THE REV. JESSE JACKSON says that an eagle can only soar with two wings. But what if one wing refuses to fly? From September 12 onwards, the left-leaning press--magazines like the Nation and the Progressive and alternative newspapers like the Village Voice and the Bay Guardian--have fed their readers a steady diet of antiwar opinion. Now that the first phase of the war against terrorism is over, I believe it's time for my fellow lefties to engage in a truly radical activity--serious self-criticism.
The Left's first reaction after the September 11 attacks was to suggest that America was finally getting its just deserts. Bill Blum, an author of anti-CIA books frequently quoted by the undergraduate Left, argued that the terrorist hijackers "had a political purpose: retaliation for decades of military, economic and political oppression imposed upon the Middle East by The American Empire." Similar sentiments were expressed by Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, and various British columnists like John Pilger and Robert Fisk.
Even if one is critical of American foreign policy, as I am, the timing and the tone of these comments were obscene, in that they reflected more sympathy for the terrorists than for the victims. Moreover, they suggested that those who seek political change through violence against innocents are entitled to have their demands met--certainly a bizarre position for proponents of nonviolent change.
While the World TradeCenter site continued to smolder, a new slogan began to circulate: "Justice, Not Vengeance." This at least had the virtue of not making common cause with Osama bin Laden. Yet, the formula was intended to suggest that any use of force was tantamount to revenge and therefore unjustified.
By "justice," the Left meant that the United States should employ diplomatic tools, such as the World Court or an embargo, to press the Taliban to hand over the al Qaeda fighters. But this suggestion ignored the fact that bin Laden was moving ahead with his publicly declared war against the infidel United States, and that we were--and are--in a race to stop him or else become victims of his next biological, chemical, or nuclear attack.
Nine out of ten Americans wanted justice another way: through use of force to capture and justly punish the al Qaeda perpetrators. Progressives, who were so unwilling to condemn the use of force by terrorists, were eager to condemn any use by the victims, before a single shot was even fired. This was, again, a slap at the American people. Most Americans didn't want revenge. Indeed, strikingly little popular anger poured onto Main Street, and every responsible opinion leader, Democrat and Republican alike, condemned attacks on Arab Americans.
Contrary to predictions from leftist skeptics, the Bush administration did not respond immediately with a massive counterstrike. It took several weeks to build its case against bin Laden, to offer the Taliban peaceful ways out, and to construct a loose coalition of nations, including unlikely allies like Pakistan and Russia.
When the bombing started, progressive commentators sounded humanitarian alarms. A halt to U.S. bombing was essential, the argument went, to respect Ramadan and to ensure that millions of Afghans did not starve over the winter. Yet virtually all those progressives making this argument were largely unaware of the desperate plight of Afghan civilians before the war, and have all but dropped the issue since. The position of the Bush administration--that the best way to prevent a humanitarian disaster was to quickly oust the Taliban regime--turned out to be correct.
Then progressives shifted arguments once again, this time to decry the civilian casualties from "indiscriminate" use of force by the U.S. military. Currently circulating in progressive Internet listserves is a cut-and-paste catalogue of civilian casualties put together by Professor Marc Herold at the University of New Hampshire, who estimates that more than 3,000 Afghan civilians were killed by the U.S.-led campaign.
While any civilian casualties of war are deplorable, and some of the criticisms of errant U.S. bombing, such as hitting a clearly marked Red Cross warehouse twice, are legitimate, the attempt to draw moral equivalence between the terrorists and U.S. troops is reprehensible. The former intended to kill civilians; the latter didn't. The former intended to perpetrate attacks on U.S. civilians (and still may do so); the latter intended to prevent them. The former increased the chances of civilian deaths by hiding among civilians; the latter sought, however imperfectly, to avoid civilian targets. To ignore these distinctions seems to be but another slap at the victims of September 11.
