When it comes to foreign policy, the “good liberal” story can be summarized as such: Yes we have sinned. But, we have overcome, transcended our sins. We are exceptional because we know our sins and have done/will do better. We have progressed, developed. Other regions of the world have not progressed as much. We can help them progress. Whenever they act out, it’s because they haven’t progressed as much. They should have progressed. We occasionally use force to help them progress--we’re not afraid to use it!--but only when necessary--and with surgical, tech precision--and when there is “collateral damage,” we feel bad about it. But, sometimes that is the price. Mistakes were made, yes--in Vietnam, in Iraq--but we feel bad about them, and that redeems our mistakes.
Ken Burns then writes our nonfiction version of events, while Aaron Sorkin gets to write the dramatized one. When we are feeling bad about some action, we are the compassionate President Jed Bartlett, able to quote scripture and the great books and Lincoln speeches verbatim. But we are at the same time the school-of-hard-knocks Chief of Staff Leo McGarry, telling us the hard truth, dramatically, “We had to, Mr. President.” We leave the room or stage (in the evening) head down, which indicates how bad we feel about it. “These are hard choices.” (Cue The West Wing theme). We enter the room (stage) in the morning, with our head held high.
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US power in the world is two-pronged. On one hand, we have the most powerful military in human history, the ability to economically cripple other nations through sanctions, etc., and the sophisticated lawfare to punish those not following the line and also to skirt our own culpability at the same time. On the other hand, we possess the “power of ideas” or “soft power,” which includes our liberal humanitarianism (despite the sordid record of our humanitarianism). Some liberals think that this so-called soft power stands apart from the hard power, but it goes hand in hand with the brute force, even when deployed in different locations. That is, the second prong (ideas) serves to legitimize the first prong (force). Those ideas may or may not do any actual legitimizing to the people on the other end of our drones or to bystanders watching the drones. But more importantly, they legitimize the use of force to ourselves and to enough American voters, which is what matters. Conservatives and liberals alike use both prongs. Generally speaking, liberals seem to put more emphasis on the ideas than conservatives do. Ours are more refined, at least. But when it comes to using force, liberals and conservatives are neck and neck, historically speaking. Conservatives understand empire, even though many shirk away from the term. Liberals don’t get empire, however. Despite the historical record, we have convinced ourselves that we were or are or should be or will be again “moral leaders” in the world and that other non-American people out there actually want that. This ignorance, feigned or not though, is quite effective because we end up with “empires without imperialism,” which is a very convenient material position/intellectual posture. We have convinced ourselves that we aren’t doing empire as we do it. So, maybe we do get it.
We rightly make fun of the Sarah Palin-Ronald Reagan mode of “American exceptionalism.” However, we liberals employ an exceptionalism and mythology that in practice is not that different. It is a little smoother on the edges. The rhetoric is prettier, less jingoistic:
The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. (Woodrow Wilson)
Partially thanks to Black Lives Matter, we liberals now rightly reject Woodrow Wilson’s infamous domestic racism. We, however, remain hopelessly infected by the stuffy Wilsonian ethic in the foreign sphere. By that, I mean the moralizing ethic of international-coalition, rights-based, self-determination for some (i.e. European countries and approved client states) and meanwhile racist domination for and capitalist extraction from others (i.e. non-European countries), all propped up by a self-serving, self-congratulating cultivation of “ideas,” as with a “Council on Foreign Relations,” for instance. Samuel Huntington, a member of the Council and no dove, is at least honest: “The West [and now specifically the US, since 1945] won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion … but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do."
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright noted quite confidently in the confident 1990s, “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.” In the less confident 2010s, Hillary Clinton, on her way out as Secretary of State, echoed Albright, “We are the indispensable nation. We are the force for progress, prosperity, and peace.” These statements do not require history or current analysis. They are true because we have said they are true.
When questioned about sanctions on Iraq by 60 Minutes' Leslie Stahl, “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” Madeleine Albright infamously answered, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.” To be fair, Albright later apologized and retracted the comment, but the fact that it was uttered in the first place, by a sitting Secretary of State, a liberal/Democratic one, a supposed feminist trailblazer is indicative of how our rhetoric can convince us of almost anything. Albright caught some hell for her comment, but for the most part neither it nor the sanctions themselves registered alarm with most Americans, including most liberal Americans. There was no lost election as a result (Clinton won again in ‘96), no unpopularity or public opinion change, no change in policy. Americans took it as normal, sane rhetoric and to the degree we were paying attention, as something we do because we have to: hard choices, hard truths that Leslie or some Seattle “flat-earther” protester out there or some child in Iraq couldn’t understand. “Get serious.”
What makes us liberals serious in our war-making is our intellectuals. Conservative intellectuals are second-rate at best, wherever they exist, and leftist intellectuals are naïve pacifists--tankies even. But, liberal intellectuals (PhD’s and non-PhD’s) have considered all the facts. Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, John Kennedy, John Kerry, Barack Obama, David Petraeus, Madeleine Albright, Samantha Power, Zbigniew Brzeziński, Ashton Carter. We have read Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Mahan, Augustine, and the ancient Greeks. Because we know the deep roots of war and know a lot about our history and our adversaries’ histories, we tell ourselves, we go into war more solemnly and soberly than the right-wing jingoists do.
And for some reason, prominent liberals seek the wisdom, the ear, and favor of the “intellectual,” the “statesman” Henry Kissinger, despite his conservative/Republican credentials and despite his war crimes. Historian Greg Grandin offers a reason why in his book Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman. Kissinger is more malleable than the neocons and thus more usable to our ends.
Kissinger’s career courses through the decades like a bright red line shedding spectral light on the role that has brought us to where we now find ourselves. From the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia to the sands of the Persian Gulf…at the very least we can learn from Kissinger’s long life that the two defining concepts of American foreign policy—realism and idealism—aren’t necessarily opposing values. Rather, they reinforce each other. Idealism gets us into whatever the quagmire of the moment is. Realism keeps us there while promising to get us out, and then idealism returns anew both to justify the realism and to overcome it in the next round.
In short, Kissinger tells us what we want to hear. He and some of the other intellectuals provide the sophistry, the smoke and mirrors, that obscure the violent domination and extraction that actually occurs when we throw our weight around in the world.
We not only love the Princeton and Harvard academics, but we adore the West Point, Annapolis, and Air Force Academy products and faculty, too. The former is predictable and obvious, the latter less so. Many of us are honestly in awe of the cosmopolitan generals and admirals out there and for some of us, it also serves a psychological role. We get to prove that we’re patriotic too. It inoculates us against getting called “traitor,” “wimp,” “unserious,” or worse, like they did to us in the ‘70s, which is supposedly the reason we lost in the ‘80s. (“The Baileys” thought we had become too radical, too weak. Not anymore.) There is a service academy-worship that is akin to our Ivy League-worship and, since the academies appear less nepotistic and oligarchic and certainly less indulgent, they fit even more with our notions of the meritocracy. In the age of Trump, when our nation’s power was revealing itself (to us) as nasty and brutish, the service academies in our minds were the bastions of more heroic and refined power. Similarly under Trump, we liberals grasped for John McCain’s or Colin Powell’s or George H.W. Bush’s mantle (and flirted with George W. Bush’s). We pivoted--we were the true patriots now. We also convinced ourselves that the former generals McMaster, Mattis, or Kelly would keep Trump in line or lead the (#)resistance if things became bad enough. “See, we don’t dislike the troops. We don’t dislike all Republicans. We don’t dislike America. McCain, Powell, Dick Lugar, the elder Bush, and the younger Bush even--not as bad anymore. They are/were ‘statesmen.’ There used to be statesmen. Where have all the statesmen gone?”
If you stumble upon the Army-Navy game on tv, you will witness sports commentators and advertisers stumbling over each other to prove who loves the troops more. The cadets and mids are the ultimate selfless heroes or soon-to-be-heroes—and they are smart too! They are the heroes we materially--and psychologically and performatively--need. Since we need leaders at the front or at sea to "keep us free,” better it be the philosopher-officer who has read Aristotle and taken calculus than the enlisted dolt who joined through the backdoor draft, because he had no job prospects elsewhere.
I have nothing against the service academies. A similar, although watered-down adulation is given to ROTC mids/cadets at elite schools. I know good people who went through the academies, and the schools did them well. But like any elite university (or perhaps any college or educational institution?), only a certain type of intelligence or innovation is celebrated. Any creativity and question-asking is only allowed to go so far, not unlike the celebrated genius in Silicon Valley (as long as they don’t question the business model, right?) David Wiggins, a West Point grad and later a conscientious objector in the Persian Gulf War observed:
People are pretty intelligent there [at West Point] but they will use that intelligence as a way to justify whatever course of action you’re ordered to do. They don’t think objectively in terms of whether or not something’s right in terms of orders. They just accept the order as what’s right and then use their intelligence to kind of create some sort of argument to justify it.
