Monday, February 23, 2004
THE LIBERAL HAWKS
by James Verini
There is an adage popularized by Georges Clemenceau,the acerbic French premiere who’s come back into vogue in Europe lately, that goes: “The man who is not a socialist in his youth has no heart, but the man who is not a conservative by 30 has no head.” This thought has taken on the status of an embedded platitude in America – just wait until you start paying taxes, your newly Republican-voting father tells you – for the good enough reason that it is, usually, true. Rare is the political thinker, or the mortgage holder, who grows more liberal with age. (The few well-known counter-examples are out of common mortal reach: Bertrand Russell, the genius; George Soros, the billionaire; Noam Chomsky, the titanic crank.) Liberalism means change and reform, or claims to anyway, and change and reform are exhausting.
But the war in Iraq has breathed new life into the question of whether old political dogs can be taught new tricks. The war has produced a cabal of contrarian liberal intellectuals not seen with this kind of fecundity since the days of Dean Acheson: the “Liberal Hawks,” as they’ve been called. They are nominally left-leaning thinkers who have, for whatever reason, supported the Iraq war – and paid heed to Clemenceau’s other famous remark, which he probably pilfered too, that “war is too important a matter to be left to the generals.” (You may remember the psychopathic Gen. Ripper quoting that one in Dr. Strangelove.)
Liberal hawks have proliferated in the place you’d perhaps expect it least: among the media elite, whose opinions are their stock in trade. Liberals who supported the Iraq war include Thomas L. Friedman, the foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times; Christopher Hitchens, the columnist for Vanity Fair and Slate; Paul Berman, New Republic contributing editor and author of Terror and Liberalism; Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria; New York Times Magazine and New Yorker writer George Packer; New Yorker editor David Remnick, and Gore Vidal biographer Fred Kaplan. Even some prominent Europeans are in the club: Bernard Kouchner, founder of Doctors Without Borders and winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace, supported forcible regime change, though in a multilateral form, as did the beloved (maybe not so much anymore) Paris intellectual Andre Glucksman and English journalist and first-team Kissinger-basher William Shawcross. Add to the group former president of the Czech Republic Vaclav Havel, a progressive who faced down not Trent Lott and Tom DeLay but Kruschev and Brezhnev and a hero of the left for going on four decades.
Of course, as we all suspect when sitting alone with the paper, the American liberal/conservative divide is too facile by half, and the idea that liberals (much less Democrats) should have the market cornered on pacifism, or that conservatives (much less Republicans) should be associated with bellicosity, is faulty, when not simple-minded. Even if you count the Democrats’ near unanimous vote to grant President George Bush war powers as craven, just look at the longtime support for taking out Saddam Hussein offered by likely presidential nominee John Kerry, an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War ? (after he got back from it) and by all accounts a liberal (and not a moderate) Democrat, or at the slew of antiwar op-ed pieces published by acolytes of George H.W. Bush before fighting commenced.
Still, whether because of the media, or political pandering, or our need to associate all things nice with people we like and all things nasty with people we don’t, those are the lines along which many of us, liberal and conservative alike, have grown accustomed to think. “Liberal Hawk” shouldn’t ipso facto strike us as a contradictory term, but of course it does. So Friedman, Hitchens, et al have been accused of fulfilling Clemenceau’s truism and turning to the right. They’ve taken on Darth Vader-like status among antiwar liberals, and the treacherous names of “neocons” such as Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, the original liberal turncoats, have come up again and again. Hitchens has taken the most heat. And it’s not just talk. Friendships have deteriorated or broken off altogether. Gore Vidal, who once anointed Hitchens his heir in spirit (his “Dauphin or Delphino” as Vidal, not surprisingly, put it), has since repudiated him over Iraq, and Hitchens in turn has expurgated Vidal’s gushy quotes from the new printings of his books.
Most of the liberal hawks supported invading Iraq for one simple, non-political reason: weapons of mass destruction. But in the past two weeks, the WMD argument has all but evaporated, and with it the reasoning of most liberal hawks. Even Secretary of State Colin Powell last week essentially said in an interview with the Washington Post, that he would have seriously questioned the war if he’d known in March of 2003 what he knows now. That was before he was, presumably, reprimanded by Bush and returned to on-message status.
The disappearing WMDs have not finished off the liberal hawks, however. In the cases of Friedman, Hitchens, and Berman, especially, it has almost served to strengthen their arguments, for now they don’t come off as discredited alarmists. These are the guys who supported war in Iraq for reasons larger and more nebulous, if less pressing, than WMD: because it was someone’s humanitarian duty to topple Saddam, and if not ours, whose?; because totalitarianism is alive and well and must be combated everywhere; because history, and not just the events of September 11, have led us to this inevitably. Or, as Friedman blurted out in a moment of unbuttoned passion in a Slate roundtable discussion of the liberal hawks in January, because we needed to “Go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something.”
