Buzzards and Dreadful Crows

An annoyance: any discussion of any complex issue in terms of abstract taxonomy at the expense of a careful account of specific people, places, times, motivations, and events. This gives me hives when it pops up in, say, literary criticism, but it really pisses me off in discussions of foreign policy, where the consequences of fucking up are a lot of dead people.

Take this bit of nonsense from a site called "Militant Moderates," of all fucking things. The author is responding to this post from Ezra Klein. There the young Mr Klein, who supported the Iraq war when he was even younger and should have been doing something more useful, like smoking a lot of grass, points out that the "liberal hawks" who pompously and thoroughly botched the whole "should we invade Iraq" question, are refusing to account for their screwup in any serious way -- but are instead huffing and puffing on the question of Iran. "Just because we were wrong in the past doesn't mean we are ontologically wrong," they intone: they are washed in the blood and spittle of Marty Peretz or some shit like that, and their sins washed clean.

Whatever. Observe how this "Militant Moderates" punk prefers to engage with the utterly meaningless question of "what is a liberal hawk" rather than talk about, well, anything that has happened or might actually occur in the real world.

The first question, of course, is what is a "liberal hawk" anyway? Klein's definition suffers from a pejorative tautology. "Liberal hawks" to him are defined solely by their stances on the issues of Iraq and Iran -- favor towards the Iraq war then, embarrassment and avoidance of the Iraq issue now, and a vaguely noncommittal stance towards Iran. Klein's depiction of "liberal hawks" is thus not a description of a political philosophy or a foreign policy approach at all, but rather just a list of behaviors Klein doesn't like. Klein does not expound upon the underlying beliefs or theories that might give an understanding of how "liberal hawks" would approach a range of issues and he certainly does not allow the "liberal hawks" to speak for themselves on such points, he merely defines the concept in terms of his negative opinion regarding their outcomes on two specific issues.

This is all my balls. Ezra Klein is perfectly right to judge people writing on foreign policy primarily on their stances towards real world issues. A discussion of "underlying beliefs or theories" in this context is absurd, given the horror of the Iraq debacle. If your "underlying beliefs or theories" made you stick your dick in the blender, even "reluctantly," and you haven't thoroughly reassessed these concepts, I frankly don't want to hear your advice about what to do with the weed whacker.

The essay is crazy. The guy thinks the primary debate about foreign policy is between "pacifists" and "militarists" -- as if the primary reason anyone opposed the war in Iraq was from a position of committed pacifism. Well, maybe a small minority did, and good for them. But most of us opposed the war in Iraq because it was obviously a stupid fucking idea. The administration was clearly spouting bullshit about why it was necessary and how much it would cost in money and lives. 

The self-declared "liberal hawks" of the period were the ones suffering from a pragmatism deficit. A failure to recognize this, coupled with a defense of "liberal hawk" based on the assertion that the reified term "liberal hawkism" is a fundamentally pragmatic "philosophy," is absurd and obnoxious.

Comments

[eRobin]

If your "underlying beliefs or theories" made you stick your dick in the blender, even "reluctantly," and you haven't thoroughly reassessed these concepts, I frankly don't want to hear your advice about what to do with the weed whacker.

I need to have that tatooed somewhere.

[Avedon]

[Enthusiastic applause]

[reverter]

I am in awe of the blender/weedwhacker analogy. It's so clear, yet so hilarious. I'm glad I wasn't drinking anything when I read that!!

[geoduck2]

But most of us opposed the war in Iraq because it was obviously a stupid fucking idea. The administration was clearly spouting bullshit about why it was necessary and how much it would cost in money and lives.

Yes. That's what was so disorienting about the months leading up to the invasion. It was _obviously_ a stupid foreign policy "plan." Just how many brain cells did somebody need to understand the probable risks of violence /chaos /non-functioning state (ect., ect.)?

And the news media/pundit talk was so, well, I don't have the words to characterize the mass media public "discourse" at that time.

