[Peace-discuss] Tony Judt in London Review of Books - Bush's Useful Idiots

[David Green]

Judt has in my opinion a too-romantic view of American
liberals. Nevertheless, after the Vietnam War it was
no longer easy to justify support for American
imperial doctrines, especially for Jewish democratic
socialists. Judt claims that liberalism provides a
figleaf for neoconservative policies. I've claimed for
years that support for Israel has provided a figleaf
for Jewish intellectuals--liberals to social
democrats--who have supported not only Israel's
criminal behavior, but what Edward Herman calls
"cruise missle liberalism" in Iraq and Kosovo, etc. He
mentions Michael Walzer and Paul Berman, and to that
list I would add my personal favorites Todd Gitlin and
Leon Wieseltier. The same pattern is followed locally,
for example, by upcoming AWARE panelist Michael
Shapiro in his claim that while he was once considered
a "dove," he is now on the right. It's all Arafat's
fault, of course. Nevertheless, Shapiro provides a
figleaf for the more avowedly right-wing members of
the Jewish community like Fred Gottheil, Fred Jaher,
and Norman Klein. Meanwhile, self-described leftists
like Matti Bunzl have remained essentially silent
through all of this on the most important issues of
our time.

DG

Bush’s Useful Idiots

Tony Judt on the Strange Death of Liberal America

Why have American liberals acquiesced in President
Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy? Why have they so
little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about
reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the
administration’s sustained attack on civil liberties
and international law aroused so little opposition or
anger from those who used to care most about these
things? Why, in short, has the liberal intelligentsia
of the United States in recent years kept its head
safely below the parapet?

It wasn’t always so. On 26 October 1988, the New York
Times carried a full-page advertisement for
liberalism. Headed ‘A Reaffirmation of Principle’, it
openly rebuked Ronald Reagan for deriding ‘the dreaded
L-word’ and treating ‘liberals’ and ‘liberalism’ as
terms of opprobrium. Liberal principles, the text
affirmed, are ‘timeless. Extremists of the right and
of the left have long attacked liberalism as their
greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies
have been crushed by such extremists. Against any
encouragement of this tendency in our own country,
intentional or not, we feel obliged to speak out.’

The advertisement was signed by 63 prominent
intellectuals, writers and businessmen: among them
Daniel Bell, J.K. Galbraith, Felix Rohatyn, Arthur
Schlesinger Jr, Irving Howe and Eudora Welty. These
and other signatories – the economist Kenneth Arrow,
the poet Robert Penn Warren – were the critical
intellectual core, the steady moral centre of American
public life. But who, now, would sign such a protest?
Liberalism in the United States today is the politics
that dares not speak its name. And those who style
themselves ‘liberal intellectuals’ are otherwise
engaged. As befits the new Gilded Age, in which the
pay ratio of an American CEO to that of a skilled
worker is 412:1 and a corrupted Congress is awash in
lobbies and favours, the place of the liberal
intellectual has been largely taken over by an
admirable cohort of ‘muck-raking’ investigative
journalists – Seymour Hersh, Michael Massing and Mark
Danner, writing in the New Yorker and the New York
Review of Books.

The collapse of liberal self-confidence in the
contemporary US can be variously explained. In part it
is a backwash from the lost illusions of the 1960s
generation, a retreat from the radical nostrums of
youth into the all-consuming business of material
accumulation and personal security. The signatories of
the New York Times advertisement were born in most
cases many years earlier, their political opinions
shaped by the 1930s above all. Their commitments were
the product of experience and adversity and made of
sterner stuff. The disappearance of the liberal centre
in American politics is also a direct outcome of the
deliquescence of the Democratic Party. In domestic
politics liberals once believed in the provision of
welfare, good government and social justice. In
foreign affairs they had a longstanding commitment to
international law, negotiation, and the importance of
moral example. Today, a spreading me-first consensus
has replaced vigorous public debate in both arenas.
And like their political counterparts, the critical
intelligentsia once so prominent in American cultural
life has fallen silent.

This process was well underway before 11 September
2001, and in domestic affairs at least, Bill Clinton
and his calculated policy ‘triangulations’ must carry
some responsibility for the evisceration of liberal
politics. But since then the moral and intellectual
arteries of the American body politic have hardened
further. Magazines and newspapers of the traditional
liberal centre – the New Yorker, the New Republic, the
Washington Post and the New York Times itself – fell
over themselves in the hurry to align their editorial
stance with that of a Republican president bent on
exemplary war. A fearful conformism gripped the
mainstream media. And America’s liberal intellectuals
found at last a new cause.