Service academies--and ROTC units like the one I was in--ultimately train officers for the world’s most powerful killing machine. Generals and admirals, including the cosmopolitan anti-Trump ones, direct that machine. That machine, I would argue as Martin Luther King did in 1967, is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” You might say the killing is justified or necessary in particular places. (I believe it has been at times, historically and it can be, hypothetically, as I’m not a pacifist, but in practice it usually has not been.) At the least, name it. Let’s not sugarcoat or intellectualize it. Or confer dignity—“statesmen”—to undignified acts and actors.
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If our nasty, brutish side reveals itself too much, we assure ourselves, “This is not who we are.” The photos leak from Abu Ghraib. “This is not who we are.” The story breaks on the My Lai massacre. “This is not who we are.” When our violence slips out of our expertly managed, mathematical orbit, we believe we can educate or discipline it back to respectable bounds. We think we can on the whole dehumanize Vietnamese or Iraqis and not expect individuals to go rogue. We think we can separate top-level, precision Tomahawk missiles and remote unmanned drone strikes from, for example, the very hands-on abuses at Bagram air base. Maybe. But as writer and Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien notes, “To understand what happens to the GI among the mine fields of My Lai, you must know something about what happens in America. You must understand Fort Lewis, Washington. You must understand a thing called basic training.” Nowadays we are rightly removing Confederate names and symbols from military bases, but it is little discussed how between the Spanish-American War (1898) and Iraq (2003), Yankee Uncle Sam gladly utilized the spirit of Dixie in its violent discipline of Filipinos, Cubans, Koreans, Vietnamese, and Arabs. That is, we have fed our collective Jungian shadow--of white settler colonialism, of slavery, of Jim Crow--when it has proved useful in further extraction and exploitation. It is difficult to escape, or unentangle, from our shadows, especially when we have enabled them. And we must note, My Lai was only one massacre amidst the constant low hum of US soldiers killing “anything that moves” in Southeast Asia. Abu Ghraib was only one incident amidst the low hum of continuous “extraordinary renditions” and “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the so-called Global War on Terror. These incidents stem from the dragons good liberals helped release, and we shouldn’t sugarcoat or intellectualize them. We certainly can’t separate them.
When the violence comes home to roost, like it did on January 6, albeit not as well organized or effective as that directed overseas, we insist also, “This is not who we are.” We heard a lot of that after the Capitol riot. Kevin Tillman, though, brother of slain NFL player/Army Ranger Pat Tillman and former Ranger himself, writes that “Our endless wars led to the Capitol insurrection.” To the sentiment “this is not who we are,” he says:
Honestly, it could only seem that way if you imagined our domestic politics as completely separate from our foreign policy. But if we’re to learn anything from that maladroit attempt at a government-toppling coup, it should be that they are anything but separate. The question isn’t whether then-President Donald Trump incited the assault on the Capitol—of course he did. It is, rather: Since when have we cared if an American president lies to incite an illegal insurrection? In all honesty, our commanders in chief have been doing so abroad for generations with complete impunity. It was only a matter of time before the moral rot finally made its way home.
Tillman lists many of the places we have invaded, directly couped, green-lit coups, materially assisted coups, or attempted to coup (“We will coup whoever we want. Deal with it!" -Elon Musk): Angola (1970s), Argentina (1976), Bolivia (1971), Brazil (1964), Cuba (1961), El Salvador (the 1980s), Grenada (1983), Guatemala (1954), Haiti (2004), Honduras (1980 and 2009), Indonesia (1967), Iran (1953), Panama (1989), Paraguay (1962), Peru (1968), Suriname (the 1980s), Uruguay (1973), Venezuela (2001), Zaire/Congo (1961). Not to mention Vietnam. Or Laos and Cambodia. Not to mention Iraq and Afghanistan. Or Somalia, Syria, Libya, and Yemen.
Nancy Pelosi called January 6 “one of the darkest days of our history. The sheer scale of the violence of the day is shocking.” It was indeed dark, violent, and shocking. It was indeed a moral scandal, encouraged by the sitting President no less and his sycophants in Congress. We must condemn, investigate, and prosecute it and make sure it doesn’t happen again. But in its scale, January 6 was extremely small potatoes compared to the crime of Iraq (or Vietnam or Panama or Nicaragua or Chile). Many good liberals, shocked and awed by January 6, have never wrestled with our own complicity in Iraq. Immediately after January 6, we then sought consensus with Bushes, with Cheneys, and other pre-Trump Republicans for a return to normal. But what type of “normal” do we want? This is not to conflate, invent causality, or obfuscate January 6’s events, but our moral outrage would carry a lot more weight if we had a sense of history and our own role in that history.
After Abu Ghraib, George W. Bush remarked,
The acts were abhorrent. It's a stain on our country's honor and our country's reputation…. The actions of the people in that prison do not reflect the nature of the men and women who wear our uniforms. We've got brave souls in Iraq sacrificing so that somebody can be free, and helping the Iraqi citizens be free.... Our soldiers in uniform are honorable, decent, loving people.
In another statement, he said the people of Iraq “must understand that what took place in that prison does not represent the America that I know.” These near-apologies assume that we have honor, that we have a good reputation to begin with, and that there is some “America” that exists out there--that he knows or we know--that is separate from the bombs, the occupation, and the torture. In a very clever move, dipping into the more liberal mode of American exceptionalism, Bush explained,
We're a great country because we're a free country, and we do not tolerate these kind of abuses. The people of the Middle East must be assured that we will investigate fully, that we will find out the truth, they will know the truth just like the American citizens will know the truth, and justice will be served.
That is to say, never mind the actual abuse done. Pay attention, instead, to the freedom of speech/press and the criminal procedure/due process that will resolve and then absolve the abuse. We are such a great country because we are ashamed of this and will not sweep it under the rug. You too, dear Iraqis, will have a democratic system as good as ours one day, you’re welcome.
In our liberal reckoning with recent history, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Bush, yes, of course, those brutes are responsible. And Johnson, too, we’ll admit Johnson was a brute. But not Kennedy. He did not really want to do the Bay of Pigs, did you know? It was Eisenhower’s people who set it up. Kennedy felt bad about it (for the US/Cuban-exile lives lost, not the invasion of a sovereign country). He only sent “advisors” to Vietnam. If he hadn’t been killed, Vietnam wouldn’t have gotten so bad, you know? (I received a little of this Kennedy apologetics in Catholic school and Catholic circles, as we felt we had to defend, at the time, our lone Catholic president.) And if Bobby hadn’t been killed and if he had won in ‘68, he would have ended it. Carter, meanwhile: “human rights” and Camp David. Clinton: the Good Friday accords, the Dayton accords! Obama: his Cairo speech, his Nowruz greetings to the Iranians, the Nobel peace prize!
The actor Wallace Shawn attempts to disabuse us of this nostalgia for some quaint liberal world order that only existed in our minds:
Barack Obama seemed to love the old rhetoric, and he may have been despised by Trump and his followers not simply because he was the first person of color to become president, and not simply because of the elegance of his speeches and the refinement and sense of self-respect evident in his demeanor, but because the words he used somehow harked back to the ethical aspirations expressed by President Kennedy (never mind that neither he nor President Kennedy lived up to them).
Over the decades of my life, America’s morale has declined, I’d say. There was a dignity to feeling kind and good. It was enjoyable. On the other hand, the lack of connection between what we felt we were and what we actually were was dangerous and led to the death of a lot of people. Personally, I have nothing to complain about in regard to my country. America has always been good to me, and so it’s really hard for me to believe that Donald Trump’s face is the true face of America. If I look back at my own life, I’d have to say that the sunny faces of the soldiers in postwar Europe, the friendly faces of the boys who lifted me up to sit in their jeeps, seem like better representations of the way I’ve been treated, and so for me those faces really do seem like the face of my country. But for those countless others, in the cities and towns of the USA and in countries far away, to whom America has not been good, the face of America has always and forever been the face of Donald Trump
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A tech-utopian inevitablism, not dissimilar to the inevitablism in the civilian world that tells us we will have self-driving cars and no one will have to work anymore, tells us that we have almost reached the clean war. With a little more technology and innovation, we will vanquish our enemy, gently, without vanquishing civilians. But then, we will soon vanquish war itself, especially when no one will challenge or feel the need to challenge our technical and moral superiority. Pretty soon, all war will be automated, and we will reach equilibrium. We will have reached the post-war war. The post-kill kill.
Throughout history, better military technology has typically translated into victory. It is not unusual, then, that US liberals and conservatives seek better military technology. Not only will it assure victory, we tell ourselves, but our “smart bombs” will also assure fewer collateral/civilian deaths. Liberals, who are more bookish and less brutish, really appreciate the technology. War fought by such technologies means it’s a more meritocratic war. From Robert McNamara and the RAND corporation whiz kids’ mathematical approaches in Vietnam to today’s drones and cyberwarfare though, we have placed too much faith in our technical superiority. One, it does not assure victory, as seen in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. And two, no technology, especially a war technology, exists divorced from politics.
In 2002, retired Marine general Paul Van Riper exposed the folly of our tech-inevitabalism-in-war when he wasn’t supposed to win the largest and most expensive war game in US history, as leader of the “Red” team, but did. Of the experience and the fallout, Van Riper noted that attempting to control or manage war is like saying:
“I’m going to put my canoe in a mountain stream. Not only am I going to control the canoe, I’m going to control the stream.” No. The stream has its own dynamics. War and battles have their own dynamics. And so the best you can hope to do is keep some sort of order within the chaos.
