You enabled the human misery and chaos we've been witnessing from "Mission Accomplished" on! Don't get all sanctimonious about your lonely championing of the struggle against dictatorship. You have no right to congratulate yourselves on your alleged concern for the Iraqi people. It's your self-hypnosis by your own ideology that blinded you to the hundreds and thousands of lives that were really at stake in Iraq.
You're no better than the Bushists.
Take for instance
Paul Berman and
Thomas Cushman, both of whom replied to Dissent's
question about lessons learned from the Iraq war. Berman's hyper-intellectuallism is bad enough, but at least he doesn't sound totally clueless like Cushman, whose self-delusion follows:
WHAT MIGHT a liberal defender of the war say to critics at the present moment? My answers are simple and even plaintive: if you stood in solidarity with the Iraqi people enough to support them in their decades of struggle against Saddam’s terror, if you bore witness to and championed them in the heady days of their free and democratic elections, if you affirmed the efforts of the Iraqi labor movement and women’s rights organizations, and now things are taking a turn for the worse, you ought to redouble your effort to stand in solidarity with them. The last thing—the very last thing—you would say to them is that on March 1, 2008, we will surrender to the enemies that are butchering you now and who are emboldened by the arguments of defeatists in the U.S. Congress and by candidates for president.
Such arguments fall flat among those on the left who never showed solidarity with the Iraqis during the early days of the war and who refused to listen to them when a substantial majority indicated that they supported the coalition war to depose Saddam and create a democratic Iraq. They fall flat among those on the left who willfully ignored any and all good news coming out of Iraq for several years before things took a turn for the worse in the last year. Free elections in which seven million Iraqis voted for the first time? Silence. The rise of the labor movement from virtually nothing to almost one million members today? Silence. An Iraqi Parliament 30 percent of whose members are women (almost twice the paltry 17 percent in the United States)? Silence. The outstanding achievements of Iraqi Kurdistan? Silence. Where is Kurdistan, anyway?
THESE SILENCES were accompanied by a constant focus on the intransigencies of the Coalition forces, the demonization of the United States and George W. Bush (perhaps deserved, but with a life all its own), and odd declamations by leftists who harped for years on the dangers of orientalism about how “they” (the Iraqis) are not “ready” for democracy. There are, of course, good-faith, well-grounded criticisms of the war, and perhaps we have reached a position of what might be called ontological failure. But if, perhaps, it is foolish to believe that something called democracy can emerge from the current wreckage, it is most certainly the case that something quite the opposite of democracy will be established in Iraq if the Democrats have their way. The hardest observation to make is that either a retreat from democratization or an effort to salvage it will produce further loss of life.
ALL THIS ADDS UP to the fact that there has been little that can be considered “liberal” in the dominant positions of the left regarding the war. No matter where one turns in so-called liberal arguments there are illiberal dead ends. The UN is an undemocratic and illiberal organization that would have been considered an abomination by the liberal republican Immanuel Kant. International law, and particularly the law that protects rulers like Saddam, is manipulated by tyrants to foster their murderous agendas, while restraining the power of liberal states to intervene against them. The call for surrender in the war—and let us call it what it is—is made without any consideration of the consequences of withdrawal for the substantial number of liberal people and movements in Iraq, to say nothing of how al-Qaeda will be emboldened to strike us again at a time and place of its choosing. This is not to denigrate those who have made the decision to oppose the war. It is to alert them to the fact that the American president and his left-wing ally Tony Blair really are a force for liberal internationalist solidarity. They have made mistakes and will be held to account in the historical record. They may, in fact, be guilty of everything their detractors say about them, but the latter are in no way the superior moral force, despite their pious tones. That Iraq is a tragedy is inescapable. That escaping from it is a virtue is arguable.
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