No More Politics: On To Movies!

I am about to post a five-part blog (short parts!) on movie-going, and pleasure, and what to do about that annoying friend who asks you, “So, what did you think of it?,” before you’re halfway up the aisle.

But first, I've had few entries on my blog in the past several months, and I feel that an explanation is due to the all the friends and relatives and colleagues who aren’t reading it. I thought I’d be writing mostly about politics–what else should a political scientist/theorist do? At the present moment, however, this seems to me to be just about impossible, at least for a paid-up inhabitant of the United States of America.

This is a stupid society and very often a lunatic society. The opening words of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground–“I am a sick man; I am a spiteful man; I think my liver is diseased”–could easily be adapted to describe an entire nation of 300 million people: not all the people, but the nation as a whole. Nothing intelligent or sane can get done, only stupid or insane projects can go forth. This may change in 2009, though I strongly counsel against optimism on that score, for the institutional and social roots of national stupidity and insanity run too deep by now to be easily uprooted: not to mention that for the first time in American history, a genuine Fascist has a 50-50 chance of becoming president. Real political debate or discussion cannot take place, in that there is really nothing to debate, and nowhere to debate it if there were anything resembling serious ideas.

There is one seriously asserted idea, which consists of one part outright lies and one part ideological madness, and the mere fact of my saying that demonstrates the point, if you agree with me. You can’t debate with liars and lunatics, and when they own or control so much of the institutional spectrum where talk is permitted--but not encouraged, never encouraged–and have established such institutional hegemony that no practicing politician is allowed to tell the simple truth about their duplicitous imbecility or madness, what is left to be done or said? So I’ve stopped writing about politics. Anyone who might be reading this already knows all there is to know about the Occupation, or the health-care system, or the destruction of the welfare state, or or or... No one needs another run-through from me. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about–well, I would have nothing to say to you anyway.

Before getting to movies, though, I do have a story to tell that might be interesting both to old and more recent friends, and family, just as a matter of historical record.

My mother hired Norman Podhoretz as Editor of Commentary, and set him on the path to becoming who he is: the leading advocate of neo-totalitarianism in the United States. Of course he would furiously deny the appellation and insist that he’s the one great opponent of totalitarianism (“Islamofascism”), but that’s like Hitler saying he was the one real anti-Stalinist.

Though she later castigated herself for, as she put it, knowing Podhoretz was an opportunist and yet going ahead anyway, and though she was expressing despairing regret almost on her deathbed, it was really a no-brainer at the time. As the founding editor of Commentary, Elliot Cohen, declined into deep depression, there were only 3 serious candidates to replace him: Podhoretz, Clement Greenberg, and a lightweight New York intellectual named Marty Greenberg. Greenbergs had the numbers but not the weight. Marty was the kind of editor who belongs at a publishing house, not an intellectual journal, and Clement had settled into the role of High Priest of Abstract Expressionism; there was little reason to believe that he could take the kind of generalized intellectual approach to other subject matters that the job required. Norman seemed at least like a somebody with generalized interests and a dedication to keeping the magazine on the same path that Cohen had charted. To be sure, technically it was up to the American Jewish Committee’s supervising Editorial Board to make the decision, but as the AJC’s representative on the magazine, General Manager of it, and de facto CEO, it was my mother’s recommendation that would govern. And so it was.

Years later we would discuss–to the extent that years later she could still engage in linear discussions–what happened to turn the Pod into a monstrous Pod Person. With Irving Kristol the explanation was simple, or so she thought–he was a corrupt social climber who fell in with the ruling-class types who could make him money, lots of it, and never looked back. The Pod was not so easy to explain, though you could always go with the malevolent force of his Svengali, Midge Decter. Still, Norman was no Trilby; he had always been full of some inexplicable rage of the kind that when I encounter it always leads me to look back with nostalgia at Else Frankel-Brunswick’s classic and (wrongly) much maligned study of The Authoritarian Personality.

I know the anti-Right conclusion of that study is out of keeping with the kind of shoddy intellectual relativism that these days posits “Left” and “Right” as “extremes” within whose boundaries moderate liberal realism falls, but that’s the way it is. For a long time genuine rage has had almost nowhere to go on the American Left, except the convulsive violence of late SDS and its Maoist successors: and these are simply not in the American grain, nor do they promise anything but total exclusion from American life (and maybe a prison sentence). The rage of race, or of thwarted power, including sexual power and the power of patriarchy, is entirely of the Right, and indeed explains the persistence of the Right even as it descends into genuine madness. It is also, sadly, very much in the American grain.

To see not the psychological (who knows?) but the chronological origins specifically of the Pod’s rage, you have to look back at the essay everyone looks back at (most recently Ian Buruma, in reviewing his book on “World War IV” in the New York Review of Books), “My Negro Problem and Ours.” “Ours” indeed–unless “we” consists of the Pod and that other Norman, the postal clerk, who had a similar problem. The “problem” was this: Negroes were tough, and nice Jewish boys weren’t, and Negroes were scary and nice Jewish boys were scared, and we were all supposed to be together in one big happy liberal family, and under such circumstances that just couldn’t work. My own tough-guy problem was with Italians, but that didn’t call one’s whole liberal pluralist upbringing into account (especially if it was founded in anti-Catholicism, to which I still cheerfully plead guilty).

The Pod has usually been acquitted of racism in that article, on the grounds that he advocated racial intermarriage (miscegenation) as a solution to American racism: perhaps following the notorious Hannah Arendt article on Little Rock that Commentary had been going to publish until my mother vetoed it, on the grounds that its opposition to school integration would lead to a fracturing of the Jewish/Negro coalition. (I won’t even mention all the historical ironies there.) But in his seeming recognition of the virtues of blackness, chief among them physical prowess, he was exactly like the kind of anti-Semite who insists on having a Jewish lawyer when big money or long prison terms are involved. More revealing, perhaps, this is the man, after all, who once said that the decline of Western civilization was due to the prevalence of homosexuals. Just substitute the word “Jews” in there and we know exactly where we’re at.

In the end it’s the same syndrome: the thwarting of “masculinity,” or rather of the wistful expectations of masculinity, and the rage that being thwarted–read “the real world”–produces. In women too, it must be said, since the pleasures of patriarchy are promised to male and female alike; more to the former, but who am I to say why people should believe or not believe, or what price they pay or compensation receive for their beliefs? In any event, you can find this kind of out-of-control masculinism everywhere in the world, of course: but in the so-called West, it is strong enough to exert real power, sometimes even hegemony, only in America. Yes, Harry Golden, Only In America. Why, who knows? but what and how, is at the present moment all too clear. Read Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream.

So, no more politics. On to movies, and pleasure.

Speech after Long Silence...

