Max Sawicky reads Medea Benjamin in the Washington Post, and channels another Max--Weber that is. Max Weber said that there are two kinds of people for whom politics becomes a calling--those who believe that the entire point of the exercise is to strike an appropriate moral posture so that one can feel righteous, and those who believe that the point is to make the world a better place.
Medea Benjamin seems to fall in the first group...
Posted by DeLong at March 21, 2004 06:07 PM | TrackBackMaxSpeak, You Listen!: ANTI-WAR B.S.:There are good and bad anti-war arguments. Some of the bad ones make for good politics. I'm afraid the opportunity afforded to Medea Benjamin today by the Washington Post is not used as well as it might have been. MB deserves credit for lengthy service in progressive causes, so I don't mean to impugn her motives or character. I have no reason to believe they are anything but sterling.
MB criticizes the U.S. for not constructing a liberal Iraqi state, by propitiating the preferences of Islamicists in re: women's rights. Supressing the Shi'a would take a lot more troops than we have now. MB does some ambulance-chasing, in reference to Iraqi civilians killed by U.S. troops. Imagine the collateral damage if the U.S. imposed feminist law on Basra. In the same vein, MB notes victims of the war and demands relief for them. But the only plausible agency for such relief at present is the U.S. occupation authorities. We can't just airdrop money. There is little acknowledgement in the column of the oppression of Saddam, hence no meaningful comparison of the difference between the pre-war status quo and U.S. intervention.
The style of the column is annoying too. It's talking at people, not to them. The "we are marching" mantra is more appropriate for a congregation of believers, not the skeptics that need to be won over. So I don't think it's good politics either, beyond the preacher-choir context.
What are some valid anti-war arguments?
1. Procedural. The Bushies lied in justifying the war, so the American people were deprived of their right to make an informed choice. (This does not answer the question of whether the invasion in and of itself was justifiable.)
2. Implementation. The Bushies screwed up diplomacy and failed to plan for the aftermath. They could have organized a more effective effort.
3. National interest. Even if you think the war is morally justifiable, it is not in the interests of the American people to support ventures in nation-building (the Bush 2000 campaign platform).
4. Limits of government. All three of the preceding inevitably contaminate all such enterprises, hence the conservative rationale for avoiding them (the libertarian position).
5. Anti-Imperialism. Sort of the flip side of #4. The designs of U.S. elites in the region have little to do with humanitarianism or democracy, hence their interventions will not be geared towards the interests of those to be liberated, except by accident. This is not really a marxist view; it's more like pragmatic fatalism as far as contemporary U.S. politics is concerned.
MaxSpeak leans to some combination of #4 and #5. The danger among Democrats is a temptation towards #1 and #2, greasing the skids for an extended occupation ("we broke it/we bought it"), or further misbegotten adventures in liberation.
Politically, the best long-term argument is #3....
What kind of parents would name their
baby daughter Medea, anyway?
Why :CAN'T: the US just drop money over Iraq?!
It's OUR money, paid for by US taxpayers and
printed in England. It replaces the old Saddam
currency and is legal tender everywhere in Iraq.
WHY NOT put a couple million dirhams or iraqmas
or whatever in the washing machine then dryer,
all small bills, and then drop pre-shrunk funny
money on the people who really need it, instead
of on the faux puppet pretenders in Baghdad who
are siphoning off $B's into their Isle of Man
bank accounts? Bubble up economics. Works like
a charm. Every drachma in the local community
generates 3 more and goes around 7 times before it winds up in some alderman's shoebox, instead of going straight into a secret overseas account.
Like monopoly, the game, not SoS parlor tricks.
Posted by: Paul Songas on March 21, 2004 07:25 PMNot to mention that it would be a great natural experiment to test the quantity theory of money.
Posted by: Knut Wicksell on March 21, 2004 08:10 PM6. Deaths of innocent people. Does not necessarily imply that the net benefits from a war cannot be positive. But it is immoral to act as if dead people don't count. If we think the deaths of 3000 Americans defines a new century, then the deaths of 10,000 Iraki civilians has to be acknowledged somehow when we assess the merits of this war. Note, 10,000 are just the dead, there are the widows, the orphans, the blind, the amputated, the disfigured etc. Also, war is traumatic for children, I have heard. I tell you this because I sometimes have the impression Americans completely ignore (or willingly disregard?) these utterly simple facts (because they have no historical experience with it on their soil?). And now, I will let you discuss in peace to what degree the near certain prospect of a future civil war in Iraq is better than the tirany of Saddam (whom the US willingly helped to power.)
Posted by: Jean-Philippe Stijns on March 21, 2004 08:49 PM7. The simple fact that escalation always plays into the interests of terrorists.
