Reappraisals (63 page)

Friedman is seconded by Beinart, who concedes that he “didn’t realize” (!) how detrimental American actions would be to “the struggle” but insists notwithstanding that anyone who won’t stand up to “Global Jihad” just isn’t a consistent defender of liberal values. Jacob Weisberg, in the
Financial Times
, accuses Democratic critics of the Iraq war of failing “to take the wider global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously at all.” The only people qualified to speak in this matter, it would seem, are those who got it wrong initially. Such insouciance in spite of—indeed
because
of—your past misjudgments recalls a remark by the French ex-Stalinist Pierre Courtade to Edgar Morin, a dissenting Communist vindicated by events: “You and your kind were wrong to be right; we were right to be wrong.”

It is thus particularly ironically that the “Clinton generation” of American liberal intellectuals take special pride in their “toughmindedness,” in their success in casting aside the illusions and myths of the old Left. For these same “tough” new liberals in fact reproduce some of that old Left’s worst characteristics. They may see themselves as having migrated to the opposite shore; but they display precisely the same mix of dogmatic faith and cultural provincialism, not to mention an exuberant enthusiasm for violent political transformations at other people’s expense, that marked their fellow-traveling predecessors across the cold war ideological divide. The use value of such persons to ambitious, radical regimes is an old story. Indeed, intellectual camp followers of this kind were first identified by Lenin himself, who coined the term that still describes them best. Today, America’s liberal armchair warriors are the “useful idiots” of the War on Terror.

To be fair, America’s bellicose intellectuals are not alone. In Europe Adam Michnik, the hero of the Polish intellectual resistance to Communism, became an outspoken admirer of the embarrassingly Islamophobic Oriana Fallaci; Václav Havel joined the Washington-based Committee on the Present Danger (a recycled cold war-era organization originally dedicated to rooting out Communists, now pledged to fighting “the threat posed by global radical Islamist and fascist terrorist movements”); André Glucksmann in Paris contributed agitated essays to
Le Figaro
lambasting “universal Jihad,” Iranian “lust for power,” and radical Islam’s strategy of “green subversion.” All three enthusiastically supported the invasion of Iraq.

In the European case, this trend is an unfortunate by-product of the intellectual revolution of the 1980s, especially in the former Communist East, when “human rights” displaced conventional political allegiances as the basis for collective action. The gains wrought by this transformation in the rhetoric of oppositional politics were considerable. But a price was paid all the same. A commitment to the abstract universalism of “rights”—and uncompromising ethical stands taken against malign regimesin their name—can lead all too readily to the habit of casting
every
political choice in binary moral terms. In this light George Bush’s war against Terror, Evil, and Islamo-Fascism appears seductive and even familiar: Self-deluding foreigners readily mistake the U.S. President’s myopic rigidity for their own moral rectitude.

But back home, America’s liberal intellectuals are fast becoming a service class, their opinions determined by their allegiance and calibrated to justify a political end. In itself this is hardly a new departure, of course: We are all familiar with intellectuals who speak only on behalf of their country, class, religion, “race,” “gender,” or “sexual orientation,” and who shape their opinions according to what they take to be the interest of their affinity of birth or predilection. But the distinctive feature of the
liberal
intellectual in past times was precisely the striving for universality; not the unworldly or disingenuous denial of sectional identification but the sustained effort to transcend that identification in search of truth or the general interest.

It is thus depressing to read some of the better-known and more avowedly “liberal” intellectuals in the contemporary USA exploiting their professional credibility to advance a partisan case. Jean Bethke Elshtain and Michael Walzer, two senior figures in the country’s philosophical establishment (she at the University of Chicago Divinity School, he at the Princeton Institute), both penned portentous essays purporting to demonstrate the justness of necessary wars—she in
Just War against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World
(2003) a preemptive defense of the Iraq war; he more recently in a shameless defense of Israel’s bombardments of Lebanese civilians (“War Fair,”
The New Republic,
July 31, 2006). In today’s America, neoconservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig leaf. There really is no other difference between them.

One of the particularly depressing ways in which liberal intellectuals have abdicated personal and ethical responsibility for the actions they now endorse can be seen in their failure to think independently about the Middle East. Not every liberal cheerleader for the Global War against Islamo-Fascism, or against Terror, or against Global Jihad, is an unreconstructed supporter of Likud: Christopher Hitchens, for one, is critical of Israel. But the marked enthusiasm with which so many American punditsand commentators and essayists have rolled over for Bush’s doctrine of preventive war; offered no criticism of the disproportionate use of air power on civilian targets in both Iraq and Lebanon; and stayed coyly silent in the face of Condoleezza Rice’s enthusiasm for the bloody “birth pangs of a new Middle East,” makes more sense when one recalls their backing for Israel: a country that for fifty years has rested its entire national strategy upon preventive wars, disproportionate retaliation, and efforts to redraw the map of the whole Middle East.

Since its inception, the state of Israel has fought a number of wars of choice (indeed, the only exception was the Yom Kippur War of 1973). To be sure, these have been presented to the world as wars of necessity or self-defense; but Israel’s statesmen and generals have never been under any such illusion. Whether this approach has done Israel much good is debatable (for a clearheaded recent account that describes his country’s strategy of using wars of choice to “redraw” the map of its neighborhood as a resounding failure, see
Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy
[2006] by Shlomo Ben-Ami, a historian and former Israeli foreign minister). But the idea of a superpower behaving in a similar way— responding to terrorist threats or guerrilla incursions by flattening another country just to preserve its own deterrent credibility—is odd in the extreme. It is one thing for the U.S. unconditionally to underwrite Israel’s behavior (albeit in neither country’s interest). But for the U.S. to imitate Israel wholesale, to import that tiny country’s self-destructive, intemperate response to any hostility or opposition and to make it the leitmotif of American foreign policy: That is simply bizarre.