Now that the breast-beating of the disillusioned neo-con fellow travelers has assumed massive proportions, it’s time to take a look at what they’re actually saying, and not saying. The new mantra is that “mistakes were made” (aren’t they always?). The tragic hero of the new revisionists–George Packer, Kenneth Pollack, Tom Friedman, Charles Ferguson, Michael Ignatieff, et al.–is Jay Garner; the black-hatted villain is Paul Bremer along with his commanding Svengali, Donald Rumsfeld.

They still don’t get it, nor do their unrepentant partners in crime–Hitchens, Berman, Geras, etc. What is it they don’t get? That there was no mistake. They would like to think that there could have been a rationally conducted War and a rationally conducted occupation. Only a pacifist can deny this tout court, so let’s leave pacifism aside and tentatively acknowledge that maybe in some hypothetical world they’re right, even; we can never be dogmatic about “what might have been” (“Of all sad words of tongue and pen/The saddest are, “It might have been.”) Perhaps FDR and George Marshall could have done it; or Abraham Lincoln. But the world is what it is, and it was impossible that George W. Bush and his morally deprived crew could have done it; not because they couldn’t know how, but because they didn’t want to. No, let’s go further than that. They were absolutely opposed to creating and implementing a rational or constructive or positive military policy, because that would have contradicted their whole ideological purpose: to weaken and ultimately destroy the state and so enrich themselves and their friends. To drown it or suffocate it or crush it or whatever their metaphor of the moment happens to be. Thus the initial “mistake” was appointing Jay Garner; that mistake was rectified by his firing and replacement with Paul Bremer. Bremer, puppet of the plutocracy, could be and was an instrument of that purpose in Iraq. Garner, the military professional, couldn’t be; he had to go.

Now the one-Party apostles–William Kristol and his ilk–will say condescendingly that we unpatriotic Leftists don’t understand that they do believe in a strong state, an imperial state, a state armed to the teeth, a state that can govern the world. With Randolph Bourne, but from the shore of Imperial madness rather than of anti-Imperialism, the lunatic Right of today believes that “War is the health of the State.” But he was wrong, and so are they.

In truth, it’s a little more complicated than that. War may be one of the activities of a healthy state, but usually it isn’t. Rather, the health of the State is strength. Not military strength–Germany today is a stronger state than it was under Hitler or the Communists; so too is Finland, which as far as we know doesn’t depend on the military-industrial complex for its health. The best exposition of what states are for, in theory if not always or even mostly in actual practice, is given in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution: “to insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty...” A healthy state is one that works–those who staff it work–to accomplish those ends; that can call on the resources and organizational supports needed to accomplish them; and that will be supported by at least a firm majority of citizens when it makes that call. It is “strong” when it can succeed in doing what needs to be done, and conversely, it can only succeed if it is strong. Therefore, no matter how bloated its military, a State that does not seek, e.g., to establish justice and promote the general welfare cannot be strong, it can only be weak, mal-adapted, irrational: like the American state under the radical Republicans of today. And a weak state cannot conduct a successful war or any other type of policy that must engage its true energies. Above all, only a truly strong, well adapted, well-rationalized state can possibly engage in nation-building, probably the most difficult task any polity can try to engage in (as Machiavelli first pointed out).

Well before the invasion of 2003, the American State under George W. Bush and his neo-totalitarian supporters was dedicated to institutionalizing injustice, subverting the general welfare at every turn, and trampling on the blessings of liberty: and to making certain that those benign purposes can never be resurrected. All departments of government were deliberately corrupted, or if relatively incorruptible (i.e., the State Department) were inundated with lies and relegated to the sidelines. In other words, this was a State devoted to its own self-destruction except as naked Force. That is its leaders’ goal. The power of its military–not “our military”--was no more a sign of strength than the unregulated power of a police force is a sign of the strength of a city. The American state of 2003 existed, and still exists, solely to increase the wealth and power of the already wealthy and powerful, and to abolish all those parts of itself that might prevent that from happening. Since a great deal of its support comes from Christian sociopaths (and Jewish monomaniacs), it also works to increase the purchase on social life of their particular form of sociopathy: again at the expense of rational thought and action. All of this was perfectly self-evident by 2003. And yet this is the State that the fellow-travelers of the Radical Right called on to bring “democracy” to Iraq: not necessarily an ignoble ideal, yet how could anyone possibly have thought that a group of conspirators dedicated to destroying every vestige of democratic self-government at home could somehow implant it abroad? That disbelievers in effective governance could establish it in the world’s most inhospitable environment?

In God Is Not Great, his recent book attacking organized religion, Christopher Hitchens does a nice (albeit unoriginal) job of discrediting creationists, and demonstrating their sheer irrationality. They refuse to look squarely at the reality of the material world. Yet in March 2003 he (and his cohort) looked the reality of the United States squarely in the eye: and flinched. To flinch in the face of reality: that is the definition of worldly irrationality. Calling what they did a “mistake” bred by “dogmatic”idealism, as Ignatieff does in his New York Times Magazine mea culpa, is to let them all off the hook upon which History has forever impaled them.

Tom Friedman Redux Redux Redux

The geopolitical imbecile is at it again. Two years ago I wrote that if the U.S. seemed to be “winning,” he would change his mind once again. Has anyone ever less needed a weatherman to know which way the wind blows? Now, today (a day that would live in infamy if there were more than three people in the world who care what Tom Friedman thinks), he preposterously tells us that “there’s only one position to have on the surge anymore: hope that it works.”

Actually, I just realized while writing this that I (and perhaps all of us who read The Times this morning), owe Jon Stewart a hearty toast of congratulations for fooling the whole world into thinking that Tom Friedman wrote that column, when he, Stewart, is clearly its real author. I mean, no one, no matter how stupid, satirizes himself, does he? “The surge can’t work without political reconciliation among Iraqi factions...” Tom, the surge isn’t supposed to “work,” it’s supposed to “win” the War. I mean, George Bush has said about six thousand times that this is a war that cannot be lost, and anyone who disagrees is more or less an unpatriotic American. Here is a President who has never told the truth about one single policy initiative, domestic or foreign, he has ever proposed, and all of a sudden Tom Friedman thinks that he’s offering a serious proposal? It’s not a proposal Tom, and it’s not open for debate, by Democrats or anyone else. It has exactly the same status as the plutonium from Niger, the threat of WMD’s, the love of Middle East “democracy,” and the rest of that sorry stew of Presidential lies. The surge “working” simply would mean more massacres of civilians by more troops of the American occupation, followed by maybe a five-minute lull after the “withdrawal” of American troops–if anyone is brain-dead enough to believe in that–before the shitstorm we created and prolong would start all over again. But don’t worry, Tom, that won’t be allowed to happen; there’ll always be good reason not to “withdraw.” Everything in scare quotes, I fear, because nothing means what it seems to say when uttered in Washington.

