Why Is the World Upside Down?
Nick Cohen of The Observer has written a book about the failings of the far left in its foreign policy called What’s Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way. There is an excerpt of it here, and another one here. It is an unrelenting and eloquent call for certain segments of the left to take account for their hypocrisy. In the same way Andrew Sullivan, a conservative, flawlessly points out the double standards and failings of the right, Cohen, a liberal, does the same for the left.
First, he recounts the way the left would weep over Saddam Hussein’s crimes right up until the moment Western military powers stood up in resistance to them:
The apparently sincere commitment to help Iraqis vanished the moment Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and became America’s enemy. At the time, I didn’t think about where the left was going. I could denounce the hypocrisy of a West which made excuses for Saddam one minute and called him a ‘new Hitler’ the next, but I didn’t dwell on the equal and opposite hypocrisy of a left which called Saddam a ‘new Hitler’ one minute and excused him the next. All liberals and leftists remained good people in my mind. Asking hard questions about any of them risked giving aid and comfort to the Conservative enemy and disturbing my own certainties. I would have gone on anti-war demonstrations when the fighting began in 1991, but the sight of Arabs walking around London with badges saying ‘Free Kuwait’ stopped me. When they asked why it was right to allow Saddam to keep Kuwaitis as his subjects, a part of me conceded that they had a point.
Then he jumps forward to the current Iraq war as the hypocrisy continued:
I waited for a majority of the liberal left to offer qualified support for a new Iraq, and I kept on waiting, because it never happened – not just in Britain, but also in the United States, in Europe, in India, in South America, in South Africa … in every part of the world where there was a recognisable liberal left. They didn’t think again when thousands of Iraqis were slaughtered by ‘insurgents’ from the Baath party, which wanted to re-establish the dictatorship, and from al-Qaeda, which wanted a godly global empire to repress the rights of democrats, the independent-minded, women and homosexuals. They didn’t think again when Iraqis defied the death threats and went to vote on new constitutions and governments. Eventually, I grew tired of waiting for a change that was never going to come and resolved to find out what had happened to a left whose benevolence I had taken for granted.
Then comes the knock-out passage in which he goes beyond Iraq and spells out the deeper sickness that has insinuated itself into much of the left:
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.
They’re good questions, and it’s exactly what makes me squeamish about today’s liberalism.
I’ve spoken quite highly of Barack Obama on this blog and elsewhere, but if any Democrat wants to seal up my vote right now, he or she will assure me not only of a commitment to the withdrawal of troops from Iraq (a policy I agree with), but a commitment to ensure a significant presence in Iraq in the form of massive amounts of foreign aid and diplomatic assistance. Too much of the rhetoric from Democratic presidential contenders sounds like abandonment of Iraqis and of the decidedly liberal cause of developing a thriving democracy there. While all of them eagerly (and rightfully) point out that there is no military solution to the ongoing struggles in Iraq, none of them are particularly eager to suggest that there is a non-military solution other than shoving everything off onto the nascent Iraqi government, which isn’t a solution at all. Most importantly, there continues to be an absence in the Democratic Party of a leading figure who believes in both the importance and the possibility of transforming the Middle East.
As each of the Democratic presidential contenders flesh out the details of their respective Iraq policies, I wait and hope for one of them to drop the hypocrisy Cohen so accurately illuminates and pick up the mantle of true liberalism.
Comment by Brandon on 21 January 2007 at 8:54 pm:
Yeah…seriously what the hell was that? A book plug? Alright…
Comment by Karen Pierce on 21 January 2007 at 9:09 pm:
I’ve noticed that hypocrisy from the far left too. Maybe extremists, right or left, tend to be irrational. Politicians should ignore them. Joe Biden has a plan, Hillary would too if she didn’t have to pander to the far left. Democrats who aren’t running for president, such as Madeleine Albright, would never suggest abandoning Iraq. I think that Richardson guy from New Mexico will sound reasonable too.
Comment by Brian Urlacher on 21 January 2007 at 11:38 pm:
Lovie Smith for president!
