Questions for the Left
"Cicero," blogging at Winds of Change, has a short list of questions for the Left about the war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. (He says the Qs are for liberals, but I thinks that's mistaken - Michael Totten, Jeff Jarvis and Christopher Hitchens are all certainly liberal, but all saw the necessity of dealing decisively with Saddam.)

I think these are excellent questions. I have blogged about similar ones myself. But his first question reveals a foundational misunderstanding:

What would have been the best, most legitimate way for Iraq to achieve democratic elections? Can it be applied to Burma, North Korea, Iran, and other dictatorships?

What Cicero seems not to realize is that the Left does not support democracy and in fact is inimical to it. So right off the bat the question assumes that the Left and the rest of us have a common regard for democracy that is not actually there.

In the months before the war began, the Left proved its sole purpose was to foil American policy, not to save the Iraqi people from Saddam. Asking the Left how it would have freed the Iraqi people is like asking the NFL how its going to save the rest of the hockey season. The NFL doesn't care whether hockey is played or not, and the Left didn't care whether Saddam was thrown down. If anything, the Left preferred for Saddam to stay in power.

Mass graves, torture rooms, rape as a state punishment, child executions, maimings - the Left simply is not bothered by these things when what is at stake in their minds is an expansive United States (or Great Britain, to a lesser extent).

Because the rest of Cicero's questions basically depend on this one, the Left will be equally unengaged by them, too. All depend on a basic mistake: that the Left is pro-democracy. But it isn't.

Nonetheless, it is true that some Americans who are not Leftists did and do oppose the war. And to them these question might make some sense. But again, Cicero's basic error is assuming that (as a group) they share the same goals as Cicero or the Bush administration. The first question again:

What would have been the best, most legitimate way for Iraq to achieve democratic elections?

And a non-Lefist war opponent might answer:

"We were told that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and that the threat was imminent. Democratizing Iraq was not said to be a war aim. Because there were no WMDs and no imminent threat, there was no basis for the war."

This is in fact nearly verbatim what the administration's opponents have been saying. My point is that freeing the Iraqi people from brutal tyranny was never their goal and is not today. That doesn't make them anti-American, as the Left so rabidly is, it is to say that the honest answer to Cicero's question is simply, "We don't care whether the Iraqis ever achieved democracy."

This position is really not liberal, of course. It is isolationist and a stance on which the not-quite-Left and the far Right find they have in common, though for different reasons. (Though the foreign military adventures of Bill Clinton didn't garner criticism from not-quite-Left side. In this the far Right is at least consistent.)

Anyway, some thoughtful liberals have already pondered and written about Cicero's questions, though wording them differently. I wrote two years ago about Sojourner's editor Jim Wallis's dilemma as a pacifist. He understood the urgency of the crisis but also more:

I oppose a widening war that bombs more people and countries, recruiting even more terrorists, and fueling an unending cycle of violence. But those who oppose bombing must have an alternative.

But Wallis is a man who is pro-democracy; his opposition to violence included Saddam's state violence. That is what Cicero is asking for - enough honesty from the opposition to admit the dilemmas of their own position, or enough honesty to admit that their opposition is really partisan political, not principled.

by Donald Sensing, 2/7/2005 04:50:26 PM. Permalink |