In his contributions over the past week to the 9/11 25th anniversary discourse, Matt Yglesias has offered a fine synthesis of the chief strands of the emerging liberal nostalgia for Bush. Yglesias wants us to remember that, however many mistakes the U.S. made in its response to 9/11 (and he agrees there were many), the motive force behind the "War on Terror" was a genuine commitment to universal values.
Bush really meant it, in other words, when he said that stuff about advancing "freedom" and "democracy" around the world. Many neoconservative and even liberal and left intellectuals (Christopher Hitchens, e.g.) went along with it because they believed it too. The post-9/11 response, then, really was part of a larger commitment to "liberal cosmopolitanism" in that era, as Yglesias puts it.
Even as a teenager living in the midst of the Bush presidency, though—I never bought this. I always wanted to know: "If Bush is really so keen on democracy, how come we're working with all these despotic regimes in the region, like Egypt, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan?"
People would just stare at me goggle-eyed when I said this.
Uzbekistan??
You've got to be kidding.
And even I felt like maybe I was grasping at straws.
Every one of these specific partnerships with some specific autocratic regime was always dismissed as a one-off or a temporary tactical concession to realpolitik. Bush had to work with some undemocratic governments in the region, because those were the only kinds of government in the Muslim world there were, I was told. Of course, the long-term strategy was eventually to make all of them into democracies too.
And in truth, I knew at the time that I wasn't arguing in complete good faith. I was a young leftist, and therefore a true believer in that oldest of unstated assumptions of progressive thought, according to Albert O. Hirschman—namely, that "all good things go together." By the same token, then, all bad things had to go together on the opposite side too. And since war and authoritarianism were both bad, in my book, they had to go together.
It was only many years later, when I read Akbar Ahmed's great book The Thistle and the Drone, that I realized that—in my desperate effort to lump all bad things and all good things into two separate piles—I had stumbled upon a truth that the wisest of our time had not seen. The U.S. really was not a force for democracy in any sense, during the War on Terror.
Rather, Ahmed points out, the conflict positioned the U.S. on the side of authoritarian central governments that had been fighting regional minorities seeking greater autonomy. This was true across the globe. Authoritarian governments who had previously faced criticism and opposition from the U.S. government, for their human rights abuses, suddenly discovered that the words "Islamic terrorism" had become an all-purpose "Open Sesame" to enlist U.S. support for their long-running wars against restive minorities.
This was true even outside the Middle East. People will recall that short-lived era when George W. Bush looked into Putin's eyes and "saw his soul"; but we forget that this rapprochement with Russia wasn't just because Bush naïvely believed that Putin would continue the country's post-Soviet democratic experiment; it also had to do with the fact that Russia was fighting a brutal long-simmering conflict with a Muslim minority in Chechnya, which they were now able to slot, however unconvincingly, into the "Global War on Terror" framework.
So too, the 2000s-era détente with China was not only about trade and globalization—it also had to do with the fact that the PRC could now recast its own repressive policies toward its Muslim minorities as part of some grand global struggle against Islamic fundamentalism. We often forget this now, but the authoritarian PRC became for a time a sort of ally in the "War on Terror," and several Uyghurs even ended up in Guantanamo at the behest of the Chinese government.
The default narrative about the "War on Terror" really has it backward, then. Instead of partnering with the forces of "democracy," the Bush and Obama White Houses found themselves fighting on the same side as just about every repressive government in the world—who realized that they could now use the specter of "Islamic terrorism" (and our one-dimensional understanding of the phenomenon) as a convenient pretext to mute or redirect U.S. human rights criticism.
I hadn't put all these pieces together in my own head when I was a teenager in the Bush years, I admit; but in my incoherent stumbling, I had grasped something closer to the truth than what a lot of liberal intellectuals at the time appeared to believe.
John Ganz observed in his own personal reflection for the 25th anniversary that if you were a kid on 9/11 instead of a grown-up, it was in some ways easier to avoid the mindless groupthink that led us into forever wars in the Middle East in the aftermath.
I think the reason is that: if you were an 11 year old when the planes hit the towers (as I was) instead of a Harvard undergrad (as Matt was), you weren't surrounded by people making high-minded arguments for war in the name of "democracy." You were surrounded by kids on the playground who said things like: "Let's nuke Afghanistan and turn it into a landfill."
It was therefore very obvious to me from the age of 11 on that the real reason Americans were gung ho to fight in the Middle East was not some noble mission to "spread our ideals." It was because we were traumatized by 9/11, and looking to exact some sort of indiscriminate and omnidirectional revenge on "foreigners" who had done this to us; and many ordinary people did not hesitate to casually suggest genocide of the Muslim world as the solution (many of the kids who talked about "nuking" the Middle East had heard the same things from their parents—though it's the last thing my own high-minded parents would have ever said).
As John Dolan a.k.a. Gary Brecher has observed in many of his writings—if you want to understand war, don't think of the people making lofty rationalizations in the op-ed pages. Think of the worst people you went to high school with. Think of P.E. class.
I think this is why left-liberal intellectuals are often so easy to talk into some idiotic crusade or other. They have all forgotten middle school. They have been immersed too long in a world of people who only cite high-minded goals for any action. They think wars are really fought for the reasons cited in The New Republic or The New York Times opinion page, instead of the ones cited on the playground.
This is why the liberal intelligentsia was the first to back Wilson's war at the dawn of the twentieth century (as Randolph Bourne witheringly observed), and why so many liberal intellectuals embraced Bush's similar crusade at the dawn of the twenty-first to make the world safe for democracy.
