Varieties of recantation

Yesterday the NY Times Magazine ran something of a mea culpa by Michael Ignatieff, a regular contributor to the magazine in whose pages he had stumped for the war in Iraq. Based on the title of the article–”Getting Iraq Wrong“–one might surmise that he has had a change of heart. However, the “wrong” is a reference to how the war was carried out, not whether it was wrong on principle. A recent documentary titled “No End in Sight” encapsulates this outlook.

Another NY Times Magazine regular also recanted a while back. David Rieff, son of Susan Sontag, seemed to have people like Ignatieff in mind in his 2006 Nation Magazine review of Larry Diamond’s “Squandered Victory” and David L. Phillips’s “Losing Iraq”, two books that tried to figure out what went wrong in Iraq. Needless to say, if the invasion of Iraq had proceeded as smoothly as the invasions of Panama or Grenada, such books would have never been written. In the final paragraph of his review, Rieff challenges the right of the US to act as the world’s policeman:

The contributions both Diamond and Phillips make to understanding what has taken place in Iraq are considerable. But there is a sense in which one of their most important contributions is inadvertent. For both their books illustrate and exemplify the extraordinary consensus about the duty to intervene that has arisen over the course of the post-cold war world. We have not yet begun to pay the price for this–not because we do it ineptly but rather because it rarely seems possible except on the far fringes of the political right and left, what with the “historic compromise” between the Bush Administration and the human rights movement over humanitarian intervention, if not over torture, rendition, the Patriot Act and myriad other issues, to have a serious conversation about whether the United States has any business trying to create democracies by force of arms. Instead, the consensus not just of these two writers and activists but of the great and the good from the Kennedy School of Government, to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, to the thirty-eighth floor of the UN, to 10 Downing Street seems to be that we–whether the “we” in question proves to be the United States, the UN or that mythical entity, the international community–must learn to do this sort of thing better, more effectively, perhaps more humanely. It is not only L. Paul Bremer who suffers from hubris.

David Rieff

The other intellectual, loosely speaking, who decided that the war has gone wrong is Johann Hari, the baby-faced British journalist who has been involved in a major dust-up with fellow British journalist Nick Cohen, who like Paul Berman and Christopher Hitchens, still insists that the war was a good thing.

Although Hari has more in common with Ignatieff than he does with Rieff, he is really good at puncturing the pretensions of the “decent left,” a function no doubt of his having gone through that experience. In his review of Nick Cohen’s “What’s Left,” an obnoxious defense of human rights imperialism, Hari hones in on Cohen’s posturing:

But the pro-war left also looked to a left-wing tradition that had fallen dormant: “they argued for a self-consciously 1930s Victor Lazlo left rather than a 1960s flower-power one. Quoting Orwell, they called for a left that is aware there are enemies that may need to be fought rather than hugged into submission.”

Somehow the notion of pampered journalists like Cohen or Hitchens risking their lives like the characters in “Casablanca,” or like Orwell who dodged fascist bullets in Spain, is enough to make one laugh out loud, which was Hari’s obvious intention. Cohen and Hitchens have far more in common with NY Times reporter Frank L. Kluckhohn, who served up encomiums to the fascist dictator in the 1930s than they do with Orwell.

Johann Hari

For Hari, any comparisons between Orwell and Cohen are meretricious:

Cohen, ostentatious claimer of George Orwell’s mantle, has forgotten the quality that made Orwell great – the power to face inconvenient truths. He simply averts his gaze from the burning vistas of Iraq that contradict his thesis, turning towards George Galloway to give him another well-deserved – but increasingly irrelevant – spit in the face.

Leaving aside the question of Orwell’s more dubious aspects, which included snitching on British reds, Hari’s contemptuous reference to Galloway betrays a hostility to the left that is found in the very book he is dismissing. His main complaint with Cohen is not so much that he opposes the radical movement, but that he does so ineffectively. This was the main complaint that cold war liberals like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. had against Senator Joe McCarthy. If you were going to fight the subversives, you had to do it intelligently.