George W. Bush’s Middle Eastern policy now tracks so closely to the Israeli precedent that it is very difficult to see daylight between the two. It is this surreal turn of events that helps explain the confusion and silence of American liberal thinking on this subject. Historically, liberals have been unsympathetic to “wars of choice” when undertaken or proposed by their own government. War, in the liberal imagination (and not only the liberal one), is a last resort, not a first option. But the United States now has an Israeli-style foreign policy, and thus America’s liberal intellectuals overwhelmingly support it.

The contradictions to which this can lead are striking. Thus, to take just one instance: There is a blatant discrepancy between President Bush’s proclaimed desire to bring democracy to the Middle East, and his refusal to intervene when the
only
working instances of fragile democracy in action in the whole Arab world—in Palestine and Lebanon—were systematically shattered by America’s Israeli ally. This discrepancy, and the bad faith and hypocrisy that it seems to suggest, have become a staple of editorial pages and Internet blogs the world over, to America’s lasting discredit. But America’s leading liberal intellectuals have kept silent. To speak would be to choose: between the tactical logic of America’s new “war of movement” against Islamic Fascism and the strategic tradition of Israeli statecraft. This is not a choice that most American liberal commentators are even willing to acknowledge, much less make. And so they say nothing.

This blind spot obscures and risks polluting and obliterating every traditional liberal concern and inhibition. How else can one explain the appalling cover illustration of the
New Republic
of August 7, 2006: a lurid depiction of Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah in the anti-Semitic style of
Der Stürmer
crossed with more than a touch of the “Dirty Jap” cartoons of World War II? How else is one to account for the convoluted, sophistic defense by Leon Wieseltier in the same journal of the killing of Arab children in Q’ana (“These are not tender times”)? But the blind spot is not just ethical, it is also political: If American liberals “didn’t realize” just why their war in Iraq would have the predictable effect of promoting terrorism, benefiting the Iranian ayatollahs, and turning Iraq into Lebanon, then we should not expect them to understand (or care) that Israel’s brutal overreaction risks turning Lebanon into Iraq.

In his new book (
Five Germanys I Have Known
, 2006) Fritz Stern— coauthor of the 1988
New York Times
text defending liberalism—writes of his concern about the condition of the liberal spirit in America today. It is with the extinction of that spirit, he notes, that the death of a republic begins. Stern, a historian and a refugee from Nazi Germany, speaks from authority in this matter. And he is surely correct. We don’t expect right-wingers to care very much about the health of a republic, particularly when they are assiduously engaged in the unilateral promotion of empire. And the ideological Left, while occasionally adept at analyzing the shortcomings of a liberal republic, is typically not much interested in defending it.

It is the liberals, then, who count. They are, as it might be, the canaries in the sulfurous mine shaft of modern democracy. And thus the alacrity with which many of America’s most prominent liberals have censored themselves in the name of the “war on terror,” the enthusiasm with which they have invented ideological and moral cover for war and war crimes and proffered that cover to their political enemies: All this is a bad sign. Liberal intellectuals used to be distinguished precisely by their efforts to think for themselves, rather than in the service of others. Intellectuals should not be smugly theorizing endless war, much less confidently promoting and excusing it. They should be engaged in disturbing the peace—their own above all.

CHAPTER XXIII

The Good Society: Europe vs. America

Consider a mug of American coffee. It is found everywhere. It can be made by anyone. It is cheap—and refills are free. Being largely without flavor, it can be diluted to taste. What it lacks in allure it makes up in size. It is the most democratic method ever devised for introducing caffeine into human beings. Now take a cup of Italian espresso. It requires expensive equipment. Price-to-volume ratio is outrageous, suggesting indifference to the consumer and ignorance of the market. The aesthetic satisfaction accessory to the beverage far outweighs its metabolic impact. It is not a drink; it is an artifact.

This contrast can stand for the differences between America and Europe—differences nowadays asserted with increased frequency and not a little acrimony on both sides of the Atlantic. The mutual criticisms are familiar. To American commentators Europe is “stagnant.” Its workers, employers, and regulations lack the flexibility and adaptability of their U.S. counterparts. The costs of European social welfare payments and public services are “unsustainable.” Europe’s aging and “cosseted” populations are underproductive and self-satisfied. In a globalized world, the “European social model” is a doomed mirage. This conclusion is typically drawn even by “liberal” American observers, who differ from conservative (and neoconservative) critics only in deriving no pleasure from it.

To a growing number of Europeans, however, it is America that is in trouble and the “American way of life” that cannot be sustained. The American pursuit of wealth, size, and abundance—as material surrogates for happiness—is aesthetically unpleasing and ecologically catastrophic. The American economy is built on sand (or, more precisely, other people’s money). For many Americans the promise of a better future is a fading hope. Contemporary mass culture in the U.S. is squalid and meretricious. No wonder so many Americans turn to the church for solace.

These perceptions constitute the real Atlantic gap, and they suggest that something has changed. In past decades it was conventionally assumed—whether with satisfaction or regret—that Europe and America were converging upon a single “Western” model of late capitalism, with the U.S., as usual, leading the way. The logic of scale and market, of efficiency and profit, would ineluctably trump local variations and inherited cultural constraints. Americanization (or globalization—the two treated as synonymous) was inevitable. The best—indeed the only—hope for local products and practices was that they would be swept up into the global vortex and repackaged as “international” commodities for universal consumption. Thus an archetypically Italian product—
caffè espresso
— would travel to the U.S., where it would metamorphose from an elite preference into a popular commodity, and then be repackaged and sold back to Europeans by an American chain store.