Leftists Embroiled in Never-Ending War

By MATT KENNARD, Columnist

During the Cold War the political left split in spectacular and rancorous fashion and like Humpty Dumpty they’ve never really put themselves back together again.

Back then, one side consisted of those who stayed blind to the crimes of Lenin and Stalin, atrocities culminating in the Gulag prison camps and the Moscow Trials. They stayed in the Communist Party (CP) through it all, arguing that Stalinism was preferable to the victory of predatory capitalism, or that all these atrocities were a means to a better end ― that dangerous ideology so beautifully rendered by Arthur Koestler in “Darkness at Noon.” Eric Hobsbawm, the famous Marxist historian, was one case of someone who refused to leave the CP even as the atrocities were coming to light, especially under Leonid Brezhnev.

On the other extreme, leftists and liberals embraced the U.S. and their putative war against communism, even when it was destroying democratically elected governments all over the world. They argued that the Popperian “open society” was in danger and anything went, from Pinochet to Suharto. Here you could find erstwhile lefties like Sidney Hook.

Then there were the Trostkyists who sat somewhere in the middle. They argued against the crimes of Stalin, snidely calling Stalinism “state capitalism,” and holding that it would have all been different if Leon Trotsky had succeeded Lenin instead of that autocratic sadist, Stalin. Near to them were the New Left who boasted minds like E.P. Thompson and Perry Anderson and Tariq Ali. They tried to cut a course with a new program which railed against both superpowers.

These debates on the left all crumbled at the same time as the Berlin Wall. There was the “End of History,” the final victory of so-called “liberal” “capitalist” “democracy.” It was a lazy consensus on the left, with only a few thinkers on the marginalized wing still railing against so-called neoliberal economics (traditional liberal economics didn’t argue for a completely unfettered private sphere, so it’s a misnomer), but they were an ever-marginalized faction; on a grand scale we all took a breather.

The general feeling is that this happy leftie consensus ended on 9/11 and when the “war on terror” began, but the rancor started in earnest before then, as the bombing of Yugoslavia commenced in 1999. NATO (which was set up as a bulwark against the Soviet Union) flexed its muscle against the regime of Slobodan Milosevic. Well, first off, why did NATO still exist after the Cold War ended? If it was meant to solidify the military alliance against the Soviet Union, what was the purpose afterward? Mull over that.

Anyway, with the war on Yugoslavia by NATO came the gleaming centerpiece of a new movement called “humanitarian intervention” led by the poster kids of 1990s liberalism, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.
In fact, it wasn’t that new: Every war through history has been fought for justice and altruism if you take the leaders of the countries that started them at their word. Anyway, the media went into overdrive with beautiful elegies to Western benevolence, the end of wars for economic or geopolitical objectives. Here we were coming to the aid of oppressed Kosovans against the brutal dictator (he was actually democratically elected) Slobodan Milosevic. Large parts of the left, from Ken Livingstone, former Mayor of London, to Paul Berman, the New York Renaissance man, cheered on this necessary war of altruism.

If you talk to your average Joe the Plumber on the street, or corporate journalist, they will tell you that we averted a holocaust there. In fact, the International War Crimes Tribunal came to a conclusion that 2,788 had been killed in Kosovo. That’s a serious crime, but compare that to contemporaneous crimes happening inside NATO, like Turkey’s atrocities against the Kurds, and you start to wonder what prompted Clinton and Blair into action.

The averting of genocide became an orthodoxy of the mainstream left and any demurral would be greeted with outbursts of hysteria about holocaust denial, etc. But in 2007 even the International Court of Justice found that the Serbian leadership was not guilty of genocide in Bosnia, where they carried out their most obscene atrocities, murdering 8,000 souls at Srebrenica.

But in the West, you would be forgiven for thinking this was a one-sided conflict as that is the uninterrupted presentation, but the wars that led to the breakup of Yugoslavia have seen atrocities on all sides. In fact, the Kosovo Liberation Army, a violent fundamentalist Islamic group, were agents of the West when they were carrying out atrocities against Kosovan Serbs and Gypsies. Many believe they were used to illicit a response (which would come in the crackdown starting in 1998) that served as a pretext for a NATO intervention. In the Croatian War of Independence in 1995, their Operation Storm offensive to retake Serbian parts of Croatia resulted in pogroms and ethnic cleansing that rivals Serbian crimes for barbarity. Some of those involved have been on trial for war crimes.

Because it was such a small sample of principled individuals that dared to stand up to the propaganda, this split in the left was merely a blip on the radar; it was an orthodoxy with every bad connotation of that word. But this same mind-set didn’t die and was transported wholeheartedly into the new “war on terror” after 9/11. The war in Iraq ― which had nothing to do with 9/11, which had no weapons of mass destruction ― was now framed as a “humanitarian intervention” against the barbarism of Saddam Hussein who gassed his own people (with our support), used chemical warfare against the Iranians (with our support) and committed genocide against the Kurds in the al-Anfal campaign (with our support). But this didn’t matter. Now, Paul Wolfowitz was the new Madeleine Albright, Saddam Hussein was Slobodan Milosevic, the Kurds were now the Kosovan Albanians and on we went, to a war supported by a significant portion of the intellectual “left.” A war by a Christian fundamentalist, far-right oil-industry Republican, to be fought for democracy. Yeah, right.

The “pro-war left” or the “anti-totalitarianism left” ballooned at this stage and took over the blogosphere in a huge way. From Harry’s Place to Nick Cohen to Oliver Kamm to Paul Berman, they were everywhere, talking about the democratic future for Iraq (with the minor detour of a bloody war). Tons of books followed, backing them up, from the compilation, “A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for the War in Iraq,” to “Anti-Totalitarianism: the Left-wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy,” “Terror and Liberalism,” blah, blah. When the war turned bad, when the U.S. used chemical weapons on a major Iraqi city, when they sold off all the oil, and built the biggest base in the world, they had to change the subject. So now they attacked the left that had been against the invasion of Iraq as “anti-Semites”, “fascists” and supporters of “Islamofascists.” This also gave birth to a load of books that lit up the media firmament but will soon be forgotten, from Nick Cohen’s dreary “What’s Left?”, to the recent “Left in Dark Times” from the ridiculous French poseur, Bernard-Henri Levi.

Until now, the part of the left that was principled and realistic about the war in Iraq has been reticent to fight back in book form. There was the prolix and dense offering from Scott Lucas early on, “The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the New American Century,” which didn’t really land the hefty punch it should have. But in recent weeks, we’ve had “The Liberal Defense of Murder” by blogger Richard Seymour, which charts the historical course of this so-called “humanitarian intervention” up to its current incarnation. And then there is Conor Foley, a former aid worker, who recently released “The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War,” which argues that humanitarian NGOs are becoming so powerful that they are affecting Western governments and pressuring them into military actions for which there is no legal basis in international law.

This is the latest stage in the long, stuttering fight-back of the anti-war left against the louder but cheap warmongering left. Let the battle commence.

Matt Kennard can be reached at MattKennard@gmail.com.