"I do not believe we have locked ourselves into leaving," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said during a Senate committee hearing Wednesday. "But what we have done ... is to signal very clearly to all audiences that the United States is not interested in occupying Afghanistan."I admit it: I relish the image of Hillary, the pantsuit vampire of our times, acting out this well-armed community-theater adaptation of Bartelby the Scrivener.
-reported on NPR
"Get the fuck out of Afghanistan, America!"
"We would prefer not to."
***
Now I do not wish to reopen the old back-and-forth with Michael Bérubé. In the first place he recently made some mildly complimentary comments about yours truly and I am truly, truly that capricious and self-involved. Rather more substantively, I am immensely enjoying the recently enjoined cockfight between him and Louis Proyect, for there is nothing so wonderful as an internecine lefty-fight--with any luck, all the world's unrepentent Marxists and liberal internationalists will eventually slash each other to death with the razors tied to their feet and we can fee their unrecognizeable, bloody remains to the one pig in Afghanistan as expiation for the sins of ineffectuality and hubris. (You can guess to which side each of those is assigned.)
And yet I do wonder what the author of The Left at War has got to say about Afghanistan now. To his credit, I do not believe that Béreubé ever used that most disgusting of all clichés and called Afghanistan "the good war." But he has certainly spoken of its necessity and derided those who always opposed it as being so in thrall to a Chomskyian vision of bloody American imperialism that they (we) simply retreated in a familiar black-and-white (he would say Manichean, but I can't condone that misuse of the word or slander of a perfectly, wonderfully weird cosmology) world where America is the rote evildoer, everyone else is ground under our heel, and not even a direct attack on our own country merited a military response.
To be sure--plenty of people were making something resembling that argument! Personally, I'm sympathetic to it, although I think it simplifies. I would say more accurately that regarding the justification proferred for 9/11 by its evident architects, America's pernicious actions and influence in the "Muslim world" were real, but ultimately pretextual, and that 9/11 was in turn actual, but nonetheless mere pretext for for invading Afghanistan. That is to say, there's a certain truth to the claims that these attacks and invasions were responses to provocations, but a very limited sort of truth: a small truth told in such a way as to make it a large lie.
So. Cast backwards. It is the 9/12 Lacuna of Good Feelings and everyone has set to crying, "Something must be done!" But had you asked a lousy anarchist, fatalist, and defeatist like me where I thought we'd be in 2010, I'd have told you straight up: Still In Afghanistan, for no particular reason, with a President of one or other party making speeches that sound like self-fulfilling prophecies. Why?
Not because America is malevolent, but because America is heedless.
This is ultimately my beef with liberal internationalism. I mean, I echo its critics from the left when they accuse its proponents of white-washing America's truly execrable history as an imperial and colonial power, but I think that critique, while accurate, misses the point. Though they would perhaps not go as far as I, or the "Chomskian Left" would like, I think you will find that folks like Bérubé accede to and accept the argument that America has often behaved very, very badly and deservedly won itself enemies. They'd simply say: we wish to redirect America's power for good. But America's power can't be redirected for good because it has no moral component. It isn't malevolent either. It can't be understood as a matter of good and evil, or right and wrong. It is a product of pressures and incentives, economies and assumptions, interia and habit, circumstance and accident. I do not actually think America invaded Afghanistan because it wished to do evil, nor (more charitably) because it confused right intention with right action. I think that its invasion was all-but-predetermined, set in advance by accumulated history, triggered by a particular event, yes--but if not triggered by that, then it would have been by something else. And while I think that we are obliged to bear witness to it as a matter of individual responsibility and morality, as a matter of personal right action, I also think that the arguments we've all been having about who does or does not support it are wholly immaterial, as likewise I believe the question of whether or not America should or should not intervene in this or that conflict, genocide, civil war, or what have you in such and such part of the world and for some or other purpose are immaterial; America either will or will not, but never because of what anybody thinks.
54 comments:
That is the saddest-looking pig I have ever seen.
It's funny. I can look back on a life of achievement, on challenges met, competitors bested, obstacles overcome. I've accomplished more than most men, and without the use of my legs.
I = we
the use of my legs = thinking
Ginger Nut, we salute you!
The title of this post contains the word "raping". You should have given us a trigger warning first.
"America either will or will not, but never because of what anybody thinks."
While I'm sympathetic to your point that history is in part guided by collective forces larger than any man, I'm not sure you can reach your conclusion above unless you accept the premise that there is no free will. I mean, American did invade Afghanistan because Bush thought, and then said, "make it so", and America will continue to kill those peeps because Obama thinks, and commands, that it be so.
Despite the forces of history, those dudes could think otherwise, no?
Just sayin'. But perhaps the Chinaman is not the issue here.