Or, rather, an old cause in a new guise. For what
distinguishes the worldview of Bush’s liberal
supporters from that of his neo-conservative allies is
that they don’t look on the ‘War on Terror’, or the
war in Iraq, or the war in Lebanon and eventually
Iran, as mere serial exercises in the re-establishment
of American martial dominance. They see them as
skirmishes in a new global confrontation: a Good
Fight, reassuringly comparable to their grandparents’
war against Fascism and their Cold War liberal
parents’ stance against international Communism. Once
again, they assert, things are clear. The world is
ideologically divided; and – as before – we must take
our stand on the issue of the age. Long nostalgic for
the comforting verities of a simpler time, today’s
liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense
of purpose: they are at war with ‘Islamo-fascism’.

Thus Paul Berman, a frequent contributor to Dissent,
the New Yorker and other liberal journals, and until
now better known as a commentator on American cultural
affairs, recycled himself as an expert on Islamic
fascism (itself a new term of art), publishing Terror
and Liberalism just in time for the Iraq war. Peter
Beinart, a former editor of the New Republic, followed
in his wake this year with The Good Fight: Why
Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on
Terror and Make America Great Again, where he sketches
at some length the resemblance between the War on
Terror and the early Cold War.[1] Neither author had
previously shown any familiarity with the Middle East,
much less with the Wahhabi and Sufi traditions on
which they pronounce with such confidence.

But like Christopher Hitchens and other former
left-liberal pundits now expert in ‘Islamo-fascism’,
Beinart and Berman and their kind really are
conversant – and comfortable – with a binary division
of the world along ideological lines. In some cases
they can even look back to their own youthful
Trotskyism when seeking a template and thesaurus for
world-historical antagonisms. In order for today’s
‘fight’ (note the recycled Leninist lexicon of
conflicts, clashes, struggles and wars) to make
political sense, it too must have a single universal
enemy whose ideas we can study, theorise and combat;
and the new confrontation must be reducible, like its
20th-century predecessor, to a familiar juxtaposition
that eliminates exotic complexity and confusion:
Democracy v. Totalitarianism, Freedom v. Fascism, Them
v. Us.

To be sure, Bush’s liberal supporters have been
disappointed by his efforts. Every newspaper I have
listed and many others besides have carried editorials
criticising Bush’s policy on imprisonment, his use of
torture and above all the sheer ineptitude of the
president’s war. But here, too, the Cold War offers a
revealing analogy. Like Stalin’s Western admirers who,
in the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations, resented the
Soviet dictator not so much for his crimes as for
discrediting their Marxism, so intellectual supporters
of the Iraq War – among them Michael Ignatieff, Leon
Wieseltier, David Remnick and other prominent figures
in the North American liberal establishment – have
focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion
itself (which they all supported) but on its
incompetent execution. They are irritated with Bush
for giving ‘preventive war’ a bad name.

In a similar vein, those centrist voices that bayed
most insistently for blood in the prelude to the Iraq
War – the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman
demanded that France be voted ‘Off the Island’ (i.e.
out of the Security Council) for its presumption in
opposing America’s drive to war – are today the most
confident when asserting their monopoly of insight
into world affairs. The same Friedman now sneers at
‘anti-war activists who haven’t thought a whit about
the larger struggle we’re in’ (New York Times, 16
August). To be sure, Friedman’s Pulitzer-winning
pieties are always road-tested for middlebrow
political acceptability. But for just that reason they
are a sure guide to the mood of the American
intellectual mainstream.

Friedman is seconded by Beinart, who concedes that he
‘didn’t realise’(!) how detrimental American actions
would be to ‘the struggle’ but insists even so that
anyone who won’t stand up to ‘Global Jihad’ just isn’t
a consistent defender of liberal values. Jacob
Weisberg, the editor of Slate, writing in the
Financial Times, accuses Democratic critics of the
Iraq War of failing ‘to take the wider, global battle
against Islamic fanaticism seriously’. The only people
qualified to speak on this matter, it would seem, are
those who got it wrong initially. Such insouciance in
spite of – indeed because of – your past misjudgments
recalls a remark by the French ex-Stalinist Pierre
Courtade to Edgar Morin, a dissenting Communist
vindicated by events: ‘You and your kind were wrong to
be right; we were right to be wrong.’