In an extended profile of Van Riper and the “Millennium Challenge” war game, Daniel Bessner concludes,
War cannot be planned, it cannot be predicted, and it cannot be made safe. Yet Americans continue to pursue the dream of clean, scientific war. What are drone strikes, if not the latest instantiation of the fiction that war could be made more efficient and precise, and therefore more humane? This fantasy of clean war reflects and empowers the fantasy of American empire, which is premised on the idea that armed primacy can force the world to become peaceful and prosperous.
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When we diagnose what is wrong with other countries—they haven’t progressed—we handpick the smart, empathetic, elite, pragmatic (Western/global capital-friendly) leaders who will technocratically lead their people into the promised/progressed land. We look for people who can deliver hope and change to those far away places (without challenging any larger world order, of course), even if those men lack popular support or haven’t lived in their home countries for years: the respectable Mohamed ElBaradei for Egypt during the Arab Spring, for example; the less respectable Hamid Karzai for Afghanistan in 2001; the completely unrespectable Ahmed Chalabi for Iraq in 2003; or the unknown Lokman Slim in Lebanon apparently for some years. These people will have to stand in until the Arab Nelson Mandela comes along. We are waiting for the Arab Mandelas, wrote Thomas Friedman at the height of the Arab Spring:
The final thing Iraq teaches us is that while external arbiters may be necessary, they are not sufficient. We’re leaving Iraq at the end of the year. Only Iraqis can sustain their democracy after we depart. The same will be true for all the other Arab peoples hoping to make this transition to self-rule. They need to grow their own arbiters — their own Arab Nelson Mandelas. That is, Shiite, Sunni and tribal leaders who stand up and say to each other what Mandela’s character said about South African whites in the movie “Invictus”: “We have to surprise them with restraint and generosity.”
This is what the new leaders of these Arab rebellions will have to do — surprise themselves and each other with a sustained will for unity, mutual respect and democracy. The more Arab Mandelas who emerge, the more they will be able to manage their own transitions, without army generals or outsiders. Will they emerge? Let’s watch and hope. We have no other choice. The lids are coming off.
That is, when the Arab versions of the Clint Eastwood-directed, dramatized movie, Morgan Freeman version of Nelson Mandela come along, then the Middle East will be fine. In fact, that has been its problem all along according to Friedman: no Mandelas.
To be sure, there have been many gross, corrupt, murderous Arab dictators, of both secular and religious flavors. They deserve plenty of condemnation. But in Friedman’s and other liberals’ telling, no mention is made of a century of French and British colonialism in the Middle East (nor the earlier centuries of the overlapping Ottoman empire). No mention is made of Zionist settler colonialism. No mention is made of seventy years of US neocolonialism. No mention is made of the oil, rubber, tin, tungsten, cobalt, phosphates, nitrates, land, and other wealth that is vacuumed up by Western corporations and banks and their corporate native henchmen in-country. Little mention is made of how we support and play Arab (and Iranian) strong men off of each other. No mention is made of the weapons we have poured in. No context is given about our “war for the greater Middle East.” There are just bad leaders who don’t believe in democracy (or technology and free trade--there’s always a free trade angle with Friedman) and “flat-earthers” who don’t get it. In the classic Orientalist trope, there is just the irascible Arab who can’t be trusted and who just hates Jews, by the way. They only need good leaders who believe in democracy (and technology and free trade). Look at Israel, meanwhile, the “lone democracy in the Middle East.” They’re prosperous because they’re tolerant and cosmopolitan (and also they deregulated finance and allowed free trade). If only the mullahs or the imams or the dictators or other flat-earthers would get out of the way, then the Palestinians and all the other Arabs could flourish, too. They could have the Lexus and the olive tree.
Between 2006 and 2012, Tom Friedman penned no fewer than nine columns where he stated the need for an “Arab Mandela.” This pining for an Arab Mandela, predictably, ignores the actual history of Nelson Mandela and of South African apartheid. We in the US tell a version of that story where there were some bad whites over there that kept some good blacks over there down, and then this one really good black guy came along over there, and united everyone everywhere, and we good whites over here supported him and celebrated that. However, the US supported the South African apartheid regime until the very end. The US vilified Mandela and labeled him a terrorist. The US (bipartisan) government, business community, and many citizens/consumers ignored or even subverted the international boycott movement against apartheid. The notion that we were on the right side of history there is pure fantasy, mythology. At a 1990 The Koppel Report town hall, some good liberals were nervous that the Mandela they had curated and “supported” was going off-script. Ken Adelman of the Institute of Contemporary Studies asked him a question:
Those of us who share your struggle for human rights and against apartheid have been somewhat disappointed by the models of human rights that you have held up since being released from jail. You've met, over the last six months, three times with Yasser Arafat, who you have praised. You have told (Moammar) Gadhafi that you share the view and applaud him on his record of human rights and his drive for freedom and peace around the world, and you have praised Fidel Castro as a leader of human rights, and said that Cuba was one of the countries that's head and shoulders above all other countries in human rights, despite the fact that documents at the United Nations and elsewhere show that Cuba is one of the worst. I was just wondering, are these your models of leaders of human rights, and if so, would you want a Gadhafi or an Arafat or a Castro to be the future president of South Africa?
Mandela replied
One of the mistakes which some political analysts make is to think that their enemies should be our enemies. That we can and we will never do. We have our own struggle, which we are conducting. We are grateful to the world for supporting our struggle, but nevertheless, we are an independent organization with its own policy, and the attitude of every country towards _ our attitude towards any country is determined by the attitude of that country to our struggle. Yasser Arafat, Col. Gadhafi, Fidel Castro support our struggle to the hilt. There is no reason whatsoever why we should have any hesitation about hailing their commitment to human rights as they are being demanded in South Africa. Our attitude is based solely on the fact that they fully support the anti-apartheid struggle. They do not support it only in rhetoric. They are placing resources at our disposal, for us to win the struggle. That is the position.
To be sure, Qaddafi, Castro, and Arafat were very problematic in their respective ways, to say the least, but Mandela essentially said, paraphrased, “Thank you, good white liberal friend, for your question. What did you or your country do to materially help our struggle? Or to help the struggle in Zimbabwe, Angola, or Namibia? You can’t appreciate decolonization because you refused to see the colonization in the first place.”
According to Tom Friedman, always what we need is just the right charismatic yet technocratic leader, the right peace summit, the right truth and reconciliation committee (more reconciliation, less truth though), the right speech, the right diplomat. Or, the right protest--the Arab Spring is fun to write about when you focus on young people, the marvel of Twitter, or Thomas Jefferson’s rhetoric living on but ignore the economic/labor struggle behind much of the Arab Spring, for instance.
Friedman loves the shiny tall buildings and social freedoms (for some) in the Emirates and the free-flowing capital alongside the free-flowing white robes. The gulf fiefdoms are the models for the Arab world, especially when they make separate peace/business deals with Israel. Friedman was enamored with the well-educated, well-spoken “reformer” Mohammed bin Salman, prior to the bonesawing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, at least. “Saudi Arabia’s Arab Spring, at Last,” which of course was not only premature and shortsighted but also totally ignored how Saudi Arabia shut down its own protests in 2011 and sent troops across the bridge to help crush Bahrain’s nascent spring (Bahrain, home of the US’s fifth fleet). Not to mention how Friedman ignores the exploited labor force from “third countries” like Bangladesh or the Philippines whose hands actually build the shiny buildings or clean the wealthy homes.
We Tom Friedmans of the world take that same ahistorical, self-satisfied approach to “problem countries” and people in Latin America, the Caribbean, West Africa, and Southeast Asia as well. Or to the Balkans. In the ‘90s, Friedman did not “give two cents about Bosnia. Not two cents. The people there have brought on their own troubles.” But, “good friends are hard to find in the post-cold-war world.” And,
The Bosnians will come and go, but good friends whom we can count on for solving problems that really do involve our national interest are hard to find. You don't tell your friends that if they get stuck in the Balkan quagmire we will hold a Congressional debate about rescuing them. You tell them only one thing: "We'll help get you out. You can count on us.” Anyone who thinks that the American people wouldn't respond favorably to that kind of leadership doesn't know the American people.
Or something like that, which passes for expertise and analysis.
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“How did we get this country so wrong?”
America's involvement in Vietnam began in secrecy. It ended, thirty years later, in failure, witnessed by the entire world. It was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence, and Cold War miscalculation. And it was prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through than to admit that it had been caused by tragic decisions, made by five American presidents, belonging to both political parties.
With that, Ken Burns opens the first episode of his 2017 ten-part The Vietnam War and, with that, he perfectly articulates the quintessential liberal non-apologia--for Vietnam or for any “blunder”--in the opening sequence. Altogether, it’s not a bad documentary series. It is compelling. Among other things, it includes interviews with anti- and pro-American Vietnamese, anti- and pro-war veterans, and anti- and pro-war civilian citizens. There is admission of some crimes: My Lai, agent orange, some of the napalm, some of the bombing, for instance. But at the outset, Burns--and thus the official historical record--set the limits to our introspection: the war was not a crime on the whole; mistakes were made; it was a tragedy; by tragedy, we mean that our good tragic heroes fell into this trap that were their and our nation’s (temporary) downfalls; it just kind of happened; there was “good faith...decent people...fateful misunderstandings.”
