[A-List] War is Bad for Logic

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

and Other Living Things

by Ted Rall

www.tedrall.com (September 18 2007)


"What non-violent antiwar activists are unable to realize", writes Peter
Gelderloos, "is that the most important resistance, probably the only
significant resistance, to the occupation of Iraq is the resistance
being waged by the Iraqi people themselves". This comes from a
relatively tangential passage in a thought-provoking book, How
Non-Violence Protects the State (South End Press, 2005), that will get a
more detailed look in a future column.

Although its appearance in The Nation guaranteed it would receive scant
notice, a July 30 essay by Alexander Cockburn was one of the first to
seriously address the most troubling internal contradiction of the
anti-Iraq War left. War, everyone knows, is a zero-sum game. For one
side to win, the other has to lose. If you "support our troops" you
hope, at minimum, for their safe return. But each day a US soldier
survives at the front means another day he will occupy Iraq and another
day he can kill Iraqi resistance forces. Supporting the troops, as
right-wingers say, requires supporting their mission. Which means
opposing the guys who are trying to kill them.

Cockburn quoted antiwar activist Lawrence McGuire: "The grand taboo of
the antiwar movement is to show the slightest empathy for the resistance
fighters in Iraq. They are never mentioned as people for whom we should
show concern, much less admiration. But of course, if you are going to
sympathize with the US soldiers, who are fighting a war of aggression,
then surely you should also [my emphasis] sympathize with the soldiers
who are fighting for their homeland." (An intellectually honest person
would substitute "instead" for "also".)

It kills me to say this, but neocon madman William Kristol was correct
when he wrote in The Weekly Standard: "What mattered to the left was
that it was dangerous politically not to 'support the troops'. Of course
the antiwar left hated what the troops were doing ... So 'supporting the
troops' meant feeling sorry for them, or pretending to."

The 2004 discussion over US soldiers who bought their own body plates,
and resorted to "hillbilly armor" to protect their Humvees from roadside
bombs, was a case in point. Antiwar pundits, including me, tried to
drive a wedge between the Bush Administration and the military by
pointing out that the Pentagon was pinching pennies at the expense of
soldiers' lives. But what if you're an Iraqi? You risk your own life
every time you place an IED along the "Highway of Death" between Baghdad
and the airport. The more Americans you blow up, the closer you come to
achieving your goal of liberating Iraq. The last thing you need is
"antiwar" Americans agitating for stronger armor plates!

A parallel to World War II, "the good war" depicted in countless movies,
is useful. You're a German citizen living in Berlin, and you hate the
Nazis. You're against the war. Do you pray for the SS? Or the French
Resistance? You can't do both. (Well, you could - but you'd be an idiot.)

The moral quandary forced upon the left is epitomized by Phyllis Bennis,
an in-the-box wonk for the Institute for Policy Studies. "Certainly",
she allows, "the Iraqi people have the right to resist an illegal
occupation, including military resistance". Which is, as they said in
the 1970s, mighty white of her. "But as a whole", she continues, "what
is understood to be 'the Iraqi resistance' against the US occupation is
a disaggregated and diverse set of largely unconnected factions, in
which the various often-antagonistic armed movements (including some who
attack Iraqi civilians as much as they do occupation troops) hold pride
of place. There is no unified leadership that can speak for 'the
resistance', there is no NLF or ANC or FMLN that can claim real
leadership and is accountable to the Iraqi population as a whole."

For most of World War II, the same was true of the French Resistance
(history grants them the upper-case "R") too. Communists, socialists and
even monarchists fought the Germans - and each other - until Charles de
Gaulle's center-right faction prodded, bullied and ultimately muscled
out his (more popular and more progressive) rivals. There were, as in
Iraq today, French criminal gangs who fought solely for money. If this
was 1943 and Bennis and other mainstream liberals were anti-Nazi
Germans, would they "support what is called 'the French resistance'"?

As their Iraqi counterparts do today, the Free French carried out what
the press of the period called "terrorist attacks". Kidnappings,
assassinations and bombings were usually directed at government
officials, German troops, and French collaborators - but civilians were
also killed. So why does the antiwar left find the Iraqis distasteful?

Gelderloos argues that the post-Vietnam American left is hard-wired with
reflexive pacifism, denying that violent militancy can ever be a valid
tactic, even when faced with horrific oppression. Liberals frequently
express disapproval of protestors who smashed windows at the 1999 World
Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, and the Earth Liberation Front's
(ELF) torching of SUVs at auto dealerships - even though no one got hurt.

Knee-jerk non-violence partly explains the left's reluctance to embrace
the Iraqi resistance. Nationalism/patriotism is another factor. Who
wants to see more funerals of American soldiers? And who wants to be
smeared as the next "Hanoi Jane"?

When "asked who I think will then take power [after US forces leave
Iraq]", Bennis writes, "the only thing I can anticipate with any
confidence is that first, I probably won't like them very much because
they're likely to have a far more religious orientation than I like but
that second, it's not up to me to choose who governs Iraq".

The Islamist and/or totalitarian ideology of many of Iraq's anti-US
factions is a turn-off to the secular American left. The Guardian's
Jonathan Freedland worried aloud in late 2003, when the war against the
occupation of Iraq heated up: "Not all of Iraq's resistance will fit [a]
romantic, maquis image. Some will be Baathist holdouts, Saddamites who
once served as henchmen to a murderous dictator. No progressive should
want to see these villains land a blow on British or American forces."
This year, in the socialist New Politics, Stephen Shalom noted that "to
give our automatic support to any opponent of US imperialism means we
should have supported the Taliban in 2001 or Saddam Hussein in 2003".

Since war is a zero-sum game, it's our guys or theirs. "Support the
troops by bringing them home" is an empty slogan that belies reality.
With both political parties supporting the war, US troops are not going
to come home any time soon. As Gelderloos writes: "The approach of the
US antiwar movement in relation to the Iraqi resistance does not merely
qualify as bad strategy; it reveals a total lack of strategy, and it is
something we need to fix". It also exposes an ugly truth about antiwar
lefties. They don't believe in national self-determination any more than
George W Bush and Dick Cheney.

_____

Ted Rall is the author of the book America Gone Wild (Andrews McMeel
Publishing, 2006), which includes a detailed behind-the-scenes look at
the most controversial political cartoons of the post-9/11 era.

Copyright 2007 Ted Rall

http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/


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