Smash Something
For size of readership and sheer number of words, Friedman is probably the most exposed, if not the most committed, of the media’s liberal hawks. He writes three columns a week for The New York Times, a paper that claims close to a million daily readers, and his book Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, was a fixture on the best-seller lists in 2003. Friedman’s development as a liberal hawk was the most public and candid, too. From embryo to fullwingedness, his conversion took several months, and bore at times the tone of a public confessional. We might call him the Thomas More of the liberal hawks as he agonizes and runs again and again through the arguments for war from a tower atop the Times’ Washington bureau.
Beginning in late 2002, Friedman began to convince himself of the need for, or at least advisability of, a war in Iraq in the pages of the Times. (Friedman declined to be interviewed for this article.) His general argument was of the “There’s something rotten in the land of Allah” school popularized by Arabist Bernard Lewis. He urged his readers to see the “super-story” of 9/11. Never under the impression that Saddam bore a technical link to al Qaeda, he nonetheless wrote: “I think the chances of Saddam being willing, or able, to use a weapon of mass destruction against us are being exaggerated. What terrifies me is the prospect of another 9/11 … triggered by angry young Muslims, motivated by some pseudo- religious radicalism cooked up in a mosque in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or Pakistan. So I am for invading Iraq only if we think doing so can bring about regime change and democratization.”
By March of 2003, Friedman had convinced himself not only that war was necessary, but that a regime change in Iraq would be an instant watershed moment in history – “pay-per-view history,” as he called it. At times this thought appeared to make him almost giddy. “Watching this Iraq story unfold,” he wrote on March 2, just days before fighting commenced, “all I can say is this: If this were not about my own country, my own kids, and my own planet, I’d pop some popcorn, pull up a chair, and pay good money just to see how this drama unfolds. Because what you are about to see is the greatest shake of the dice any president has voluntarily engaged in since Harry Truman dropped the bomb on Japan.” Walter Winchell couldn’t have put it better.
Friedman’s tone in the months leading up to the war was far less certain than that, however. He conducted a Hillary Clinton-esque listening tour of the U.S. and claimed to find that, contrary to what some polls and the Fox News Channel indicated, the American public was deeply ambivalent about the prospect of war. He seemed to want to embody this ambivalence in his column, sounding one day like John Wayne and the next like your hand-wringing aunt Maude, changing his mind about Bush by the week. In one of his more arresting laments, in November of 2002, he decried the Bush administration’s squandering of international good will and its adoption of what he called Europe’s “tragic” view of history. “JFK and FDR and Ronald Reagan faced enemies more evil than Saddam and Osama without losing touch with American optimism and communicating that to the world. The Bush team has lost it – and it’s a loss for them and for America.”
But by the following February, he was able to applaud Bush’s “audacity”: “I must say, (it) has an appeal for me.” Then he thumbed his nose at the supporters of Jacques Chirac and France, a group that one must guess makes up a good portion of his readership, and seriously suggested, in a column called “Vote France off the Island,” that India replace France as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. He risked offending the materialist-minded wing of the polity when he admitted that oil probably figured in the Bush administration’s motives, but then said, “There is nothing illegitimate or immoral about the U.S. being concerned that an evil, megalomaniacal dictator might acquire excessive influence over the natural resource that powers the world’s industrial base.”
At other times, Friedman sounded like a starry-eyed Teddy Roosevelt circa age 15. In early September 2002, he concluded a heartfelt deliberation of the Iraq question with this lovely hypothetical: “In the best case, a ‘nice’ strongman will emerge from the Iraqi Army to preside over a gradual transition to democracy.” A “nice” strongman? “Now, truth be told, I think I get this war,” he wrote in February of 2003, apparently doing his best Jerry Mathers impersonation. And in September he reported breathlessly: “The big thing that has happened in Iraq, which you can really feel when you’re there, is a 100 percent correlation of interests between America’s aspirations for Iraq and the aspirations of Iraq’s silent majority.” Iraq and America, now 100 percent correlated!