Comment by kofi the wayne on 22 January 2007 at 12:21 pm:
if any Democrat wants to seal up my vote right now, he or she will assure me not only of a commitment to the withdrawal of troops from Iraq (a policy I agree with), but a commitment to ensure a significant presence in Iraq in the form of massive amounts of foreign aid and diplomatic assistance. Too much of the rhetoric from Democratic presidential contenders sounds like abandonment of Iraqis and of the decidedly liberal cause of developing a thriving democracy there. While all of them eagerly (and rightfully) point out that there is no military solution to the ongoing struggles in Iraq, none of them are particularly eager to suggest that there is a non-military solution other than shoving everything off onto the nascent Iraqi government, which isn’t a solution at all. Most importantly, there continues to be an absence in the Democratic Party of a leading figure who believes in both the importance and the possibility of transforming the Middle East.
I am doubled over in laughter. This is hilarious on so many levels. Let’s break it down:
will assure me [] of a commitment to the withdrawal of troops from Iraq (a policy I agree with)
Ok. So far so good. Consistent. No flipity-flopity or anything going on.
a commitment to ensure a significant presence in Iraq in the form of massive amounts of foreign aid and diplomatic assistance.
In my best Wayne’s World extreme close-up impression: Woooooaaahh! What in the?! You want to pull the troops out of Iraq but ensure a significant presence? This quagmire? This civil war that we have no business involving ourselves in? You want to stay involved by dangling golden carrots exerting diplomatic pressure? You lament the billions we’ve wasted on the war; all those billions that could have gone to Katrina rebuilding, or education, or whatever other social program. Now you want to throw money down at an unwinnable war? What a drastic policy shift. What could be the cause of this?
Too much of the rhetoric from Democratic presidential contenders sounds like abandonment of Iraqis and of the decidedly liberal cause of developing a thriving democracy there.
Ready, Garth? Woooooaaahh! Developing a thriving democracy?! Developing a thriving democracy?! I thought Dubya was shoving a thriving democracy down the unwilling throat of millions of Iraqis. I thought Dubya was trying to remake parts of the world in styles they were not comfortable sporting. I thought we were empire building and attempting to prop up false government so that we could secure allies in the region and – most importantly – oil. Dubya talked a nice talk about bringing democracy to the Iraqis but you wanted nothing to do with it. You wanted had been lied to about WMDs. You didn’t want blood for oil. You wanted out. Now suddenly you and Dubya are sitting on the same side of the building democracy table?
there continues to be an absence in the Democratic Party of a leading figure who believes in both the importance and the possibility of transforming the Middle East.
Woooaahh. Again with the empire building. Now it’s not just Iraq. It’s the entire middle east. I thought Dubya and the Haliburton Party were going to be the ones tumbling us into new messes with Syria and Iran and the rest of the region. Not only did we need to get out of Iraq completely and let them work things out for themselves, we needed to pass laws specifically prohibiting Dubya from getting an itchy trigger finger and falling into Iran by mistake. Now we need to recognize the greater goal of transforming the middle east? A hardcore liberal is promoting this? An Obama or a Hillary is going to lead us in this? Hahaha!
You start off with quotes about the hypocrisy of the the modern liberal. You pine for your party leaders to throw off this cloak of hypocrisy and take up ‘true liberalism.’ And somewhere in the middle you do a 180 on every middle east issue save the troop withdrawl. Seriously, is this entire piece a joke? Did I miss that this was intended to be an obvious funny and over react? Hilarious. Party on, Brian.
Comment by Brian on 22 January 2007 at 1:32 pm:
Kofi,
Uh…I hate to take the wind out from under your wings, but I think you’re somewhat misinformed about me. I actually wholeheartedly supported the invasion of Iraq and have written about that support on several occasions, for the very reason that I support transforming the Middle East. I think the war has been bungled pretty badly, and my confidence in the policy decision in general has been shaken, but you can’t really accuse me of the hypocrisy you’re accusing me of here. Sorry.
