[Peace-discuss] Liberals and opposition to war

[C. G. Estabrook]

Anthony Lewis (1927-2013), the extreme liberal columnist for the NYT, has just died. 

Chomsky spoke of him as follows in an interview five years ago:

'Take, say, Anthony Lewis, who's about as far to the critical extreme as you can find in the media. In his final words evaluating the [Vietnam] war in The New York Times in 1975, he said the war began with "blundering efforts to do good" but by 1969, namely a year after the American business community had turned against the war, it was clear that the United States "could not impose a solution except at a price too costly to itself," so therefore it was a "disastrous mistake." 

'Nazi generals could have said the same thing after Stalingrad and probably did. That's the extreme position in the left liberal spectrum. 

'Or take the distinguished historian and Kennedy advisor Arthur Schlesinger. When the war was going sour under LBJ, he wrote that "we all pray" that the hawks are right and that more troops will lead to victory. And he knew what victory meant. He said we're leaving "a land of ruin and wreck," but "we all pray" that escalation will succeed and if it does "we may all be saluting the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government." But probably the hawks are wrong, so escalation is a bad idea.

'You can translate the rhetoric almost word by word into the elite, including political elite, opposition to the Iraq war...'  <http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20080123.htm>.

Also to Obama's wider war.