It is particularly ironic that the ‘Clinton
generation’ of American liberal intellectuals take
special pride in their ‘tough-mindedness’, in their
success in casting aside the illusions and myths of
the old left, for these same ‘tough’ new liberals
reproduce some of that old left’s worst
characteristics. They may see themselves as having
migrated to the opposite shore; but they display
precisely the same mixture of dogmatic faith and
cultural provincialism, not to mention the exuberant
enthusiasm for violent political transformation at
other people’s expense, that marked their
fellow-travelling predecessors across the Cold War
ideological divide. The use value of such persons to
ambitious, radical regimes is an old story. Indeed,
intellectual camp followers of this kind were first
identified by Lenin himself, who coined the term that
still describes them best. Today, America’s liberal
armchair warriors are the ‘useful idiots’ of the War
on Terror.

In fairness, America’s bellicose intellectuals are not
alone. In Europe, Adam Michnik, the hero of the Polish
intellectual resistance to Communism, has become an
outspoken admirer of the embarrassingly Islamophobic
Oriana Fallaci; Václav Havel has joined the DC-based
Committee on the Present Danger (a recycled Cold
War-era organisation dedicated to rooting out
Communists, now pledged to fighting ‘the threat posed
by global radical Islamist and fascist terrorist
movements’); André Glucksmann in Paris contributes
agitated essays to Le Figaro (most recently on 8
August) lambasting ‘universal Jihad’, Iranian ‘lust
for power’ and radical Islam’s strategy of ‘green
subversion’. All three enthusiastically supported the
invasion of Iraq.

In the European case this trend is an unfortunate
by-product of the intellectual revolution of the
1980s, especially in the former Communist East, when
‘human rights’ displaced conventional political
allegiances as the basis for collective action. The
gains wrought by this transformation in the rhetoric
of oppositional politics were considerable. But a
price was paid all the same. A commitment to the
abstract universalism of ‘rights’ – and uncompromising
ethical stands taken against malign regimes in their
name – can lead all too readily to the habit of
casting every political choice in binary moral terms.
In this light Bush’s War against Terror, Evil and
Islamo-fascism appears seductive and even familiar:
self-deluding foreigners readily mistake the US
president’s myopic rigidity for their own moral
rectitude.

But back home, America’s liberal intellectuals are
fast becoming a service class, their opinions
determined by their allegiance and calibrated to
justify a political end. In itself this is hardly a
new departure: we are all familiar with intellectuals
who speak only on behalf of their country, class,
religion, race, gender or sexual orientation, and who
shape their opinions according to what they take to be
the interest of their affinity of birth or
predilection. But the distinctive feature of the
liberal intellectual in past times was precisely the
striving for universality; not the unworldly or
disingenuous denial of sectional interest but the
sustained effort to transcend that interest.

It is thus depressing to read some of the better known
and more avowedly ‘liberal’ intellectuals in the
contemporary USA exploiting their professional
credibility to advance a partisan case. Jean Bethke
Elshtain and Michael Walzer, two senior figures in the
country’s philosophical establishment (she at the
University of Chicago Divinity School, he at the
Princeton Institute), both wrote portentous essays
purporting to demonstrate the justness of necessary
wars – she in Just War against Terror: The Burden of
American Power in a Violent World, a pre-emptive
defence of the Iraq War; he only a few weeks ago in a
shameless justification of Israel’s bombardments of
Lebanese civilians (‘War Fair’, New Republic, 31
July). In today’s America, neo-conservatives generate
brutish policies for which liberals provide the
ethical fig-leaf. There really is no other difference
between them.

One of the particularly depressing ways in which
liberal intellectuals have abdicated personal and
ethical responsibility for the actions they now
endorse can be seen in their failure to think
independently about the Middle East. Not every liberal
cheerleader for the Global War against Islamo-fascism,
or against Terror, or against Global Jihad, is an
unreconstructed supporter of Likud: Christopher
Hitchens, for one, is critical of Israel. But the
willingness of so many American pundits and
commentators and essayists to roll over for Bush’s
doctrine of preventive war; to abstain from
criticising the disproportionate use of air power on
civilian targets in both Iraq and Lebanon; and to stay
coyly silent in the face of Condoleezza Rice’s
enthusiasm for the bloody ‘birth pangs of a new Middle
East’, makes more sense when one recalls their backing
for Israel: a country which for fifty years has rested
its entire national strategy on preventive wars,
disproportionate retaliation, and efforts to redesign
the map of the whole Middle East.

