Tag Archives: Conor Friedersdorf

Iraq War anniversary apologies

Media, Politics, , , , , , , , ,
Courtesy of PolicyMic.com.
Courtesy of PolicyMic.com.

There’s an interesting discussion taking place on Corey Robin’s blog regarding Ezra Klein’s apology for supporting the Iraq War:

Like many people who supported the Iraq War, Ezra Klein has written his apologia.

But he fails to identify—indeed, repeats—his biggest mistake in supporting the war: When thinking of the US government, he  thinks “we.”

Iraq, [Kenneth Pollack] said, shouldn’t be America’s top priority. We should first focus on destroying al-Qaeda. We should then work on the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. Only then should we turn to Hussein. Moreover, when and if we did invade Iraq, we should do so only as part of a coordinated, multilateral operation…

…

After all, what other chance would we get to topple Hussein?

…

It wasn’t worth doing precisely because the odds were high that we couldn’t do it “right.”

Klein doesn’t think a state invaded another state; he thinks “we” went to war. He identifies with the state. Whether he’s supporting or dissenting from a policy, he sees himself as part of it. He sees himself on the jeeps with the troops. That’s why his calls for skepticism, for not taking things on authority, ring so hollow. In the end, he’s on the team. Or the jeep.

I’ve learned a lot from reading the comments. (Now there’s a sentence you rarely see on the Internet these days.) One commenter, Justin, replied:

Maybe I’m too naive, but isn’t the problem that more people DON’T identify with the government? If we identify with the government, then its failings are our failings and there’s more motivation to change things because they’re being done in our names. If we don’t identify with it, then it’s just this abstract entity that we can have nothing to do with, which leads to the government abusing its power because none of us feel responsible for it.

I guess I don’t think it’s a problem that Klein is “on the team” – it’s that most of us aren’t on it and thus don’t have any say on what’s happening.

Another commenter, Ned Ludd, raised a different point:

Because he supported the stablishment position on Iraq, Ezra Klein was able to rise into the ranks of the establishment. Back in January 2007, Jebediah Reed of the now-defunct Radar Magazine took a look at some of the career trajectories of pundits who supported the war (Tom Friedman, Peter Beinart, Fareed Zakaria, Jeffrey Goldberg) and the subsequent careers of vocal opponents of the invasion (Robert Scheer, William. S. Lind, Jonathan Schell, Scott Ritter). If Klein had been against the war, he never would have been promoted from obscurity to the pages of the Washington Post.

All of these points raise the question of how such a calamity as Iraq can be avoided in the future. As The Atlantic‘s Elspeth Reeve has ably demonstrated, the 10-year anniversary edition of self-flagellation for supporting the Iraq War has blossomed so ubiquitously as to necessitate a taxonomy of apology bullet points: “I was but a lowly worm,” “I was fooled by bad intelligence,” and so on.

However, what many such Iraq War apologists and (much later) apologizers seem to have in common is an inability to grasp their deeper failing for directing much of their vitriol at the anti-war crowd and castigating those people (who turned out to be very right in the end) as a bunch of hippies. Freddie deBoer remembers this specifically:

You know, I’m reading all of the Iraq mea culpas, some good, some bad. But they are all systematically ignoring one of the most obvious and salient aspects of the run up to the war: the incredible power of personal resentment against antiwar people, or what antiwar people were perceived to be. As someone who was involved in day-to-day antiwar activism at the time, the visceral hatred of those opposing the war, and particularly the activists, was impossible to miss. It wasn’t opposition. It wasn’t disagreement. It was pure, irrational hatred, frequently devolving into accusations of antiwar activists being effectively part of the enemy. Yet for as visible and important as this distaste was for the debate, it’s missing from the postmortems.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has similar memories:

I am not a radical. But more than anything the Iraq War taught me the folly of mocking radicalism. It seemed, back then, that every “sensible” and “serious” person you knew — left or right — was for the war. And they were all wrong. Never forget that they were all wrong. And never forget that the radicals with their drum circles and their wild hair were right.

And Conor Friedersdorf compiles a roundup of mockery aimed at anti-war protesters before and during the war.

It’s enough to make one wonder if we ever learn anything, at all, from history.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Why (not) to vote for Obama

Politics, , , , ,

As the election approaches, I’ve found myself waffling among various choices:

  • voting to re-elect President Obama
  • voting “none of the above”
  • voting “Foreign Policy: Ron Paul; Economic Policy: Paul Krugman; Social Policy: Barney Frank”
  • (lastly, voting for Tom Brady)

You’ll notice “vote for Romney” is not present anywhere on that list. Strange as this may sound, during the Republican primaries, I honestly believed the whole “Romney is out of touch with the average voter” meme was simply on-point messaging from a well-oiled Democratic PR machine. But it turned out that the spin was a lot closer to the truth than I’d initially imagined (either that or the Democratic PR team is even better than I’d thought). I wouldn’t have voted for him anyway, as I think Obama’s a far better choice. But my “unfavorable” (to borrow polling terminology) impression of him has greatly increased in recent months.

