OK, today I don't have the "Goddamned BLAW-grrr" excuse (update: so much for that--Blogger is acting like hell AGAIN), but I DID manage to knock out a few things at work that had me spinning a death spiral over the last few days--for those who don't mind a little techno-babble, my problem centered around changes to a switch in our setup room. Would've been nice if someone had mentioned this to me, because I thought the issue was old network card drivers on our boot disks. The good news is that our boot disks now have up-to-date drivers (this after loading everything from old, old legacy files to the latest and greatest, without success), AND the new switch, which was actually causing the trouble, will soon be assigned to surplus...
My own preference for the new
Onto other, more interesting topics, though. Last night I noticed Your Right Hand Thief nominating this from Crooked Timber as Post of the Year--well, that certainly caught my attention, although I'd been previously distracted by a bottle of wine that found its way into my living room. So...I took another, more sober look this afternoon, making sure to follow Oyster's instructions--read the post, read the links, read the post again--and while I'll hold on for just a bit before seconding it--after all, there are nine and a half more months of 2005--but, yeah, it's pretty good.
This, though, really caught my eye--a longish essay by Timothy Burke entitled At the Checkpoint. I'll reprint some of what Oyster thought worth mentioning, plus a bit more (although the post itself is highly instructive for anyone with time to read the whole thing).
The beginning of the essay is, to be honest, disappointing: Burke comes across as either a typical librul, ready to concede a mile before being asked for an inch, or a closet reactionary, expressing some admiration for David Brooks AND Paul Wolfowitz...but I bit my lip, until I came across this:
The criticism of Wolfowitz has always come from much more powerfully serious thinkers and activists who question the generality of his theories and models and the specificity of his understanding of the region he’s experimenting with. The defenders of the war in Iraq, and Wolfowitz in specific, usually refuse to engage with this criticism at all. If they do, they’ll gloss it, carelessly, as amoral “realism”...
What’s at stake here is both an abstract theory but also a quite empirical argument about how and when liberal democracy has taken hold in the world, and what actually defines “liberal democracy”. What's at stake here is also a principled argument about the conditionalities and realities of interventionism, one that asks in all seriousness that the pro-interventionists explain how they know which injustices require the immense cost and suffering of an intervention and which do not. Here it’s not just that Wolfowitz’ theory is up against a very strongly detailed, intellectually meticulous, and wide-ranging opposition, but also that Wolfowitz and his defenders are prone to a kind of horribly sloppy, contemptibly instrumental tendency to grab at any shred of evidence supporting their theories and complete ignore anything else...
Well, yes. That's putting it a hell of a lot more diplomatically--well, and intellectually--than I have lately, but it's no less troubling. I've noted, as recently as this week, that I find it interesting (not in a good way) that pro-war folks show a remarkable lack of sympathy or even concern with the people they're liberating (which Burke gets to as well). They're mere pawns, disposable, with no more regard from the pro-war folks than this week's garbage.
Burke devotes a couple of paragraphs, again describing better than I'm able, to Lebanon, and, by extension, the various faux concerns mouthed by the neo-con crowd about the "necessity for democracy," which is boiled down to a plebescite, with virtually zero concern for who's actually running. In that context (and in disagreement with the author), the Iraqi "election" makes perfect sense--if the only thing that matters is an "X" on a ballot, who actually cares about the candidate? (Of course, one TINY problem with that underscores a valid criticism of the neo-con movement, namely, that there's an underlying authoritarian streak to it).
Then, as Oyster noted, you get to the paragraphs that (to paraphrase A.J. Liebling) if Burke's essay was a concerto, would be the part where the soloist begins playing the loud, banging notes that signal even to the casual listener that the end is near:
This week’s news about the shooting of an Italian intelligence agent at a US-manned barricade is a good example. For months now, both Iraqis and observers have been talking about a pattern of reckless military aggression at checkpoints. They have often been met with overwrought, hysteric condemnation from pro-war pundits and bloggers, with accusations that showing concern over such incidents is just a tactic in a conspiratorial attempt to weaken the war effort...Sorry, but that’s got it exactly opposite. If the war really is following the most generously constructed version of the neocon argument, it is absolutely crucial to treat every Iraqi citizen with the same presumptive respect as the US Constitution instructs the US government to treat its own citizens...
If there is anyone who ought to be deeply, gravely concerned about unwarranted shootings at checkpoints, accidental deaths of civilians, torture in US prisons, killings of surrendered prisoners, it’s the advocates of the war, at least the ones who believe in the Wolfowitz vision as it is represented by Brooks, Hitchens and others. They ought to be concerned for very functional reasons, because failures of these kinds are effectively losses on the battlefield...They ought to be concerned also for philosophical reasons, the same way I would be concerned if the police started busting down the doors in my own neighborhood for what seemed flimsy reasons and then hauling away some of my neighbors without any real due process.
Wolfowitz and his defenders want to convince us that humanity is united by its universal thirst for liberal democratic freedoms, well then, how can they possibly fail to react to injustice or error in Iraq with anything less than the grave and persistent concern they might exhibit in a domestic US context? Where’s the genuine regret, the mourning, the persistent and authentic sympathy? I don’t mean some bullshit one-liner you toss off before moving on to slam Michael Moore again for three or four paragraphs, I mean the kind of consistent attention and depth of compassion that signals that you take the humanity and more signally the rights of Iraqis as seriously as you take the humanity of your neighbors. Only when you’ve got that concern credibly in place, as a fundamental part of your political and moral vision, do you get to mournfully accept that some innocents must die in the struggle to achieve freedom.
The Wolfowitzian defenders of the war want to skip Go and collect $200.00 on this one, go straight to the day two centuries hence when the innocent dead recede safely into the bloody haze of anonymous tragedy. Sorry, but this is not on offer, least of all for them. If they can’t find the time, emotion and intellectual rigor to be as consumed by the case of a blameless mother and father turned into gore and sprayed on their children as they are by what Sean Penn had to say about the war last week, then their entire argument about the war is nothing more than the high-minded veneer of a more bestial and reasonless fury. If Brooks or anyone else wants to rise to toast Paul Wolfowitz, then they’ll have to live up to the vision they attribute to him, and meet the real problems and failures of that vision honestly and seriously.
Indeed.
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