The Military State of America and the Democratic Left Responses by George Packer and Michael Walzer
Rule, James B.
ARGUMENTS George Packer Responds Jim Rule’s reference to me is hard to parse, because the language is vague, but he’s essentially saying that anyone who now warns against a swift and...
...But Jim wants to get past state sovereignty...
...Michael Walzer Responds Jim Rule has written a wonderfully bracing but also a strangely high-minded critique of United States foreign policy...
...He doesn’t say...
...But, again, he never tells us how or where this is “happening...
...By “high-minded” I mean first of all abstracted from all the difficult decisions of past and present policy making...
...Where else on the left is that possible...
...So, let’s cut the military budget and renounce wars like Iraq 2003...
...Fearing a military struggle, Jim aims to avoid any struggle: he seems to say that there is nobody out there to fight with...
...He is especially outraged by the claim that “Islamo-fascists” (rather than liberal hawks) are our enemy...
...We need to think much more seriously than Jim does here about how to live in it, and we need to listen more closely than he seems willing to do to intelligent people who disagree with us about how to do that...
...But Islamic radicalism is a powerful force in the world today, and surely secular liberals and leftists ought to be worried by it—ought even to be ready to engage in an ideological struggle against it...
...There is no engagement with (what we used to call) the real world...
...He seems to believe that anyone who thinks that is just a mercenary intellectual in the service of American militarism...
...George Packer is a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of the new book Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade, which includes essays previously published in Dissent...
...military intervention in Bosnia (and presumably also in Kosovo, where the argument for intervening was pretty much the same...
...Perhaps he is only against unilateral U.S...
...interventions—but he doesn’t say that either...
...As such it’s an argument no one can answer, and no one should make without solid evidence...
...Maybe one day there will be pleasant pastures “beyond” the state...
...But here’s the rub: he says that he favors only multilateral humanitarian interventions...
...That is easy to say, especially if you avoid talking about the many occasions when people are being massacred and no multilateral agency is interested in intervening...
...This isn’t an argument about merits, it’s about motives...
...ARGUMENTS George Packer Responds Jim Rule’s reference to me is hard to parse, because the language is vague, but he’s essentially saying that anyone who now warns against a swift and complete withdrawal from Iraq must be trying to justify an earlier decision to support the war...
...But it’s not necessary, in order to do that, to pretend that the world isn’t a desperately fearful place...
...Right now, no political leader in his right mind would entrust the safety of his people to any international organization...
...And he is ready, he says, to support military intervention to stop massacres and ethnic cleansing...
...What does he think of the unilateral Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia, the unilateral Indian intervention in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), the unilateral Tanzanian intervention in Uganda...
...Readers will find that it was a discussion about the pre-war debate over Iraq among liberals who supported the Balkan interventions of the 1990s...
...Right now, there is only a wasteland...
...Michael Walzer is the co-editor of Dissent and author, among other works, of Just and Unjust Wars...
...He thought the Iraq War was utterly wrong, and so he is critical of some liberal hawks, but I don’t see how he can be critical of liberal hawkishness...
...Right now, what the most oppressed and impoverished people in the world most urgently need is a decent and effective sovereign state...
...In the world as it is today, only sovereign states can provide these services...
...Rule’s evidence is an article I wrote for the New York Times Magazine in December 2002...
...And I mean, second, that his piece is an exercise in moralizing—in the bad sense of that term, where anyone who disagrees with him is denied any possible moral conviction...
...The “liberal hawks” are his first choice among enemies—though I think that he is a liberal hawk himself: he seems to support, at least in retrospect, U.S...
...The article listed eight arguments on each side of the debate and it profiled six liberal thinkers, who split half and half and, in a few cases, were internally conflicted...
...He is a hawk for some occasions, as are I and many others...
...For myself, I would like to see a wide range of disagreement about all the hard questions in the pages of Dissent...
...This is obviously true for Tibetans, Kurds, and Palestinians, but it is also true of people across Africa and in many parts of Asia, living in failed states, ruled by warlords, without effective police, without welfare systems or functioning schools...
...He thinks that the most important thing happening in the world today is the growth of international institutions and the erosion of state sovereignty...
...In short, the article gave roughly equal consideration to positions for and against a war...
...Rule’s quotations and characterizations are so misleading that I have to conclude—with this evidence—that he isn’t arguing in good faith...
...Should we stand by and watch the killing...
Vol. 57 • January 2010 • No. 1
