Leftists Who Love the War Too Much

Greil Marcus is a discerning radical humanist. So it was a shock to pick up the progressive paper "First of the Month" and find him dissing leftist intellectuals for their skepticism about the war on terror. Marcus is not the only member of the counterculturati to find the hawk within. Dan Savage, the shoot-from-the-hip sex columnist, has lately become hip to the shoot. Then there's Christopher Hitchens, the ex-socialist who has found an occasion in 9-11 to revise his ideological profile. He is now a latter-day incarnation of the Cold War liberal. Hitchens's recent homage to George Orwell includes a remarkable defense of his work for the British government during the McCarthy era, when Orwell supplied lists of suspected com-symps, dutifully noting who was homosexual--or Jewish. Hey, says Hitchens, Orwell wasn't lying.

I can't think of any comparable example of bad faith among the neohawks, but I do have some thoughts about what makes them run. For one thing, there's a real temptation to leave the chronic depression and ample masochism of the left behind. The war on terror can seem like an opening to build a muscular new progressivism with its feet on the ground. And speaking of feet, there's an undeniable satisfaction in kicking a masochist while he's down. Among the many rewards for sadism these days is the power it confers--and for progressives power is in terribly short supply. Finally, never underestimate the appeal to a critic of being taken seriously, and that means declaring your independence from left-wing "orthodoxies."

This is not to say that the thinking of these neohawks can be dismissed as status anxiety. The danger is real and their sense of urgency is appropriate. Hitchens is correct to point out that the militant Islamists are fascists. Marcus is right to recoil from Noam Chomsky's reductive response to 9-11 (though he's guilty himself of a reductive response to Susan Sontag). But there is much more to the anti-war movement than ideologically driven rigidity. There are plenty of pragmatists arguing for peace, and a sound moral case for standing down. It's not the critique but the contempt for their dovish peers that reveals the neohawks' denial.

When Ron Rosenbaum lambastes anti-U.S. peace marchers--and uses his disdain for them as an excuse to declare his severance from the left--he represses his memory of the Vietnam peace movement, which also had its share of self-righteous fools. Such amnesia is a prerequisite for breaking ranks, which has become a post-9-11 ritual among pomo pundits. Like the revisionist liberals who became neocons in the 1970s, these neohawks invoke the blessed memory of Orwell or Hannah Arendt, as Marcus does when he argues that the situation produced by 9-11 is entirely new. Therefore, the knowledge gleaned from Vietnam--and from all the disastrous campaigns of American imperialism over the last century--is to be disregarded. In order to respond to the present danger, we must forget what we know.

What we know about U.S. foreign policy is that it played a crucial part in the rise of Muslim militance. You don't have to condone the attacks of 9-11 to understand that suicide bombers are driven by a response to real conditions, and America had much to do with creating those conditions. Now we find ourselves in the unenviable (but not unfamiliar) position of bolstering dictatorships in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt that suppress a democratic opposition--because it is Islamist.

The Bush doctrine comes veiled in an assurance that the societies we create in the countries we invade will be democratic and moderate. But how is that possible in the current climate? Already there are rumblings about returning a king to Iraq. Shades of the Shah, whom we foisted on Iran after we helped overthrow its democratically elected leader in 1953. We know where the Peacock Throne led. How can anyone believe that the U.S., which gave chemical weapons to Saddam (in order to strengthen his position against Iran) and armed the fundamentalists in Afghanistan (in order to build a bulwark against the Soviets), is now able to manage a region embroiled in the consequences of its machinations?