Yes there is only one position “to have on the surge,” though as he asserts it’s utterly fruitless: stop the surge. Withdraw. Stop killing Iraqis. Every one we kill is one who might not have been killed by another Iraqi; maybe so, but maybe not. Above all, stop pretending that the rapist has to hang around the house to help his poor victim get back on her feet, that that’s the “honorable” thing to do instead of just going off to jail and paying her all the compensation she asks for. Or in this case being prosecuted for war crimes.

I apologize to all readers who feel that in that last paragraph I should have wanted to stop the putting of American GI’s into harm’s way, too. Not my issue. That’s what you do in the Army, or Marine Corps, you kill and get killed. That’s what you’re there for. I feel sorry for Gold Star mothers, but the moral (as distinct from political) purpose of stopping this war is not to help out Americans, but just to stop them from killing other people.

The Impeachment of Dick Cheney

You wish!
But in a sense, it’s astonishing that this hasn’t surfaced yet, because it’s really an open-and-shut case, without the practical liability of a Bush impeachment that would leave Cheney himself as President. For the details of what Cheney did and when he did it, see the article by David Corn in the March 19 Nation. The details, as I’ll explain, aren’t really that important anyway, most of what he personally did being on the order of “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” The central point is that there was a conspiracy, centered in either the White House or Cheney’s office or both, but with the VP not having the defense of being the Chief Executive, Commander-in-Chief, etc., that Bush could make. In any event, what’s clear from all the coverage, the trial itself, and the comments of Patrick Fitzgerald (and the jurors), is that in the plot to smear Joseph Wilson and cover up the lies that led to War, there are in effect a bunch of unindicted co-conspirators still at large, including at a minimum Cheney and Karl Rove, who took the easy way out (and I would insist Robert Novak). The offenses that got Andrew Johnson impeached, mostly being essentially policy disagreements, were nothing compared to this.

I think that it’s partly because of a couple of common misapprehensions about the impeachment process that the case hasn’t got legs so far. First, the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” is usually misunderstood, as though crimes were really bad and “misdemeanors” something less, like unpaid parking tickets. This is not so. That’s the second dictionary definition of the word, but the first (AHD) is simply “a misdeed.” Period. And the drafters of the Constitution knew their words very well. So a “high...misdemeanor” is a very, very bad misdeed–and it doesn’t have to be a crime at all in the formal legal sense. So Fitzgerald’s assertion of not having the evidence to prosecute the VP for a “crime,” while presumably true, has no bearing on the issue–the standards for proceeding are not the same at all.
Second, what are the standards? Essentially, there are none. In an impeachment proceeding, the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee (or a hired prosecutorial gun) is the prosecutor, and the full House acts as a Grand Jury. So it only has to find “probable cause” of an indictable offense, after which the jury–the Senate–will decide whether the offense is serious enough, whether the case has been made that it actually took place, and whether it ought to be done anyhow. In other words, whether or not to convict.
Impeachment, in order words, is primarily a political rather than a criminal proceeding. The House sets its own rules, and if it wanted to, it could indict the President for serving imported French cheese, and do so on the basis of unsubstantiated rumors at that. The usual rules of evidence, prohibitions against, hearsay, etc., do not apply. As Howard Baker said about Nixon, the question is “what did he know and when did he know it;” and he meant not can we prove it but are we or will we be satisfied that we (the Senate) know enough to convict. In fact, a defense of “you can’t prove it” would itself be a strong ground for conviction--or at least impeachment, which is the main issue, because in order to make a case the House would have to explore the entire run-up to the War, the lies about WMDs, and so forth. The whole vile mess would be exposed, and couldn’t be prevented by refusals to testify that would just serve to confirm the accusations. It would be one of the greatest learning experiences the American public would ever have had. Alas, I must use a weirdly subjunctive tense.
Of course in a different kind of society or social order the subject wouldn’t arise. In Japan not so long ago, the miscreant would have fallen on his sword (or however they do it). In the British Army, he would resign “for the honor of the Regiment.” In the US Army, he’d take “early retirement,” or else be reassigned to command an MP battalion in Juneau, Alaska. In the US Navy, it would go on his record that he could never again have a command. But American politics is not about honor, and the VP thug doesn’t have any anyhow. So here we are--let's all get in touch with John Conyers, the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and tell him to go for it.

Letter to the Nation

The following appeared in edited form in the issue of The Nation that just went to press; it's taken from my earlier blog post on "American Caesar."

To argue as my friend Sanford Levinson did in that the Administration is only “grossly incompetent”—and that the President therefore should not be impeached, having not committed “high crimes”—is to completely miss the point. It’s a highly competent Administration, one of the most competent ever, the way a sociopath—say, Ted Bundy—is competent.

As for high crimes: Under the leadership of George W. Bush, tyranny is now institutionalized in the form of the unitary executive and, especially, the anticonstitutional extension, as though by an absolute monarch, of the constitutionally allocated role of “commander in chief.” This is probably the most breathtaking assault on democratic government ever to take place in a supposedly stable democracy. The President’s ultimate command (rarely exercised by past Presidents) over the armed forces has been turned into a claim to exercise dictatorial command over all persons, not only in the United States but in other nations as well. As for the legislature, its role in the separation of powers has been effectively abolished, no matter who controls it; it remains to be seen whether any part of that role can be recaptured.

As things stand, the President still ignores it and suffers no penalty for doing so. He does whatever he wants—e.g., setting out to destroy New York State’s public hospitals. The things he can’t do—e.g., invent and implement an overall “healthcare” policy all by himself—are things he doesn’t want to do anyhow, since he and his accomplices are against all government other than that which further enriches or empowers themselves. So all the agitated discussion on the left about what the Democrats ought to be doing is about nothing. Can anyone seriously believe that Bush will give up his warmaking powers if Congress denies him funding?

And what have the leaders of the one-party state accomplished? They’ve stolen countless billions from the national economy (and Iraq’s as well), and transferred it to themselves and their friends; they’ve installed a regime of spies and torturers at the heart of the state; they’ve suborned the military to surrender its professional responsibilities to an ex-deserter turned tyrant. Abroad they engage in willful slaughter, including that of the nation’s young, to enhance their own control. They’ve carefully presided over the continued destruction of a center of African-American population exactly as they want to; taken over the National Labor Relations Board for their antiunion agenda; cemented their party’s coalition with Christian totalitarians at the expense of science, healthcare and democracy itself; packed the court system and ignored its remnants of independence when it would interfere with their power; stolen one and possibly two presidential elections.

This is incompetence? What could they possibly have done with more success? Quite possibly the idea of impeachment is chimerical. But please!

HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION: REAL AND FAKE

When you look at the pro-War literature–e.g., the collection A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq–it comes across as a novel and unpleasant phenomenon. You have intelligent people like Christopher Hitchens, Norman Geras, Paul Berman, Tony Blair, Ian Buruma, Adam Michnik, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and others engaging in a smugly self-righteous, venomously left-baiting, discourse–a discourse that rests on a doubly dishonest verbal sleight of hand.