Fight it better. We should have fought it better. We should have stayed longer. Or, we shouldn’t have stayed as long. We should have gone in lighter. Or, we should have gone in heavier. We should have gone in sooner. Or, we should have gone in later. This is the non-reckoning we have, and yet we convince ourselves that we’ve had a reckoning. This is the tone of Robert McNamara’s non-apologies:
We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why. I truly believe that we made an error not of values and intentions, but of judgment and capabilities.
(His Retrospect was a number-one bestseller by the way.) This is the type of limited criticism allowed in the mainstream media of Iraq, too. The intel! The damn WMDs weren’t there! As if they were there, that would have justified the invasion, as if we’re the only country allowed to have WMDs. (As much as I am against WMD proliferation and don’t want any country to have them, including Iraq, this premise remains quite arrogant and hypocritical, to say the least.) The premise that regime change is ours to make meanwhile remains unchallenged. For the limited number of us in the military who were reading critical histories at the height of the Iraq war, our scope was limited. For example, some of us devoured Thomas Ricks’ Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. The book raises some good questions, but for the most part, limits its focus to planning and execution: e.g. Rumsfeld didn’t send the body armor! The right of the US to invade a sovereign country is mostly still presumed. The deaths of Iraqis are quite secondary compared to the deaths of US soldiers. Meanwhile, we convinced ourselves that we were good, liberally minded philosopher-officers. There we were, after all, reading a book critical of the Iraq war during the Iraq war. Isn’t that democracy? That is the extent of mainstream liberal critique of Iraq: darned quagmires we fumbled into and couldn’t get out of.
Of McNamara’s non-retrospective, Chomsky writes:
You’ve got to recognize that a crime was committed before you give a defense. McNamara can’t perceive that. Furthermore, I don’t say that as a criticism of McNamara. He is a dull, narrow technocrat who questioned nothing. He simply accepted the framework of beliefs of the people around him. And that’s their framework. That’s the Kennedy liberals. We cannot commit a crime. It’s a contradiction in terms. Anything we do is by necessity not only right, but noble. Therefore, there can’t be a crime.
If you look at his mea culpa, he’s apologizing to the American people. He sent American soldiers to fight an unwinnable war, which he thought early on was unwinnable. The cost was to the U.S. It tore the country apart. It left people disillusioned and skeptical of the government. That’s the cost. Yes, there were those three million or more Vietnamese who got killed. The Cambodians and Laotians are totally missing from his story. There were a million or so of them. There’s no apology to them.
The press on the whole was much more skeptical of and adversarial towards the US government during Vietnam, as is their job, than it has been in the wars since. There were some very good, critical investigative journalists who got surprisingly decent air/print time in the major corporate news outlets. But if you were to follow the master narratives of The New York Times or The Washington Post, you might be led to believe that they were always against the war, that they were always questioning power. They were not. When King delivered his famous “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence” speech at Riverside Church, The Washington Post declared, “He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country and to his people.” The New York Times accused him of “antagonizing...recklessly comparing American military methods to those of the Nazis...slandering...whitewashing Hanoi.” His speech was “wasteful and self-defeating…. There are no simple and easy answers to the war in Vietnam or to racial injustice in this country. Linking these hard, complex problems will lead not to solutions but to deeper confusion.” In short, get serious, Dr. King, you unserious “wall person.” Listen to the good “web people”: McNamara, Bundy. We know what we’re doing. It’s too complex for you to understand. Also at the same time, it’s a no-brainer.
In the Trump era, as the president went after the press regularly, Stephen Spielberg, Meryl Streep, and Tom Hanks teamed up to give us The Post, a triumphant tale celebrating the “fourth estate” during Vietnam and in particular its publishing of the leaked Pentagon Papers. The film also was an obvious, liberal clarion call to defend journalism under Trump. It is enjoyable. Trump did target journalists, and we rightly defended the press and need to continue doing so. But The Post, like most textbook sections on Vietnam (whether or not they mention the Pentagon Papers), focuses on the sin of the government lying to the American people: i.e. McNamara kept sending soldiers to Vietnam even though he knew we couldn’t win it. That is significant, yes. But, the more significant sin--our killing over four million Southeast Asians--is only a side story in the film (and in most textbooks and mainstream accounts). Tangentially, we liberals love our Watergate exposes and films, but the Watergate break-in and cover-up were extremely minor compared to our contemporaneous crimes in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Our hands are clean with the former: we took down the bastard!...Woodward, Bernstein!...the checks and balances work! Our hands, however, are much dirtier--bloodier--in the latter.
While getting out of Vietnam, as the losing side, and realizing we committed some war crimes, the US needed a larger master narrative to save some face. One part of that narrative was the POW/MIA myth. Historian Rick Perlstein, drawing on historian H. Bruce Franklin’s work in MIA, or Mythmaking in Action, writes of the well-known flag:
It began, as cultural historian H. Bruce Franklin has documented, with an opportunistic shift in terminology. Downed pilots whose bodies were not recovered—which, in the dense jungle of a place like Vietnam meant most pilots—had once been classified “Killed in Action/Body Unrecovered.” During the Nixon years, the Pentagon moved them into a newly invented “Missing in Action” column. That proved convenient, for, after years of playing down the existence of American prisoners in Vietnam, in 1969, the new president suddenly decided to play them up. He declared their treatment, and the enemy’s refusal to provide a list of their names, violations of the Geneva Conventions—the better to paint the North Vietnamese as uniquely cruel and inhumane. He also demanded the release of American prisoners as a precondition to ending the war.
This was bullshit four times over: First, because in every other conflict in human history, the release of prisoners had been something settled at the close of a war; second, because these prisoners only existed because of America’s antecedent violations of the Geneva Conventions in bombing civilians in an undeclared war; and third, because, as bad as their torture of prisoners was, rather than representing some species of Oriental despotism, the Vietnam Communists were only borrowing techniques practiced on them by their French colonists.
And finally, our South Vietnamese allies’ treatment of their prisoners, who lived manacled to the floors in crippling underground bamboo “tiger cages” in prison camps built by us, was far worse than the torture our personnel suffered. (Time magazine quoted one South Vietnamese official who was confronted with stories of released prisoners moving “like crabs, skittering across the floor on buttocks and palms,” and responded with incredulity that such survivors even existed: “No one ever comes from the tiger cages alive.”)
With this clever narrative shift—and with the Reagan conservative resurgence—came the really bad Rambo movies, the more critically acclaimed The Deer Hunter, and many other popular stories about our troops as the main victims in Vietnam. It was “as though the North Vietnamese had kidnapped 400 Americans and the United States had gone to war to retrieve them,” wrote Jonathan Schell of The New Yorker. More conservative versions of this myth focus on the American people not having the resolve to really win the war and the weak-kneed media/liberals leaving the soldiers out to dry--killed in the war, left behind as POW/MIAs, or spat on when they returned. (This version of events helped funnel many Vietnam vets into the white power movement). More liberal approaches focus on the tragedy of sending our boys to fight an unwinnable war and their psychological or biological entanglements in the aftermath. But in many of these accounts, from “Goodnight Saigon” to Miss Saigon, from “Born in the USA” to Born on the Fourth of July, little attention is paid to the four million people we killed in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
Paul Simon’s “American Tune” was written, in 1973, to express lament during the Vietnam war and during Watergate. It doesn’t name those events specifically, but it speaks of a lost innocence and a people that has strayed from the path. “I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered/I don’t have a friend who feels at ease...When I think of the road we’re traveling on/ I wonder what went wrong.” (In 2019, Jeffrey Fleishman of The Los Angeles Times suggested it as a kindred song for the Trump years.) Six years later, in his “Crisis of Confidence” or “malaise” speech, Jimmy Carter spoke of a similar loss of innocence for the same reasons—Vietnam, Watergate—then compounded by the OPEC oil crisis, inflation, and deindustrialization. The Simon song is one of my favorites. The Carter speech is pretty good too, as far as presidential speeches go, because he told us what we didn’t want to hear—that we consume way too much and that we do not have limitless frontiers (even though not all Americans were consuming equally; even though the Carter administration was materially pursuing neoliberal policies at the same time it preached virtue, giving even freer rein to capital to consume even more; even though Carter walked back many of these sentiments after the rising Reaganites smelled blood; and even though Carter haphazardly fired six of his cabinet members right after). This particular “loss of innocence,” however, is still very self-referential. The lament is for us first, for our physical and spiritual deaths. As an artist, Paul Simon’s loss of innocence can work on the individual level and in other contexts as well, so he is off the hook. But, we could only experience such a loss of innocence, as a country, if we had been brought up to believe we were innocent in the first place.