While the existence of free will is debatable, I believe the point is that the system will always find someone whose "free will" is directed towards the required ends. If Bush had thought otherwise, he would not have ended up President.
Free will is just wave function collapse.
if you will it, it is no dream.
IOZ, this point carries over to other contexts. For example, Shell oil corporation is not aiding and benefiting from paramilitary forces killing natives in the Niger Delta because they are evil in the sense that they want to do evil things, but they are chasing a profit and because they are already there (momentum).
I don't think this was your point, but this amoral analysis is pretty similar to NC's in international relations.
"I do not actually think America invaded Afghanistan because it wished to do evil, nor ... because it confused right intention with right action"
I think very few people argue the first and a lot of people, mainstream 'left' and 'right' mistakenly believe the second; it is certainly not the exclusive domain of Chomsky Lefties.
"The pig was a gift to the zoo from China, which itself quarantined some 70 Mexicans, 26 Canadians and four Americans in the past week, but later released them."
"Mujahideen fighters then ate the deer and rabbits and shot dead the zoo's sole elephant. Shells shattered the aquarium.
One fighter climbed into the lion enclosure but was immediately killed by Marjan, the zoo's most famous inhabitant. The man's brother returned the next day and lobbed a hand grenade at the lion leaving him toothless and blind."
After very serious deliberation, consideration, and rumination . . . I have decided . . . unfortunately and with a heavy heart . . . that we must reluctantly continue to kill brown people in the service of vague notions that no one can really explain.
This is Michael Berube and every well meaning leftist who simply wants to use bombs for the "right kind of things." How they fail to see that the imperial and destructive tragectory of the US over the last century has nothing to do with political allegiances or any sort of coherent foreign policy is beyond me. Its seems plain that every moral argument in the history of ever has been adduced, at some point, in support of completely unecessary violence, and yet...
I once found myself in a class on the use of force in international law. Mostly leftist interventionists, naturally. One day, several took turns prattling on about how there ought to be a limited exception to article 2(4) for humanitarian intervention, using Rwanda circa 1994 and Sudan lately as the prime examples. I asked why it is that no one ever inquires into efficacy before prescribing bombing. After all, if it is our moral obligation to help those in need that inspires us to the task, why do we not ask whether we will actually improve that which we decry? Armies are designed to destroy things and kill people. Both Rwanda and Sudan involve roaming gangs of young people killing people with primitive weapons on the basis of tribal grievances that the army cannot possibly perceive, let alone understand. What reason do you have to think that if our army invades, they will be able to do something better than kill people and destroy things? And if a beneficial difference is achieved through our presence, when do we leave? 5 years? 10? 50? What happens after we leave?
Complete silence.
it's all bullshit.
IOZ doesn't believe in anything. He's a nihilist.
It IS, in fact, exhausting.
Oh, wait, no, I meant to say "Say what you will about the tenets of Liberal Internationalism, at least if's a fucking ethos, IOZ."
La Rana, that is not how Rwanda happened. Yes, it was carried out by roving gangs, but it was expressly condoned and encouraged by the government and stopped as soon as the government was overthrown.
If we had gone in and unseated the government, there is a very good chance that things would have been different. Moreover, there were places in which our mere presence was saving lives and after we pulled out, hundreds of people were massacared the next day.
That is not to defend the war in Afghanistan, which is retarded, but there's no genocide there, so I hardly see the comparison to Rwanda as apt.
lol
and how did Rwanda happen, NutellaonToast?
because I was definitely an accident.
Referring to Berube as a leftist or a liberal internationalist is giving him more credit than he deserves. He's a vindictive concern troll, angered by the left's response to his various smears. Under the guise of a critique of the left, he's lashing out at those who had the gall to criticize him. His gripe is personal, not political; but in order to camouflage his pettiness he has to pretend otherwise. Berube's M.O.: smears, distortions, selective quotations -- all wrapped up in smarmy prose and shitty humor.
Fuck Michael Bérubé.
Okay Dude. I can see you don't want
to be cheered up. C'mon Donny, let's
go get a lane.
Whoa. The Medium Lobster sayeth.
NoT: There's a hole in the bottom of your pocket history.
Hmm. I think I agree that the critique of "America's truly execrable history as an imperial and colonial power," while accurate, misses the point. If I understand you correctly that's what I was saying yesterday. How does it square with your previous idea that the main sin in promoting nation building in Afghanistan is that it's euphemistic? Isn't it more important to say that nation building is a fallacy, that state formation is "a product of pressures and incentives, economies and assumptions, interia and habit, circumstance and accident," and that the invasion of Afghanistan (as I put it) was "just an after-effect of a state failure," or as you put it, "all-but-predetermined, set in advance by accumulated history, triggered by a particular event, yes--but if not triggered by that, then it would have been by something else"?
