In Response

By Andrew Gold

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*This essay is a response to Mark Grueter's essay Siding with Hitchens.

I begin, my friend, with a quote, since you are so fond of quotes. I don’t want to disorient you so I will tell you ahead of time that this quote will not be found in any of the writings or utterances of Christopher Hitchens. I hope this does not prevent you from reading on, let’s say, for religious reasons. “It is no bad preparation for any attempt at exposition … to realize how easily the combative impulse can put us in mental blinkers and make us take another man’s words in the ways in which we can down him with the least trouble.” The words are I.A. Richards from his lectures on “The Philosophy of Rhetoric” and for some reason when I read them I thought immediately of you and your piece, bravely titled - considering he is your professor and hopeful mentor - “Siding with Hitchens”.

As one thought followed another, I started to consider why it is that I did not pick up the challenge and joust with you over this all important issue of “the left.” Might Richards’ words have anything to do with my refusal? I mean, yours seemed a generous offer, in so far as you seem to be capable of anything beyond combativeness and a desire for authority (anyone’s, not necessarily your own). And so I gave it some thought, the product of which I will return to after responding to some points made in your essay.

It makes sense to start at the beginning. “It has become fashionable in some circles to oppose a war in Iraq.” An agreeable enough proposition and you offer up an example or two. The same could be said for the other side of the debate, where they murmur about “Hobbesian” choices as if simply mentioning the philosopher of “the short brutish life” frees them from discussing humane alternatives and questioning the validity of their own presuppositions. But no matter, you open up with tactics, not arguments. And so we have a couple of examples. I particularly like the Mark Green one; I have no idea why it is in the piece, but it made me smile.

Now, just to show you are a man of arguments, not sophistry, you dismiss the elements you recount in the first paragraph as a “sideshow,” but an effective sideshow nonetheless for your purposes. We can allow it to taint the positions that you generously call “intelligent” and “compelling,” though “insufficient.” So far so good, though upon finishing your essay, I think you chose the “insufficient” arguments on purpose. I guess the others would have taken some research.

Your next move seems to be to pick out a particular comment by Arato and ask how he “can be so sure of himself.” You are right to call it a guessing game, but the guessing game seems to be what new argument Bush and Co. will come up with each day to justify exactly what they want to do. The fact is, though, that the presumption lies with Arato’s position. Leaders use weapons when it suits them. All the lessons of power politics for the past three centuries have produced this relatively safe assumption. Intuitively, you must have known that, because instead of investigating the roots of Arato’s position, you sidestep it and offer a political version of radical skepticism: We can’t know anything. This is true and possibly important for many of the reactionary antiwar elements to hear. But history is on Arato’s side and his point should be well taken because one of the most worrisome things about Bush’s march towards regime change is that it relies on a view of the post-9/11 world that “anything can happen”. This is merely an extension of the administration’s position not to explain the diplomatic roots of the attacks and not to consider our behavior in the part of the world from which these attacks emanated. As long as the cause of the attacks remains mythic, so will the administration’s description of the geopolitical world.

As for your point about Arato distrusting his own government more than Hussein, you pull one of the key rhetorical tricks of this whole debate: the false choice, or, in this case, the irrelevant choice. No one is asking anyone to trust Hussein, just believe he does not want his life to end in a fiery nuclear holocaust. Period. That’s all that Arato needs to believe. I believe it as well.

As for distrusting our government, we can discard history and just look at the variety of arguments Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz have offered for an invasion, some of which they offered up when those points were more relevant, nearly ten years ago. Their arguments are often unrelated to each other and have been used like a list of marketing slogans. They have ignored addressing the dangers involved beyond vague talk of casualties. They have proved themselves untrustworthy, at least in so far as we can take it on faith that they know what they are doing. (A point you concede later in the essay.)