First, as in the book title above, War becomes reconceptualized as a form of “humanitarian intervention” or democratic revolution instead of what it really is, an alternative to humanitarian intervention and democratic revolution. Next, War having been arbitrarily reconstituted as “humanitarian” and/or “democratic” (or any other analogous euphemism), is now divided into two forms as though they’re actually separate from each other: intended violence, and gosh gee whiz unfortunate but perhaps unavoidable “collateral” violence. Can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.

Both of these steps are intellectual frauds of the first order. First, armed assaults on bad guys are not humanitarian, and second, the makers of war–and its proponents--are directly responsible for all the violence it engenders.

As to the first, there is undoubtedly real humanitarian intervention involving armed force. Examples: ferrying of supplies to needy persons, and protecting the supply lines. Or, sending an expeditionary force to rescue or defend beseiged persons, on their request. In essence, these are no different from using violence to protect someone from being attacked, or raped. But this means correlatively that political interventions are not “humanitarian.” Whether we like them or not, they are matters of policy, and always questionable as such. For example, take the question of defending a legitimate government from being overthrown. Under some circumstances this can be thought of as an extension of the right of self-defense, and then that’s what it is, and perhaps sometimes it’s a defensible form of intervention in a civil war. But it’s still really a political choice, not a moral obligation, in the sense that deciding what “legitimate” means, and which governments are “legitimate,” is a profoundly political act based on political beliefs rather than moral or humanitarian standards of any kind–standards of which the current American regime has in any event simply none at all. So political intervention is not humanitarian intervention, and armed political intervention is War.

When is armed humanitarian intervention, specifically “in principle,” actually called for? There’s a great passage in a novel by AEW Mason, about mountain guides: “They obeyed a law, a law not of any man’s making, and the one law last broken--the law that what you know, that you must do, if by doing it you can save a life...If you can swim, sail a boat, or climb a mountain, and the moment comes when a life can be saved if you use your knowledge--well, you have got to use it. That’s the law.” By extension from individuals to societies I think that’s a good general principle. And in that case it is “a matter of principle,” as with the mountain guides, not of self-interested political choice. Rwanda may be an example of such a case--the French Army and the U.N. force both had the responsibility and perhaps (though possibly not) the power, and did nothing with it. To their shame.

War, contrarily, is the direct use of armed violence by one human group against another human group--excluding justifiable self-defense, which can fairly be conceptualized as a response to war, as long as it really is self-defense. (Always claimed to be, and rarely so.) The invasion of Afghanistan, e.g., might have been defensible as a limited police action, like any other justifiable punitive undertaking, but as an invasive War destructively overturning an entire society it is no longer self-defense, not even close.

Is there any way that war-making can be a “matter of principle”? It’s possible. It could be, say, in fulfillment of a treaty obligation--Sept 1, 1939. Or it could be in response to a cry for help. But has any country ever issued a call to invade it in order to help it? I can’t think of any. There’s the Bosnian case perhaps--“bomb us to help us.” That’s a very limited form of intervention--and the verdict of history is still out on whether it was a genuine matter of principle.

The clearest case of intervention in a civil war being a matter of principle is Rwanda, because now we’re talking about genocide, one people setting forth to wipe out another. Hitchens and the English writer Norman Geras have spoken of Saddam’s Iraq as though genocide was what was going on, but that’s a travesty of a morally serious argument. Whatever Saddam was doing, wiping out the overwhelming majority of Shiites–80% of the population!–wasn’t it. Ethnic cleansing of Kurds?–They seem to have survived remarkably well, and now we have ethnic cleansing of Sunnis, courtesy of the people who were going to bring “democracy” to Iraq. So in any event, what we did was not then an intervention in a civil war to prevent one side from wiping out the other.

There was no civil war in Iraq, just a loathsome tyranny, and the intervention there like any similar one became a war against a government you don’t like. Not liking the object of an attack, however loathsome, doesn’t make it any the less an attack, or War any less a War. An attack is not an intervention and massive bombardment (“shock and awe”) and destruction aren’t “humanitarian,” any more than a race is a stroll, or a fish is a bicycle. etc. (Actually, I think I’m being literal here--inter [between] vention [coming]--a coming between. Unless it’s a genuine coming between, the word is being hijacked.)

So the supposedly principled interventionist case, once you acknowledge that we’re talking about War, now goes like this: “It is ethically required that A wage war on B because B is being brutalized by B’s tyrant.” Are they kidding? This doesn’t come close to sounding anything like any imaginable “matter of principle.” Think of A and B as persons--principled intervention means we put ourselves between them to prevent A from hurting B. War means we throw a grenade at them and blow them to bits to stop the act of hurting, substituting our own act of hurting for theirs. That’s War. “We destroyed the village in order to save it.” Uh-huh.

This brings up the second part of the conceptual shell game practiced by the interventionists: their refusal to acknowledge the real nature of War. Assaults on another nation, in addition to not being “humanitarian,” are also not generators of regrettable “collateral damage”–“oh, I’m so sorry we killed all those civilians.” The damage, all of it, is the intention of the act. To say otherwise is to lie. There are no sanitary wars, and anyone who doesn’t know this is both a fool and a liar.

This is also true, inter alia, of occupations. This has been much misunderstood. The successful occupations of Japan and Germany after WWII are desperately taken as evidence that occupation can succeed more or less peacefully, without endless insurgency and violence. Totally false: the violence of the occupation of Japan was much much worse than the violence of the occupation of Iraq because it included the dropping of two A-bombs, not to mention the devastating fire-bombing of Tokyo and other cities, to sanitize the entire nation precedent to occupation by threatening it with mass destruction, regardless of whether there might have been inhabitants who were secretly but helplessly opposed to the war-making regime.

The same was true, to a lesser extent perhaps, of Germany: massive destruction of civil society along with massive loss of life as an expectable and desired outcome of total war (cf. Dresden), the complete smashing of the Wermacht after three years of all-out war on both fronts, and unconditional surrender by the leaders of a totally exhausted and completely demobilized society: which the Western Allies at least then proceeded to build up in a massive allocation of resources rather than an exploitation of its only resource (i.e. in Iraq, oil).

For an occupation to succeed, in other words, you must smash or terrorize the subjected society–the Nazis knew that!--and that is what has been going on in Iraq for two years: smashing the society, by visiting destruction on it in the name of “democracy!” Germany, contrarily, was not smashed in the name of “democracy,” because you can’t smash anyone in the name of democracy. It was smashed in the name of winning the War and ending the presumed threat to civilization. Democracy came later to Western Europe (and Japan), because there were actually regimes in the U.S. and Britain that were more or less democratic. (The Japanese Constitution was actually written by committed American democrats.) Conversely, thinking that George Bush might bring “democracy” to Iraq is like imagining that Stalin might have brought democracy to East Germany (see my earlier blog on "Second Thoughts on Intervention"). Fellow-traveling comes in many guises.