Many liberals know Vietnam and Iraq were wrong. But, maybe because those wars’ veterans are still living or we might know some of them or because of any of the aforementioned political and social anxieties we have, we seem incapable of calling them crimes. When we grasped for John McCain’s mantle under Trump, what exactly were we grasping for? Eric Levitz probed that very question after McCain’s death, very poignantly in New York Magazine:
John McCain did not plan the Vietnam War. He didn’t lie to the American people about the nature of the conflict, the atrocities it entailed, or the probability of its success. He merely trusted the civilian leadership that did. There is no reason to doubt that McCain believed he was in Vietnam to risk his life — and then, to endure a living hell — in defense of our nation’s highest ideals…. As the senator is laid to rest, one can reasonably argue that respect for his family, and legacy, compels us to isolate his act of transcendent patriotism from the indefensible war that produced it.
But there are hazards to such myopia. McCain’s loved ones deserve to take pride in the sacrifices he made at the “Hanoi Hilton.” But we, as a nation, do not. The United States asked John McCain to risk his life — and kill other human beings — for a war built on lies. We asked him to give some of his best years on Earth — and the full use of his arms — to an illegal, unwinnable war of aggression. The story of McCain’s time as a prisoner of war should inspire national shame. It is a story about our government abusing the trust of one of its most patriotic citizens. But it’s (almost) never presented as such. Instead, in stump speeches, op-eds, and obituaries, McCain’s service is typically framed as a testament to our nation’s greatness, or an affirmation of its finest values.
This distortion invites broader misconceptions. The selfless sacrifices of American soldiers are supposed to be lamentable costs of war, burdens that can only be redeemed by the justness of the cause that demanded them. And yet, the way we remember McCain’s heroism threatens to invert this principle. In celebrating his discrete act of patriotism — while ignoring the question of what cause it served — we risk treating the selfless sacrifices of American soldiers as ends in themselves.
Furthermore, what war, “conflict,” or military intervention did McCain not support in his years afterward in Congress? And, what exactly were/are we grasping at when we sought/seek Colin Powell’s favor or endorsement? Powell sold the Iraq war to the public in that infamous UN speech in February of 2003. He has not apologized for it. It was a “blot” on his record. It was “painful.” It was a “great intelligence failure.” Sure, but those are not apologies. Inside sources say that Powell was hesitant to deliver the speech because he had his doubts. For some observers, that tidbit makes him seem more thoughtful and introspective. For me, I think that seems worse. He had doubts and still went to sell the story. Furthermore, he has not attempted to make amends. He has not spent the intervening years on his knees begging for forgiveness from Iraqis and US gold-star families (His former chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, on the other hand, has apologized and has spent the last fifteen years trying to make amends.) We trusted Powell because he seemed reasonable and experienced, not ideological like the neocons that surrounded him. But what type of experience led us to trust him? His direct or indirect role in obstructing information on My Lai? His role in the invasion of Grenada? His overseeing, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the invasion of Panama or Iraq I/"Desert Storm"?
If there was a Vietnam syndrome that hung in the air and made us feel bad about ourselves, President George H.W. Bush declared it dead after a quick victory in Desert Storm: “The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian peninsula.” This is the same man who, as Vice President and candidate for president, claimed, “I will never apologize for the United States. I don’t care what the facts are. I’m not an apologize-for-America kind of guy,” after the USS Vincennes accidently shot down an Iranian passenger jet killing 254 civilians onboard. This is the same George H.W. Bush whose mantle during the Trump years we tried to carry. He apparently was a statesman of a bygone era. That is, refuse to learn anything substantive. Refuse to apologize. That is the statesman way.
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The Nobel Prize committee, 2009:
Barack H. Obama, the 44th President of the United States, had been in power for less than eight months when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009. Among the reasons it gave, the Nobel Committee lauded Obama for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples". Emphasis was also given to his support - in word and deed - for the vision of a world free from nuclear weapons.
Even before the election, Obama had advocated dialogue and cooperation across national, ethnic, religious and political dividing lines. As President, he called for a new start to relations between the Muslim world and the West based on common interests and mutual understanding and respect. In accordance with a promise he made during his election campaign, he set in motion a plan for the withdrawal of U.S. occupying forces from Iraq. During his first year in power, President Obama showed himself to be a strong spokesman for human rights and democracy, and as a constructive supporter of the work being done to put effective measures in place to combat the climate crisis. This is in line with his appeal: "Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.”
Like Teddy Roosevelt, like Woodrow Wilson (both previous president winners of the prize, although not in their first years in office), maybe we can just wish or write or speak peace into being, all the while pursuing the same violent imperial policies. Like Alfred Nobel himself, who made a fortune as the inventor of dynamite, perhaps we can retroactively make peace happen by endowing a prize for it, while never taking concrete steps towards making peace. Nobel justified his inventions, saying that he wanted to create a material so explosive it could end all wars. “[T]he day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilized nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops.” Kind of like the war to end all wars.
We know from Obama himself and other insiders that he really believed in the Palestinian cause. We know that he had reservations about bombing Libya. We know he felt he had to support the Saudis’ Yemen adventure in order to placate them enough to get the Iran deal through. Steve Coll’s very thorough Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan tells us Obama had reservations about the Afghanistan surge and doubted its long-term efficacy, but he felt domestic pressure and pressure from our handpicked (warlord) allies in Afghanistan. (I remember personally being for that surge, for the “good war” not the “dumb war" of choice. Especially with a smart, empathetic liberal in charge, I supported it, but I did so somberly, seriously.) Obama feels for the people on the other end of our missiles, be they guilty militants or innocent bystanders or that gray area in between:
I wanted somehow to save them — send them to school, give them a trade, drain them of the hate that had been filling their heads. And yet the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead.
“Had me killing them.” Daniel Bessner again:
This statement [above] is typical of A Promised Land. On the surface, it appears rather searching: Has any other president been so open about articulating the tensions of being the head of the world’s most powerful empire? But in actuality, this soliloquy ends precisely where policymaking should begin. Obama never seriously considers how he could alter the structures of exchange and distribution, the structures of the empire he leads, that “warped and stunted” the minds of the young men in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Somalia he claims to care about. Instead, his ultimate faith in the American idea allows him to do nothing but feel bad. While he “took no joy” in targeting “terrorists,” in the end, “the work was necessary,” and that was that.
Yes, it’s hard to imagine being in his shoes. Yes, every military action his administration took probably had some pros to it on the balance sheet. Yes, the world is a dangerous place. Yes, he approached each situation seriously. And yes, he deescalated with Iran and Cuba. Yes, the Iraq (sort of) withdrawal. Yes, the Republicans. Yes, I know according to Ben Rhodes’ The World As It Is and HBO’s The Final Year, team Obama was really smart and really tried their best. They are entitled to their memoirs and their sides of the story, but that should not stand in for our analysis. Pentagon budgets remained bloated. Mass surveillance continued. The “deep state” grew in size and power (yes, of course there is a deep state, although not exactly acting how Trump/Fox imagines it is). Team Obama conducted exponentially more drone strikes than Bush had. Weapons continued to flow to Egypt, apartheid Israel, Morocco (illegally occupying Western Sahara), Jordan, Colombia, and to many other corrupt/authoritarian governments in the world. The administration used the World War I-era Espionage Act to prosecute more leakers and whistleblowers than all his predecessors combined. The US expanded its presence in Africa all while “pivoting” to Asia (even though “pivot” insinuates leaving some other part of the world). Yes, he inherited the machinery, but still Obama left office “as the first American president in history to have been at war for every day of his tenure.”
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There is a self-prescribed limit to liberals’ empathy. Empathy shields good liberals from having to change anything of substance, in foreign affairs too. If you suggest or work toward radical change--actual or seemingly--you cross the liberal class and are no longer welcome at major newspapers, on the talk shows, on university or museum or foundation boards, the charity balls and cocktail parties, or at the big conferences. Chris Hedges, in Death of the Liberal Class (2011), ascribes much of our feckless liberalism to self-preservation:
It would be a mistake to assume that the liberal class was simply seduced by the Utopian promises of globalism. It was also seduced by careerism. Those who mouthed the right words, who did not challenge the structures being cemented into place by the corporate state, who assured the working class that the suffering was temporary and would be rectified in the new world order, were rewarded. They were given public platforms on television and in the political arena. They were held up to the wider society as experts, sages, and specialists. They became the class of wise men and women who were permitted to explain in public forums what was happening to us at home and abroad. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, a cheer leader for the Iraq war and globalization, became the poster child for the new class of corporate mandarins. And although Friedman was disastrously wrong about the outcome of the occupation, as he was about the effects of globalization, he continues, with a handful of other apologists, to dominate the airwaves.
