
their cohort, Christopher Hitchens, even explicitly lauds cruise
missiles themselves--"precision-guided weaponry"--which he finds
"good in itself," but especially admirable when decimating the
forces of evil that are the official targets ("Its a Good Time for
War...," Boston Globe, Sept. 8, 2002).
CMLs often designate themselves the "pragmatic," "rational,"
and "decent" left, and they spend considerable energy attacking
their erstwhile comrades for failing to keep in touch with the U.S.
public, for "reflexive anti-Americanism" (Todd Gitlin), for
"genuflecting only briefly--if at all--to the [9/11] dead" (Marc
Cooper), for "refusing to acknowledge that the country faced real
dangers" and has a right to defend itself (Michael Walzer), and for
not crediting U.S. policy with successes when it attacks and
removes bad men from power (Michael Berube et al.), among other
leftists' failings.
CMLs are of course welcomed by the mainstream media, because
they not only support the elite political agenda, they attack its
real left critics with great vigor, and with the credibility of
alleged leftists who have escaped "the politics of guilt and
resentment" (Walzer, "Can There Be a Decent Left?," Dissent, Spring
2002). Marc Cooper recently published a second article in the Los
Angeles Times that focused on the recent failures of the peace
movement, attributed to the influence of a left faction "steeped in
four decades' worth of crude anti-Americanism," although why he and
the decent left haven't successfully stepped into the breach and
revitalized the movement, Cooper never makes clear ("Protest: A
Smart Peace Movement is MIA," LAT, Sept. 29, 2002). CMLs even speak
of the "Chomsky-left" as a generic class of leftists who are
extremist, angry, reflexively anti-American, etc., and attacking
Chomsky himself is a favorite outing for CMLs. This helps improve
their access to the mainstream media, where in addition to
garnering publicity they are relatively free from critical
response.
One problem with the work of the CMLs is that, not really being
on the left, they have lost sight of what the left is all about.
The left's criterion of success is not the extent to which it is
listened to or heard, irrespective of message content; it is its
success in getting a left message across (and on some issues, like
"free trade," and the merits of overseas military ventures [except
in the heat of battle and under a furious elite propaganda
barrage], the "radical left" is far closer to mainstream opinion
than is the "decent left," and it is listened to on those issues by
ordinary citizens when they can be reached). On issues where it is
in a minority position, a real left does not abandon its position
in order to be acceptable.
Marc Cooper objects to the left's "scold mold" and its
"alienation from its own national institutions," and Gitlin calls
upon the left to be "practical--the stakes are too great for the
luxury of any fundamentalism." One can readily imagine the Cooper,
Gitlin, Walzer, Berube and Hitchens equivalents of the 1850s
explaining to the abolitionists that they must tone down their
message and alter or even drop their anti-racist and anti-slavery
message given the "political realities" and public sentiment. But
then as now a genuine left focuses on the struggle against basic
exploitative and unjust policies and structures--it does not give
up its radical educational and organizing role in order to win
transitory victories and gain access and approval from the
mainstream. Most certainly it does not join militaristic bandwagons
and support wars against distant small targets on the grounds of
the evil being attacked in some particular case.
The CMLs have tried to convey the image that their leftist
enemies have felt no sympathy for the 9/11 victims or have said
that they, or at least the United States, "had it coming." There is
an "odious whiff of 'chickens coming home to roost' that has
permeated much of the left's reaction to Sept. 11" says Marc
Cooper; Michael Walzer speaks of "the barely concealed glee that
the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved." Neither
cite any cases in point, and CMLs mainly assert this without
bothering to offer evidence. They maintain these claims in the face
of almost universal statements by members of the real left that
those killed in the 9/11 events were truly innocent victims who
deserve real grief and sympathy; that this was a terrible act of
terrorism; and that those who planned and facilitated it should be
pursued by all legitimate methods and punished. Some leftists have
said that the attack can surely be explained as a consequence of
U.S. policy abroad, but they don't say that explaining it justifies
it, or, more outrageously, that it makes the U.S. victims proper
targets.