In other words, what’s grotesquely missing entirely from the “Iraq as Just War” position is the recognition that first and foremost War is War. It becomes everything else but in the commentaries of its apologists like Elshtain, Hitchens, Geras, and the like. You’d think they’d understand that if one is to have a “just war” theory, then the first step in just-ifying War is to acknowledge that it is a War, with all that entails, and that it will necessarily go way beyond your own alleged “intentions.” Waging War is the only intention that counts. The War may later turn out to have been just according to some theory or other, but you can’t possibly know that beforehand, and cannot claim the mantle of “justness” a priori. The alleged intention to do one thing rather than another can’t create the description of what has actually been done--that’s literally what logicians call the Intentional Fallacy.

If a man intends to rape a woman non-violently--if she would just give in and not make a fuss--and then somehow winds up beating and knifing and killing her because she resisted--I don’t think even Hitchens would credit his “intention.” That’s the US in Iraq. Is and always was, as all of us who opposed the invasion pointed out time and again. The just war theory of the Iraq invasion simply makes the Iraqis into non-people, objects of the moralizing fantasies of Western intellectuals who are prepared to sacrifice any number of people to a convenient theory.

As for the hideous conduct of the War, are these high-IQ thinkers actually surprised? Since the invention of the bomber, the flame-thrower, the fragmentation bomb, the distinction between just and unjust means has collapsed, though it’s amazing how many self-styled public intellectuals refuse to notice this. There’s no such thing as a partial war, except when one side completely defeats the other’s armed forces in a purely military zone (the 6-Day War, perhaps, which in the immediate sense was self-defense and did not initially involve invading someone else’s territory–until its historically disastrous conclusion). Otherwise, all persons are targets, all weapons that destroy persons are used if they have to be.

There may be a “just” war but there is no clean war, and all plans for war are therefore plans for Total War. A man who goes into the woods with a .22 rifle looking for rabbit may actually be said to be hunting rabbits. Substitute a phosphorus grenade launcher or a napalm sprayer for the rifle and no matter what he says he “intends,” he’s no longer hunting rabbits, he’s destroying a woodland. This is the truth of war, “just” or “unjust” as history may later decide. In either case, there is nothing about it that is “humanitarian,” whatever the rights or wrongs on either side.

The baffling thing is that all this is perfectly self-evident to military professionals (and politicians too, though the latter simply lie about it). Only intellectuals focused on airy abstractions could manage to miss this point. That they do so with such consistency is, I imagine (and to be charitable), attributable to a misguided desire to avoid falling into the pit of a supposedly irresponsible pacifism, which seems to beckon if one accepts the clear truth that no war can any longer be sanitized. In truth, the premise does not lead inexorably to the pacifist conclusion. It certainly does lead to the less drastic conclusion that even wars in a just cause will necessarily encompass large elements of injustice, and that the latter must be accepted with open eyes as part of any pursuit of the former. Not whitewashed with the euphemism of “humanitarian,” or “democratic.” And weighed against the results that may or more likely may not actually come about.

Once you acknowledge that you chose War, then you acknowledge also that you chose what War does: you chose to kill everyone who is to be killed, and to destroy everything that is to be destroyed. You posited a chimerical end and invoked its fantasized achievement to justify any means at all, and as for the human beings who insist on getting in the way, well, to paraphrase Norman Mailer, “fuck em.”

And what about those of us who said No, you are about to engage in butchery and national destruction in the name of seizing power in a One-Party State? Did we therefore, as Norman Geras alleges, in our own way choose to endorse Saddam’s killing and torturing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Kurds? The way the Reagan Administration chose to endorse that by arming Saddam during the Iraq-Iran War? No, that was Saddam’s choice. If I could have stopped it I would, but I couldn’t, and neither could you, or you. That’s the tragedy of history. Only the Iraqi people could have, perhaps with less social destruction; now we’ll never know.

We are not the accomplices of every brutal killer across the world if we are helpless to stop him by armed violence without becoming brutal killers ourselves. We didn’t invade South Africa to free the Blacks, we don’t invade Israel to free the Palestinians, we didn’t invade Argentina to overthrow the torture regime of the Generals, we don’t invade China to end the regime of oppressive slave labor, we didn’t invade East Timor to stop the slaughter there (hell, we winked at it), we didn’t invade Germany to save the Jews, we don’t invade Pakistan to stop the brutalization of women–and all these, sadly, were the right, because the only possible, decisions.

AEW Mason said it best. If what you can do can save a life, you do it. By pressure, by sanctions, by disinvestment, by assassination, by the interposition of yourselves as witnesses (the Quaker way), even by selective military intervention–interposition of armed selves between the victims and their attacker. But if all you can do is change the identity of the massive life-takers, and aggrandize your own self-interest meanwhile, you don’t do it. Or if you do, we know who you are: not an “humanitarian,” but just another murderous imperialist–or his fellow traveler.

killing dragons, torturing terrorists (revised)

A simple yet fundamental question presents itself under the rubric of “rules of war.” Can it ever be morally rightful, can it ever be accepted as legitimate, to execute a dragon on sight, without first attempting to inquire as to whether its intentions toward humans are peaceful; whether it means no harm; or at least whether it can be captured and caged without posing an unacceptably grave threat?

The question surely answers itself. We know, all of us, that there is no such thing as a peaceful or well-intentioned or harmless dragon; such exists only in the fantasies of pacifists and other hopeless idealists, who always wind up doing more harm than good in the name of their “principles.” Dragons are, without exception, mortal enemies of humankind; anyone who attempted to “establish communication” with one would be incinerated before the first word was out of her mouth. Only nervous nellies and girlie-boys refuse to face this simple truth.

There is, to be sure, one problem with the argument I have just made. There are no dragons; never have been. Ils n’existent pas. But then why, an impatient reader might be demanding, have I just been arguing about non-existent dragons in an essay that is supposed to be about torture. What can the two things possibly have to do with each other?

Actually, everything.

Let us consider three putative “enemies:” dragons, aliens who abduct humans into their spaceships, and terrorists who will cause massive destruction if they are not tortured into a timely revelation of their nefarious schemes. These all have one crucial thing in common: never in recorded history has any one of them been known to exist.

To be fair, historically torturers are not totally without their accomplishments. In perhaps the most well-known instance, the Gestapo captured two ill-trained British spies and tortured them into revealing their network, which it then rolled up. And there may have been other instances in occupied Europe in which the Gestapo successfully tortured spies and resistants at some cost to their colleagues.

And because of these signal successes, Nazi Germany was finally able to...destroy the French Resistance; repel the Normandy landings; win World War II...
...well, no. Maybe kill a few dozen more people than it would have killed anyway.

Wow! Glory be. Praise Allah.