We will skip over the fact that you have not proved your point that anything you have written “gives credence” to Hitchens’ position, but that doesn’t reflect on Hitchens’ position, only your own. You quote Hitchens as to a serious concern about the perspective of The Nation, but then oversimplify the issue: “for many on the Left, that Bush is more dangerous or sinister than Saddam”. Yes, some people believe that and, what to it? Bush is more powerful than Saddam. He is capable of wreaking more havoc on the world system. Saddam tries anything serious, the U.S. nukes Baghdad. We get on a bent to “solve” the world’s problems and who’s going to stop us? That’s probably not the gist of The Nation’s perspective. It seems more likely that “for many on the Left”, the citizens of this nation are the ones best in a position to stop this. Yes, some may have lost a little perspective, but I would say a large amount of energy exerted by this administration is directed towards getting the American populace to lose perspective about the very same issue, only towards a different conclusion.

I might be missing something but I don’t see the connection between 1939 and right now. I know you tried to clarify it by repeating the word “strange” and, if I have parsed the sentence correctly, that does seem to be the connection. Or maybe it is the “corresponds neatly” that is supposed to convince me that the two situations correspond neatly. Yes, I know that for the hysterical elements willing to call up any argument, regardless of validity, to make their case, your point can be taken as true. But it is a tired point. You are like the rookie offensive lineman on kickoff duty who decides he can make a name for himself by flattening the kicker.

Taking the analogy, though, for a moment, as a central point to be considered, I still think it mistakes the validity of a particular argument for the validity of a position. British leftists opposed the war for the reason most Brits did: they didn’t want another generation to die on the Continent. India was something to wield, but I hardly think this is why they “opposed war.” What Hitchens offers, you receive dutifully. As for now, I don’t think the point is that “one has to be faultless in order to criticize others,” but that those forming positions on these issues should use their abilities of reason and discernment to recognize the vast incongruities between the administration’s current reasoning, our government’s historical practices and the historical practices of states in general.

You might hope that the invasion of Iraq will break new ground for the cause of world peace and I hope, if it comes to war, that the outcome is the liberation of the whole Arab world. The problem is that this seems extraordinarily unlikely. I am in favor of burning up American power for good reasons, but I have to have some confidence, not necessarily rooted in past experience, but rooted in something other than wishful thinking, to base my judgment on.

One way I think you get around that problem is by linking this situation with other recent situations, the idea apparently being that if things fall close together in time they must be related. You seem to give little thought between the situations of Afghanistan and Milosevic and this one. You don’t question Hitchens’ link between this situation and those others. But again, I will save this for later.

I dealt with the “conservative position” in my original essay and see no reason to revisit it here. Again, the devil is in the details, but you aren’t interested in the details of the situation. As for Hitchens saying opposing “regime change” “doesn’t take any risks,” I’m speechless. If a risk is regional destabilization or possible confrontation involving countries with nuclear weapons, is that worth the risk? I agree that if everything that people like Hitchens, you, and I hope would happen, happened, the risk would be worth it. The odds, though, are stacked overwhelmingly against that. In light of the odds, his quote strikes me as one from a person who forgets that the joy of the debate begets real-world consequences.

A few other notes before I pick up the loose ends. You are probably a little hopeful, maybe a lot hopeful, as to the effect of our venture into Afghanistan. Your line about “music was back on the airwaves” is ad copy, but little else. We went in there because of our needs and, as you point out correctly, that doesn’t necessarily produce a bad outcome, but it means that the reconstruction of their government and infrastructure has been and will continue along very undemocratic lines. They are not closer to an internal balance of power, which is the precursor to civilized life. And such a balance cannot be imposed for the first time by some outside force (another flaw in the analogy comparing the rebuilding of Iraq to rebuilding post-WWII Germany and Japan).

Many people on the left did not oppose going into Afghanistan, but more importantly, there is a difference between not supporting an action and not supporting the way someone goes about it. I too don’t support the “war on terrorism” because “war” seems an inexact and broad name for what we must do to fight terrorism and an easy way to allow the government to multiply its power. Your whole approach, though, seems to me a case of someone lacking the energy to attack the real arguments involved. Hence, I guess I should say here, my initial lack of interest in responding to what you wrote.

