Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing

Back from Hay, which was inspiring as usual. Especially considering the masses of people who lined up for events in the face of a near-Biblical stormfront. I got to see a panel on whether “Islam is compatible with democracy” that featured the most amazing display of internecine Palestinian warfare. The conversation was pretty uneventful until Samir al-Youssef told Hamas representative Ghazi Hamad that he was an atheist. “But you’d probably kill me for that, right?” he asked. Hamad just looked over at him and shrugged. It was classic.

Also worth mention, Nigerian writer and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka talked about the “wall of silence,” that maintains the West’s inaction in Darfur. The color of the ink on this wall, he told us, “is red.” Later, talking about the evils of fundamentalism, he said something that I believe can also be applied to liberals and their own self-identification with just war. Smiling under his bush of white hair, Soyinka remarked, “the pathetic passion to play God to other human beings brings truth to its knees.”

And speaking of truth, after getting in from the airport last night, I found this review of my sold-out event at Hay. For the click-weary, Zoe Williams writes that I look like Rob Lowe and had basically nothing to contribute, except good looks, to the debate against pro-war lefty Nick Cohen. I have heard that Zoe Williams is slightly ridiculous but to reduce my entire argument to the ramblings of a tv-star lookalike is more than just bad journalism. It’s highly suspect. Especially when she is writing about someone who was opposing one of her cohorts at the Guardian. So I have asked to get some space to respond to her in the paper, but meanwhile, here is the response I posted on the site.

Somewhere along the way, I learned that it was bad form (not to mention, relatively useless) to respond to character assassination in the letters section of a paper. But in this case, I don’t know what’s worse. My desire to rebut Zoe’s reduction of my presentation at Hay to the ramblings of a brainless tv-star look-a-like or the Guardian’s printing of a disingenuous report that essentially obscures a well-made attack on one of their stalwart writers.

That said, I would obviously prefer to do this on equal footing - and with similar real estate - to Zoe’s mean article. And have requested that I be given space in the paper to respond. But in case that goes unrewarded, I will record the thrust of my opening remarks at Hay.

Zoe characterizes the substance of my case against pro-war leftists as “the truest thing I ever heard was from a 17-year old.” Of course this helpfully obscures the actual basis of my book, in which I find that “the truest thing I ever heard was from a tank commander on the front lines of the Iraq war.”

His name was Sgt. Hollis and after we had returned from a mission to engage enemy fighters on the streets of Samara, he told me that the goal of the war was “globalization. It’s about expansion of economies… We’re into the stage where we have to stabilize new and emerging markets in order to secure resources. Fifty years, hundred years, it’s not about what it can do us in the short term, it’s what it can do us in the long term.”

Of course, this was just one man’s opinion. But it echoed the beliefs of so many of us who could not accept the Bush administration’s WMD argument, nor the bleating on of leftists like Hitchens and Cohen that it was all for the good of democracy and standing up for the oppressed - indeed massacred - minority in Iraq. It almost seemed too good to be true… this bastard son of John Pilger strapped into an Abrams tank.

So I asked him why he believed this was the true function of the war. And he plainly told me that it was one thing for politicians to make the case to a weary public. Or for intellectuals to advocate intervention for the good of humanity. But for him, who was willing to risk his life, it had to be about something more than ideas.

“When Americans say ‘liberation,’ we mean, capitalism. It’s our way of life. And we believe in it. Can you tell mothers and daughters and sisters that your sons are dying for the American way of life? Can you say that they’re dying for capital goods, this and that? No you cannot. So you have to make sure that whenever you fight, you fight for moral and ethical reasons.”

And this is what begins the odyssey that is “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing.” There are many ideas presented in the book, which is not a polemic like Nick Cohen’s “What’s Left.” Rather, it is a journey into the hearts and minds of a liberal elite who once fought against supposedly ideological, state-sponsored war. And one of the most revealing interviews is with Christopher Hitchens in the Green Room at Hay. [Read the excerpt from the book, here]

There, after a few glasses of “fizzy water and apple juice,” Hitch tells me where he initially found the desire to become a writer. It was in a library in Devonshire, reading an essay by Conor Cruise O’Brien, Irish diplomat and historian. In it, O’Brien refers to liberalism as “the word that makes the rich world yawn and the poor world sick.” Casting the Kennedy-era American UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson as the liberal voice par excellence, O’Brien describes how the liberal state’s benevolence looked to its recipients… as “the ingratiating moral mask which a toughly acquisitive society wears before the world it robs: ‘liberalism’ is the ideology of the rich, the elevation into universal values of the codes which favoured the emergence, and favour the continuance, of the capitalist society.”

And yet when I confronted Hitch about this vision of “liberalism” and the skepticism people have about the West’s desire to bomb nations into compliant “democracies,” he shrugged. American democracy, he admitted, has become indistinguishable from free market capitalism. “There’s obviously been a great trial that could’ve been about social democracy… And you see, that’s what people don’t believe anymore. That’s what made me give up. There is no… plausible theory of power; that capitalism could be challenged. There isn’t. For the first time in its history, capitalism doesn’t have an ideological enemy.”

Ironic, at best. Tragic, at worst. And herein lies the problem: people like Nick Cohen may have wonderful ideals but they have thrown their lot in with empire. They got their war and it has been a disaster. But instead of taking the time to question what kind of intervention we should have, and by whom, they just beat up anyone who questions it at all. And in this they have abandoned the great role they could play in defining a new era of leftism, in which we define what intervention means and what the actual goals of it will be.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at 5:02 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.