“He seems to think too much with his feelings,” is what Hitchens said to me of Friedman, and, clearly, Friedman at times wants to convince himself – before a million well-educated readers, no less – that his fondest hopes for the world may come true. But to his credit, it is refreshing, amid Maureen Dowd’s shrill invective and the doomsday predictions of Paul Krugman, to see a New York Times columnist wearing his optimism on his sleeve. Even more to his credit, it’s oddly reassuring to hear his dependably off-message voice. When questioning the motives of a president who aligns his minions’ upbeat public statements and glosses over obvious changes in policy as slickly as Bush does, ambivalence can be a powerful rhetorical strategy in itself. One of the more insidious effects of September 11 is that it deflated the quality of certainty so natural to everyday American thinking, and Friedman represents the new, less-assured mode of thought. A pedant or pundit he is not.
“Deceitful”
The same uncertainty does not plague Paul Berman or Christopher Hitchens. Berman, who cut his teeth at the Village Voice in its heyday and was in the early 1980s a columnist for The Nation, is not as prolific as Friedman or Hitchens. But Terror and Liberalism, released in fall of 2003, has given grandiloquent expression to the “super-story” liberal hawk case. It has justified the liberal hawk position the way Reagan alum Robert Kagan’s screed, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, released about the same time last year, has justified the conservative argument for ignoring the U.N. and “Old Europe.”
Like Friedman, Berman is no great admirer of President Bush – he does not even admit to finding that Texas roll-the-dice audacity appealing – and, as a reporter who covered Nicaragua in the 1980s, he does not think too highly of the president’s father, either. But he believes that Bush set his sights on Iraq with something more substantial than realpolitik in mind. He suggests that Bush recognizes that Islamic totalitarianism is not an anomaly confined to al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein, but is ingrained in the Muslim world, peddled by sinister intellectual heroes and codified by febrile leadership. Bush, he says, has progressed despite his flaws past the Nixonian cynicism that produced his father (who, before playing G-man in Central America, was Nixon’s ambassador to China), even if the administration’s thinking is “a bit incoherent” or “even at times deceitful,” as he put it to me when I reached him at his home in New York City last week.
“I have not turned to the right,” Berman said. “The reasons I find most respectable to oppose the war are reasons of caution and prudence. But caution and prudence are conservative virtues. Therefore, from my point of view, the position against the war in Iraq is conservative – and I don’t say that pejoratively.”
“We’re dealing with a clash between liberal society and people who want to destroy liberal society,” he went on. “What we’re fighting against is not neglect and not apathy – we’re fighting against totalitarian political movements that are animated by very worked-out doctrines. Somebody who’s marching in the peace march, I’d say to them, ‘You should express yourself, and so I can’t question your motives.’ But what I don’t want to hear is that this is left-wing idealism. Left-wing idealism is the wish to help 45 million people to live freely in Iraq and to help the Kurds live with religious freedom and to help women achieve rights, etc.”
Berman’s thinking and his book – nothing less should be expected of a liberal hawk – have pleased and incensed both the right and the left. The conservatives at The Weekly Standard reviewed it poorly, but then so did The Nation (which Berman quit, not amicably, in 1986). The National Review praised it, as did Salon.
How does he account for this? “Any original work of political analysis that’s worth its salt is a mindfuck,” Berman said. “If people aren’t thrown into confusion and scattered to the winds by your thinking, it can only mean that you’ve merely reproduced the clichés of political thought.” But doesn’t this smack a bit of intellectual novelty-seeking? Is the liberal hawk position mental Viagra for bored old lefties? “No,” he said. “I would put it to you this way: if you keep on articulating the same truth in the same way you always have, the truth will by and by turn into a non-truth, a slogan. And if you have something genuinely new to say, people on the right and left will find that their proclivities don’t help them much in responding.”
Against Nihilism
In his book Letters to a Young Contrarian, Christopher Hitchens writes: “the radical ? conservative is not a contradiction in terms.” Hitchens is arguably the most forceful of the liberal hawks, and he is the most reviled among antiwar liberals. He does not draw a thick line between the roles of activist and journalist, and, where Iraq is concerned, has a deep attachment to the Kurdish cause in particular. He has become something of a force of nature in American journalism and letters. He writes a political column for Slate, a regular cultural affairs column for Vanity Fair, and contributes frequently to The Atlantic. He has published 11 books. Until late 2002, he wrote the “Minority Report” column for The Nation, a post he quit, after a more than 20-year association, because the magazine had become, in his words, “The echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden.” (Apparently, The Nation is the dreaded nursery for liberal hawks.)