[Whispers]

More applause for the blender/weed whacker analogy.

[jayinbmore]

Whatever. Observe how this "Militant Moderates" punk prefers to engage with the utterly meaningless question of "what is a liberal hawk"...

A "liberal hawk" is a social liberal who's afraid Rush Limbaugh is going to call them a pussy.

[pastordan]

Actually, Ezra may have been hitting the wack tabacky while he supported the war. Or so he says here.

Don't you wish everyone could have that excuse?

[LittlePig]

A truly excellent essay. Thank you.

The degree to which the spoiled brats that run our government and their soulmates like the Militant Moron are disconnected with reality never ceases to astound. If one finds that words are more "real" than the scattered bloody bits of what used to be human beings, seek professional help immediately.

[Spokane Moderate]

For the record, I'm with Thers on this one.

[SteveB]

Isn't "Militant Moderate" just Tom Tomorrow's Sensible Liberal in a slightly different guise?

Yes, Mr. Moderate, please continue to "study" the "option" of bombing Iran, while the aircraft carriers gather en masse. Perhaps you can have your extremely thoughtful conclusions ready for us after thousands - or hundreds of thousands - are dead.

[Captain Goto]

One more kudos re: the blender thingy. Effin' gold, I tells ya.

[Captain Goto]

And of course, we would be remiss in neglecting to point out whose dicks were *actually* being volunteered in the service of this grand and glorious 'experiment' with erm, household appliances.

Note carefully that it sure as hell *wasn't* the appendages of the 'Militant [snerk] Moderates'.

[grendelkhan]

I think I knew that the war was a bad idea when it started. I will admit, however, to not really understanding just how bad of an idea it was. Ignorance, I suppose, is no excuse, but at least I wasn't telling other people how silly they were for saying that it was a very, very bad idea.

[Righteous Bubba]

I think I knew that the war was a bad idea when it started.

I was shocked and awed. It seemed like a weird dream and the right combination of "drink me" bottles or "eat me" cakes would make it go away. Amazing it's gone on for so long.

Bush is so young, too. What'll another forty years of self-justification look like?

[ChiTownReader]

Thanks for the definition of "liberal hawk" jayinbmore. You can hear their fear of this everytime they speak(or write).

[Righteous Bubba]

If your "underlying beliefs or theories" made you stick your dick in the blender

Who are the female liberal hawks?

[mrh]

Brilliant.

[flory]

I am in awe of the blender/weedwhacker analogy. It's so clear, yet so hilarious. I'm glad I wasn't drinking anything when I read that!!

Posted by: reverter

What reverter said.

This is Koufax worthy.

[Amit Joshi]

Reminds me of PZ Myers' "Courtier's Response" takedown of critics of Dawkins' God Delusion: yes, Ezra Klein refuses to look at the contours and texture of the reality distortion unique to liberal hawks, as distinct, say, from the beliefs of the out-and-out insane. But he's still right, and they're still looking like fools.

[Pooh]

Thers wins the intranets for the day.

[Marky]

The blender/dick metaphor is deep. It captures the post-iraq reality that the US no longer has a dick to fuck with.. not that the airy theorists who sold the Iraq war care.

[spencer]

Bush is so young, too. What'll another forty years of self-justification look like?

I suspect he'll only make it five years or so before he drinks himself to death. The guy's got serious problems that have never been, and never will be, treated properly.

[vox clamantis in red state]

Could the dick in a blender be Dick Cheney?
/Would that it were so.

[Drano]

The thing is, they're not dealing with the issue but with the rhetoric, an ancient and hoary dodge. I've even seen this very template used many times before: "X's [term used by X and seized on for our purposes] is thus not a cohesive idea, but rather a list of things X does not like."

