[Peace-discuss] Street v. "anti-war liberals"

[C. G. Estabrook]

[In a recent article from Znet, Paul Street points out that "What’s 
necessary ... is to define the war itself – rather than just the fact 
that America is losing it – as wrong."  And that's what the leaders of 
the Democratic party and columnists like the Nation's Eric Alterman 
won't do.  --CGE]


     Eric Alterman, The Democrats, and the “Stab in the Back”
     by Paul Street; October 10, 2007

         The Nation’s snotty, radical-baiting columnist Eric Alterman 
(1) doesn’t get it. In the latest issue of The Nation, the know-it-all 
Democrat Alterman warns us (rather belatedly and unoriginally) about 
“The Coming Stab in the Back Campaign” (2).

         “Having exposed their country to the ignominy of certain defeat 
in Iraq,” Alterman notes, “the Bush administration and its 
neoconservative allies are seeking to salvage their crumbling 
reputations by blaming their critics for the catastrophe their policies 
have wrought. We are witnessing the foundation for a post-Iraq ‘stab in 
the back’ campaign” – a right-wing public relations offensive that will 
question the national loyalty of those who recognize the reality of U.S. 
failure and place the blame “for a supposedly premature withdrawal to 
those who refuse to play along.”


         The allegation will be that evil “left” war opponents like 
(believe it or not) Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Zbigniew Brzezinski 
stuck a fatal and treasonous dagger in the White House’s virtuous war 
for “Iraqi Freedom” by not “supporting the troops.”



         The “stab in the back campaign” is real and underway.  But 
there are two key problems with Alterman’s column. The first difficulty 
is that the vicious, Nazi-like campaign (3) he seems to think he 
discovered has been well known and widely commented upon for some time 
by now (4).



         The second and more relevant problem is that the Alterman says 
nothing about why leading Democrats have at least partly earned the 
absurd backstab charge.  He does not grasp that the Democrats have made 
themselves into big fat Iraq War Swift-boating targets by failing to 
admit and confront the elementary fact that the invasion of Mesopotamia 
is a brazenly imperialist and mass-murderous crime.



         Far from acknowledging “Operation Iraqi Liberation (O.I.L)’s” 
(5) illegal and immoral essence, in fact, leading Democrats cling to the 
childish notion that the war was launched with noble intentions 
consistent with the preposterous doctrinal and bipartisan claim – 
rejected as unmitigated nonsense by the preponderant majority of the 
morally and politically cognizant human race – that U.S. foreign policy 
is about the advance of freedom and democracy in the Middle East and 
around the world.



         It is questionable, in fact, just how different the Democratic 
Party’s foreign policy positions are from those of the current War 
Criminals in Chief. As Tuft’s University political scientist Tony Smith 
noted in an important Washington Post commentary last spring, “although 
they now cast themselves as alternatives to President Bush, the fact is 
that prevailing Democratic doctrine is not that different from the 
Bush-Cheney doctrine. Many Democrats, including senators who voted to 
authorize the war in Iraq, embraced the idea of muscular foreign policy 
based on American global supremacy and the presumed right to intervene 
to promote democracy or to defend key U.S. interests long before 9/11, 
and they have not changed course since. Even those who have shifted 
against the war have avoided doctrinal questions.”



         The leading faction in the formulation of Democratic Party 
foreign policy helped, Smith notes, provide “the intellectual substance 
of much of the Bush doctrine.”  It may have “issued repeated broadsides 
damning Bush's handling of the Iraq war, but it has never condemned the 
invasion. It has criticized Bush's failure to achieve U.S. domination of 
the Middle East, arguing that Democrats could do it better.”



         If the Democrats win the White House in 2008, Smith thinks 
“they could remain staked to a vision of a Pax Americana strikingly 
reminiscent of Bush's” (6)



         Broader doctrinal issues aside, as long as the Democrats refuse 
to acknowledge the illicit and imperialist reality of O.I.L., they will 
continue to help make themselves vulnerable to the “stab in the back” 
accusation.



         To escape the nefarious charge, genuinely democratic Democrats 
should tell the truth about the origins and essence of the invasion.  As 
Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith noted last April on the Common Dreams 
website, “the Democrats and the peace movement are walking into a trap. 
  The Republicans are preparing with Rovian cunning to focus the mind of 
the public on the question: Who lost Iraq?  And they are already giving 
the answer: the Democrats and the peace movement."



         "What’s necessary to evade this trap," Brecher and Smith argue, 
"is to define the war itself – rather than just the fact that America is 
losing it – as wrong.  It is wrong because we were lied into it by a 
rogue executive intent on launching an illegal war and occupation, in 
violation of national and international law, the U.S. Constitution, and 
the U.S. Charter.  And it is wrong because it has imposed an illegal 
occupation that has systematically violated the Geneva Conventions and 
the U.S. War Crimes Act” (7).



         Brendan and Smith’s line about defining “the war itself” – not 
simply “the fact the America is losing it” – as wrong is germane to 
Alterman’s column, which criticizes the Bush administration for “the 
ignominy of certain defeat” but NOT for launching an illegal invasion.



         What’s wrong with the defeat of an unlawful imperial assault 
that was (to quote noted radical U.S. foreign policy critic Alan 
Greenspan) “largely about oil?”



         Too bad the Democrats have not in fact “refuse[d] to play 
along” with the Bush administration and its neoconservative allies in 
the execution, funding and legitimization of the terrible Iraq 
occupation – a great irony (unmentioned by Alterman) behind the “stab in 
the back” charge.





         Paul Street is a writer, speaker and activist based in Iowa 
City, IA and Chicago, IL.  He is the author of Empire and Inequality: 
America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm); Racial 
Oppression in the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 
2007); and Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil 
Rights America (New York: Routledge, 2005. Paul can be reached at 
paulstreet99 at yahoo.com.



         Notes



         1. Alterman once wrote the following: “If Alexander Cockburn, 
Noam Chomsky or Gore Vidal has ever had anything balanced or nuanced to 
say about America's role in the world, I've missed it.”  See Eric 
Alterman, “Straw Liberals and False Prophets,” The Nation (December 9, 
2002), available online at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20021209/alterman.



         2.  Eric Alterman, “The Coming Stab in the Back Campaign,” The 
Nation,  “October 15, 2007” (I use quote marks for the date because the 
issue arrived in my local library on  October 6,  2007. I don’t know why 
The Nation dates ahead...perhaps it is trying to confuse future 
historians ).



         3. The first “stab in the back” campaign came in Germany after 
World War One, when that country’s fascists blamed Jews for causing the 
Fatherland's defeat in the Great War. American right- wingers have 
similarly blamed U.S. liberals and radicals (generally conflated with 
each other in the paranoid far-right world view) for U.S. defeat in the 
Korean and Vietnam wars.



         4. For one example, see Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith, “The 
Stab in the Back Trap,” Common Dreams (April 26, 2007), available online 
at www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/26/766/print/



         5.  It is not urban myth that Dick Cheney and George W. Bush’s 
petro-imperialist “Operation Iraqi Freedom” was initially titled 
“Operation Iraqi Liberation” and thus would have born the overly 
reality-suggestive acronym “O.I.L”.  See Greg Palast, Armed Madhouse 
(New York: Plume, 2007) p.65.



         6. Tony Smith, “It’s Uphill for the Democrats: They Need a 
Global Strategy, Not Just Tactics for Iraq,” Washington Post, 11 March, 
2007, p. B01, available online at 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/ 2007/03/09/ 
AR2007030901884_pf.html).



         7.  Brecher and Smith, “The Stab in the Back Trap.”


	###