[lit-ideas] The reasonable vs the radical Left
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 10:48:24 -0800
I?ve gone abroad, figuratively, to get some coherent intelligent arguments
from the Left. I just read Free World by Timothy Garton Ash. Ash would
have been in favor of not going to war in Iraq but instead continuing the
sanctions. The problem with that is that the sanctions were being subverted
by the Food-for-Oil procedure. UN representatives were enriching themselves
while allowing Saddam to accumulate the money he needed to build up his
military effort. The nations who vetoed UN support of invasion were the
same nations most heavily involved in the Food-for-Oil scandal. But Ash
does agree that Saddam?s regime should have been removed and the world is
better off having him gone.
Ash is an intelligent fellow and realizes that it serves no purpose to rail
about what might have been had the election gone otherwise. He is more
interested in what should occur in the future. Bush?s War against Terror is
real and legitimate. The objectives are out there to be seen by all, but
they require looking ahead instead of behind. Europe has a vested interest
in having an Iraq democracy be a success. It wants to do everything in its
power to have it succeed. A Middle-East filled with Terrorists is more
alarming to Europe than it is to the US. They can get in boats and sail
from North Africa to Europe rather more easily than they can to the US.
Europe doesn?t do as well with its immigrants as the US. They don?t make
them feel welcome ? to some extent because most of them need immediate
welfare benefits ? something the locals resent. Given that situation,
Europe is vitally interested in having stable, democratic nations in the
Middle East so not so many Arabs will want to immigrate to Europe. Saddam
needed to be removed. Europe is in agreement with the US about that.
Whether he could have been removed before his weapons programs were
completely reestablished is now moot.
Libya gave up without a fight; however it remains a dictatorship.
Europe and the US are coordinating their efforts in hopes of getting Iran to
give up its belligerence peacefully. The EU is able to put pressure on Iran
by using the good cop/bad cop, ?you?d better quit rattling your saber. You
saw what happened in Iraq when Saddam really get America?s attention. Come
on now, let?s have a little less belligerence and a little more Liberal
Democracy.?
Ash takes Bush?s desire to export Liberal/Democracy to the Middle East as
real and legitimate. The EU would also like to see the Middle Eastern
nations become Liberal/Democracies. Bush?s insistence is putting pressure
on the EU and some of them (according to Ash) seem to be moving in the
direction of saying, ?okay, but let?s do it peacefully.?
It is well-known that the more peaceful responses to the earlier Al Quaeda
attacks during the Clinton administration only emboldened Al Quaeda. It was
convinced the US was afraid to fight. The first Gulf war was considered a
great victory for Saddam. We think we won that war, but few in the Middle
East did. Saddam was able to boast that he had pulled his troops back to a
defensive posture around Baghdad and the Americans ran away. That
misconception has now been removed, but it probably hasn?t been removed once
and for all. There are undoubtedly Islamist theorists reasoning that if
they can keep the Middle East disrupted for four more years, the US is sure
to elect a Liberal President who will once again run away.
There is a good deal of serious thought and writing being engaged in by
bright people like Ash. One does not intuitively understand the Middle
East. To begin to understand it you must engage in a considerable amount of
study of the history and current events as they exist. Reinvoking the
Vietnam War may make some Leftists feel good. Unfortunately some have gone
further and have declared common cause with the Islamists. David Horowitz,
a former Leftist, has written Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the
American Left. Joshua Kurlantzick (of the New Republic) has written a
review. He writes, ?Over the past century, [Horowitz argues] the radical
Left in Europe and the U.S. has come to define itself as a ?movement
against, rather than a movement for.? Primarily, of course, its target has
been the United States, no matter what the United States has stood for. For
Horowitz, the historical roots of today?s ?red-green-alliance (green being
the color of Islam) are to be found in the American Left?s long-standing
obsession with the treatment of blacks and Native Americans and especially
in its loudly proclaimed solidarity over the years with Fidel Castro, the
North Vietnamese, and Communist rebels in El Salvador and Nicaragua. When
the U.S. declared war on terror, it was time, once again, for the Left to
lionize whomever America opposed.?
I observed an affiliation back in the Phil-Lit days when I was preoccupied
with the writings of Edward Said. Said is dead now but others are active in
declaring common cause with the Islamists. Horowitz has according to
Kurlantzick done a considerable amount of research, and produces evidence
for his arguments. One of the best known Leftist organizations making
common cause (according to Horowitz) with the Islamists is ANSWER (Act Now
to Stop War and End Racism), founded by Ramsey Clark. ?In December 2003,
the group helped to convene the second annual Cairo Conference, an anti-U.S.
hate fest attended by a variety of Islamists, including Osama Hamdan, a top
leader of Hamas. ANSWER has also given a seat on its steering committee to
the Muslim Students Association (MSA). This American group presents itself
as a benign advocate for Muslim college students. But as Jonathan
Dowd-Gailey has recently documented in the Middle East Quarterly, the MSA
has funneled money to the Holy Land foundation and other charities accused
of funding Hamas and Hizballah. MSA leaders have called for the death of
all Jews and have spread pro-Taliban propaganda. The group advises its
members that their ?long-term goal? should be ?to Islamize the politics of
their respective universities.??
?Indeed, for radicals in the U.S. and Europe, any taboo that may once have
kept them from openly collaborating with known Islamic terrorists has
largely disappeared.?
Is it evidence that a person has declared common cause with the Islamists
when his and their arguments are more and more indistinguishable? The
radical defense attorney Lynn Stewart identified so strongly with Sheik Omar
Abdel Rahman (the blind cleric serving a life-term for the first WTC
bombing) that she is being tried for helping him. She told a reporter of
the Washington Post, ?we hit it off . . . He?s really an incredible person.?
Horowitz shows ?how the anti-American pronouncements of Noam Chomsky have
become increasingly indistinguishable from those of the fire-breathing
clerics who appear on Arab satellite TV stations. Horowitz dredges up reams
of similarly incendiary quotations from a range of American and Arab
radicals. At the organizational level, he documents occasions on which
leftist Western lawyers like Stewart have defended Muslim groups accursed of
abetting terrorism, and he points to the participation of militant Muslims
in some of the most publicized antiwar rallies.?
This is somewhat of a new thing for me to say, but I found Timothy Ash to be
a ?reasonable? Leftist. In fact I wasn?t at all confident that he was a
Leftist (because of his reasonableness) until assured of that by Judy Evans.
But Ash and Chomsky are worlds apart. It?s too bad there aren?t terms to
describe the difference. If I had to place Ash in our own political
spectrum, I?d place him with the moderate or even conservative Democrats.
He wouldn?t balk at war if he found it absolutely necessary. He thinks
Liberal/Democracy the finest form of government the world has ever seen ?
although he favors the EU Social-Welfare version to the American Version.
Ash tries to look twenty years in the future when the West may have passed
the crest of the mountain and be on the downward other side. China, Japan,
a united Korea and India may be the new powerhouses in the world. We have a
chance to do good now, but we won?t do it if we spend our time bickering
with each other. A futile Gaulist attempt to make the EU a superpower so it
can counterbalance the US is absurd. The EU needs one part Gaulist (in
order to help the US militarily) to two parts Atlanticist (agreement with
the US) in order to work together with the US to build the best, most
peaceful, prosperous, and healthy future possible. In 50 years when the new
superpowers look back, Ash would rather they not see a history of constant
bickering. He would rather they saw a West that did as well as it could
before handing the baton on to the new superpowers.
Lawrence Helm
San Jacinto
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