Liberalism in Israel, our client state, operates in a similar way to liberalism here. Hedges cites Norman Finkelstein, who deftly caricatures Israeli liberalism’s psychological role in This Time We Went Too Far (about the 2008-09 Gaza war):
Israeli liberalism always had a function in Israeli society…. When I talk about liberal, I mean people like A.B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, and Amos Oz. Their function was to issue these anguished criticisms of Israel, which not only extenuated Israeli crimes but exalted Israeli crimes. “Isn’t it beautiful, the Israeli soul, how it is anguished over what it has done.” It is the classic case of having your cake and eating it. And now something happened. Along comes a Jewish liberal [Justice Richard Goldstone, of the International Criminal Court] and he says, “Spare me your tears. I am only interested in the law.”...Goldstone did not perform the role of the Jewish liberal, which is to be anguished, but no consequences. And all of a sudden Israeli liberal Jews are discovering, hey, there are consequences for committing war crimes. You don’t just get to walk into the sunset and look beautiful. They can’t believe it. They are genuinely shocked. “Aren’t our tears consequences enough? Aren’t our long eyes and broken hearts consequences enough?” “No,” he said, “you have to go to the criminal court.”
Hedges and Finkelstein (and Goldstone), respectively, became pariahs for violating the mores of the liberal class. Both still courageously try to chip away at the imperial edifice.
The peculiar case of Algeria--and of two non-native-Algerian writers--I believe, is a microcosm for our international goodwill. Liberals across the globe love our Albert Camus. (The Plague remains one of my favorite books.) Camus had a lot of good things to say against fascism and shared much wisdom on politics, resistance, love, art, and the soul. Camus made a lot of appearances in liberal journals in the Trump era and, with The Plague, under COVID. However, as a pied-noir (i.e. French settler in colonized Algeria), he had little to say about French imperialism or about the oppressed Algerians. In fact, where he did, he demeaned the Algerians and defended settlers (and demeaned the Malagaches in Madagascar and the Indochinese, that is, other parts of the French empire contemporaneously resisting). Meanwhile, fewer liberals know or read Frantz Fanon. If we do know him, he makes us nervous. We might loathe him, discredit him, or try to put him in a safe distant past. Fanon, of black African descent but from Martinique, excoriated not only the French in Algeria but the native Algerian nationalist elites--and the native nationalist elites in other newly independent African countries--for continuing the colonization after the Europeans officially left, for enriching themselves while still enabling Western extraction and exploitation. Fanon’s fierce words, especially in The Wretched of the Earth, let none of us off the hook for our complicity in European colonialism and now US-corporate-led neocolonialism, aka globalization.
In the US, we teach about the theft of Native (North) American land, rightly. We rightly commemorate Wounded Knee, the Trail of Tears, or the boarding schools. Canada does the same regarding its own sins against its First Nations. Some of us open meetings by acknowledging that we are standing on Lenni-Lenape or ___fill-in-the-blank___ land. However, in both the US and Canada, this history has often become the end in itself. Many liberals (let alone conservatives) will go nowhere near the Red Power movement, the Land Back movement, or the Standing Rock/No DAPL/No Keystone XL movement, for instance. We do not seriously consider any “radical” reparations or any structural adjustments of land and capital (although Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s efforts represent potential). We sometimes collaborate with--our 401(k)’s often profit from--the industries extracting from indigenous land and threatening indigenous water. We promise progress for everyone with just one more push, one more pipeline, one more fracked gas site--one more innovation--and we will finally reach that equilibrium where we will be “energy independent” and all will share in the fruits. “Get serious, [assholes],” we tell the radicals blocking the pipeline, which represents the progress. Our tears for our past misdeeds, in the meantime, are enough, we tell ourselves. “Isn’t it beautiful, the American soul, how it is anguished over what it has done?” And then, if we live long enough, we will say we were always on the right side.
Regarding Palestine, Nathan Thrall (author the very powerful New York Review of Books article “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama”) predicts:
I am confident that all right-thinking liberals and progressives will say that they were always opposed to this and that they had always been, you know, against U.S. support for a system of oppression and apartheid. But we don’t see them behaving that way right now. And so, the bare minimum we need to see is to have people just call their congresspeople and say, “I don’t want to pay for this. I do not want to be complicit in what’s happening here,” at the very least end our own complicity. Before we talk about what good the U.S. can do, let’s talk about how the U.S. can stop doing harm.
This could be said about a whole host of issues, both domestic and foreign.
“Trump has made the whole world darker”
For the first two years of Trump, the Democrats and mainstream media ascribed to Vladimir Putin powers he probably wished he had. That is, Putin was supposedly behind every Trump move and every nefarious global action. The talking/tweeting heads, in turn, lazily branded all skeptics of Russia-gate as Russian stooges or Putin apologists, when those skeptics first insisted on actual evidence/journalism or when the evidence was released and they questioned whether that was the cause of Trump’s election (after racism, of course--"their racism, not ours”). Russia’s meddling in our elections was serious and should have been investigated and prosecuted as such. But, Russia-Putin, Putin-Russia every day sucked up all the air in the room, and therefore when the reports from Mueller, etc., were made public, the actual crimes looked small compared to our inflated expectations of a bombshell. With all the focus on the Russia soap opera, the media happily neglected to cover actual policies and the deteriorating social/economic conditions of actual people’s lives. (Additionally, tangentially, as Shoshana Zuboff highlights in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Russia/Facebook meddling is not that surprising, considering how the internet is monetized and incentivized in our larger unfettered surveillance capitalist system.)
When Trump took office, we liberals began lionizing institutions and people that historically have wielded great power and violence: the CIA, the FBI, NATO, Clapper, Brennan, Mueller, Comey, the generals, the Pentagon, the NSA. We convinced ourselves that the institutions that have actually harassed and killed thousands of more people than Trump did, or could have (at least at that juncture), would save us from Trump. And for all his big talk against NATO by the way--and for all our reactionary love-fest for NATO and all our ascribing Putin-related motives to Trump’s supposed NATO hatred--Trump in the end reaffirmed every NATO commitment and supported every NATO expansion opportunity, as historian Stephen Wertheim notes in his Times column, “Sorry Liberals. But You Really Shouldn’t Love NATO.”
Liberals opposed almost everything Trump did, usually for good reason--so much of what he said and did was despicable--until April of his first year, however. That is, until Trump fired missiles at Syria (or was it Iraq?) while eating “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you’ve ever seen” with Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, who had been a relentless critic of Trump, stated,
I think Donald Trump became president [last night]. I think this was actually a big moment. President Trump recognized that the president of the United States does have to act to enforce international norms, does have to have this broader moral and political purpose. For the first time really as president, he talked about international norms, international rules, about America's role in enforcing justice in the world. It was the kind of rhetoric we have come to expect from American presidents since Harry Truman.
(In February, CNN’s Van Jones had said Trump “became president” after he honored the wife of a killed Navy SEAL. AC360 concurred with Jones.) MSNBC’s Brian Williams spoke of the “beautiful pictures at night... the beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments.” He quoted Leonard Cohen, “I am guided by the beauty of our weapons.” Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi praised the attacks. Almost all elected Democrats refrained from criticizing the bombing. Those that did only questioned the unconstitutional/constitutional process but not the merits of bombing in the first place. From her perch, Hillary Clinton approved. Ian Bremmer tweeted, correctly (and approvingly, I presume?), “Among US political establishment, attacks on Assad the most popular action Trump has taken as president to date.” Anne-Marie Slaughter tweeted, “Donald Trump has done the right thing on Syria. Finally!! After years of useless handwringing in the face of hideous atrocities.”
Bashar al Assad is ruthless and is responsible for thousands of Syrian deaths, including through the use of chemical weapons, likely, but it’s hard to see how the US bombing Syria would have helped (or helps). Our arming of rebels by itself has had unintended consequences. Also, see Libya. Furthermore, we must acknowledge that for a time in the so-called Global War on Terror, Assad was a useful dictator to us, with our/his black sites, extraordinary renditions, and enhanced interrogation techniques. Additionally, our humanitarian overtures are not consistent, especially considering repressive Middle East regimes who happen to be our allies. See Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Israel. Finally, how would Trump, whom we were calling a fascist for months and who campaigned on more bombing and against military humanitarian missions, then be the appropriate deliverer of our humanitarian bombs? Glenn Greenwald wrote right after the bombing, as Democrats were closing ranks with Republicans:
Given all that, could American elites possibly believe [Trump] when he says that he is motivated by humanitarianism – deep-seated anger over seeing Syrian children harmed – in bombing Syria? Yes, they could, and they are. That’s because American elites always want to believe – or at least want others to believe – that the U.S. bombs countries over and over not out of aggression or dominance but out of love, freedom, democracy and humanitarian concern.
It was not the last time under Trump that good liberals closed ranks with Republicans, including Trump Republicans, on foreign affairs. For instance, when Congresswoman Ilhan Omar grilled Elliott Abrams, the new special envoy to Venezuela, over his role in the 1980s Central American dirty wars, many of her Democratic colleagues and liberal pundits criticized her for not being polite to such an experienced “statesman.” These Democrats were already onboard for regime change in Venezuela, so it apparently was not her role to challenge this known war criminal and regime-changer. Democrats and the media closed ranks with Republicans even more swiftly when Omar and her fellow Muslim congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib, criticized Israel in 2019.
From the good liberal Speaker Tip O’Neill, ostensible opposition, closing ranks with Reagan to invade Grenada in 1983 to Senator Joe Biden whipping enough Democrats to vote for the 2003 Iraq misadventure, war is too often the only consensus bipartisan issue.