That said, I hardly think Obama has come out smelling like roses. The Atlantic recently published an essay by Conor Friedersdorf (currently the most popular article on its site) titled “Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama.” In it, Friedersdorf identifies three key disappointments in the Obama administration: drone strikes in Pakistan, extrajudicial assassinations of American citizens, and a conflict in Libya that was not approved by Congress:

In different ways, each of these transgressions run contrary to candidate Obama’s 2008 campaign. (To cite just one more example among many, Obama has done more than any modern executive to wage war on whistleblowers. In fact, under Obama, Bush-era lawbreakers, including literal torturers, have been subject to fewer and less draconian attempts at punishment them than some of the people who conscientiously came forward to report on their misdeeds.) Obama ran in the proud American tradition of reformers taking office when wartime excesses threatened to permanently change the nature of the country. But instead of ending those excesses, protecting civil liberties, rolling back executive power, and reasserting core American values, Obama acted contrary to his mandate. The particulars of his actions are disqualifying in themselves. But taken together, they put us on a course where policies Democrats once viewed as radical post-9/11 excesses are made permanent parts of American life.

There is a candidate on the ballot in at least 47 states, and probably in all 50, who regularly speaks out against that post-9/11 trend, and all the individual policies that compose it. His name is Gary Johnson, and he won’t win. I am supporting him because he ought to. Liberals and progressives care so little about having critiques of the aforementioned policies aired that vanishingly few will even urge that he be included in the upcoming presidential debates. If I vote, it will be for Johnson. What about the assertion that Romney will be even worse than Obama has been on these issues? It is quite possible, though not nearly as inevitable as Democrats seem to think. It isn’t as though they accurately predicted the abysmal behavior of Obama during his first term, after all. And how do you get worse than having set a precedent for the extrajudicial assassination of American citizens? By actually carrying out such a killing? Obama did that too. Would Romney? I honestly don’t know. I can imagine he’d kill more Americans without trial and in secret, or that he wouldn’t kill any. I can imagine that he’d kill more innocent Pakistani kids or fewer. His rhetoric suggests he would be worse. I agree with that. Then again, Romney revels in bellicosity; Obama soothes with rhetoric and kills people in secret.

To hell with them both.

I not only sympathize with Friedersdorf’s thesis. I am nearly convinced by it. In fact, maybe I already am. (I’m still not sure how I’ll vote, although I’m fairly certain it won’t be for Tom Brady.) But I recently fell upon an equally arresting argument for the opposite position, and from the unlikeliest of sources: comedian and Daily Show correspondent John Hodgman (perhaps best known for playing the clunky PC in those then-ubiquitous “I’m a Mac” commercials).

On a web site called 90 Days, 90 Reasons, which describes its mission as compelling “a wide range of cultural figures to explain why they’re voting for Obama in 2012, in the hopes that this might re-inspire the grassroots army that got Obama elected in the first place,” Hodgman does so in hilarious yet eloquent fashion:

Like many, I first heard of Barack Obama when he spoke at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Though I lived at that time on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I was listening to him on the radio at our summer house in the five college area of Western Massachusetts. I say this to set the scene, and also to re-assert my credentials as an elite, affluent, northeastern liberal, and thus, at that time, a non-American. In case you had forgotten.

Listening to Obama, I realized I agreed with him on most issues, but mostly I was electrified by the premise of the speech, which was essentially that we are all part of the same country, but which I took to mean “people in blue states are actual humans as well.” There weren’t many people saying this in 2004. Not even many Democrats. And while I was instantly thralled by this on a purely selfish level, I also liked that the sentiment flowed in reverse as well. I have disagreements with, but no need to demonize, conservative America, as indeed many of them are my family, even right here in supposedly liberal Massachusetts. We are all one, he said in 2004, and I was so excited. This guy is going to lose so BEAUTIFULLY, I thought.

But it didn’t happen that way. I can place the moment I knew I was wrong. In July of 2008, I was driving past the empty hole where the new World Trade Center had STILL not been built, and I heard on the radio (I LOVE PUBLIC RADIO, REMEMBER) that Obama had reversed his position on the update of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and would agree with a compromise that would grant telecom companies immunity from prosecution for cooperating with warrantless wiretaps. I had to look all that up, because I honestly forgot what the specific issue was at the time. All I remember was that knife twist in my gut of deep disappointment. I learned then that Obama was going to disappoint; that his ideals were tempered by a kind of rough pragmatism; and that he would be willing to personally alienate ME. ME OF ALL PEOPLE. The one person who knew best about how to run a presidential campaign and ranked Obama’s performance as a candidate solely upon his adherence to a few very specific positions that I cared most about. HOW COULD HE WIN THIS ELECTION WITHOUT ME? And then I realized: Oh. How can he win the election WITH an asshole like me?

Now that I’ve looked it up, I still disagree with his decision on the FISA update. But what I remember is this: not only would I have to get used to that knife twist of disappointment, I would have to learn to enjoy it. Because that’s the moment that I realized that Obama actually intended to win…

And of course, the cost of losing is very high. As a supporter of health care reform, same sex marriage, women’s rights, tax fairness, a domestic policy responsive to the realities of the present day as opposed to toxic nostalgia, and an international policy that punishes our enemies more than it rewards our private contractors, I may not always agree with the speed or execution of Obama’s policies. But I know that a loss this year would not be seen as a noble failure. It would be seen as a repudiation of these values for a long time to come. Losses transform ideals into irrelevant fantasy, and idealists into weepy self-pitiers, like old-school Red Sox fans and Tea Partiers and people who really believe some day that Firefly might come back.

There’s more, of course, and it’s definitely worth reading the whole thing. As for me, I remain undecided but, like the U.S. as a whole, leaning Obama.