The Military State of America and the Democratic Left Reply by James B. Rule
Rule, James B.
ARGUMENTS James B. Rule Replies Bad faith, indeed! George Packer’s opening sentences in the New York Times Magazine article he published as the Iraq invasion loomed read, “If you’re a...
...A little more than two months after these words appeared, an antiwar demonstration numbering somewhere between three hundred thousand and one million filled the streets of New York...
...But I think that’s really not what’s eating him...
...People sometimes seek state power that will protect them, but no less often need protection from states...
...Right now, Walzer argues, “there is only a wasteland” beyond the state...
...The effort to discredit popular efforts to block what is now revealed as a horrifically irresponsible lurch to war—or to airbrush those efforts out of existence—is an insult to those who rallied against the war...
...Michael Walzer, on the other hand, professes to find my message excessively “high-minded...
...These include nascent international and supranational legal authorities with powers to level sanctions for abuse of state power, as in the cases of Chile or the former Yugoslavia...
...Similar demonstrations occurred on the same date in other U.S...
...Supposedly I aim “to avoid any struggle” with authentic evil-doers...
...Growing diversity in levels and forms of legitimate authority, and attenuation of exclusive state power, is something we should all support...
...More interestingly, Walzer notes that some unilateral invasions have produced life-saving results, and he argues that some of the world’s people would prefer to live under stronger states...
...But in fact, recent decades have produced beginnings of many new forms of authority above and beyond state power...
...But I hold that we should work for a world marked by less recourse to unilateral invasion and less reliance on state power as the exclusive form of political authority in general...
...This includes, I believe, most Dissent readers and writers...
...war aims in Iraq—from those who dismissed efforts to stop the war in the first place ring hollow...
...Yes and yes—sometimes...
...We hardly think of ourselves as “controlled by the furthest reaches of the American left,” as Packer described us...
...But Walzer really loses it when it comes to “Islamo-fascism...
...Among our natural allies on the democratic Left, I simply hope that hardheaded analysis—moralizing very much included—will reinforce the conviction that a hypermilitarized, imperial America is an obstacle to our key values...
...I fear—hoping I’m wrong—that he’s resisting my central appeal to retool the United States as a “normal country,” halving its military budget and renouncing its imperial ambitions...
...Seven years later, pleas for “responsibility”— in the form of open-ended pursuit of U.S...
...ARGUMENTS James B. Rule Replies Bad faith, indeed...
...He casts me as “outraged by the claim that ‘Islamo-fascists’ … are our real enemy...
...A number of his attributions to my essay are simply unwarranted by anything I wrote— particularly the serious charge that I deny “any possible moral conviction” to “anyone who disagrees with” me...
...Sometimes a forceful response is unavoidable—just as I wrote...
...And if I’m a liberal hawk, the pope’s a Marxist...
...Had these utterly legitimate protests been heard, the massive destruction triggered by this disastrous invasion would have been averted...
...cities and abroad...
...The neoconservatives who gave us the Iraq War certainly have their own moral convictions, as do other worldviews foreign to our own...
...But my words could hardly have been more explicit: “The one thing we can be sure of is that the supply of ugly movements and regimes around the world shows no sign of running short...
...But that is hardly to say that we should support the open-ended military ambitions flying under that discredited flag of convenience, the so-called “War on Terror...
...More to the point, why is there no antiwar movement that you’d want to join...
...allegedly I “say there is nobody out there to fight with...
...George Packer’s opening sentences in the New York Times Magazine article he published as the Iraq invasion loomed read, “If you’re a liberal, why haven’t you joined the antiwar movement...
Vol. 57 • January 2010 • No. 1
