Dilemma's Definition: The Left and Iraq

By DAVID CARR

April 17, 2003

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/featured_articles/20030417thursday.html

This has been a tough war for commentators on the American left. To hope for defeat meant cheering for Saddam Hussein. To hope for victory meant cheering for President Bush.

The toppling of Mr. Hussein, or at least a statue of him, has made their arguments even harder to defend. Liberal writers for ideologically driven magazines like The Nation and for less overtly political ones like The New Yorker did not predict a defeat, but the terrible consequences many warned of have not happened.

Now liberal commentators must address the victory at hand and confront an ascendant conservative juggernaut that asserts United States might can set the world right.

The left's debate over this war has been agonized, full of mixed messages and sharp turns as commentators struggled with the military success and the obvious joy of the Iraqis. Sometimes the debate has taken place in one publication.

The New Yorker, something of a liberal beacon, was both for and against the war, depending on the week. In this week's issue, David Remnick, the editor, wrote in a nuanced but clear editorial in the Talk of the Town section that removing Mr. Hussein was worth the risk, saying that "to feel no sense of relief and joy in the prospect of a world without him is to be possessed of a grudging heart."

But just a week before, Hendrik Hertzberg, the executive editor, cautioned in the same space that it was "already too late for the rosy scenario of the cakewalk conservatives."

Mr. Remnick said in an interview over the weekend, "The issue of Iraq is filled with complexity, perhaps like no other I have seen in the past five years, and I think it is appropriate to reflect that complexity."

In an interview last week, Mr. Hertzberg spoke of the conflict many liberals have been living with since the war began.

"It has been agonizing and excruciating," he said. "It's not like the 2000 elections or the Bush tax cut, where I felt a certainty about what is right."

"Iraq is a battle, not a war," Mr. Hertzberg added. "In that war, the larger problems still exist. It will take some time before we find out what effect this battle has on the larger war."

For unreconstructed pacifists, like many of the writers for The Nation, the war with Iraq appears like most others, unnecessary and ill-intentioned. But among a broad spectrum of left-leaning thinkers, the war — an invasion of a sovereign republic — was a much more complicated matter.

After the Vietnam War, a liberal dialectic of opposing the war but supporting the troops emerged. But opposition to war in general, an important tenet for many liberals, was challenged by military interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo. Those exercises of United States might became a new kind of "good war," battles waged to end "ethnic cleansing" and bring human rights to far-flung lands. The hawk became the new dove for many who believed that resolutions from the United Nations were a poor substitute for vigorous intervention in the face of genocide.

"The nonpacifist left, which is to say the bulk of the left, is not as squeamish about armed conflict as they were 10 years ago," said Paul Glastris, editor in chief of The Washington Monthly.

The forays of the 1990's were followed closely by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which convinced many that a policy of containment was a wistful notion. Many liberals found their patriotism but lost their voice as the specter of 3,000 civilian casualties served as a mute button on what had been a reflexive opposition to preventive military strikes. President Bush has suggested that the country has been at war ever since, and at the time, Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said that people "need to watch what they say."

Dan Perkins, a cartoonist whose strip "Tom Tomorrow" frequently satirizes the Bush administration, said, "Being against the war is somewhat analogous to defending the rights of Nazis to march in Skokie."

Michael Kinsley, the founding editor of Slate and a former editor of The New Republic, said the rules for commentary had changed since Vietnam. "People have adopted the convention that you can say anything before a war starts, but once it does, you have to be very nervous about criticism." The start of the war brought a kind of transference, a shift from questions about the morality of a given act to a more prosaic argument over tactics.

The winding down of the war may allow the resumption of a deeper discussion about the war's objectives, one that writers can address without being labeled unpatriotic.

While television news showed images of Iraqis celebrating in the streets last week, Eric Alterman, a liberal commentator and author, addressed the Hudson Institute, a conservative research group in Washington. David Brooks, a writer who supported the war along with most of the other conservatives in the room, introduced him.

"He said that they ought to be extra nice to me and others who opposed the efforts to liberate the people of Iraq because we were having a really bad day," said Mr. Alterman, the author of "What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News." "I explained to him and the crowd that my opposition to the war was not because I didn't think we could win."

For writers and editors who live at the far left of liberalism, little has changed. Last week, with the much criticized war plan suddenly looking brilliant, The Nation suggested that Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld should resign.

"Even if people think this is a great military victory, we wanted to be out front on this issue," said Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation. "There is much to say about whether this is the last unilateralist war by the Bush regime or the first in a series to reshape the world in the Bush image."

Many liberals have criticized the president's ever-changing rationales for the war, but Christopher Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair and a former contributor to The Nation who left that magazine over ideological differences, said it was those who were against the war who were guilty of revisionism.

"Their prediction and deepest hope was that the black shirts of the fedayeen were going to win or force a stalemate," he said. "Just like they predicted, the Arab street did explode, but with the joy of freedom, which is not the one that they meant, so they are furious and depressed."

Mr. Perkins, who writes a Weblog at www.thismodernworld.com, said he liked scenes of liberation as much as the next person but did not believe that the Bush administration was motivated by the plight of Iraqis.

"Anybody who believes that the liberation of the Iraqi people is more than a happy afterthought is kidding themselves," he said.

And some commentators said the absence of Mr. Hussein, or his body, might make it easier, not harder, to challenge the military effort that brought him down.

"No one wanted to be seen as serving as a human shield on Saddam. I am happy to see Iraqis cheering in the streets," said Joan Walsh, news editor of Salon, the online magazine. "But I think it gets very interesting now. How do we restore order? How do we restore infrastructure and build democratic institutions? And we are still confronted by the costs of going it alone. Since our job is to critique and analyze, it is hardly finished."