Hari’s review contains a swipe at Richard Seymour of Lenin’s Tomb, who occupies a place in the decent left’s world that is almost as notorious as Galloway’s. Hari writes:

One of the most popular left-wing blogs in Britain, Lenin’s Tomb, goes further, viciously scorning Muslims who fight back against Islamic fundamentalism. Even though it is written by an atheist writer who enjoys alcohol, female company and free speech, it has ridiculed Muslim women who attend freedom of speech rallies as “Uncle Toms”, and condemned Muslims who have “comfortable upper-middle class” lives because they aren’t “interested in subjecting [themselves] to the ascetic demands of religion.” Cohen’s thesis applies with laser-accuracy to these parts of the left, and it is here that his critique is most powerful: they have indeed become reflexive defenders of the far right.

Richard, who is probably the world’s leading expert on the “decent left” and who was considering writing a book for a top-notch radical publishing house (that unfortunately likes to rob its authors blind), responded to Hari thusly:

I don’t viciously scorn Muslims who fight back against “Islamic fundamentalism”, because that can be a very good thing to do. I do viciously scorn all those who misrepresent and vilify Islam in the service of imperialism, because that is a bad and wicked thing to do. I don’t condemn Muslims who live comfortable upper middle class lives and aren’t interested in the ascetic demands of religion. I mentioned in this post about the neocon American Islamic Congress that one member of it was probably of that ilk, but I did not and do not think that being in that position merits special criticism. What I did think at the time, and what I still think now, is that “being determines consciousness”, and that one’s class perspective is likely to regulate one’s political purview.

Lenin’s Tomb also responds to Ignatieff’s recantation today:

In fact, Ignatieff shows no sign of understanding why he was wrong. He says that he “let emotion carry me past the hard questions, like: Can Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites hold together in peace what Saddam Hussein held together by terror?” Which is to claim that Iraqis have proven themselves to be incapable of self-government and should be ruled through terror – an appropriate conclusion from the Wilsonian airhead. Almost 90% of the essay isn’t about Iraq, of course: it is an extended, self-serving rumination on the nature of politics and the political career. He even hints that he may not be entirely sincere about anything he says: “Nothing is personal in politics, because politics is theater. It is part of the job to pretend to have emotions that you do not actually feel.” But nevertheless, he is “worthy of trust” because he has not had a “charmed life” like the American president, and is a man of sorrow “acquainted with grief, as the prophet Isaiah says”. Isaiah did indeed say this (53:3) – about the Messiah. What exactly is Ignatieff trying to tell us?

Now the longest in American history, the war in Iraq has long lost any support based on the original justification of “spreading democracy” except among the most hardened ideologues, including Bush, Cheney and Christopher Hitchens who at least has the excuse of being drunk most of the time.

The ground has shifted perceptibly among ruling class opinion. There is no longer a gung-ho attitude but a kind of “white man’s burden” that is often expressed in terms of “you break it, you fix it.” Immediate withdrawal is opposed because it will lead to greater chaos, etc. Not two years ago, you could hear this argument from the likes of Juan Cole who advocated high altitude bombing of the insurgents in Iraq to keep them at bay. Nowadays, you will find this sentiment expressed in the pages of the Washington Times rather than in any respectable liberal journal.

It is difficult to anticipate how this war will finally come to an end, with a whimper or a bang. Meanwhile, the economic contradictions of late capitalism in the US continue unabated with Wall Street openly worried about the consequences of the unfolding credit crunch. The Soviet Union went through major structural changes partially under the impact of its adventure in Afghanistan. Let’s hope that US imperialism will also be forced to go through some wrenching changes under the blows of the heroic Iraqi resistance, even when its political goals are often clouded in obscurity. What remains clear, however, is that US imperialism must be resisted whatever the character of the resistance. As Leon Trotsky once remarked:

Of course, we are for the defeat of Italy and the victory of Ethiopia… When war is involved, for us it is not a question of who is ‘better’, the Negus or Mussolini; rather, it is a question of the relationship of classes and the fight of an underdeveloped nation for independence against imperialism.