" The Liberal Quandary Over Iraq " (cont'd IV)
The Secularist
During the Congressional debates on the war resolution, it was just about impossible to hear an argument in favor of the administration without the words ''Munich'' and ''Chamberlain.'' The words ''Tonkin'' and ''Johnson'' were far rarer, which tells you something about the relative acceptability of World War II and Vietnam -- appeasement and quagmire -- as historical precedents. I wanted to ban all analogies, because they always seemed to be ways of avoiding the hardest questions. But the analogies are hard-wired, and Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, is right to say that Americans of the postwar generation ''have operated with two primal scenes. One was the Second World War; one was the Vietnam War. And you can almost divide the camps on the use of American force between those whose model for its application was the Second World War and those whose model for its application was the Vietnam War.''
For Wieseltier, whose parents survived the Holocaust, the primal scene is American power helping to end evil. Shortly before I met him at his Washington home, Wieseltier had seen a TV documentary with rare footage of the gassing of Kurds by Saddam's army -- a reminder of a primal scene if ever there was one. But that was in 1988, when America failed to intervene. Today, American and British pilots in the no-fly zone are preventing the very genocide that Wieseltier feels would justify an invasion.
Wieseltier is a secular liberal in the classical sense. He says he believes that the separation of religion and power marked a violent rupture with the past. This rupture created a new and universal idea of freedom and equality -- one that Islamic societies around the world have not yet been ready to face. Sept. 11 was a cataclysmic ''refreshment'' of this idea, after years in which only money mattered. But terrorism should not turn liberals into simple-minded missionaries; being a secular liberal means accepting that the world is a difficult place. ''Democracy in Iraq would be a blessing, but it cannot be the main objective for embarking on a major war,'' Wieseltier says. ''If there is one thing that liberalism has no time for, it's an eschatological mentality. There is no single, sudden end to injustice. There's slow, steady, fitful progress toward a more decent and democratic world.''
Wieseltier says he believes that Saddam's weapons and fondness for using them will probably necessitate a war, but unlike some other editors at The New Republic, he is not eager to start one. ''We will certainly win,'' Wieseltier says, ''but it is a war in which we are truly playing with fire.''
The Idealist
Paul Berman's book ''A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968'' traced a line from the rebellions of the 1960's to the nonviolent revolutions of 1989. It is essentially a line from leftism to liberalism. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the great ideological battles of the 20th century seemed to have ended: liberal democracy reigned supreme.
Then came Sept. 11, which, Berman argues in a coming book called ''Terror and Liberalism,'' showed that, as it turns out, the 20th century isn't quite over yet.
''The terrorism we face right now is actually a form of totalitarianism,'' Berman told me in his Brooklyn apartment. ''The only possible way to oppose totalitarianism is with an alternative system, which is that of a liberal society.'' So the war that began on Sept. 11 is primarily a war of ideas, and Berman harshly criticizes Bush for failing to pursue it. ''We're going into a very complex and long war disarmed, in which our most important assets have been stripped away from us, which are our ideals and our ideas. He's sending us into war with one arm tied behind our back.''
Berman argues for a war in Iraq on three grounds: to free up the Middle East militarily for further actions against Al Qaeda, to liberate the Iraqi people from their dungeon and to establish ''a beachhead of Arab democracy'' and shift the region's center of gravity away from autocracy and theocracy and toward liberalization. In other words, war in Iraq has everything to do with the war on terrorism, and the dangers of an American military occupation that might not be seen by everyone in the region as ''pro-Muslim,'' though they worry Berman, don't deter him.
Perhaps the boldest intellectual move he makes is to claim a liberal descent for these ideas -- connecting the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sept. 11 and Iraq. This lineage, Berman claims, is represented not by George W. Bush but by Tony Blair, ''leader of the free world.'' Bush has presented the wars on terrorism and Saddam as matters of U.S. security. In fact, Berman says, they are wars for liberal civilization, and the rest of the democratic world should want to join. It doesn't bother Berman to hear conservative hawks at the Pentagon like Paul Wolfowitz talking similarly. ''If their language is sincere,'' he says, ''and there is an idealism among the neo-cons that echoes and reflects in some way the language of the liberal interventionists of the 90's, well, that would be a good thing.''
But Berman, unlike Hitchens, doubts their sincerity. And in the end, Berman can't support the administration's war plan, ''because I don't actually know -- I believe that no one actually knows -- what is the actual White House policy.'' So he is left in the familiar position of intellectuals, with an arsenal of ideas and no way to deploy them.
one chilly evening in late November, a panel discussion on Iraq was convened at New York University. The participants were liberal intellectuals, and one by one they framed reasonable arguments against a war in Iraq: inspections need time to work; the Bush doctrine has a dangerous agenda; the history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East is not encouraging. The audience of 150 New Yorkers seemed persuaded.
Then the last panelist spoke. He was an Iraqi dissident named Kanan Makiya, and he said, ''I'm afraid I'm going to strike a discordant note.'' He pointed out that Iraqis, who will pay the highest price in the event of an invasion, ''overwhelmingly want this war.'' He outlined a vision of postwar Iraq as a secular democracy with equal rights for all of its citizens. This vision would be new to the Arab world. ''It can be encouraged, or it can be crushed just like that. But think about what you're doing if you crush it.'' Makiya's voice rose as he came to an end. ''I rest my moral case on the following: if there's a sliver of a chance of it happening, a 5 to 10 percent chance, you have a moral obligation, I say, to do it.''
The effect was electrifying. The room, which just minutes earlier had settled into a sober and comfortable rejection of war, exploded in applause. The other panelists looked startled, and their reasonable arguments suddenly lay deflated on the table before them.
Michael Walzer, who was on the panel, smiled wanly. ''It's very hard to respond,'' he said.
It was hard, I thought, because Makiya had spoken the language beloved by liberal hawks. He had met their hope of avoiding a war with an even greater hope. He had given the people in the room an image of their own ideals... |