The intellectual handmaidens of torture–John Yoo, Alan Dershowitz, the cynical utilitarian Judge Richard Posner–will instantly spot the flaw in this argument and leap into the breach: they only mean to justify torture that will prevent “mass murder,” not be its accomplice. Except, unfortunately, that is not what they are about. Can they really believe, e.g., that Mohammed Atta, had he been picked up in New Hampshire and tortured (in the real Gestapo way, not the timid water-boarding and fingernail-pulling that our heroes advocate), would have revealed the destination at which he fully intended to blow himself to bits an hour later? That a suicide bomber is afraid of pain? That a fanatical terrorist who intends, say, to detonate a nuclear weapon in New York City will be sitting peacefully in Philadelphia waiting to make this happen? After having sent a detailed map of his plans, complete with maps and time-tables, to his colleagues in Afghanistan just in case they are captured, perhaps? This is all the most total nonsense, of course. The discourse of torture has nothing to do with Judge Posner’s ridiculous calculations of cost and benefit. There is something much larger at stake: an attempt to destroy moral limits in the name of naked (American) power. Nothing less.

And the attempt is succeeding. Critics of the torture complex, ignored by the mainstream mass media, play catch-up with the fait accompli and its spokesmen. At best, we get “both sides of the debate" (see, e.g., Sanford Levinson’s Torture: a Collection), letting us know that we're already living in a morally degenerate society. It might as well be a place where Holocaust deniers are not only granted equal time and a polite hearing, but set the tone of the discussion. There is no “other side.” (I remember being told of a Rotary Club meeting at which, having listened to a presentation about the nature and extent of wife-beating, a man in the audience asked if they were going “to hear the other side.”) The argument “for” torture illustrates only the depths to which persons of higher than average accomplishments–not just professors, judges, and legal bureaucrats, but also their post-deserting, draft-dodging bosses in the White House and its vicinity–can sink in the pursuit of their private fantasies of unrealized masculinity. The minor accomplishments of the Gestapo aside, in real life no one tortures to find out something they didn’t already know, since nothing the torturer finds out can be trusted as evidence, as the history of coerced confessions in police stations endlessly testifies. And of course if there were a single case in the history of warfare where torture had enabled the pursuers of a just cause to ward off a supposedly greater evil, we would certainly have heard of it, instead of all the invented stories of ticking bombs and hidden terrorists in which the Dershowitzes and Posners of the torture discourse traffic.

There is none and there won’t be, not simply because torture can’t procure reliable information but because that’s not its purpose. The true aim of the Inquisition was inquisition; the purpose of torture, whatever its fellow travelers argue, is to satiate the lust for sex or power of the torturers; none other. And the purpose of the argument “for” torture in, remember now, “only a few extreme instances”...is to justify torture in any instance. As with any other inhibition, break it down once and away it goes–and then we can get on with the real business of being tough and winning. The point is, after all, that once the utilitarian calculus gets under way the benefit–let’s say, to save the life of one soldier “on our side”–always, always exceeds the cost of doing what is necessary “just this once.” How could it not? Come on, Judge Posner: you mean we would torture in the name of defusing a nuclear weapon but, hey, if it’s only a mortar round that’s going to kill a platoon of our heroic men and women, let it come down!

The people who write this crap can’t possibly believe it themselves, although perhaps the intellectual fellow travelers of American Caesarism really fall for their own ideological siren song. Practical men of affairs suffer from no such illusions. Witness the enthusiastic endorsement by the Justice Department’s torture brigade–Albert Gonzalez, David Addington, Jay Bybee–of all torture, all the time, anywhere, under the guise of “necessity” and “self-defense;” not to mention the welcoming embrace of the War-Criminal-in-Chief and his Vice-Criminal. And why not? Other than hard-core sadistic psychopaths, who ever commits an act of brutal violence that isn’t either “necessary” or in “self-defense?”The academic purveyors of the lust to inflict pain are simply men who can only satisfy that lust in their brains, and who can only prove their masculinity by winning on paper battles that they have never won in life. Never fired on a man who aimed a loaded weapon at them; never entered a burning building to save a trapped child; never won a fistfight against a truly tough guy. Like that purveyor of fantasized masculinity Harvey Mansfield, Jr., they can only show their manhood to a skeptical world by imagining it. Some of those imaginaries may be relatively harmless; but the imagination of torture enables–encourages--true evil, the repressed voice that longs for realization, to bubble up from the depths and present itself as good; and in that it is one of the worst evils of all. The apologists for torture should be shunned as one would shun an advocate of child molestation in the name of "love"–they are at the same ethical level, not one whit higher. Not one.

American Caesar

“Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed, that he hath grown so great?”

Having recently co-authored an essay arguing that the United States is properly considered a representative oligarchy rather than a democracy, I feel impelled at this point to register somewhat of a dissent from myself–ourselves. Yes, the normal state of affairs in the US toward the end of the 20th Century was a version of oligarchy, though actual governance might alternate between slightly different political parties. For the past 6 years, though, since the electoral coup d’etat of 2000, a world-historical change (as Hegel might call it) has been under way; to quote an earlier coup-ist, I now want “to caveat that.” The US is not now an oligarchy, whether what our essay called “representative” or in the more traditional sense. The appropriate term for the political system under which we live and within which we are subordinate is rather Tyranny.

Exactly what kind of tyranny is the only open question. It’s tempting to use that somewhat abused word, “fascism,” but tempting as that move is–it enables us to say, for example, that the primary world struggle today is between Islamic Fascism and American Fascism–it really should be resisted. (Actually, both halves of that attribution should be resisted.) Fascism was a total political economy, an organized way of life, a system of authority based on violence aimed primarily at organizations of the working class; to start talking about “friendly fascism” or “elective fascism” or some other similar modifier really misses the point.

Nor is the United States exactly a “police state,” though it’s equally tempting to borrow that nomenclature. The term is meant to convey the feeling that power is always lurking behind the barrel of the nearest rifle, so that citizens are constantly under threat even when just walking up the Avenue–say, Argentina after the take-over by the Generals. But even though I belong to an affinity group that talks much radical talk, and occasionally participates in demonstrations against something or other, I never feel–I’m sure none of us ever feels–that we essentially live in a military occupied zone. The NYPD is bad, but not that bad–once in a while they even lose arguments with civil liberties attorney Norman Siegel, who isn’t walking around worrying that there’ll be a knock on his door by Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. Nor is Katrina vanden Heuvel, nor even Noam Chomsky or Alex Cockburn.

The loose concept of authoritarianism, or authoritarian populism–more an ideological than an institutional denotation–isn’t fully helpful either; the Right is certainly authoritarian or even totalitarian, but again there’s too much resistance and dissent, and usually little or no penalty for it, to convey what that word is meant to convey, and anyhow the term is too general.
Okay, what kind of “tyranny?” What is the problem we face, exactly?