Comment by Matthew on 22 January 2007 at 3:39 pm:
“if any Democrat wants to seal up my vote right now, he or she will assure me not only of a commitment to the withdrawal of troops from Iraq (a policy I agree with), but a commitment to ensure a significant presence in Iraq in the form of massive amounts of foreign aid and diplomatic assistance.”
Withdraw the troops WHEN?
And what form do you want the “massive amounts of foreign aid and diplomatic assistance” to take? Unless you’re talking about dropping parcels of food and medicine from the sky (which isn’t really a good way to help), then we’re probably looking at people on the ground. And since you don’t want it to be a military presence (because you favor a troop withdrawal, remember?), then it will likely be civilian people on the ground, trying to help.
So, are you proposing taking military personnel out of a dangerous situation and putting civilians in their place?
Comment by kofi the MSM pundit on 22 January 2007 at 5:04 pm:
Brian: I have neither the time nor desire to go back through every post and comment you’ve made here or to dig through DI archives to confirm that you supported the war and have always been in favor of establishing democracy, so I will just take the claim at face value. Even so, you are still asking for yet another flipity-flopity by your party leadership and a vast number of their supportive MSM pundits. And as Matthew pointed out, your idea of an ideal approach is schizophrenic. Not to mention expensive. Remember the hurricane victims, the social programs, the schools, the children? You’ve gotta think of the children. ;)
But sure, maybe I’m not familiar with every word you’ve ever written and maybe your plan is not hypocritical. But it would still be insanely hypocritical if put forward and embraced by the Democrat Party.
Comment by Karen Pierce on 22 January 2007 at 6:37 pm:
Kofi–I can verify that Brian supported the war from the beginning since I knew him back then. He supported it because spreading democracy was a good idea, not because of WMD.
Tom–no, I wouldn’t ignore the Abolitionists or the Founding Fathers. Maybe extremist isn’t the right word to describe the far left. I have a friend who is very far left and she only sees the down side of America. She sees white people who massacred Indians, junk food junkies who zone out on stupid TV shows, shop till they drop and pollute the environment. She’s a socialist, she’s anti-war, anti-corporation, anti-competition, anti-globalization, anti-Republican, and anti-Bush. She thinks America has brought on terrorism because we supported corrupt regimes in the past and haven’t rid the world of poverty. I don’t think she hates America, but she definately thinks it’s on the wrong track and she blames Bush and Republicans for that.
Comment by Brandon on 22 January 2007 at 6:56 pm:
“She thinks America has brought on terrorism because we supported corrupt regimes in the past”
…and the flaw in this reasoning is…?
Comment by Ozaksut on 22 January 2007 at 11:44 pm:
Brian, I’m sorry to say I find you really off-base with this one.
To start, I’ve got to say that Cohen’s appraisal of the liberal left is aimed directly between fictional straw-liberals and the leftest leftists of the left – modern followers of the Weathermen and generally people that Greens find too liberal. The number of these people in the US is at most barely into 5 digits and fails to describe the vast majority of those of us on the liberal left.
Now, if Cohen’s intended point is that the left ought to distance itself from its leftest leftists, it seems like a real misattribution. You’d be hard-pressed to state that the problem with Democrats over the past 10 years is that they’ve been too dovish. When the current Prez front-runner is still saying her IWR vote wasn’t a mistake, the Dem party isn’t remotely listening too closely to the left edge of the political spectrum. More importantly, trying to purge Dennis Kucinich from the party is a real waste of time when he’s not going to be on the ballot come Nov. ‘08.
Also, the belly-moaning about insufficient glee over the elections is just as ridiculous. It’s no particular surprise to me that most of the left wasn’t joining in the euphoria over the Iraqi elections – not because of BDS (a delightfully asinine diagnosis usually more applicable to the accuser than the accused), but rather because given the ongoing insurgency, it was apparent then as now that elections and a government weren’t all that was necessary to create a functioning, stable democracy.
Now, if you can point me to A-, B-, or C-list leftist bloggers defending al-Sadr, bin Laden, or Hussein for their actions, there’s evidence. But asserting that a stable dictatorship was safer for Iraq’s citizens than the civil war they’re currently in doesn’t constitute a defense of Saddam Hussein, and false choices like that are the hallmark of pathetic, bullying rhetoric.