[the exile]

One reason I (and I think many of us) did not get more worked up in the runup to the war was because the idea of invading the wrong country, overthrowing a known enemy of Al Qaeda and creating a new breeding ground for jihadis was so patently insane that I didn't think they were stupid enough to actually do it. Afghanistan had been handled smartly (Clinton's plan, it later turned out). So I thought it was a bluff, and as a bluff it could have been a brilliant move. Only too late did I realize that they really WERE effing lunatics. It was the very scope of the madness that allowed me to stay in denial and not believe it would really happen. How many out there shared my experience?

[El Cid]

I'm bringing this over from where I posted it at the American Prospect, but I think the 90 years ago perspective on liberal hawks is just as relevant today, and sounds as though it were written 4 years ago, rather than 90 years ago.

Almost 90 years ago this month, one of the editors and writers for the socialist journal The Masses took a good hard look at the New Republic and its special role in using its liberal inheritance, even a pacifist outlook, to sell the Great War to American intellectuals.

I encountered this in a collection about The Masses called Echoes of Revolt, which collected a great deal of this fascinating publication killed by U.S. censorship when the Postmaster General refused to deliver it, due to its call to resist the new conscription for World War 1.

I typed the following excerpts in, and I think many people might find a creepy parallel from July of 1917 with TNR's approach to War as Peace in early Iraq War II days.

Dell even wonders if the editors of TNR, after having pushed so hard for conscription, would serve in the trenches themselves.

We Wonder
by Floyd Dell, July 1917
The Masses

Some of our friends tell us it isn't good taste to criticise our esteemed contemporary, the New Republic, in the way we do. The charge of bad taste pains us deeply, but it seems to us that it is hardly relevant. The New Republic is not so much a magazine as a political institution, comparable in its way to the Progressive Party. We all know with what forward-looking deals the Progressive Party was formed, and how it fell into the hands of Roosevelt and other plausible reactionaries.

...The folly and failure in which Progressivist idealism becomes mired and stuck are plain for all to see. Not so plain, perhaps, are the ironic follies and failures into which the New Republican idealism is being led...

The New Republic came into existence at a time when there was a peculiar and tremendous need of analytic and constructive thinking in regard to social and political justification...

The New Republic was by the nature of its intellectual ostentions pledged...to assist in the discovery and installation of efficient social and political means of preventing war between nations...

...The New Republic did not actually intend at first to accept War as a substitute for Peace. It began with what seemed a merely realistic determination to accept this war as an existing fact, not to be unduly cavilled about. It continued by hoping, less and less skeptically, for it to bring forth good fruits -- though it was considerably surprised and not a little alarmed when it {World War 1} brought forth the Russian Revolution.

But long before this latter incident, the conversion of the New Republic to War had been for practical purposes complete. It had taken War to its bosom, and its own doubtful past as an ambiguously pacifist journal was forgotten. Vanished were the days when it had seemed to our substantial citizens a kind of Yellow Book of Ideas, or, as a famous ex-President is said to have called it, "a pornographic version of the Nation."...

...That this compromise was so complete, being more nearly, perhaps, a surrender, was due entirely to the logic of events. If the New Republic had been too coolly aloof from the popular pro-Ally enthusiasm, it would have lost the opportunity to utter the counsels of moderation -- or at least the chance of its being heard...

...[The New Republic] does not yet realize how thoroughly it has committed itself to the program of militarism. Having assisted in inflicting conscription on an unwilling nation, it proceeds to suggest with the most virtuous air in the world that it is really not right to conscript men who consciously object to war...

...We have some doubts of the effectiveness of such mild and courteous protestations in behalf of liberty. Perhaps those who are engaged in destroying our liberties are not after all the best ones to defend them....

...Unconscious as it is still of the nature of its relations to militarism, the New Republic occasionally behaves as no ordinary militarist publication would dare to do. It occasionally gives away the whole show.

It did this notably in the days before the war when it innocently pointed out, and succeeded in making very clear, the fact that our alleged neutrality was no neutrality at all... Everybody knew it, but it wasn't being admitted by the pro-Ally partisans just then.

A second admission, to the effect that this war was not wanted by the people of the United States, but was put over on them by a small group of intellectuals, was commented on in our last issue. For the second time, the New Republic had said things that good militarists shouldn't say.