Hitchens’s perceived defection galls antiwar liberals the most, because he has for so long been a hero of the Left (beginning when he spoke out against the Vietnam war at Oxford, where he overlapped with Bill Clinton, whom he loathes, and extending to his opposition to the first Gulf War), because he is the hardest liberal hawk to pin down, but, perhaps most of all, because he is such a seductive writer. No debating team likes to see a star philomethian switch masks, though they should know it’s inevitable. Reading Hitchens after reading Friedman (or, to be fair, after most any writer) is like sipping a tumbler of Maker’s Mark after taking a shot of watered-down well whiskey. His thinking is less compromised and more nuanced; his command of history more deft; and his prose is, well, better. The English accent – undiluted after nearly a quarter-century of living in the U.S. – doesn’t hurt, either.
Hitchens himself insists that he hasn’t taken a new side. “What strikes me about partisanship these days is that it’s over less and less, which makes it doubly boring for me,” he told me, from Northern California, where he was visiting in-laws. “I have no ideological attachment anymore of any kind. On some days that feels like a missing limb, and some days it feels liberating.”
“‘Liberal hawk’ is wrong, in my mind,” he said. “It attempts to suggest that there’s some contradiction in being liberal and pro-war.” Still, Hitchens sometimes talks like he believes he has switched sides. “I’m not ashamed of the time I spent on the left,” he said. Unlike Friedman, Hitchens does not feel the need to preface his support for the Iraq war – “intervention,” he prefers to call it – with assurances that he distrusts Bush. He did, however, refer to himself as a “republican” during our conversation.
Indeed, his defense of the Bush administration has at times been strident. In a Slate column from December of 2002, he defended Bush’s repeated use of the word “evil,” a point of verbiage that has nettled the Left to no end. “Scoff if you must,” he wrote, “but you can’t avoid it.” In a February 2003 column called “Drumbeat,” the subtitle asserted: “Bush rushing to war? Nonsense.” He’s even defended Halliburton. And in October of last year, while every news magazine in the country was running cover stories with titles like “What Went Wrong?”, Hitchens published a rosy picture of postwar Baghdad in Vanity Fair, even as Graydon Carter, in his Letters From the Editor, marched on with what has become a monthly tirade against Bush.
“Bush is an extremely limited guy who’s saved by the fact that he’s aware of his limitations,” Hitchens said. He claims that he no longer minds being associated with certain neocons. His thinking began to change when he reported from Kurdish territory in northern Iraq in the early 1990s, where George H.W. Bush was revered as a hero. “I found myself with Kurds who said, ‘If it wasn’t for Bush, we’d probably all be dead.’ And I thought, I’d better think about what that means.”
His opinions continued to change when he reported from the mid-’90s war in the former Yugoslavia and found that just as many liberals opposed committing American troops to intervene and depose Slobodan Milosevic as did conservatives. But among those arguing most strongly for intervention were people such as Paul Wolfowitz, now Deputy Secretary of Defense, and former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. “If someone had suggested to me that I had any relationship with them, I would have taken it as an insult,” he said. “But then I thought, ‘Good for them.’ By the time that was over, I decided that what I admired in people was a willingness to break with their own fiction, to generally call things by their right name and to see a point of principle when it came up.”
Like Berman, he sees the Iraq war as part of a larger war against totalitarianism, or the “open society vs. nihilism” as he puts it, and agrees that an antiwar position is in fact not a truly liberal one. “The problem, to me, is leftists who claim they’re not in favor of disturbing the status quo,” he said. “In fact, their position is reactionary – and they make excuses for the most savagely reactionary movement on the planet – Islamic extremism. There are a lot of liberals and left-wingers who would see Iraq go to hell if it would give Bush a hard time.”
For Hitchens, a confirmed atheist, the real war, the ongoing war, is ages older. “I think everything is a clash between secularism and religion – my original allegiance to the left was on this point,” he said. “You hear (the left) saying ‘Well, we mustn’t offend Muslims.’ Do they think the Muslims will return the compliment? Do they think the Muslims will recognize gay marriages? Yes, actually they do. Then we get to the dirty secret that they refuse to admit – that religion is a lousy way to run a country. That you can’t run a country out of a holy book. This is not a new idea – this is what Thomas Jefferson said.”
Not surprisingly, his combativeness has served to alienate him from some of his former admirers. He does not feel the need to be polite in print to liberals, or even to liberal hawks, which, after all the half-hearted post-WMD self-flagellation and warm forgiveness being handed around lately, can be as refreshing as Friedman’s ambivalence. He has been involved in public disputes with, in addition to Gore Vidal, Fred Kaplan, Oliver Stone, and Studs Terkel, to name a few. But for Hitchens, combat, intellectual and real, is vital.