Since its inception the state of Israel has fought a
number of wars of choice (the only exception was the
Yom Kippur War of 1973). To be sure, these have been
presented to the world as wars of necessity or
self-defence; but Israel’s statesmen and generals have
never been under any such illusion. Whether this
approach has done Israel much good is debatable (for a
clear-headed recent account that describes as a
resounding failure his country’s strategy of using
wars of choice to ‘redraw’ the map of its
neighbourhood, see Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The
Israeli-Arab Tragedy by Shlomo Ben-Ami,[2] a historian
and former Israeli foreign minister). But the idea of
a super-power behaving in a similar way – responding
to terrorist threats or guerrilla incursions by
flattening another country just to preserve its own
deterrent credibility – is odd in the extreme. It is
one thing for the US unconditionally to underwrite
Israel’s behaviour (though in neither country’s
interest, as some Israeli commentators at least have
remarked). But for the US to imitate Israel wholesale,
to import that tiny country’s self-destructive,
intemperate response to any hostility or opposition
and to make it the leitmotif of American foreign
policy: that is simply bizarre.

Bush’s Middle Eastern policy now tracks so closely to
the Israeli precedent that it is very difficult to see
daylight between the two. It is this surreal turn of
events that helps explain the confusion and silence of
American liberal thinking on the subject (as well,
perhaps, as Tony Blair’s syntactically sympathetic
me-tooism). Historically, liberals have been
unsympathetic to ‘wars of choice’ when undertaken or
proposed by their own government. War, in the liberal
imagination (and not only the liberal one), is a last
resort, not a first option. But the United States now
has an Israeli-style foreign policy and America’s
liberal intellectuals overwhelmingly support it.

The contradictions to which this can lead are
striking. There is, for example, a blatant discrepancy
between Bush’s proclaimed desire to bring democracy to
the Muslim world and his refusal to intervene when the
only working instances of fragile democracy in action
in the whole Muslim world – in Palestine and Lebanon –
were systematically ignored and then shattered by
America’s Israeli ally. This discrepancy, and the bad
faith and hypocrisy which it seems to suggest, have
become a staple of editorial pages and internet blogs
the world over, to America’s lasting discredit. But
America’s leading liberal intellectuals have kept
silent. To speak would be to choose between the
tactical logic of America’s new ‘war of movement’
against Islamic fascism – democracy as the sweetener
for American involvement – and the strategic tradition
of Israeli statecraft, for which democratic neighbours
are no better and most likely worse than authoritarian
ones. This is not a choice that most American liberal
commentators are even willing to acknowledge, much
less make. And so they say nothing.

This blind spot obscures and risks polluting and
obliterating every traditional liberal concern and
inhibition. How else can one explain the appalling
illustration on the cover of the New Republic of 7
August: a lurid depiction of Hizbullah’s Hassan
Nasrallah in the style of Der Stürmer crossed with
more than a touch of the ‘Dirty Jap’ cartoons of World
War Two? How else is one to account for the
convoluted, sophistic defence by Leon Wieseltier in
the same journal of the killing of Arab children in
Qana (‘These are not tender times’)? But the blind
spot is not just ethical, it is also political: if
American liberals ‘didn’t realise’ why their war in
Iraq would have the predictable effect of promoting
terrorism, benefiting the Iranian ayatollahs and
turning Iraq into Lebanon, then we should not expect
them to understand (or care) that Israel’s brutal
over-reaction risks turning Lebanon into Iraq.

In Five Germanys I Have Known, Fritz Stern – a
coauthor of the 1988 New York Times text defending
liberalism – writes of his concern about the condition
of the liberal spirit in America today.[3] It is with
the extinction of that spirit, he notes, that the
death of a republic begins. Stern, a historian and a
refugee from Nazi Germany, speaks with authority on
this matter. And he is surely correct. We don’t expect
right-wingers to care very much about the health of a
republic, particularly when they are assiduously
engaged in the unilateral promotion of empire. And the
ideological left, while occasionally adept at
analysing the shortcomings of a liberal republic, is
typically not much interested in defending it.

It is the liberals, then, who count. They are, as it
might be, the canaries in the sulphurous mineshaft of
modern democracy. The alacrity with which many of
America’s most prominent liberals have censored
themselves in the name of the War on Terror, the
enthusiasm with which they have invented ideological
and moral cover for war and war crimes and proffered
that cover to their political enemies: all this is a
bad sign. Liberal intellectuals used to be
distinguished precisely by their efforts to think for
themselves, rather than in the service of others.
Intellectuals should not be smugly theorising endless
war, much less confidently promoting and excusing it.
They should be engaged in disturbing the peace – their
own above all.



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