Salim Muwakkil repudiates Hitchens and company

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(In These Times is an influential social democratic magazine. Muwakkil, who 
is an African-American, is one of the sharper contributors.)

In These Times, May 9, 2003
The Progressive War
By Salim Muwakkil

The pro-war progressives want to claim the tradition of the anti-Stalinist 
left of Cold War lore, but that analogy is faulty.

Among the many effects of the terrorism attacks of September 11, 2001, was 
the ideological shift they provoked among those on the left. Many 
left-leaning commentators were so disconcerted by some of their fellow 
travelers? responses to the attacks, they jumped straight into bed with the 
neocon war party.

Journalists like Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman, Ron Rosenbaum, Greil 
Marcus and Dan Savage are four of the most prominent of these prowar 
progressives. But several others, including comedian/commentator Dennis 
Miller, said they too were shocked rightward by the left?s reflexive, 
?blame-America? reaction to 9/11.

The U.S. response to terrorism pushed me in a different direction. Sure, I 
was surprised, terrified and angered by the cold savagery of the hijackers 
and the intensity of their grievances. But I also was dumbfounded by our 
nation?s refusal to acknowledge its role in nurturing those grievances. The 
United States has thwarted democracy, inserted puppet dictators, smothered 
human rights, and stifled freedom in many countries in the Middle East. Did 
we think that our long history of ignoble intervention in the region would 
leave no angry aftermath?

This tendency to deny responsibility for the consequences of dubious deeds 
is a hallowed American tradition that is familiar to me as an 
African-American and a descendant of enslaved Africans. Denial doesn?t 
expunge the errors of history; it compounds them. Victims of those errors 
don?t disappear, and their quest for justice doesn?t dissipate.

When history?s victims inevitably lash out, their grievances are downplayed 
and they become targets of revenge rather than mediation?perpetuating the 
cycle. One of the roles of progressives is to connect the dots linking 
present disorders to past injustices. But fear of future terrorist attacks 
has convinced pro-war progressives to abandon that role and push for a 
muscular response to the present danger. But instead of discouraging 
potential terrorists, our military aggression likely is seeding vast fields 
of future antagonists, and nothing we have in our high-tech arsenal will be 
able to stem that hostile tide.

If we deny the historical context that connects the ?asymmetrical warfare? 
that we call terrorism to the past, we are only postponing a necessary 
reckoning. The pro-war progressives know this, but they are fearful, and 
fear is the right?s best recruiter. The defection of Hitchens, a British 
expatriate and ex-Trotskyite, is perhaps the most significant of the bunch. 
Until recently, he was a regular Nation columnist and one of the left?s 
most gifted polemicists. Hitchens? pro-war argument is fueled by a powerful 
strain of anti-clericalism. He frames the ongoing war on terrorism (he 
included the Iraq invasion under this rubric) as a seminal struggle between 
totalitarian theocrats (or ?Islamo-fascists?) and the protectors of civil 
society.

?The theocratic and absolutist side in this war hopes to win it by 
exporting it here, which in turn means that we have no expectation of 
staying out of the war, and no right to be neutral in it,? he wrote in his 
last column for The Nation. He resigned as a columnist because he said the 
publication was ?becoming the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly 
believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden.?

Hitchens? view is similar to that of Paul Berman, whose recent book Terror 
and Liberalism also urges a strenuous battle against Islamist 
totalitarians. By portraying the war on terrorism as a battle of liberalism 
vs. fascism, the pro-war progressives seek to claim the tradition of the 
anti-Stalinist left of Cold War lore. But that analogy is faulty.

The Arab world has legitimate grievances, and by ignoring them we are 
feeding the totalitarian impulse driving the Islamist cults. Were the 
administration more skilled in diplomacy and not dominated by the bellicose 
neocons that have hijacked U.S. foreign policy, it might have used the 
world?s sympathy following 9/11 to organize a more efficient global fight 
against terrorism. After all, diplomatic pressure from Libya and Egypt is 
what forced Sudan to eject Osama bin Laden in the ?90s. Such an approach 
would have put the pressure on Muslim groups to speak out more vigorously 
against terrorism as an affront to Islam.

What?s more, the United States could easily have helped to dry up 
grassroots support for Islamist cults with a tangible expression of 
assurance that it seeks to assist rather than destroy the Muslim world. 
Political gestures could have been modeled on the European Union?s efforts 
at the 2001 U.N. conference on racism, when it vowed to forge new 
relationships between the colonized and the colonizers of history.

Instead, the Bush administration launched an illegal military invasion of 
Iraq for what now appears to have been a fraudulent pretext; appointed Lt. 
Gen. Jay Garner, an open admirer of Israel; Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, to 
head up Iraq?s reconstruction effort; nominated the well-known Islamophobe 
Daniel Pipes to the U.S. Institute of Peace; and continues to act in a way 
that seems designed to produce exactly the hatred of the United States that 
the radical Islamists want to provoke.

If pro-war progressives truly seek to limit the allure of Islamo-fascism, 
they?ve chosen the wrong bedfellows.

Salim Muwakkil is a senior editor of In These Times, where he has worked 
since 1983, and a weekly op-ed columnist for the Chicago Tribune. He is 
currently a Crime and Communities Media Fellow of the Open Society 
Institute, examining the impact of ex-inmates and gang leaders in 
leadership positions in the black community.



Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org