Bertrand Russell was baffled to observe, in researching his War Crimes in Vietnam, that so many purported "socialists" and leftists and liberals in the United States actually seemed to favor the war in Southeast Asia. He cites an editorial from Dissent making the old "you break it you bought it" argument for "staying the course" the Vietnam—which we still hear people cite today as a reason to keep bombing Iran ("since we started it, we have to finish it," etc.).
[I] must be stressed, the Dissent editorial read, that simply for the us to pull out of the country would mean something quite as inhumane. [...] To abandon these people now, after years of bitter civil war, would be an act of callousness.’
Russell responds: "This statement sums up the ignorance and confusion of many well-meaning Americans who choose not to know the true role of the United States in world affairs[.]"
The same "ignorance and confusion" was on display among those many smart and serious liberal intellectuals who backed Bush's wars in the name of democracy.
In order to escape it, it helped to be a dumber person at the time—and surrounded by other dumb people.
One of the books that meant the most to me as a teenager was Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt; and I particularly cherished one scene in which two college-educated left-liberal intellectuals develop a budding romance: "All evening they 'talked about ideas,'" Lewis observes sardonically. "They discovered that they were Radicals. True, they were sensible about it. They agreed [...] that while there ought to be universal disarmament, of course Great Britain and the United States must, on behalf of oppressed small nations, keep a navy equal to the tonnage of all the rest of the world."
I got Lewis's joke because I had seen so many Dissent-style "liberal hawks" and "democratic socialists" and Hitchens-style ex-Trotskyites-turned-neocon-war-boosters foolishly wander into the same vapid self-contradictions: of course we are all still "Radicals" and oppose war, but the best way to prevent war is for the U.S. to liberate all the "oppressed nations," and so on....
This is why I just can't accept Matt Yglesias's thesis that the whole "War on Terror"—however "deeply misguided," he concedes it was—was founded in some good faith adherence to "universal values" and "cosmopolitanism." To be sure, plenty of liberal intellectuals talked themselves into it on that basis—but I think their involvement in the whole affair only ever penetrated skin-deep. They came on board and rationalized the fight, but only after the powers that be had already decided this was happening.
When it comes to the neoconservatives who actually led us into war, they certainly did cite their share of "high-minded" reasons for war as well; but I think they did so in the same spirit in which European colonizers in the 19th century would brag of the "civilizing mission." The same ideological framework, that is to say, can accommodate both a belief in the "universality" of "Western" ideals—and a belief that those other cultures to be forcibly assimilated to its tenets were fundamentally inferior and even basically subhuman.
Seymour Hersh observes, in his book Chain of Command, that the abuse and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other U.S. facilities had its roots in stereotypes about Muslim societies that were already entrenched in right-wing circles before the war:
"The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation had become a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives," Hersh writes. "[...] One book that was frequently cited was The Arab Mind," which became "'the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.' In their discussions [...] two themes emerged—'one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation."
I am reminded here of André Gide's dismayed reaction to the French colonial attitudes he witnessed in the Congo. While the intelligentsia of the time might cite a lot of high-minded reasons for the French colonial presence in Africa—the universal ideals of European civilization; freeing the inhabitants from ancient oppression and slavery, etc.—if you so much as scratched the surface of the typical French colonist and got him talking, Gide writes, "immediately afterwards he started approving a policy of brutality towards the blacks, affirming that one could get nothing out of them except by blows and by making examples, even bloody ones." (Bussy trans.)
The same "they only understand force" trope, that is.
So too, a neocon might talk for a time about "liberating" the world and bringing "democracy and freedom"—but the belief that this must be imposed by force suggested that the intended "beneficiaries" of this "liberation" in fact were of such a baser, subhuman type that they "only understand force" (in the paraphrase of Hersh's source). And so, the supposed "universalism" and "cosmopolitanism" starts to actually sound much more like racism.
As Ernest Crosby once wrote of the U.S. colonial war in the Philippines—similarly proclaimed with a lot of grand universalistic talk about bringing "civilization" and "democracy"—
"Freedom!" you cry, and train your gun
On men who would be freed,
And in the name of Washington
Achieve a Weyler's deed.
[...]
Oh, for the good old Roman days
Of robbers bold and true,
Who scorned to oil with pious phrase
The deeds they dared to do—
The days before degenerate thieves
Devised the coward lie
Of blessings that the enslaved receives
Whose rights their arms deny!
I hate the oppressor's iron rod,
I hate his murderous ships,
But most of all I hate, O God,
The lie upon his lips! ("Rebels," from Swords and Plowshares (1902))
In a great book about the history of European colonialism, Sven Lindqvist cites a passage from Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a kind of key to all imperialism. We can regard it as a key as well to understanding the heart of darkness in neoconservatism too—as we look back on 25 years, now, of forever wars in the Middle East that the ideology kicked off—and which the U.S. is apparently still waging today, in Iran, in Yemen, and elsewhere.
In the Conrad passage, Lindqvist reminds us, Marlow has just been perusing an eloquent description in Kurtz's hand about the glories of the European "civilizing mission" and its noble ideals. "By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded," Kurtz declares. In reading it, Marlow observes, "It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm."
Until—that is—he reaches the end of the document. There, he finds only a single sentence. "It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: 'Exterminate all the brutes!'" (It was this one command Lindqvist therefore chose as the title for his book.)
Revisit that passage if you want to understand the true heart of the "War on Terror." Sure, there may have been a lot of lofty rhetoric about "liberal cosmopolitanism." Sure, there may have been much talk at the time about "universal values" and a "new American century" that would bring "a power for good practically unbounded."
But the real meaning of it all—barely disguised—evident to anyone too dumb at the time to read The New Republic or The New York Times—was perfectly obvious. It was what my schoolmates said on the playground. It was: "I say, we nuke Afghanistan." It was: "The Arabs only understand force."
It was: "Exterminate all the brutes!"
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