I'm okay with personal outrage though. There's a place for that!
The devastating rebuttal testimony to "we" "saving lives" in "places" notwithstanding, Rwanda is a bit more than that movie you saw once. Though you do provide a nice coda to my comment, Nutella, for the dominant explanation is that most know absolutely nothing about the countries they want to invade or the conflicts they intend to stop. Much less how the former might lead to the latter.
So, your ultimate beef with liberal internationalism is that it's immaterial? Almost sounds like you would approve if it was material. Surely there are more ultimate reasons for its unpleasantness than immateriality, no?
AND A GOOD DAY TO YOU, SIR!
Since, on a personal level, I'm an enormous fan, and this blog having been, especially during stretches of unemployment and my first semester of law school, truly a source of inspiration, I must ask: who's the fucking nihilist here?
..."I think that we are obliged to bear witness to it as a matter of individual responsibility and morality, as a matter of personal right action..."
Yes ... what makes a man, IOZ?
This post could serve well as another brief restatement of principles for "Whaddurweegunnadoo?!" folks--but I would love a statement of our ever-magnanimous host's guiding principles of personal morality (this post featuring the first explicit mention of any I can recall).
Sorry for so many Lebowskisms. No I'm not.
I agree with this structuralist critique, but also would like to point out that the system rewards certain kinds of behaviors and pathologies in order to justify and effectively implement empire. The whole of the apparatus is greater than the sum of its parts, but it is still made op of individuals.
Also, can someone please slip Berubay an ativan?
The big problem with Rwanda as a model for liberal interventionism is that almost all of the liberal interventionalists WERE ON THE WRONG FUCKING SIDE WHEN IT HAPPENED. They thought the Hutus were being driven out by Kagame's army, and wanted to stop a refugee crisis.
Go high enough, you always get to one man.
About Rwanda: it's possible the RPF killed more than the government: http://leninology.blogspot.com/2009/12/what-happened-in-rwanda.html
And the U.S. did actually intervene:
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2009/07/rwanda-rpf-and-myth-of-non-intervention.html
IOZ, sir, again you are absolutely on FIRE. It is a true delight reading your columns every morning.
I don't know if it's a recent change in your diet or the onset of cold weather or what but wow, awesome! :P
I wish I had a blog so we could engage in much half-duplex debate and exchange of witticisms and links and all that but for now, I'll resign myself to the GWB at Yale role - cheering you on from the sidelines ;)
Aaron - I still think we're rappin with each other, brah. Let me try to put it this way: as a concept, yes, you're right, "nation-building" is a fallacy. As a usage--let us say, in the parlance of our times--it's a euphemism.
Wait -- I thought Berube said you (we) were the "He-Man Left". He-Man, Manichean, Chomskian...could someone please plot all these Lefts on a graph for me? Thanks much.
IOZ, as a naive wanderer in your garden, I would ask what accumulated history predetermined the US's return to Afghanistan? After dumping much money and arms into it during the past century in order to frustrate our evil enemy and then abandoning the country when that got boring, I don't see what historical pressures precipitated its return.
@ Michael L
I'd say that the reason you conclude that way is that you assume the reasons for involving the USA in Afghani affairs have always been noble.
Perhaps try assessing it from this perspective: meddling in Afghani affairs has always boiled down to these agenda items:
* local geopolitical destabilization
* control (attempted extermination among the means of "control") of opium poppy crops
* cross-country transiting pipelines for transmission of oil and gas
Why would we go back? There's still more geopolitical destabilization, there's still profit to be made from heroin, there's still the chance to run those pipelines.
In all these agenda goals, nobody is aiming at improving life for Afghanis. That's never been in the mix.
@8:02 - Done and done.
Michael L said...
to frustrate our evil enemy.
I'd rather Soviet Union be referred to:
"our former great and glorious ally"
by people who think of themselves ("our") as appendages of the US federal state.
Trolly yours
The Christians
i sat with this all day yesterday, and it's probably too late to make a splash, but you're twisting that bartleby quote pretty far. it's an act of protest, of NOT doing something. the idea that bartleby is similar to an invading army refusing to leave is an interpretation that needs to be rethought.
Yes we are rapping, as white persons say.
I haven't been disputing the different issues, just the priority. Who cares about the euphemism? Foreign policy discussions are euphemistic almost by definition. But if a sentence has one euphemism and one major conceptual and philosophical error that has a lot more to do with the critique my vote is to focus on door number two. On the other hand, blog.
Who cares about the euphemism?
Shit. . . Uh, yeah, you know, me and the driver. I'm not
handling the money and driving the car and talking on the
phone all by my fucking--
Shut the fuck up.
Okay, have it your way.