It’s this: constitutional government has been overthrown, elections have been tossed on the historical trash-heap, electoral and legislative politics have been neutered, the separation of powers has been abolished, and so too has the hitherto at least partially operative concept of the rule of law. There has indeed been a coup d’etat, and it is ongoing rather than being merely what happened in December six years ago. What the Founders called the Republic–the American Republic–has been assassinated by the Republican Party.

Tyranny is now institutionalized in the form of the unitary executive and, especially, the anti-constitutional extension, as though by an absolute monarch, of the constitutionally allocated role of “commander-in-chief.” This is probably the most breathtaking assault on democratic government ever to take place in a supposedly stable democracy (or oligarchy for that matter). The President’s ultimate command (rarely exercised by past presidents) over the armed forces has been turned into a claim to exercise dictatorial command over all persons, not only in the US but even in other nations as well. Putting all this together, it’s clear that the recent alteration of majority power in the legislature makes no difference in that the legislature–the subject of Article I of the Constitution (the Presidency being relegated to Article II) is no longer relevant to political policy-making, except when the Party of the President controls it in a One-Party State, and gives it its marching orders.

Otherwise, the President ignores it and suffers no penalty for doing so. He does whatever he wants–e.g., setting out to destroy New York State’s public hospitals, or gutting the powers of legislatively authorized regulatory agencies. And the things he can’t do --e.g., invent and implement an overall “health-care” policy all by himself--are things he doesn’t want to do anyhow, since he and his accomplices are against all government other than that which enriches or further empowers themselves. So all the agitated discussion on the Left about what the Democrats ought to be doing and which congressional anti-War resolution is the best–Carl Levin? Teddy Kennedy?–is about nothing. Can anyone seriously believe that George Bush will give up his war-making powers if Congress denies him funding? Of course the Democratic Party ought to take its constituency seriously. But we ought not to think that it can make anything important happen, because that would be under a different form of government.

Thus to argue as my friend Sanford Levinson did in last week’s Nation that the Administration is only “grossly incompetent” and not thereby criminal, is to completely miss the point. It’s a highly competent administration, one of the most competent ever, the way a destructively effective sociopath–say, Ted Bundy--is competent.

They’ve embezzled countless billions from the national economy (and Iraq’s as well, of course), transferred to themselves and their friends; they’ve installed a still-functioning regime of spies and torturers at the heart of the State, they’ve suborned the military to surrender its professional responsibilities to an ex-deserter turned tyrant. Abroad they engage in willful slaughter, including that of the nation’s young, to enhance their own drive for total control. They’ve carefully presided over the continued destruction of a center of African-American population exactly as they want to; taken over the NLRB for their own union-busting agenda (hmm, maybe “Fascism” is beginning to look better); cemented their Party’s coalition with democracy-hating, Christian totalitarians at the expense of science, health care, and democracy itself; packed the court system and ignored its remnants of independence when those would interfere with their power. Most of this they’ve done without any input from the national legislature except occasional acquiescence. This is incompetence? What could they possibly have done with more success?

They have been able to accomplish this because their Party stole one and quite possibly two elections, not by phonying up its own vote totals as in the old-fashioned way, but rather and much more frighteningly by suppressing thousands upon thousands of votes that would have gone overwhelmingly to the other party. As opposed to the historical Caesar and Bonaparte, who at least really were “acclaimed” in some recognizable sense, this tyrant managed to achieve only the “acclaim” of the most slender of “majorities;” yet he proceeded to rule (and continues to do so wherever executive power operates) exactly as if by genuine acclamation; as though he had received 95% of a free vote rather than (in successive elections) somewhere between 48 and 51% of a partially rigged vote.

So what is all this about how stupid George Bush is (yes he’s a total ignoramus, but so what?), how incompetent his Administration is, how low his popularity has sunk, and so on? Perhaps in 2008 we will go back to alternating two-party oligarchy, though with changes to both public and private institutions so immense that we may still look back with envy on oligarchy, when it wasn’t yet pure mean-spirited plutocracy. Meanwhile, though,

“Why man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus.”

We live under Caesar–a Caesar who’s not even a great General but merely a deserter in his youth and an inept military planner in his adulthood (there’s the one vindication of Levinson’s “incompetence”), who would be unchecked Emperor of the entire imperium known as “the free world.” The system we live under, without any recourse for the next two years (at best) is properly described as Caesarism. It is not a falling-off from democracy, or even the lame version of democracy we’ve known throughout much of our history–it’s the antithesis of both democracy and the Republican, constitutional form of government. Caesarism it is.
“This man is now become a god”–one of the most malign and malignant of gods, but a god nonetheless. His outward personality, which might be described as the genial butcher with clean hands, enables him to pose as a would-be democrat, in-between speeches arrogating total power to himself to prosecute his murderous War as he sees fit. We have to advert to the occasional appearances of his thuggish Vice, to hear the absolute contempt for popular democracy that is the heart of their tyranny.

How did we come to this pass? There’s much to be said, about 9/11 and other crucial junctures. But the real point is that citizenship, we ought to have learned, is not just a line on a birth certificate but a state of mind, a habit of attention. We’ve been losing that state of mind and letting that habit weaken for a long time, and now we can only hope that they can be recovered before it’s finally too late.

Asked what kind of government the new Constitution had created, Ben Franklin replied, “A republic–if you can keep it.”

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

second thoughts on intervention

The following essay was written with Drucilla Cornell (Professor of Political Science and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University), and was published in Logos, an excellent on-line journal, in the summer of 2004. It was a follow-up to an earlier essay we had published in the same journal, “For a New Multilateralism,” which has been reprinted in The Logos Reader, edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Michael J. Thompson (Kentucky, 2006); and Planetary Politics, (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), also edited by Bronner. Together we also wrote "Rethinking Democratic Theory: the American Case," published in the winter 2005 issue of the Journal of Social Philosophy: a grim, even mordant, verdict on the American political system today, but god, perhaps not mordant enough (despite current euphoria over Election 2006). I was going to ask her permission to rewrite this essay slightly to make it more timely, but on re-reading it seemed to need hardly any change at all other than cutting and a bit of rewording. I have just added a postscript of my own.

SECOND THOUGHTS ON INTERVENTION

Why second thoughts? First thoughts about the war in Iraq tended to be more or less the same, and became conventional in intellectual circles. Intervention is “humanitarian,” or it’s more destructive than it’s worth. It prevents the depredations of “rogue states,” or it’s simply a cover for American imperialism. It would be acceptable if truly multi-lateral, but the same actions are unacceptable if unilateral (read, “American”). To foreswear it entirely would be “neo-isolationist;” to endorse it in principle is to try to become a “world policeman.” And so on.

