`Above All, Do No Harm': The War in Iraq and Dissent: Replies
Walzer, Michael
JIM RULE has provided a textbook example of what I called in the last issue of Dissent "the great crossover" ("All God's Children Got Values," Spring 2005). The political projects that he...
...MICHAEL WALZER'S most recent book is Politics and Passion...
...We once called ourselves revolutionaries, didn't we...
...What risks is Jim prepared to take for the sake of a great social transformation...
...From the Dissent community...
...Should we have purged the dissenting editors from our pages...
...The worst of all this, for Dissent and its readers, is that this debacle has received support in these pages...
...I am not criticizing the crossover, just describing it...
...Now the revolutionaries seem to be on the other side...
...But Rule's version of the crossover seems to me incomplete in one respect and much too extreme in another...
...The political projects that he rejects—"schemes involving vast short-term suffering on behalf of speculative goals of sweeping historical transformation"— are of course classic left-wing schemes...
...If he tries to specify the acceptable and unacceptable risks, then he is engaged in a useful argument with the very people he wants to ban from our pages...
...From the left generally...
...Jim wants to give no space at all to those revolutionaries who sought historical transformations in the Middle East—at great risk, obviously, to the people living there...
...and that in the two years since the war, we have given about three times as much space to critics of the war as to defenders...
...Neoliberal economists, for example, believe that the global redistribution that Jim and I favor would be disastrous for the very people we want to help...
...that in our Spring 2003 symposium on the war, six of the eight writers opposed the invasion of Iraq...
...If he says, none at all, then he has withdrawn from political life...
...Note, please, that we have printed three of Jim's pieces against the war...
...Isn't Jim's certainty about these matters at odds with his commitment to humility and Popperian uncertainty...
...there are good reasons for it...
...From the editorial board...
...At the same time, his crossover is much too extreme if its maxim is, "Above all, do no harm...
...Much to the discredit of Dissent, its pages have echoed the Washington line . . ." There should have been no disagreement at all on this issue, despite our commitment (Jim's, too) to disagreement on so many others...
...It is incomplete because of the Old Left certainty with which he condemns Dissent for publishing articles by his opponents...
...What are the odds that they might be right...
...So, what ought to have been done...
...And the projects he supports— amoaerate steps toward incremental improvement" taken with great humility about what we are able to know and do—are positively Burkean, classically conservative...
...It is impossible to carry through any significant political reform, domestic or international, without risking harm to some people...
Vol. 52 • July 2005 • No. 3
