Maligning the left has been fashionable in a mainstream sort of way ever since Ronald Reagan and the elder George Bush taught Republicans how to utter the word “liberal” with a derisive sneer. Following Sept. 11, however, left-baiting has escalated into a genuine growth industry, as the rhetorical patrons of war tee off with unrestrained asperity at even the slightest doubt about military action in Afghanistan.
Yes, polls show significant popular support for the so-called war, but a substantial gap separates endorsement of means from confidence that ends will be achieved. More than 85 percent of Americans still favor the current action in Afghanistan, but according to a recent Newsweek poll, only about 40 percent think that it’s very likely to succeed in toppling the Taliban regime, with even fewer confident that the U.S. will capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Americans apparently believe that the ends justify the means as a theoretical abstraction, but they are skeptical that the means will actually serve the ends the Bush administration has in mind.
It is against this backdrop of strategic schizophrenia that some on the left question the merits of Operation Bomb Afghanistan Into the Stone Age Except That It Was Already Pretty Much There in the First Place. The right’s response to such rank impertinence is a blistering chorus of rebuke and disdain that seems far out of proportion to the crime of geopolitical skepticism. Michael Kelly of The Washington Post, for example, described American pacifists as “objectively pro-terrorist” and “on the side of future mass murders of Americans.” In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Andrew Sullivan tagged the left as “phony” and so ideologically bankrupt that “we need to expose it and condemn it as widely and as irrevocably as we can.”
Academe is predictably scapegoated as the breeding ground of liberal infamy. Syndicated columnist Paul Craig Roberts draws from Sept. 11 an imperative to do something about “the left-wing multicultural diversity-mongers who assault Americans every day in university classrooms.” David Brooks of The Weekly Standard codifies the academic liberal stereotype: “Sitting on their campuses, they are powerless themselves, and have embraced a delicious, self-glorifying identity as the outmanned sages who alone can see through the veils of propaganda in which the powerful hide their oppressive schemes.” Jeepers!
It is, of course, much easier to fling ad hominem salvos at those who challenge U.S. policy than it is to answer the questions raised—and such outlandish questions they are: What are the achievable aims of U.S. policy? How much of Afghanistan will have to be leveled to get there? What sort of long-term humanitarian nightmare is being created or exacerbated by the U.S. bombing campaign? How does the use of cluster bombs on a civilian population bolster the moral authority of U.S. statecraft? How, given selective, self-serving participation in multilateral arrangements, can current American diplomacy be construed by the community of nations as an authentic commitment to future collective security? How will the effort to nation-build in Afghanistan around questionably savory insurgents differ from the many ill-fated such efforts the U.S. has pursued in recent decades? How many thousands of Afghans will die of starvation this winter?
But even if it has been unfairly pilloried for raising compelling and legitimate questions about the war, the skeptical left has been less effective at cogently answering the big one: What to do instead? As the venerable activist Saul Alinsky observed 30 years ago, “the price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” If not this misguided war, then what, precisely?
Retrospectively, many persuasive answers are easily summoned: more attention to economic development in the impoverished third world; greater fidelity to and participation in systems of international law and justice, the U.N. and other multilateral milieus; more consistent pressure on autocratic regimes for democratic reforms and human rights protection; a more balanced approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; a diminished fondness for economic imperialism and arms proliferation. It is sophistry to assume these things would have forestalled militant Islamic fundamentalism, Al Qaeda or some version of Sept. 11, but they certainly would have positioned the U.S. for a substantially more constructive global role in the present circumstances.
Given the regrettable baggage of current realities, however, it behooves war skeptics to propose a different course not just looking backward, but going forward. The basic contours include a substantial reorientation of foreign policy toward greater internationalism, and a redefinition of terrorism as a criminal threat to peace and stability addressable through collective mechanisms of international law enforcement and justice. Bringing American military might to bear on the people of Afghanistan may satisfy a thirst for revenge, but it seems just as likely to inflame anti-Western extremism as to marginalize it. And so a choice: Shall we continue to rationalize the immeasurable violence of war by disparaging the inadequacy of multilateral systems of peace and security, or can we seize this difficult moment to lead their transformation?
The Bush administration clearly prefers to miss this opportunity, favoring truculent self-aggrandizement over a difficult reinvention of enlightened global self-interest. We are constantly reminded that everything has changed since Sept. 11. The sensible message of the anti-war left is that some things never do.
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