“There’s nothing like a good war to bring on social and political revolution,” he said. “Of course, you have to be careful which wars you get involved with. I’m not against war. War is a natural human condition. The question is who is going to be the intelligent winner.”
by James Verini
There is an adage popularized by Georges Clemenceau,the acerbic French premiere who’s come back into vogue in Europe lately, that goes: “The man who is not a socialist in his youth has no heart, but the man who is not a conservative by 30 has no head.” This thought has taken on the status of an embedded platitude in America – just wait until you start paying taxes, your newly Republican-voting father tells you – for the good enough reason that it is, usually, true. Rare is the political thinker, or the mortgage holder, who grows more liberal with age. (The few well-known counter-examples are out of common mortal reach: Bertrand Russell, the genius; George Soros, the billionaire; Noam Chomsky, the titanic crank.) Liberalism means change and reform, or claims to anyway, and change and reform are exhausting.
But the war in Iraq has breathed new life into the question of whether old political dogs can be taught new tricks. The war has produced a cabal of contrarian liberal intellectuals not seen with this kind of fecundity since the days of Dean Acheson: the “Liberal Hawks,” as they’ve been called. They are nominally left-leaning thinkers who have, for whatever reason, supported the Iraq war – and paid heed to Clemenceau’s other famous remark, which he probably pilfered too, that “war is too important a matter to be left to the generals.” (You may remember the psychopathic Gen. Ripper quoting that one in Dr. Strangelove.)
Liberal hawks have proliferated in the place you’d perhaps expect it least: among the media elite, whose opinions are their stock in trade. Liberals who supported the Iraq war include Thomas L. Friedman, the foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times; Christopher Hitchens, the columnist for Vanity Fair and Slate; Paul Berman, New Republic contributing editor and author of Terror and Liberalism; Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria; New York Times Magazine and New Yorker writer George Packer; New Yorker editor David Remnick, and Gore Vidal biographer Fred Kaplan. Even some prominent Europeans are in the club: Bernard Kouchner, founder of Doctors Without Borders and winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace, supported forcible regime change, though in a multilateral form, as did the beloved (maybe not so much anymore) Paris intellectual Andre Glucksman and English journalist and first-team Kissinger-basher William Shawcross. Add to the group former president of the Czech Republic Vaclav Havel, a progressive who faced down not Trent Lott and Tom DeLay but Kruschev and Brezhnev and a hero of the left for going on four decades.
Of course, as we all suspect when sitting alone with the paper, the American liberal/conservative divide is too facile by half, and the idea that liberals (much less Democrats) should have the market cornered on pacifism, or that conservatives (much less Republicans) should be associated with bellicosity, is faulty, when not simple-minded. Even if you count the Democrats’ near unanimous vote to grant President George Bush war powers as craven, just look at the longtime support for taking out Saddam Hussein offered by likely presidential nominee John Kerry, an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War ? (after he got back from it) and by all accounts a liberal (and not a moderate) Democrat, or at the slew of antiwar op-ed pieces published by acolytes of George H.W. Bush before fighting commenced.
Still, whether because of the media, or political pandering, or our need to associate all things nice with people we like and all things nasty with people we don’t, those are the lines along which many of us, liberal and conservative alike, have grown accustomed to think. “Liberal Hawk” shouldn’t ipso facto strike us as a contradictory term, but of course it does. So Friedman, Hitchens, et al have been accused of fulfilling Clemenceau’s truism and turning to the right. They’ve taken on Darth Vader-like status among antiwar liberals, and the treacherous names of “neocons” such as Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, the original liberal turncoats, have come up again and again. Hitchens has taken the most heat. And it’s not just talk. Friendships have deteriorated or broken off altogether. Gore Vidal, who once anointed Hitchens his heir in spirit (his “Dauphin or Delphino” as Vidal, not surprisingly, put it), has since repudiated him over Iraq, and Hitchens in turn has expurgated Vidal’s gushy quotes from the new printings of his books.
Most of the liberal hawks supported invading Iraq for one simple, non-political reason: weapons of mass destruction. But in the past two weeks, the WMD argument has all but evaporated, and with it the reasoning of most liberal hawks. Even Secretary of State Colin Powell last week essentially said in an interview with the Washington Post, that he would have seriously questioned the war if he’d known in March of 2003 what he knows now. That was before he was, presumably, reprimanded by Bush and returned to on-message status.
The disappearing WMDs have not finished off the liberal hawks, however. In the cases of Friedman, Hitchens, and Berman, especially, it has almost served to strengthen their arguments, for now they don’t come off as discredited alarmists. These are the guys who supported war in Iraq for reasons larger and more nebulous, if less pressing, than WMD: because it was someone’s humanitarian duty to topple Saddam, and if not ours, whose?; because totalitarianism is alive and well and must be combated everywhere; because history, and not just the events of September 11, have led us to this inevitably. Or, as Friedman blurted out in a moment of unbuttoned passion in a Slate roundtable discussion of the liberal hawks in January, because we needed to “Go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something.”