We argued strongly against unilateral action and we still hold to that position. But given the grotesqueness of recent events, we want to stress our own need for second thoughts. Yes, as we wrote before, moral principles are important, when they are being systematically undermined by the so-called realists who argue that principles are simply out of date in the war on terror. But on the ground, where people live and die, what matters is not only the ostensible content of those principles, but also who puts them into action. It is only once we understand the full moral and legal significance of who puts principles into action that we can get beyond some of the seemingly insoluble dilemmas of the positions that we described above.

The dilemmas are insoluble in the sense that a position’s opposite is always equally true, and so we flail futilely around us, trying to persuade each other with concessions that are rhetorically meaningless and empirically empty. How can you measure one destruction against another? how can you honestly say that the U.S. is not an imperial power? how can you honestly say that American policy has never been based on anything but nakedly imperial self-interest? how can you oppose the spread of a democracy you argue for so ardently at home? how can you be so naive as to believe that democracy can be imposed on others by force? how can you be so elitist as to doubt that others want democracy as much as you do? Hypocrite lecteur! Mon semblable! Mon Frere!

In this array of not-quite-principles that demand their own refutation as soon as they are stated, there is no firm ground to stand on except historical outcomes that always arrive too late to be of any use. As Machiavelli wrote, history will be the judge (“look to the end”)--but that’s for the authors of history books. If the Thomas Friedmans and Michael Ignatieffs and Bill Kellers of the world have changed their view of the War on Iraq, it’s because the only excuse for the War as they imagined it was a particular kind of victory, and that War has already been lost. And if somehow it were to seem as though it might be “won,” they would change their minds again. But all the while the real “war,” the war of invasion and conquest against a non-belligerent Iraq, began and goes on as though they had never written or existed--if they never had, nothing would have been changed.

How do we explain this total disconnection between the educated intelligence and the obvious reality that it was failing to observe? We believe the explanation is that many of us, for or against, were asking only part of the right question. We needed to focus more on who was implementing the principle as part of a matter of principle itself. We need to remember that in international affairs, it is the nature and quality of the regime that distinguishes “right” from “wrong.” And the nature or quality of a regime have nothing to do with its stated purposes; with its intentions. It’s misleading, or even false, to say that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” The road to hell is paved with stated intentions of any kind, and we set foot on it when we take them seriously; when we start believing what people say instead of paying attention to what they do.

So intellectuals such as Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman and Jean Bethke Elshtain (and Tony Blair) parroted phrases about “democracy” and “ending tyranny” and “Saddam the torturer” on behalf of a regime that was and is visibly not pro- but anti-democratic; that had not and has not the faintest interest in preserving anyone’s liberties; and that has lied about every one of its actions, domestic and foreign, as a matter of course. No one in their right mind would trust this regime to “bring democracy” to Florida, let alone Iraq; or to have humanitarian values deeper than those of the average jackal; or to have any interest in replacing destructive violence anywhere with non-violent stability.

On the plain record, the bedrock goals of the regime and its various factions were and are to install and perpetuate plutocratic, one-party rule long enough to enrich its friends and punish its enemies; to secure a cordon sanitaire around Iran, in order to prop up a faltering oil-based economy and maintain the nationalist delusions of empire that could sustain one-party rule; to make the mid-East safe for Israeli dominance; to cement its alliance with a neo-totalitarian Christian fundamentalism. To forget all this while talking about “America” and “its” goals, as though a “nation” were some imaginary ideal, were anything more than the real people who manage to commit real atrocities in its name, is a verbal swindle. It’s the same swindle that the Commander-In-Chief of Abu Ghraib’s MP’s attempted to foist on the world by saying that “they” didn’t represent the real “us,” as though a real “we” are out there somewhere else, unnoticed by the rest of the world, creating a peaceful “democracy.”

In short, the intellectuals, journalists, and prime ministers who promoted the policies of this regime deserve the epithet that Joseph Stalin bestowed on Western fellow-travelers who thought Communism was about a new world of human equality and pretended the gulag didn’t exist: “useful idiots.”

This corrective emphasis on the nature of the regime that sets out to engage in “humanitarian interventions,” or to “promote democracy,” casts a different light on the conventional argument about the role of the UN in this kind of venture. Anti-war but pro-UN commentators such as ourselves have sometimes seemed uneasily to advocate a double standard (destructive violence is somehow more acceptable if the Security Council approves it), or a single standard that is bound to produce disastrous inaction, as in Rwanda-Burundi. Against this position the unilateralists point to the UN’s incapacities: its institutionalized inertia; its numerical domination by nations that are not interested in the strengthening of what “we” consider democracy; its tendency toward the usual corruptions of a sclerotic bureaucracy, as supposedly evidenced in the oil-for-food scandal (hardly a blip on the corruption radar compared to even the minor accomplishments of the Bush II Administration).

But the pro-UN argument is correct, for these are precisely the difficulties that make the United Nations a more appropriate “world policeman” than the United States. As regimes go, the UN is so minimalist it barely qualifies. Its dangers are entirely of a negative kind--that it won’t do anything. It’s no danger to world peace or regional stability; it won’t attempt to take over anybody or anything; it has no black helicopters at all. It ought to be strengthened, but at ten times its current possibilities for armed intervention it would hardly be competing with France, or Germany, let alone the United States.

Not what the U.S. should do in the world, then, but what it ought to do on behalf of or in concert with the United Nations, and how such cooperative action could be arranged, is the question that all of us who believe that humanitarian intervention may on occasions be necessary ought to discuss. But it follows from what I have said about the importance of regime, that this discussion cannot begin to take place in a serious way until and unless regime change has taken place in the United States. If a pro-democratic rather than anti-democratic regime were in power here, we could attempt to link its political direction with arguments about the usefulness of the UN, limits on the US’s imperial sway and economic power, and so on. But if George W. Bush is elected in 2004, there is not a single imaginable foreign regime, anywhere, of any kind whatsoever, that will be better off for being the object of America’s supposedly humanitarian intentions. And as for spreading democracy, it’s the oligarchical, wealth-dominated, United States that is in serious need of an “intervention.”

Postscript–January 2007

And so he was; and so there isn’t. And so we do, still. Will there ever be a U.S. regime that could make a part of the world better via U.S. intervention? The Clinton Administration arguably improved the condition of Haiti in the short term–but not for long. There were too many competing motives at work, too little long-run interest; and once Clinton and his associates were replaced by a regime for whom people of color simply do not exist except as objects of one kind or another of sex policy, that was the end of “humanitarian intervention.” And after Bush? In a way, personnel doesn’t matter. The only way out of imperialism-as-intervention is for the American people to end militarized imperialism, with its immense associated costs to the nation’s material, social, and moral fabric, as well as its reputation with the rest of humanity.

How that might happen in such a violence-prone, historically divided, racially conscious society I have no idea. It may be possible, however, at least to define “humanitarian intervention” in a meaningful way. And one thing is clear: if the UN is too weak to be a successful humanitarian actor, than the goal of the world’s greatest power should be not to desert it but to strengthen it!
All that will be the subject of a future posting here.