While liberals closed ranks with Trump and Republicans to do the occasional bombing, they closed ranks with the traditional Republican hawks without Trump when it came to North Korea. Now, it was obvious that Trump was interested in “peace” with North Korea for his own self-aggrandizement and personal enrichment. His personal affinity for Kim Jong-un was bizarre and troubling. His mentioning of potential condos on North Korean beaches was not surprising. He did not have the attention span, good will, or work ethic to actually pursue a peace deal. This, we know. Nevertheless, it was shameful that no Democrats—the party that pursued honest negotiations with North Korea under Clinton, that is, until the W. Bush administration came in and scuttled diplomacy—attempted to involve themselves, triangulate, or provide much needed substance to the negotiations. They did not call on the (albeit, weak) peace movement or other progressives to engage. Who’s to say whether team Trump would have engaged with Democrats, liberals, or progressives on peace with North Korea? Unlikely. However, an attempt would have shown our good faith despite the bad actor president. South Korean President Moon Jae-In, to his credit, was not naïve about Trump’s motives but gave him what he needed (i.e. compliments) to try to take advantage of the opening. But, the Democrats and the whole press committed themselves to partisan attacks on Trump and the summit. I believe Congressman Ro Khanna was right when he said, “Imagine if it weren’t Donald Trump there, but if it were Barack Obama there having that kind of breakthrough. I think there would be a reaction from almost every progressive Democrat cheering that on.” Furthermore, I believe Trump was right when he said that the war games/mock invasions we conduct with South Korea, Japan, and other countries every year (I participated in “FOAL EAGLE” in 2007 myself) provoke North Korea. As the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day. But, we opted for the war-games, Pentagon-planner, military-industrial status quo instead.
The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser wrote, beamingly, in September of 2018, “John McCain’s Funeral Was the Biggest Resistance [sic] Meeting Yet.” That is, a funeral for a Vietnam bomber (and yes, POW tortured by the Vietnamese) and relentless war hawk in Congress (who once sang “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” as presidential candidate), eulogized by two former commanders-in-chief (Obama and George W. Bush), attended by John Boehner, David Petraeus, Leon Panetta, Madeleine Albright, Paul Ryan, and other notables, was a meeting of “the Resistance.” Glasser wrote, non-ironically:
For a moment, at least, they still lived in the America where Obama and Bush and Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney could all sit in the same pew, in the same church, and sing the same words to the patriotic hymns that made them all teary-eyed at the same time. When the two Presidents were done speaking, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” blared out. This time, once again, the battle is within America. The country’s leadership, the flawed, all too human men and women who have run the place, successfully or not, for the past few decades, were all in the same room, at least for a few hours on a Saturday morning. The President of the United States, however, was not.
Our liberal #resistance narrowed in against one personality (yes, a vile and dangerous personality) but, doing so, it pledged allegiance to the larger power structures, thus rendering the term “resistance” meaningless.
“How Joe Biden Can Win a Nobel Prize” (“I honestly think we can again be our best selves, but it’s on all of us to make it happen. How so?”).
“The President-elect has the most racially diverse presidential Cabinet in the history of the US,” noted CNN in January. ABC's Martha Raddatz called Biden's appointments "deeply experienced," "humble" and "lifelong public servants." They "are not political" They are “career people." Max Boot emphasized that the cabinet is “a diverse slate of highly competent appointees with decades of relevant experience.”
“America is back,” Joe Biden declared at a speech in February at the State Department.
WestExec Advisors, the consultancy firm co-founded by now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken, brings the Situation Room to the Board Room:
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Or, if you prefer:
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What is the end of such diversity, or is diversity the end in itself? The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah quipped, “Biden appointed an all-women communications team and a national security team that’s racially diverse? People around the world are are gonna be like ‘What an honor to be bombed by such a woke administration!’” What do we do with all that experience and expertise? Is all experience good experience? And, expertise doing what? Or, are experience and expertise ends in themselves too, like history has become an end to itself? Experience should matter. It will necessarily come with failures. But, should not failures make us reflect, reconsider, or change? Do we even want Max Boot’s (or Bill Kristol’s or “axis-of-evil” speech-writer David Frum’s) approval? Finally, do people in other countries want us “back”? What does “back” mean? Did we really, actually go away the past four years? Do people in our country want us “back”?
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On domestic policy, the Biden administration has been better than I thought it would be. It is sometimes helpful to have tempered, low expectations. If Biden wants to imagine himself as LBJ and/or FDR, if he cares less about bipartisan consensus with bad faith Republicans than Obama did, then all the better. On foreign policy however, the Biden administration has not been good. Considering his expansive voting record from his years in the senate, as Jeremy Scahill did in an Intercept project “Empire Politician,” this is not surprising. The mainstream press, though, has been silent to laudatory. That also is not surprising. The role of the “blob” has been to lubricate and perpetuate endless war (but with humanitarian and intellectual posturing of course.) Also to be fair, it is difficult to imagine how a President Bernie Sanders would steer the blob/deep state/military industrial complex in a different direction or shrink its influence--it has immense inert power. Sanders’ foreign policy voting record, while better than most Democrats, is not without blemish, and his 2016 campaign was devoid of foreign policy (although his 2020 campaign included a better and more coherent foreign platform).
To his credit, President Biden has vowed to end the war in Afghanistan by September. It remains to be seen whether that will happen. It remains to be seen what type of footprint we will leave there--surely, it won’t be zero. It is up to us to hold him and Congress accountable to that withdrawal, twenty years after we entered. Presidents have reneged on promised withdrawals before, even as they knew we weren’t winning (or couldn’t win?), as The Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” revealed. Meanwhile, some liberals and many conservatives are circling the wagons to stay for, presumably, another twenty years. In an apparent disagreement among the #resistance, George W. Bush recently remarked, “I’m afraid Afghan women and girls are going to suffer unspeakable harm. … I’m sad. And I spend a — Laura and I spend a lot of time with Afghan women, and they’re scared.” As if that is the reason we went to war there or stayed there, as if the non-Taliban warlords we support aren’t as misogynistic, as if women aren’t always made vulnerable in war and militarized spaces. Malalai Joy, a women’s rights activist who in 2005 became the youngest person ever elected to the Afghan Parliament (and who in 2007 was suspended for publicly denouncing the war criminals in the Afghan Parliament), calls Bush’s claim a “shameless lie.” We can have legitimate feminist concerns, but it is hard to see how our guns and bombs will deliver women's rights. It is time to cut our losses.
To his credit, Biden announced we were ending our support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, but the Saudis continue to bomb Yemen, and the US continues to service Saudi warplanes with private contractors. To his credit, Biden wants to reenter the Iran nuclear deal. However, the administration is seeking to extract more concessions out of Iran before we re-engage, as if we weren’t the rogue nation that left first and scuttled the deal. Also, we are bombing Syria, apparently retaliating against Iranian-backed militias.
Biden has yet to reverse the Trump reversal of Obama’s (semi)-normalization with Cuba. He has not yet reversed Trump’s coercive measures, many of them cruelly put in place in the middle of the pandemic. He said he “stands with the Cuban people” in their latest protests, but the punitive embargo remains (Israel and the US are the only two nations in the world that support the blockade). The US continues to seek regime change in Venezuela. Republicans, Democrats, and Hollywood have all agreed that "socialism," rather than kleptocracy, is the problem in Venezuela , and thus all overlook similar trends in non-socialist ally countries Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Colombia. The administration declares Israel’s “right to defend itself” as it goes forward with its apartheid and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. It pretends, like Thomas Friedman does, that the 1993-2000 Oslo “peace process” was a golden opportunity that Palestine threw away and that some serious (smart, innovative, Mandela-like) leader will come along to usher in the famed “two-state solution.” The Lexus and the Olive Tree and its disciples have little to say when actual Palestinian olive trees are destroyed. The Biden administration meanwhile greenlights settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and sends extra weapons to Israel as it pummels Gaza. It has heavily criticized the nonviolent BDS movement (although for now does not want to criminalize it). It chides more progressive Democrats who do not fall in line on Israel.
To his credit, Biden announced support for a TRIPS waiver for the COVID vaccine to be distributed widely in the global south. Although, he did announce that in May, and the world needs to get moving on it, yesterday. Biden aside, the fact that “intellectual property” which the US, UK, and other taxpaying publics helped finance could then be hoarded and not shared--the fact that TRIPS or no TRIPS is even a debate--is a scandal. How peculiarly, narrowly, and conveniently some people define “free trade.”
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"Is There a War Coming between the US and China?"
In 2008, while forward deployed aboard the USS Cowpens (homeport Yokosuka, Japan), we were steaming somewhere in or near the East China Sea, in international waters. When taking the watch as “officer of the deck,” I learned that we had earlier spotted a Chinese submarine several miles away. I made note of it, which was, for us, a big deal. Some people were flipping out nervously. Some people were flipping out excitedly--this was their big moment after years of doing circles in the ocean. The watch continued uneventfully. At one point, I called down to the captain with a routine report. He asked me where the Chinese submarine was, and I told him I would call him right back with the information. Thirty seconds later, I did. The captain, however, berated me for not knowing the direction and coordinates of the submarine off the top of my head. He was right. A good officer-of-the-deck should have had that information instantaneously. But reflecting later, zoomed out, I thought to myself, “Well of course, there’s a Chinese submarine there. We’re in the East China Sea.”