Although the real left was full of sympathy for the 9/11
victims, agreed that the perpetrators should be pursued and
punished, and that the United States had legitimate security
concerns that demanded attention, the Bush administration response
and the threat that it posed was quickly the primary real left
concern. The actual course of events has completely vindicated that
priority. The left considers the United States a dangerous and
aggressive imperial power that has been employing its military and
economic resources to take advantage of the opportunities provided
by the death of the Soviet Union and its own domination to advance
its narrow and mainly corporate interests. It has done this by
pushing a regressive global economic agenda that has done terrible
injury to the global majority, and it has displayed an exceptional
willingness to use force and the threat of force. It also seems
very obvious that the rightwing and business-dominated Bush
administration took advantage of 9/11 with its "war on terror" to
advance its regressive agenda at home and abroad. That would seem
extremely important and deserving of front and center treatment in
discussing 9/11 and its significance.
But for the CMLs, using such a critical framework shows the
left's "reflexive anti-Americanism," its view that "patriotic
feelings are politically incorrect," and "the lingering effects of
the Marxist theory of imperialism" along with a failure to
recognize that "religious motives really count" (Walzer--he means
Islamic religious motives, not the motives of the Christian right,
pro-Israel faction, and market fundamentalists doing their thing in
Washington D.C.). For the CMLs, imperialism is an obsolete notion
and U.S. global power affords no basis for sustained criticism: the
United States fights both just and unjust wars, and the CML aim is
to make it more "responsible" in its use of power. As Gitlin says,
"there is on occasion something to be said for empires," and "the
trick is to use power with justice" ("Empire and Myopia," Dissent,
Spring 2002).
In the wake of 9/11 leftists should have joined together with
their fellow Americans "in recognition of our common perplexity and
vulnerability" (Gitlin). We shouldn't study closely what the United
States has done to arouse widespread hatred with a view toward
working to diminish anti-U.S. terrorism by policy changes. We
shouldn't look at what Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft have
done with 9/11, to forward their agenda at home and do things
abroad that might make anti-U.S. terrorism more likely in the
future. No, we should stay focused on the U.S. victims and how we
may together punish the folks responsible. This is precisely the
perspective Bush and Ashcroft have wanted and successfully
cultivated, with the help of the media and CMLs.
The CMLs are all agreed that the war against Afghanistan was
desirable, reasonably handled, and has had largely beneficent
results; in Gitlin's words, it was "a just, coalitional war of
self-defense." It is interesting to see how uniformly they slither
past the fact that the United States once again violated
international law and ran roughshod over the UN in going to war.
The UN Charter requires UN Security Council approval unless a
military operation is required for self defense, where self defense
means a response to an ongoing attack or one that is imminent. But
like Bush, the CMLs are impatient over such niceties. Thus, Marc
Cooper explained that the left must recognize that bin Laden and al
Qaeda couldn't be neutralized "by international law alone," but a
few sentences later he states that the left must push for "an
authentic internationalism that would include strengthening the
United Nations," which he had just rationalized U.S. bypassing (and
weakening).
The CMLs are all keen on the idea that the United States has a
right to defend itself and that the Afghan war was just plain old
self defense, but also justified by the fact that the Taliban was
a terrible government whose removal was desirable. They never
discuss seriously whether that war, and the "war on terror" of
which it is a part, constitute acts of defense or whether they
might be based on some other motives, like vengeance, the political
need for violent action, and the advantage of a war to the Bush
administration's agenda. They don't discuss the possible connection
of this war to other interests being pursued by a great and
aggressive imperial power. It doesn't seem to occur to them that a
relatively easy victory might facilitate and encourage the Bush
administration's aggressive proclivities. Some of them are not
happy at the current plan to commit aggression against Iraq, but
they fail to grasp that this rush to war is linked to a larger
agenda and was greatly aided by the victory over the Taliban in
Afghanistan.
The CMLs are very cagey in discussing the Israel-Palestine
conflict. They regularly say that "peace in Israel and Palestine"
is desirable and that the United States should help bring it about.