...Being pacifist and militarist both at once involves difficulties. We wonder, for instance, whether the editors of the New Republic are, as militarists, going to enlist for the trenches, or, as pacifists, going to stay at home and work out the problem of peace. Or will they take the ground that in helping to spread the snare of conscription for the feet of others they have already done their bit and should be allowed to walk free? We wonder.

[aimai]

What everyone else said. And thank you el Cid for that very interesting post.

I wanted to add that the rhetorical dodge:
"lets not talk about facts, let's talk about ideas" is kind of paired with the other one "you don't want to talk about ideas and facts, you just hate george bush." both are sickening evasions and distortions of the various and complex anti-war positions which, as others have noted, didn't proceed from ignorance or hatred of bush but rather from serious study, and knowledge of george bush as a potential leader. You'd have to have been an idiot to think before the war that you'd get anything other than a george bush special. if I got to a barbecue restaurant i don't order the sushi because they don't know how to make it. People who had been paying attention to the actual government we'd gotten could have been under no illusion that when given lemons bush would make lemonade. And he wasn't going to make lemon layer cake either, even if he'd had all the ingredients. He was going to stare and the lemons in a rage and then use them to squirt acid in gth eyes of his enemies.

Bu tthe liberal hawks then, and the liberal hawks now, want to take refuge in hypotheticals like "if we'd only done x" and hypotheticals like "if we only had a brain..." Well, they are as wrong with the first construct as they are with the second.

aimai

[darrelplant]

Man, those TNR people were windy, boring bastards even then. You must have fallen asleep two or three times trying to get that excerpt in, Cid.

Is Marty Peretz, like, 150 years old?

[PBI]

This is an excellent post, highlighted by two elements I know I will be referencing in the future. The first, the blender/weed-whacker analogy, is a truly outstanding example of both personal expression and pointed truth-telling. The second, the Iraq-War-as-stupid-fucking-idea-and-not-pacifism, is about as terse a response to that argument as could be desired. Really well said on both counts!

[El Cid]

Man, those TNR people were windy, boring bastards even then. You must have fallen asleep two or three times trying to get that excerpt in, Cid.

Is Marty Peretz, like, 150 years old?

Posted by: darrelplant | June 19, 2007 at 12:42 PM

No, Peretz is more recent, but very long-lived are the habits of mind by which haughty and prominent liberal intellectuals who aim to use their positions of prominence and presumed moral authority to lay propagandistic (yet profoundly untruthful) groundwork for the more literal war-mongers.

I learned all I needed to know about many supposedly "liberal" publications who were in reality power-mad and self-absorbed from their general agreement with the wisdom and necessity of Reagan's slaughters throughout Central America, Afghanistan, and Southern Africa.

[Phoenician in a time of Romans]

Yes. That's what was so disorienting about the months leading up to the invasion. It was _obviously_ a stupid foreign policy "plan."

Not quite as stupid as the idea of bombing Iran while you don't have the troops to actually invade it.

Oh, yeah, that'll work real well.

[ken]

there are no beliefs. there are no policies. there are no strategies. there are no convictions. there are no facts. there is only the reflex action of sucking up to the troops. with liberals, the disconnect is total. since liberals are born "suspect" or "funny", it is neccessary for them debase and soil themselves before the military in especially public and revolting ways. conservatives are troopsuck defined; but for liberals s, sucking up to the troops requires betrayal. democrat troop-suck excuses absolutely any lie, any destruction, any loss of life. everything is moral under full-bore liberal troop-suck. soon you will vote for someone whose sole purpose in life is to debase you and your values to the greater glory of the troops. it is- as of now- the only certainty to have emerged from the "the price is president" quiz show on now. and the thing i like about the weed-whacker analogy is it presupposes an anatomically correct hillary clinton.

[Bengt Larsson]

A liberal hawk is someone who wouldn't argue military aggression unless a real (conservative) hawk has done it first.