Seven years earlier, during my first ROTC midshipman summer, I remember listening to a surprising number of navy people and marines who spoke almost gleefully of China as the next big threat. The China threat seemed to give them and future-me a purpose. That was ten years after the end of the Cold War (and the “end of history”) and only a couple months before 9/11 and the Global War on Terror, which would provide a new purpose for them and future-me.
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As candidate and president, Trump engaged in much anti-Chinese rhetoric and racism. From the incessant “China is killing us on trade” to the “Kung Flu,” he stoked a latent animosity toward the Chinese government, the Chinese people, and Chinese-Americans (and all East Asian-Americans, as many white people can’t tell or care about the difference). At the same time, he developed a bizarre, troubling personal affinity for Xi Jinping.
Now that Biden is in, we have cut out the “kung flu” and overt racism and jingoism. We have returned, instead, to the Obama-inspired “pivot.” In March, US officials had a tense meeting with Chinese officials in Alaska, where sharp but “constructive” words were exchanged. In June, the Senate, which can hardly get fifty Democratic votes for investment in our own public institutions or for voting protections, passed the Innovation and Competition Act of 2021 with bipartisan support. The bill would put nearly $250 billion into “science” and “technology,” designed to counter China’s rise in those sectors. $200 billion would funnel into grants, scholarships and other channels, and another emergency $52 billion would boost semiconductor production in the US. Chuck Schumer, co-sponsoring it, declared, “If we do nothing, our days as the dominant superpower may be ending. We don't mean to let those days end on our watch. We don't mean to see America becoming a middling nation in this century. We mean for America to lead it.”
Who will benefit from this investment? Who will own the intellectual property on these publicly funded semiconductors? Will cheap Chinese labor continue to assemble the parts for US capital so that it can outdo Chinese capital? Just a little more tech, more science, some more STEM education, more grants, some better semiconductors--we are almost there. We will vanquish poverty, inequality, war, and China!
The media blob, in turn, repackages White House/State Department/Pentagon talking points with no criticism. Meanwhile, no matter how hawkish the Democrats are towards China, traditional Republican hawks say Biden is “rolling over.” We are, at least for this post-Trump moment, back to our familiar pre-Trump Democratic-Republican “debates” over China and other foreign policy.
Yes, Xi, the Chinese Communist Party, and the Chinese state present many problems and issues. We on the left do not need to--and should not--defend the Chinese government or take up Chinese nationalism in reaction to US policy and US nationalism. For instance, we should absolutely condemn the repression in Hong Kong, the occupation of Tibet, and most pressingly, the concentration camps and ethnic cleansing of Uighurs. Historically speaking, we certainly should not lionize or iconize Mao, with his fatal repression and famine blunders, for instance. (Likewise, we need not defend the Cuban, Venezuelan, or Iranian governments as we rightly decry US imperialism toward those countries and as we rightly remain skeptical of our government’s “human rights concerns.”) In a world of what seems to be just competing nationalisms, it is difficult to conceive of an international, trans-national solidarity with Chinese people, but that is our best hope to combat the Chinese government's and Chinese capital’s repression--and the US government and US capital’s repression. That is our best chance to avoid cold war, or hot war, and to salvage parts of the planet from climate change. (In my cursory experience, I have actually found the socialist/Marxian left more morally consistent than other parts of the left, who minimize Chinese or Cuban government repression, for instance. Solidarity means solidarity with all people. To hell with all nationalisms.)
Chinese capital is a rival to US capital (yes in its particular form, China is a capitalist country). Or put another way, Chinese capital looks to compete with US capital--is not capitalism supposedly about competition? China’s quest for regional superiority threatens, slightly, US global hegemony. We should not be naïve nor should we wholly welcome the rise of Chinese state power, most especially in its relation to its internal constituencies such as those already named (e.g. the Uighurs). But, China is not an existential threat to the US. For some perspective--for us and for the USS Cowpens steaming there in the East China Sea surprised to find a Chinese submarine--between 1820 and 1949, the US intervened in China no fewer than thirty times with “dollar diplomacy,” “gunboat diplomacy,” small invasions, and other military incursions, to defend US "interests." In 1949, Mao and the communists finally won the protracted civil war, in what we would call “the loss of China” (presumably ours to lose in the first place). Between 1958 and 1974, the CIA Tibetan Program trained thousands of Tibetan Chinese at Camp Hale in Colorado to wage war against the Chinese government, but it was unsuccessful. While we should not lionize or iconize Mao (or Castro or Ho Chi Minh), it is necessary to see how US imperialism helped create all of those independence/revolutionary figures. Interestingly, many years earlier, Ho Chi Minh and Mao, along with Gandhi, Egypt’s Saad Zaghloul, and the Puerto Rican Pedro Albizu Campos all believed or wanted to believe that Woodrow Wilson’s beautiful fourteen points of self-determination weren’t just for white European countries. They were let down.
Since détente in the 1970s, China has been a useful tool for both Democrats and Republicans, depending on what the situation has called for. With its gradual market liberalization beginning in the ‘80s, it became a convenient place of markets and materials, a place for US capital to invest in. When the Tiananmen Square massacre happened in 1989, President George H.W. Bush and Congress issued condemnations, but they were tepid enough to not disrupt the growing economic relationship between the two countries. US mouthpieces had to talk the tightrope of praising China's economically liberalizing trends yet criticizing China's politically hardening trends, without disturbing our new partner. I believe many US lawmakers were/are honestly concerned about human rights violations, but as many of those lawmakers--both Democratic and Republican--are beholden to capital, human rights concerns are secondary to them. As Elizabeth Bruenig reminded us, “Capital is unfaithful.” Be it US or Chinese, it seeks profits. Everything else is incidental. During the 90s, that golden age of globalization and the internet, we told ourselves that market liberalization would lead to political liberalization in China. We convinced ourselves that we cared about human rights abuses, while of course overlooking our own and our client-states' human rights abuses. With “most favored nation” status conferred and admission to the WTO sealed, we realized, with few exceptions, we didn’t care about human rights abuses. As more jobs were offshored to China, we cared less because that meant cheaper consumer goods for us, especially with bigger and bigger container ships doing the lifting, and as long as it wasn’t our job offshored. We had to do it this way to "remain competitive." Meanwhile, “Go learn how to code,” or “Go back to finish your degree,” we told American workers. Depending on the specific mouthpiece, the enemy has been the Chinese worker or the Chinese government or “automation” or now Chinese capital, but never the slippery, very pliable US capital, which in the name of profits, can play all angles at once. And so, the latest is that we are following through with the pivot, and this spells continued profits for the defense industry.
In the end, we might decide that this new cold war rhetoric and continued spending is helpful. Some thoughtful international relations scholars believe there must always be a global hegemon and that Chinese hegemony will necessarily replace US hegemony and it will be more brutal. Some of those scholars even take note of US brutality. I do not, however, believe a new cold war will benefit Americans or anyone other than US investors and their sponsored politicians. I am for what Robert Wright calls “progressive realism.” In progressive realism, “cognitive empathy” (not to be confused with emotional empathy) is crucial to avoiding war. We don’t have to agree with how an adversary views us and the world, but we should understand how/why China, Russia, Cuba, Iran, or Venezuela views us and the world the way they do. While there is often good domestic reporting from the major newspapers, they are less rigorous when it comes to foreign affairs, and they contribute to this saber-rattling. Perhaps we still think we should be the reigning hegemon--that this time around, we’ll be more noble, more humanitarian. Let us at least be honest, however, with our own military history against China, our own number of global military bases, our own military spending (which makes China’s look miniscule), our own duplicitous and cynical charges of human rights abuses, and our own role, in the end, in depressing both Chinese and US workers.
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Therefore, the problem is not just Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, or the recently departed Donald Rumsfeld. The problem is not just Henry Kissinger. Christopher Hitchens wrote The Trial of Henry Kissinger in 2001, which focused on the singularity of Kissinger’s supposed evil and influence. Greg Grandin’s Kissinger’s Shadow, however, attempts to show how the man’s ideas have influenced the entire spectrum--how he was fed by the political milieu of his upbringing and how feeds the current milieu. Grandin, in The Nation, draws a contrast between his book and Hitchens’:
Hitchens’s polemic, which is a good example of what the great historian Charles Beard, in 1936, dismissed as the “devil theory of war”—placing the blame for militarism on a single, isolable cause: a “wicked man.” To really understand the sources of conflict, Beard argued, you had to look at the big picture, to consider the way “war is our own work,” emerging out of “the total military and economic situation.”
In 2003, Hitchens succumbed to that evil he had singled out. He became an important liberal cheerleader for the Iraq war.
The problem is not just Hitchens or Thomas Friedman or CNN. The problem is not just the Clintons or Obama/Biden either. Singular blame misses the point. As the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton, as the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, and as so many other elders teach us, war is the ultimate sin, and we, swimming in militarized water, are all guilty.
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