The conscience of the left is a wonderful thing to behold. I
remember some commentator during the Vietnam war who found his way
into the “Current Wisdom” of The American Spectator — it
may have still been The Alternative then — who blamed
Johnson or Nixon or whoever it was who was getting the blame in
those days because he had woken up one morning to find that he was
“rooting for” the Viet Cong! There he was, rooting (and tooting)
against his own country and for its enemies and it was all the
government’s fault. The bastards! What they had done to the
Vietnamese people was as nothing compared to what they had done to
this poor addled peacenik’s amour propre as a good
American.
I thought of his narcissism, so far ahead of its time in some
ways, once again when I read that Gary Kamiya of Salon had
confessed that “I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly
wished for things to go wrong. Wished for the Iraqis to be more
nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise
up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I’m
not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive
people who oppose the war have told me they have had identical
feelings.
“Some of this,” he is ready to admit, “is merely the result of
pettiness — ignoble resentment, partisan hackdom, the desire to be
proved right and to prove the likes of Rumsfeld wrong, irritation
with the sanitizing, myth-making American media. That part of it I
feel guilty about, and disavow. But some of it is something
trickier: It’s a kind of moral bet-hedging, based on a pessimism
not easy to discount, in which one’s head and one’s heart are at
odds.”
Of course you can see how they would be. “What,” for instance,
“if you are convinced that an easy victory will ultimately result
in a larger moral negative — four more years of Bush, for example,
with attendant disastrous policies, or the betrayal of the
Palestinians to eternal occupation, or more imperialist meddling in
the Middle East or elsewhere?” Surely, he implies, preventing any
or all of the above is worth a few more lives, whether American or
Iraqi, and a prolonged period of misery for the Iraqi people who do
manage to survive. Yes, Mr. Kamiya might well be willing to pay
that price in other people’s blood to be spared the “larger moral
negative” of a second Bush term.
Perhaps it was in the same spirit that Mr. Trevor Trotman of
Croydon writes in a letter to The Times of London that
“The fact that a war is brought to a quick conclusion does not
prove that it was right to go to war.” This is true. But neither is
the fact an irrelevant datum in any calculation of the war’s
rightness. In this war, especially, there were very few among those
who opposed it going in who did so on the grounds that the removal
of Saddam Hussein and his henchmen from power in Baghdad was an
unworthy use of military force. Very many of those opponents,
however, did so on the grounds that the prospective war’s duration
or intensity would be catastrophic for one side or the other, or
for both. They have now been shown to have been in error.
In another letter Mrs. Muriel Syed of Burnley cited the
well-publicized case (in Britain) of Ali Ismail Abbas, the little
boy who lost both his arms when an allied bomb blew up his house:
“As a mother and grandmother it is my belief that, whatever the
rights and wrongs of the war in Iraq, nothing at all is worth his
suffering, nor that of hundreds of children like him in Iraq. If
the Iraqi regime had to be changed there had to be another way.”
Ah, but, you see, there didn’t have to be another way — because
there wasn’t another way. There very often isn’t when countries go
to war. But when they do so, some calculation of the number of
little boys who will suffer one way as measured against the number
who will suffer the other must, of necessity, end up proving that
somebody’s suffering is worth it. If Saddam Hussein had
been left in power, something tells me it would not have been
difficult to find some other little boy who would suffer for it at
least as much as young Ali Ismail Abbas has done. Would, then,
his suffering have been worth it as the cost of putting up
with the dictator a bit longer?
And then there was the Michael Kinsley approach to being an
anti-warrior after the war’s successful conclusion: “No sane
person,” he wrote “doubted that the mighty U.S. military machine
could defeat and conquer a country with a tiny fraction of its
population and an even tinier fraction of its wealth — a country
suffering from more than a decade of economic strangulation by the
rest of the world.” No sane person? Lots of sane people had doubted
it only just over a week before. “Oh, sure,” he allows, “there was
a tepid public discussion of how long victory might take to
achieve, in which pros and antis were represented across the
spectrum of opinion. And the first law of journalistic dynamics —
The Story Has to Change — inevitably produced a couple of comic
days last week when the media and their rent-a-generals were
peddling the q-word.”
Ha ha. Very comic. Looking back on it Kinsley is quite sure that
he and other “honest opponents” of the war had paid no attention to
the rent-a-generals or the shallow media pessimists and
“unreflective peaceniks” who had spoken of a quagmire. Yet he
reserves his right to be antiwar even after its success on the
rather feeble ground that the arguments about it (unspecified)
remain unsettled and that “dropping all opposition at the beginning
of the war would surely be more intellectually suspicious than
maintaining your doubts while sincerely hoping for victory.” Like
the “antiwar” Mr. Kamiya of Salon, in other words, who has
managed to square it with his conscience that he wanted, well, a
bit more war, Kinsley is at least untouched in the sense of his own
intellectual rectitude.
“Inevitably,” he concludes, “more than one supporter of this war
has taunted its opponents with Orwell’s famous observation in 1942
that pacifists — the few who opposed a military response to Adolf
Hitler — were ‘objectively pro-fascist.’ The suggestion is that
opposing this war makes you objectively pro-Saddam Hussein. In an
oddly less famous passage two years later, Orwell recanted that
‘objectively’ formula and called it ‘dishonest.’ Which it is.”
Regrettably, Kinsley does not get around to explaining this
alleged dishonesty. If there is an opportunity to remove a tyrant
from power and you speak and write and vote against making use of
that opportunity, however high-minded your anti-war principles,
aren’t you “objectively” on the side of the tyrant’s desire to stay
in power? Kinsley may have an argument to make against that logical
inference, but he does not make it — let alone show any reason why
it should be considered “dishonest.” But then not making arguments
and instead only alluding to them, or calling them “dishonest,” is
another of the privileges of the lefty conscience.