On the topic of false choices, we can see Kofi offering Talking Point A, conflating troop redeployment or withdrawal with giving up on Iraq altogether. No front-running Presidential candidate in the Dem party is advocating a strategy of leaving Iraq troop-wise as well as otherwise. Following such a strategy is a ridiculous abdication of realistic foreign policy, something we all should strive to get back to.
Spreading democracy when you don’t have the necessary ingredients isn’t a liberal value, it’s lunacy.
Comment by tet on 23 January 2007 at 8:41 am:
Well, actually, democracy, let alone spreading it, is as evil as it is crazy.
Remember–democracy is two men and a woman voting on who gets raped.
Half the people in a given country are below average in intelligence. Given the opportunity, they will invariably vote themselves “bread and circuses” until the nation collapses under the tax burden of a consumer culture with no wage-earners.
Personally, I figure the qualifications for voting should be an intelligence one or two SDs higher than the median.
Tom
Comment by Brandon on 23 January 2007 at 9:46 am:
Wow Tom that’s not elitist…
See I tend to think that people can be duped, but they aren’t flat out stupid. Most people are very aware of the situation they’re in and can point to at least one probable source at least some of their problems. That there is vast diversity of opinion in this country simply shows that people manage to think. Granted I don’t think they think deeply about many issues, but in a general sense I’d say most people “get it.”
Now I don’t know where all you’ve been or with whom you’ve interacted in your lifetime, but I’d say that it’s been the rare person I’ve met who didn’t have at least a general idea of their situation (I’m mostly referring to people in rather bad places here) and didn’t realize the problems they faced. If voting, in it’s general sense is to advance one’s interests then I’d say they have as much a right to vote as elitist libertarians like yourself. You want to protect what you have, they want to get what they need.
Comment by Brian on 23 January 2007 at 9:51 am:
Ozaksut,
A few things. First, I think you’re right that Cohen creates some straw men in a few instances in the segments I quoted above: the denial of Serbian concentration camps, the Jewish conspiracy theorizing, the excusing of suicide bombers. If he’s talking about just the group of people that does those things, he is cheapening his argument and singling out a few nuts to draw conclusions about a much larger group.
I also think that this isn’t so much a criticism of the Democratic Party as it is of liberal-thinking people across the country, and I think there are far more of them here than you might think. Over the course of the past four years, I’ve had plenty of debates about the war in Iraq, and by an overwhelming majority the single most common arguments against it I heard took the form of (1) “Who are we to tell other countries how to run their governments?”, (2) “That part of the world is incapable of liberal democracy”, or (3) “America needs to deal with its own problems before we can go off and solve anybody else’s.” Agree with those arguments or not, they are undoubtedly not at home among what forty years ago would have been called a liberal ideology. Occasionally I would encounter arguments I could accept: “Is war really the best means of ensuring the spread of liberty?”, “Is Iraq really the best country to invade?”, “Shouldn’t the United States wait for a stronger international coalition?”, “Isn’t President Bush misleading the American people into war with talk of WMDs and terrorist connections?”, etc. I can accept all of these arguments, and agree with some of them, because they can still rest on the assumption that free societies are objectively better than unfree ones. But these arguments were almost never put forward in isolation from the first set of arguments, and I eventually came to conclude that the liberals I was talking to–liberals who were members of the ACLU, who were ready to march if Bush made even a headfake toward claiming some kind of executive authority, who claimed not to have any understanding of those who would advocate anything less than absolute equality for gays and women and minorities–didn’t really care about liberty at all, at least not enough to shed their righteous anger against the GOP long enough to join together in righteous anger against the unequivocal enemies of freedom holding onto power in so much of the Muslim world and elsewhere.
Maybe a year back or so, one of my professors taught me a fun word: infracaninophile. It looks intimidating, but it’s pretty easy to break down into common Latin roots: infra, meaning below or under; canino, meaning dog; and phile, meaning lover of. Lover of underdogs. I fear that’s what many liberals today have turned into: a group of people that looks at every issue through the lens of who has power and who doesn’t and sides with whomever doesn’t.