Let’s return to Hitchens’ support of the war in Afghanistan and in Kosovo as it relates to this situation. In one case, you have a nation that has been attacked by elements residing in a particular country; in the other, an ongoing war where one side does not seem to have a good shot at defending itself. These are reasons for fighting. Every country in the world knows that these are the rules of the game. Yes, in Afghanistan, the terrorists were not the main target of our military’s efforts, but the Taliban were beholden to al Queda and would not have been able to unseat the terrorists. Whether the new government can is another matter, but that’s not our concern.

The crux of the antiwar argument is that finding a new and unprecedented way to undertake military action is not a good idea. It does not help the cause of peace. If this situation fit into any of the other reasons for going to war, then Bush would have argued those, but he did not. He offered a new doctrine at the same time the Department of Defense offered a new policy briefing that should also have included a recommendation to rename the department to the Department of Offense.

The one idea that has seemed to stick is the idea of disarming Iraq, an idea Bob Kerrey said he wished Bush wasn’t using. Hitchens isn’t much concerned with that, either. But since that’s the only play that’s working, Bush & Co. are acting out the whole farce on the world stage. The inspections, if allowed to continue, could cancel out that threat. If that has been Bush’s point all along, I commend him, except that he has created such a rhetorical mess to achieve this goal that one has to assume this isn’t his goal. We aren’t sending all those troops over to the Gulf to enforce the inspections, but for, of course, regime change.

Yes, let’s deal with “regime change.” Rumsfeld said yesterday that he would support amnesty for Hussein if he went into exile, a de facto admission that the administration has overplayed its hand and just wants this to be over with. You do not consider “regime change” much because, I’m guessing, you find the logic sound: Hussein is bad and getting rid of him would be good. Of course, if this is all you needed to know about leaders, it is likely world peace would have been established prior to our births.

That said, I want to offer an alternative “leftist” position. Despite its shortcomings, state sovereignty still holds the best chance for world peace. Until organizations of world government have had time to establish themselves over a longer period of time and their legitimacy is more widely exercised among the citizens of the world’s nations, offensive uses of military force, even in the name of these organizations (which, it seems, would not be the case this time), would undermine these organizations. In other words, the majority of nations in the U.N. are right on this one: now is not the time and Iraq is not the place for it to start acting under these pretexts. In other words, and I say this probably as sincerely as anything in this essay, I think that if Hitchens believed in multilateral, as opposed to unilateral, action, he would have taken the real radical position, but still, like many radicals before him, would be about a generation or two ahead of the appropriate time. But he did not and he has turned his back on the future of peace: international cooperation.

Of course, there might have been a scenario under which such action could have been warranted. It would have started by the U.S. accepting the International Court of Justice (even if it meant securing amnesty for Henry: at this point, let him discuss his crimes with his maker). It would have been followed by a U.S.-led move to prosecute Hussein under crimes against humanity. The U.S. could have made its case to the U.N. under very different auspices, offering to cede some influence over any potential action to other nations. In other words, it could have set the real precedent: not imagining the end of the Nixon Doctrine, but demonstrating that all nations, powerful or weak, should work within the only framework that can bring about world peace, that of the international framework.

As befits a good essay, you make your most interesting point at the end. You side with Hitchens not because you are sure “he is right,” but because he is willing to challenge what “we on the Left think.” There’s nothing wrong with this, per say, but who cares? Who cares what Hitchens’ thinks? Or Chomsky? Or Blackburn? It’s just their opinion. Your whole essay seems predicated upon the idea that everyone else cares as much as you do about what these people say. You read about this stuff too much. Most of the arguments on both sides of ANY debate are just garbage. People get a gut feeling about something and then they start finding the words. Then it’s a process of working backwards towards the truth. Bush and Co. are playing upon fear and making it up as they go along. And same goes with most of the arguments that you address. That said, there is some value in taking on these arguments and debunking them, and for those who have thought only reflexively about this issue, your essay is a good primer.

But I finished the essay not knowing anything about what you think - I only learned that “Hitchens possesses a unique and genuine understanding of the nature of the threat we are now faced with.” I’d rather read about your own ideas.

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Andrew Gold is a freelance journalist and a student at New School University's Graduate Faculty in New York City.  He can be contacted at [email protected].

© Me Three 2003