Posted by: ogmb on March 21, 2004 09:30 PMJPS: "6. Deaths of innocent people. Does not necessarily imply that the net benefits from a war cannot be positive. But it is immoral to act as if dead people don't count."
Is this JPS's real reason to be against the war, or is it just carping? It's a bit unclear.
JPS: "And now, I will let you discuss in peace to what degree the near certain prospect of a future civil war in Iraq is better than the tirany of Saddam (whom the US willingly helped to power.)"
A real #6 - unless this is counted as a variant of Sawicky's #4 (or #5). And to me, the best anti-war argument (in the case of Iraq): are we really going to be able to make things better for the Iraqis?
Posted by: Joe Mealyus on March 21, 2004 11:08 PMIgnatieff said it all, in "Empire lite", before the war (1993). The introduction alone lists all the good reasons against the war. and outlines the policy a reasonable US administration should have followed - and then, probably, it would have rallied the entire European Union at its side.
Posted by: gerhard on March 22, 2004 12:26 AM"Is this JPS's real reason to be against the war, or is it just carping? It's a bit unclear."
How hard is it to believe that someone would care about the victims of a conflict? The only type of war I feel comfortable about are those that clearly prevent further deaths from a civil war or those that improve the lifes of the local population at very little human cost. And as for the rest, unless it's a war of defense (a real one, that is), I request to see strong, undisputable evidence that a war brings net benefits to the country it's to be waged in. Since victims weight heavily in my (dis)utility function, my threshold in terms of certainty equivalent improvement in political freedom is high.
George Brassens (1921-1981), the French chanson icon, wrote a cult song about all those people who urge others to die for their own ideas:
http://www.geocities.com/foursov/brassens/mourir_pour.html
Mourrons pour des idées, d'accord, mais de mort lente,
D'accord, mais de mort lente!
My favorite part of the song (it's hard to choose though) is:
Mais de grâce, morbleu! laissez vivre les autres!
La vie est à peu près leur seul luxe ici bas
And just in case you thought this is a communist song:
Encor s'il suffisait de quelques hécatombes
Pour qu'enfin tout changeât, qu'enfin tout s'arrangeât
Depuis tant de "grands soirs" que tant de têtes tombent
Au paradis sur terre on y serait déjà
P.S. Excuse my French, but it would take a gifted translator to translate this. If I improvised myself at that, I would most surely betray the poetry of the lyrics. The funny thing about Brassens is that back when my father was listening to him on his phonograph, my grand-father would call his music barbarian. Nowadays, it's considered poetry and features prominentlty on the school curriculum in french speaking countries.
"But it is immoral to act as if dead people don't count."
Then why are you acting as if the deaths of many hundreds of thousands under Saddam and the many more deaths that have been prevented by his ouster don't count? Would it have been acceptable to you for America to have stayed out of World War 2 to avoid causing the deaths of innocent German civilians? This "reasoning" of yours is as specious as it is immoral.
Posted by: Abiola Lapite on March 22, 2004 08:27 AM"Then why are you acting as if the deaths of many hundreds of thousands under Saddam and the many more deaths that have been prevented by his ouster don't count?"
I didn't say that. The fact is that Saddam's regime was not nearly as bloody towards its end as the war party would like us to believe. The real point though is that if -and it's very hard not to predict it- there is a civil war, the number of victims will dwarf the number of Saddam's assassinations.
"Would it have been acceptable to you for America to have stayed out of World War 2 to avoid causing the deaths of innocent German civilians?"
That's not the point. If the US had stayed out of WWII, millions more Jews and gentiles would have died. Europeans would have had to live in a clearly worse regime. Europe was a place that knew democracy and was easy tor return to it.
In any case, when Kenneth Galbraith, who had been in charge of army procurements during WWII, was charged with estimating the effectiveness of US bombings on Germany, he had one conclusion: unnecessarily excessive. And such excessive bombings are known to have taken place outside Germany as well, in France for example.
In short, overall WWII was worth it (and I thank the Great Generation for their sacrifice). But it cannot be used as a joker excuse for all possible wars. And even saying it was worth it doesn't imply that the same result could not have been attained with fewer causalties. Just because the US has waged a handful of just wars doesn't imply that all past, current and future wars are consequently just. There is simply no logic to that.
Posted by: Jean-Philippe Stijns on March 22, 2004 08:55 AM"What kind of parents would name their
baby daughter Medea, anyway?"
Someone who's not expecting grandchildren, I'd think.
I met Medea Benjamin once at a DSA event. Her husband is actually much, much more charismatic than she is. She struck me as a well-meaning person, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Still, you can get some great world music at Global Exchange.
Posted by: Tom on March 23, 2004 11:10 AM