There’s a discussion up at Slate, involving Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens and Kenneth M. Pollack among others, and billed as Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War (with follow-on page here). Paul Berman:
Are these strategic goals so impossible to see? On Sept. 10, 2001, the totalitarian wave in the Muslim world appeared to be at high tide. Many millions of people did think so, at least, and therefore felt inclined to give the various tendencies of the larger movement their support. In quite a few countries, the most gruesome tyrannies were in power, in the name of sundry versions of the totalitarian ideology. There seemed to be no prospect, none whatsoever, of seeing those tyrannies overthrown.
And today? The larger totalitarian movement in the Muslim world has been dealt two very powerful blows. The Taliban no longer rules Afghanistan and has been reduced to a guerrilla insurgency. The Baath in Iraq has likewise been reduced to a guerrilla insurgency. Some 45 million Afghanis and Iraqis, who had previously been confined to the lowest ranks of hell, are now engaged in a very tough fight – a fight in which there is at least a plausible hope of achieving a better society, animated by liberal values in a suitably Muslim version.
On Sept. 10, 2001, liberal-minded people in those two countries had no reason to think that life would ever be better. Today the liberal-minded Afghanis and Iraqis have been given a somewhat shaky boost, but a boost, nonetheless, which can only encourage their fellow-thinkers in other parts of the Muslim world. Strategic goals? These are the strategic goals.
Why don’t people understand these goals and accomplishments? (And, therefore, why don’t they lend their support, which is desperately needed, if only to undo the American blunders that Fred [Kaplan] correctly identifies?) The blame, a lot of it, does fall on Bush, who, in addition to his other errors, has given a very muddy picture of the reasons for war and its goals, sometimes making one argument, sometimes a contradictory argument. Really, the man has a lot to answer for. I don’t see how Powell has helped (though it’s good to have someone with personal charm speak for the country and not leave it to Rumsfeld to give the world the willies).
But some of the blame falls as well on the anti-Bush naifs who pretend not to hear when anyone speaks about the larger reasons and goals – the people who pretend that WMD and non-existent conspiracies were the only reasons for war and pretend that the only serious goals were the arrests of a couple of men, or the achieving of a magical utopia tomorrow, and pretend that if war has still not ended, we have gotten nowhere at all. It’s all too true that better leaders could have made better plans, and the French and the Germans and the United Nations could help even now, if only they would. But it ought not to be so hard to see that, even so, the prospects of the totalitarian movement are looking a lot less healthy today than they did on Sept. 10, 2001 and the prospects of Muslim liberalism are looking up, somewhat.
(Hat tip: SdeW.)
Meanwhile Down Under, Jim Nolan, ‘an old fashioned social democrat… with an interest in Human Rights… [and] a long-standing member of the Australian Labor Party’, takes John Le Carré to task:
[quoting him] “What is at stake is not an imminent military or terrorist threat, but the economic imperative of US growth. What is at stake is America’s need to demonstrate its military power to all of us… poor mad little North Korea, as well as the Middle East.” Curiously, not a word at all about the estimated 200,000 political prisoners held in starvation in the Gulag state of poor mad little North Korea just as the 200,000 Iraqis and hundreds of thousands of forced exiles and other victims of Saddam rated not a syllable.
Jim also says that ‘what passes for much of the political left these days has sheared its mooring from enlightenment values and is increasingly willing itself into political irrelevance’. I think the first proposition here is true of some of the political left, though I wouldn’t care to estimate how much of it. I’m rather less sure of the second proposition.