The
crimes of the Bush administration aren't substantially different than
those of the Great Liberal Humanitarian, Jimmy Carter, who helped to
butcher countless thousands of innocents, nor of any other President
in recent memory.
Let me change the subject a bit. In an article in the London Review
of Books, Perry Anderson wondered why the Bush war on Iraq had given
rise to such a large anti-war movement. He thought that there were
many similarities between Iraq and what the U.S. had done in the
past, and didn't understand why sud-denly things were perceived as
different. And he attributed it in part to a cultural antipathy
against the Bush administration. Now I think cultural antipathy to
the Bush administration is a very good thing, and I'm very much in
favor of it, but what do you think of Anderson's critique?
I don't find this difference as mysterious as it may seem. There's a
shift in legitimation, a real break here. First, there is, to use
the old Stalinist dialectical term, a clear jump of quantity into
quality. To the horror of many leftists, even I did show some
understanding for the NATO bombing of ex-Yugoslavia. Sorry, but this
bombing did stop a terrible conflict. Some kind of humanitarian
effort was perceivable, and the action had some kind of
international legitimacy. Since then, a whole series of shifts threw
things into a different perspective. One of the key events was the
American dismissal of the Hague International Court. Although it may
appear just a minor judicial matter, it inscribed itself into
people's consciousness. And with Iraq, the U.S. wanted to do it
alone. It was absolutely clear already before the war that all the
official justifications-the al-Qaeda connection, the mythical status
of the weapons of mass destruction-did not work.
You've said that Bush's target was also in part the emancipatory
possibilities of American society.
Maybe I exaggerated it a little bit, but still I think that you
simply cannot also discount that factor. Not that Bush will use this
as an excuse to introduce some kind of half-military dictatorship.
No! But the imperceptible, unwritten rules of political life are
changing gradually. My eternal trump card is torture. Can you even
imagine the topic of torture as a legitimate topic two or three
years ago? My biggest worry is this "soft revolution," these
imperceptible changes in normativity, the unwritten rules about what
is acceptable.