Smash Something
For size of readership and sheer number of words, Friedman is probably the most exposed, if not the most committed, of the media’s liberal hawks. He writes three columns a week for The New York Times, a paper that claims close to a million daily readers, and his book Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, was a fixture on the best-seller lists in 2003. Friedman’s development as a liberal hawk was the most public and candid, too. From embryo to fullwingedness, his conversion took several months, and bore at times the tone of a public confessional. We might call him the Thomas More of the liberal hawks as he agonizes and runs again and again through the arguments for war from a tower atop the Times’ Washington bureau.
Beginning in late 2002, Friedman began to convince himself of the need for, or at least advisability of, a war in Iraq in the pages of the Times. (Friedman declined to be interviewed for this article.) His general argument was of the “There’s something rotten in the land of Allah” school popularized by Arabist Bernard Lewis. He urged his readers to see the “super-story” of 9/11. Never under the impression that Saddam bore a technical link to al Qaeda, he nonetheless wrote: “I think the chances of Saddam being willing, or able, to use a weapon of mass destruction against us are being exaggerated. What terrifies me is the prospect of another 9/11 … triggered by angry young Muslims, motivated by some pseudo- religious radicalism cooked up in a mosque in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or Pakistan. So I am for invading Iraq only if we think doing so can bring about regime change and democratization.”
By March of 2003, Friedman had convinced himself not only that war was necessary, but that a regime change in Iraq would be an instant watershed moment in history – “pay-per-view history,” as he called it. At times this thought appeared to make him almost giddy. “Watching this Iraq story unfold,” he wrote on March 2, just days before fighting commenced, “all I can say is this: If this were not about my own country, my own kids, and my own planet, I’d pop some popcorn, pull up a chair, and pay good money just to see how this drama unfolds. Because what you are about to see is the greatest shake of the dice any president has voluntarily engaged in since Harry Truman dropped the bomb on Japan.” Walter Winchell couldn’t have put it better.
Friedman’s tone in the months leading up to the war was far less certain than that, however. He conducted a Hillary Clinton-esque listening tour of the U.S. and claimed to find that, contrary to what some polls and the Fox News Channel indicated, the American public was deeply ambivalent about the prospect of war. He seemed to want to embody this ambivalence in his column, sounding one day like John Wayne and the next like your hand-wringing aunt Maude, changing his mind about Bush by the week. In one of his more arresting laments, in November of 2002, he decried the Bush administration’s squandering of international good will and its adoption of what he called Europe’s “tragic” view of history. “JFK and FDR and Ronald Reagan faced enemies more evil than Saddam and Osama without losing touch with American optimism and communicating that to the world. The Bush team has lost it – and it’s a loss for them and for America.”
But by the following February, he was able to applaud Bush’s “audacity”: “I must say, (it) has an appeal for me.” Then he thumbed his nose at the supporters of Jacques Chirac and France, a group that one must guess makes up a good portion of his readership, and seriously suggested, in a column called “Vote France off the Island,” that India replace France as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. He risked offending the materialist-minded wing of the polity when he admitted that oil probably figured in the Bush administration’s motives, but then said, “There is nothing illegitimate or immoral about the U.S. being concerned that an evil, megalomaniacal dictator might acquire excessive influence over the natural resource that powers the world’s industrial base.”
At other times, Friedman sounded like a starry-eyed Teddy Roosevelt circa age 15. In early September 2002, he concluded a heartfelt deliberation of the Iraq question with this lovely hypothetical: “In the best case, a ‘nice’ strongman will emerge from the Iraqi Army to preside over a gradual transition to democracy.” A “nice” strongman? “Now, truth be told, I think I get this war,” he wrote in February of 2003, apparently doing his best Jerry Mathers impersonation. And in September he reported breathlessly: “The big thing that has happened in Iraq, which you can really feel when you’re there, is a 100 percent correlation of interests between America’s aspirations for Iraq and the aspirations of Iraq’s silent majority.” Iraq and America, now 100 percent correlated!