Maybe their numbers aren’t as large as I fear; maybe my presence on a college campus surrounded by academics has tricked me into thinking this line of thought is more common than it is. But even if their numbers are small, my concern is not so much over the power the wield. The far left forms the foundation of liberal thinking just as the far right forms the foundation of conservative thinking. And just as the far right has hijacked truly conservative thinking in the form of religious conservativism, I fear truly liberal thinking is being similarly hijacked. It is such an offensive form of hypocrisy that I probably make a bigger deal out of it than it is, but I am endlessly frustrated by those who vigorously oppose George Bush’s infringements on OUR constitutional liberties and hardly bat an eye at the constant and overwhelming infringements of liberty elsewhere in the world. It is so fundamentally NOT liberal and yet it has come to define the left end of the spectrum. It’s hard to stomach sometimes.
Comment by erik on 23 January 2007 at 9:59 am:
thats funny. i would make the same argument to the contrary–that centrist “liberals” who allow themselves to have everything they want to offer the electorate completely neutered in the name of bipartisanship or out of fears of being called radical (laughable in this country) are the ones who have left a bad taste in the mouths of many people who would otherwise be receptive to real leftism. of course the right will still say you are too radical, only now you have no real solutions to offer people.
Of course i say all this with the assumption that the democrats ultimately want to serve working people rather than just consolidate power. not my belief.
will try to come back to the greater part of the post, how the left coddles dictators later. think it is a bit too black-and-white, with-us-or-against-us, but again this is an example of allowing the right to set the agenda, frame the debate and neuter your already weak position. most serious analysts and academics (the same who to my great surprise basically predicted the situation today) who were againSt the war from the beginning saw it as imperial maintenance and so the idea that we were supporting mr hussein or opposing the march of freedom was simply absurd. neither choice was good, but we were only given two. the same was true during the sanctions period, when madeline albright, faced with the LOW estimate of 500,000 deaths due to the sanctions regime said it was “worth the price” to get saddam out of power. i’ll try to go into this more later, perhaps at the uic library after meeting with some professors there.
Comment by tet on 23 January 2007 at 11:12 am:
Erik’s last two posts are right on the money.
Brandon, it’s not that I have a lot of trouble with people at the median in intelligence in America. Even though a two-SD difference in intelligence is as large a gap between the truly intelligent and the average as it is between an average person and someone with Down’s Syndrome, people with average intelligence have been part of this country since its inception. We have, however, been protected from them since we are a representative republic.
The problem with democracy (of which the Founders were well aware) is that understanding what would be good for oneself or one’s family if different than understanding WHAT IS GOOD FOR ONE’S NATION.
People of all intelligences seem to do remarkably well when they run their own lives.
It is the mob’s impostion of their own desires upon a coercive entity that becomes the problem. (and another reason that I am undeniably opposed to both coercive governments and democracy)
You seem to be equating folks with lower intelligence as either lower class or oppressed somehow. Are you sure that there’s a correlation there? I’ve had wonderful philosophical discussions with the guys on the line when I worked in a factory–there were some really smart cookies.
Sometimes I think you worry way too much about the types of oppression in society and not enough about opportunity for the individual.
I’m elitist in that I believe that I understand politics and history somewhere in the 99% percentile (if there was some kind of accurate test for it). However, I cannot play either NBA basketball or the oboe as a member of the Chicago Symphony.
It would be as foolish for me to try out for those venues as it is for the average American to try to make intelligent decisions in the realm of economics, politics or interpreting history. This is why the Founders planned for an intelligent, coercion-limited elite to serve in Washington as their representatives.
Tom
Comment by Brian on 23 January 2007 at 3:12 pm:
Erik,
Then what do you suggest be done about tyranny in the world? You’ve scratched sanctions and war off the list. I’m not asking in a smarmy, “well, if you’re so smart” kind of way. I’m genuinely curious what you think would have been the best way to deal with the misery Saddam Hussein inflicted on his people, or, for that matter, the best way to deal with dictators of all stripes around the world.