But none of them point out that for decades the United States has
given unconditional support to Israel's occupation and long-term
ethnic cleansing. And none of them have noted that the "war on
terror," supposedly aimed at U.S. self defense, has given Ariel
Sharon carte blanche to step up his assault on Palestine. All of
them are of the view that the Kosovo war was a just war against
ethnic cleansing, but none of them comment on the fact that the
same power that pursued that war now supports an accelerated ethnic
cleansing and state terrorism in the occupied territories. (Of
course, none of them talk about the disclosures that al Qaeda had
been brought in to fight in Bosnia and had ties to the Kosovo
Liberation Army; nor do they discuss the massive ethnic cleansing
of Serbs, Roma, Turks, and Jews in NATO-occupied Kosovo.) They
don't make the connection of Sharon's war to the Afghan War, the
possible forthcoming war against Iraq, and the larger Bush agenda,
which has nothing to do with "self defense."
So the "decent left" is virtually silent on the crushing of the
Palestinians, accelerated by the war on terror. They all agree that
Saddam Hussein's is a "terror regime" (Gitlin), but the word
terrorism is never attached to Sharon and his policies, nor of
course to the United States. The CML's are also extremely blase, if
not openly apologetic, about the "sanctions of mass destruction" in
Iraq, which are estimated to have killed over a million civilians,
far more than at Hiroshima and Nagasaki taken together. Gitlin
expresses "doubt the sanctions against Iraq are effective, let
alone just." Marc Cooper dismisses the claim that they are
"genocidal," saying that "the entire American left supported
similar painful sanctions against the apartheid state of South
Africa" (LAT, Sept. 29, 2002). The ignorance here is monumental--
the vast majority of blacks in South Africa applauded those
sanctions, even if they suffered from them; and the South African
sanctions did not prevent the import of needed medical supplies and
repair of destroyed water sanitation systems, and did not involve
a "process of destroying an entire society" (Denis Halliday).
Notice also that Cooper implies that a sanctions system that
killed a million civilians is properly described as only "painful."
Imagine what he would say if someone brushed off the 3,000 9/11
deaths as merely "painful." He asks, what else can we do but starve
or invade to stop this "dangerous dictator"? He takes as given the
official U.S. version that Saddam's weaponry poses a threat that
will not be contained as it is everywhere, by the counter-threat of
weaponry held by others. His indignation about this dictator's
theoretical threat contrasts markedly with his failure to say a
word about how we might control the actual use of advanced weaponry
by Ariel Sharon in Palestine. But it serves the imperial state's
agenda extremely well.
It is now very clear that in Afghanistan the United States
targeted literally hundreds of civilian villages and sites where al
Qaeda or Taliban MIGHT be located; that, as the New York Times
finally acknowledged, many civilians died when airstrikes hit
"precisely the target they were aimed at...because in eagerness to
kill Qaeda and Taliban fighters, Americans did not carefully
distinguish between civilian and military targets" (Dexter Filkins,
"Flaws in U.S. Air War Left Hundreds of Civilian Dead," NYT, July
21, 2002). Marc Herold has provided compelling evidence in support
of this targeting claim, and his minimum estimate of civilians
killed directly by U.S. bombs is some 3,100. Many thousands more
were injured or traumatized, some dying with a lag, and still
further thousands died of hunger, disease and cold in refugee camps
to which they fled from bombed villages.
After having castigated the left for insufficient attention to
the U.S. victims of 9/11, it is notable how unconcerned or
apologetic the CMLs have been about civilian casualties of the
Afghan war. Hitchens has written gross apologetics for the bombing,
taking Pentagon claims of care for civilians at face value, while
suggesting that Herold's figures might be inflated by bias (Boston
Globe, Sept. 8, 2002; The Nation, Dec. 17, 2001). Marc Cooper has
also denounced Herold's figures as "unverified" and probably
"false," in sharp contrast to his reaction to reports of U.S. 9/11
deaths where the focus was on the victims, not on whether the
number was larger or smaller than reported. Michael Walzer also
knows that Herold was "aiming at as high a figure as possible," and
that the left fails to make the basic moral distinction between
"premeditated murder and unintended killings." But Walzer fails to
grasp the elementary notion that bombing hundreds of sites
overflowing with civilians because an al Qaeda soldier might be
there is as premeditated a form of killing as shooting each of them
individually.