“He seems to think too much with his feelings,” is what Hitchens said to me of Friedman, and, clearly, Friedman at times wants to convince himself – before a million well-educated readers, no less – that his fondest hopes for the world may come true. But to his credit, it is refreshing, amid Maureen Dowd’s shrill invective and the doomsday predictions of Paul Krugman, to see a New York Times columnist wearing his optimism on his sleeve. Even more to his credit, it’s oddly reassuring to hear his dependably off-message voice. When questioning the motives of a president who aligns his minions’ upbeat public statements and glosses over obvious changes in policy as slickly as Bush does, ambivalence can be a powerful rhetorical strategy in itself. One of the more insidious effects of September 11 is that it deflated the quality of certainty so natural to everyday American thinking, and Friedman represents the new, less-assured mode of thought. A pedant or pundit he is not.
“Deceitful”
The same uncertainty does not plague Paul Berman or Christopher Hitchens. Berman, who cut his teeth at the Village Voice in its heyday and was in the early 1980s a columnist for The Nation, is not as prolific as Friedman or Hitchens. But Terror and Liberalism, released in fall of 2003, has given grandiloquent expression to the “super-story” liberal hawk case. It has justified the liberal hawk position the way Reagan alum Robert Kagan’s screed, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, released about the same time last year, has justified the conservative argument for ignoring the U.N. and “Old Europe.”
Like Friedman, Berman is no great admirer of President Bush – he does not even admit to finding that Texas roll-the-dice audacity appealing – and, as a reporter who covered Nicaragua in the 1980s, he does not think too highly of the president’s father, either. But he believes that Bush set his sights on Iraq with something more substantial than realpolitik in mind. He suggests that Bush recognizes that Islamic totalitarianism is not an anomaly confined to al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein, but is ingrained in the Muslim world, peddled by sinister intellectual heroes and codified by febrile leadership. Bush, he says, has progressed despite his flaws past the Nixonian cynicism that produced his father (who, before playing G-man in Central America, was Nixon’s ambassador to China), even if the administration’s thinking is “a bit incoherent” or “even at times deceitful,” as he put it to me when I reached him at his home in New York City last week.
“I have not turned to the right,” Berman said. “The reasons I find most respectable to oppose the war are reasons of caution and prudence. But caution and prudence are conservative virtues. Therefore, from my point of view, the position against the war in Iraq is conservative – and I don’t say that pejoratively.”
“We’re dealing with a clash between liberal society and people who want to destroy liberal society,” he went on. “What we’re fighting against is not neglect and not apathy – we’re fighting against totalitarian political movements that are animated by very worked-out doctrines. Somebody who’s marching in the peace march, I’d say to them, ‘You should express yourself, and so I can’t question your motives.’ But what I don’t want to hear is that this is left-wing idealism. Left-wing idealism is the wish to help 45 million people to live freely in Iraq and to help the Kurds live with religious freedom and to help women achieve rights, etc.”
Berman’s thinking and his book – nothing less should be expected of a liberal hawk – have pleased and incensed both the right and the left. The conservatives at The Weekly Standard reviewed it poorly, but then so did The Nation (which Berman quit, not amicably, in 1986). The National Review praised it, as did Salon.
How does he account for this? “Any original work of political analysis that’s worth its salt is a mindfuck,” Berman said. “If people aren’t thrown into confusion and scattered to the winds by your thinking, it can only mean that you’ve merely reproduced the clichés of political thought.” But doesn’t this smack a bit of intellectual novelty-seeking? Is the liberal hawk position mental Viagra for bored old lefties? “No,” he said. “I would put it to you this way: if you keep on articulating the same truth in the same way you always have, the truth will by and by turn into a non-truth, a slogan. And if you have something genuinely new to say, people on the right and left will find that their proclivities don’t help them much in responding.”
Against Nihilism
In his book Letters to a Young Contrarian, Christopher Hitchens writes: “the radical ? conservative is not a contradiction in terms.” Hitchens is arguably the most forceful of the liberal hawks, and he is the most reviled among antiwar liberals. He does not draw a thick line between the roles of activist and journalist, and, where Iraq is concerned, has a deep attachment to the Kurdish cause in particular. He has become something of a force of nature in American journalism and letters. He writes a political column for Slate, a regular cultural affairs column for Vanity Fair, and contributes frequently to The Atlantic. He has published 11 books. Until late 2002, he wrote the “Minority Report” column for The Nation, a post he quit, after a more than 20-year association, because the magazine had become, in his words, “The echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden.” (Apparently, The Nation is the dreaded nursery for liberal hawks.)