I mean, white rapper
There's so many of us now
White people like rap now
Ah, ah, yeah
I'm capricious and self-involved enough to be glad you asked, Monsieur IOZ. Where am I on Afghanistan now? All effed up, every day. I still think a military response was not wrong in principle (and would have gotten unanimous Security Council approval had Bush-Cheney taken the trouble to ask), but that the actual consequences haven't been anything like anything I can support. In other words, the deontological justification was there (I think) but the consequentialist calculus isn't (and of course I have to recalculate that all the time, 'cause it's consequentialist). And that means all kinds of things. For one: I now think "decisive" wars are anomalous. Every war has horrid sequelae that we can't even imagine, not only in terms of massive civilian atrocities but also in terms of who-the-fuck thought that Gulf War I would lead bin Laden (who wasn't on the radar in 1991) to turn his attention to the US and that its aftermath would lead to the delegitimation of sanctions theory (not to speak of all the Iraqis killed by the sanctions), since sanctions had been upheld by the internationalist left as one of the things that brought down South African apartheid? Besides, as I say in that left-at-war book, the world has had enough of blundering, well-intentioned Americans. Better to try to think up some kind of internationalism that will supersede the American crypto-empire.
In other other words: I'm not willing to give up on things like international intervention in Sierra Leone and East Timor (I do wish Chomsky would say, "goddamn, my side won one for a change" on that one, but I understand why he doesn't), but I'm much less willing to think that war can decide anything, and I think everything since 9/12 (from Bali to London to Madrid to Mumbai) should be a matter of international police action. (Now all I have to do is imagine an international police.) So, to your question: where am I on Afghanistan today? Somewhere in the vicinity of Andrew Bacevich and Russ Feingold. (Though I think the former underestimates what he calls the "neglect" of Afghanistan between 1989 and 2001, and the latter leaves open the possibility that we should be deploying anti-terrorist special forces around the globe -- which is not, I hope, what he wants to suggest.)
Thaaat's right, Dude. The beauty of this is its simplicity. If the plan gets too complex something always goes wrong. If there's one thing I learned in Nam--
"I think everything since 9/12 (from Bali to London to Madrid to Mumbai) should be a matter of international police action. (Now all I have to do is imagine an international police.)" Police what, exactly? And who will do the policing, and who will they be responsible to, and what interests will they be serving? Or is the United States the global police force, as Bush the Elder proclaimed? It seems you are circumventing the issue here. Also, a better analogy for the embargo against Iraq is the ongoing one against Cuba.
"as I say in that left-at-war book, the world has had enough of blundering, well-intentioned Americans"
You gotta be kidding. Who are these 'well-intentioned' Americans again? Not the people in power, I suppose. Are you talking about yourself?
Then the other thing is that idea of international policing 'since 9/12'. Why not since 9/11? The attacks in Madrid (proportionally speaking) were every bit as murderous as 9/11 and could be traced to another country. Isn't this another instance of 'American Exceptionalism'? If it is, then I don't see why you would call yourself 'Left'.
See why i don't like (US) Americans? Those who consider themselves leftists wouldn't be anything but center-right anywhere else. Good thing that nobody gives a shit about Mr. Be-roubay in the rest of the World. It's Chomsky all the way, baby.
Pepito
Nice to see Mr Bay-Rube-Ay thinks it is MY duty to solve problems in OTHER nations before solving the ones that affect ME DIRECTLY.
What an ass. What a smug, self-satisfied, superior ASS.
"international intervention in Sierra Leone and East Timor (I do wish Chomsky would say, "goddamn, my side won one for a change" on that one, but I understand why he doesn't)..." Well, yeah, he'd be like totally assassinated, because They couldn't let him get away with saying the Truth.
But what I'm trying to figure out is how East Timor was a win for Chomsky's "side". Is that in the new book?
While I applaud your contribution to the marketplace of ideas, America is a representative democracy. The government represents the people, and therefore whatever the government does, the people wanted.
Nice try IOZ, but I'm afraid my logic is unassailable.
Representative Democracy is a belief in social alchemy.
'if you consider these worthy electors as unable to look after their own interests themselves, how is it that they will know how to choose for themselves the shepherds who must guide them? And how will they be able to solve this problem of social alchemy, of producing a genius from the votes of a mass of fools?' Errico Malatesta
Malatesta makes an interesting, if drearily familiar point. I would ask: How do the wise elites select themselves from the sheep they will ultimately guide? Where do they come from indeed, if not from the mass of fools? What makes them different, what makes them "geniuses"?
"I still think a military response was not wrong in principle (and would have gotten unanimous Security Council approval had Bush-Cheney taken the trouble to ask), but that the actual consequences haven't been anything like anything I can support."
So you thought a project run by Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld would be a smoothly run operation? Forget any broader argument and focus exclusively on the people in charge. How could you have supported them in this war?
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