Possibly most blatant is Michael Berube, who finds the Afghan
attack "laudable" and the negative reactions of the "Chomsky-left"
simply "morally odious." He cites Cynthia Peters' statement that
the U.S. crimes there differed from 9/11 only in being "many times
larger." Berube finds this morally odious because it compares "the
hijackers deliberate slaughter of civilians" with "the U.S.
military response." This is wonderfully evasive rhetoric: a bin
Laden spokesperson could have contrasted the "hijackers attack on
the symbols of U.S. imperialist power" with "the U.S. aggression
against Afghanistan relying on firepower rained on innocent
villagers." That would have matched Berube's rhetorical ploy.
Berube's "U.S. military response" included the previously mentioned
targeting of hundreds of civilian villages, using cluster bombs and
other ferocious weapons, that "deliberately killed" by planned
military tactics more than 3,000 Afghan civilians. The self-
proclaimed "progressive" doesn't bat an eyelash at these 3,000-plus
deaths. He even pretends that any bombing deaths were only
"intelligence failures" rather than a result of systematic
targeting of "maybe" al Qaeda hideouts (he mentions the Karakak
bombing as "an atrocity," but an "intelligence failure"--and he
mentions no other basis of bombing deaths.)
In an even more egregious bit of apologetics for killing Afghan
civilians, Berube castigates Chomsky, now "so difficult to defend,"
with his "repellant mixture of hysteria and hauteur" ("Peace
Puzzle: Why the left can't get Iraq right," Boston Globe, Sept. 15,
2002). He cites Chomsky's statement pointing out that "The
U.S...demanded that Pakistan terminate the food and other supplies
that are keeping at least some of the starving and suffering people
of Afghanistan alive." Chomsky went on to suggest possible mass
deaths based on this disruption of supplies. This was the repellant
hysteria and hauteur. In a brief letter of reply, Chomsky pointed
out that he was reporting New York Times statements on what the
United States was demanding of Pakistan (closing the border and
preventing food trucks going into Afghanistan), and what horrified
officials of a number of international aid organizations on the
scene were saying might well be the consequences of the forced
closure of the borders. Berube was repelled by this expression of
concern over the possible deadly effects of curtailment of the food
supply that were anticipated by international aid personnel, but
the policy itself and its consequences didn't faze him at all.
Berube could overlook all these petty details of civilians
killed and starved because, "on balance, the routing of the Taliban
might have struck a blow, however ambiguous and poorly executed,
for human freedom." This rationale, common among the CMLs, will be
a handy justification for any attack on any repressive state--
Arundhati Roy points out that such a rationale could justify an
attack on India to strike a blow for the untouchables; but it could
also rationalize attacking Israel to end the occupation, or the
United States itself to end the drug war's war on the black
population and free the million prisoners of that war.
Berube tells us the war "Might have struck a blow," but then
again it might not, as the Northern Alliance, another terrorist
warlord group was put in power, war-lordism has returned in the
regions, the drug business flourishes again, and the United States,
having hit the poor country with bombs, once again runs. This is
the rational and decent left--bomb away because it "might" be a
blow for freedom.
Berube, like the other CMLs, isn't bothered by the flaunting of
international law, or the United States taking it upon itself to
determine the political constitution of another country by
violence--it doesn't strike him that this may be incompatible with
true freedom and self-determination and may yield a neo-colonial
external control. He is not worried about precedents in such
interventions, or that its success might feed on itself and lead to
successor wars to "strike blows for freedom."
The notion that the war in Afghanistan is a phase of imperial
action and reflects a broader and uglier agenda is outside Berube's
framework of thought. Like the other CMLs, he believes that the
Afghan and Kosovo wars were good wars, with humanitarian ends, and
that we must push the leadership toward doing good abroad: "the
United States cannot be a beacon of freedom and justice to the
world if it conducts itself as an empire." Berube would perhaps
think it foolish to say that "the lion cannot rule as king of the
jungle unless it conducts itself like a king, and behaves
responsibly." After all, the lion's behavior toward antelopes flows
from its nature. But for the CML's an empire--or at least their
own--need not behave like an empire; it can "use power for
justice." The United States as presently organized and run has the
capacity to treat people abroad nicely and not serve its own TNCs
and military industrial complex--what its leaders need is good
advice from Michael Berube and the "rational left" to get
straightened out.