Hitchens’s perceived defection galls antiwar liberals the most, because he has for so long been a hero of the Left (beginning when he spoke out against the Vietnam war at Oxford, where he overlapped with Bill Clinton, whom he loathes, and extending to his opposition to the first Gulf War), because he is the hardest liberal hawk to pin down, but, perhaps most of all, because he is such a seductive writer. No debating team likes to see a star philomethian switch masks, though they should know it’s inevitable. Reading Hitchens after reading Friedman (or, to be fair, after most any writer) is like sipping a tumbler of Maker’s Mark after taking a shot of watered-down well whiskey. His thinking is less compromised and more nuanced; his command of history more deft; and his prose is, well, better. The English accent – undiluted after nearly a quarter-century of living in the U.S. – doesn’t hurt, either.
Hitchens himself insists that he hasn’t taken a new side. “What strikes me about partisanship these days is that it’s over less and less, which makes it doubly boring for me,” he told me, from Northern California, where he was visiting in-laws. “I have no ideological attachment anymore of any kind. On some days that feels like a missing limb, and some days it feels liberating.”
“‘Liberal hawk’ is wrong, in my mind,” he said. “It attempts to suggest that there’s some contradiction in being liberal and pro-war.” Still, Hitchens sometimes talks like he believes he has switched sides. “I’m not ashamed of the time I spent on the left,” he said. Unlike Friedman, Hitchens does not feel the need to preface his support for the Iraq war – “intervention,” he prefers to call it – with assurances that he distrusts Bush. He did, however, refer to himself as a “republican” during our conversation.
Indeed, his defense of the Bush administration has at times been strident. In a Slate column from December of 2002, he defended Bush’s repeated use of the word “evil,” a point of verbiage that has nettled the Left to no end. “Scoff if you must,” he wrote, “but you can’t avoid it.” In a February 2003 column called “Drumbeat,” the subtitle asserted: “Bush rushing to war? Nonsense.” He’s even defended Halliburton. And in October of last year, while every news magazine in the country was running cover stories with titles like “What Went Wrong?”, Hitchens published a rosy picture of postwar Baghdad in Vanity Fair, even as Graydon Carter, in his Letters From the Editor, marched on with what has become a monthly tirade against Bush.
“Bush is an extremely limited guy who’s saved by the fact that he’s aware of his limitations,” Hitchens said. He claims that he no longer minds being associated with certain neocons. His thinking began to change when he reported from Kurdish territory in northern Iraq in the early 1990s, where George H.W. Bush was revered as a hero. “I found myself with Kurds who said, ‘If it wasn’t for Bush, we’d probably all be dead.’ And I thought, I’d better think about what that means.”
His opinions continued to change when he reported from the mid-’90s war in the former Yugoslavia and found that just as many liberals opposed committing American troops to intervene and depose Slobodan Milosevic as did conservatives. But among those arguing most strongly for intervention were people such as Paul Wolfowitz, now Deputy Secretary of Defense, and former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. “If someone had suggested to me that I had any relationship with them, I would have taken it as an insult,” he said. “But then I thought, ‘Good for them.’ By the time that was over, I decided that what I admired in people was a willingness to break with their own fiction, to generally call things by their right name and to see a point of principle when it came up.”
Like Berman, he sees the Iraq war as part of a larger war against totalitarianism, or the “open society vs. nihilism” as he puts it, and agrees that an antiwar position is in fact not a truly liberal one. “The problem, to me, is leftists who claim they’re not in favor of disturbing the status quo,” he said. “In fact, their position is reactionary – and they make excuses for the most savagely reactionary movement on the planet – Islamic extremism. There are a lot of liberals and left-wingers who would see Iraq go to hell if it would give Bush a hard time.”
For Hitchens, a confirmed atheist, the real war, the ongoing war, is ages older. “I think everything is a clash between secularism and religion – my original allegiance to the left was on this point,” he said. “You hear (the left) saying ‘Well, we mustn’t offend Muslims.’ Do they think the Muslims will return the compliment? Do they think the Muslims will recognize gay marriages? Yes, actually they do. Then we get to the dirty secret that they refuse to admit – that religion is a lousy way to run a country. That you can’t run a country out of a holy book. This is not a new idea – this is what Thomas Jefferson said.”
Not surprisingly, his combativeness has served to alienate him from some of his former admirers. He does not feel the need to be polite in print to liberals, or even to liberal hawks, which, after all the half-hearted post-WMD self-flagellation and warm forgiveness being handed around lately, can be as refreshing as Friedman’s ambivalence. He has been involved in public disputes with, in addition to Gore Vidal, Fred Kaplan, Oliver Stone, and Studs Terkel, to name a few. But for Hitchens, combat, intellectual and real, is vital.
“There’s nothing like a good war to bring on social and political revolution,” he said. “Of course, you have to be careful which wars you get involved with. I’m not against war. War is a natural human condition. The question is who is going to be the intelligent winner.”
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