My Fellow Lefties
SHUMAN, MICHAEL H.
My Fellow Lefties . . . Stop it with the America-bashing. BY MICHAEL H. SHUMAN THE REV. JESSE JACKSON says that an eagle can only soar with two wings. But what if one wing refuses to fly? From...
...the latter intended to prevent them...
...Nine out of ten Americans wanted justice another way: through use of force to capture and justly punish the al Qaeda perpetrators...
...From September 12 onwards, the left-leaning press—magazines like the Nation and the Progressive and alternative newspapers like the Village Voice and the Bay Guardian—have fed their readers a steady diet of antiwar opinion...
...Bill Blum, an author of anti-CIA books frequently quoted by the undergraduate Left, argued that the terrorist hijackers "had a political purpose: retaliation for decades of military, economic and political oppression imposed upon the Middle East by The American Empire...
...the latter sought, however imperfectly, to avoid civilian targets...
...Besides this stunning failure of political and strategic analysis, progressives were insensitive to "the people" they claim to champion...
...bombing was essential, the argument went, to respect Ramadan and to ensure that millions of Afghans did not starve over the winter...
...This at least had the virtue of not making common cause with Osama bin Laden...
...The former intended to perpetrate attacks on U.S...
...Then progressives shifted arguments once again, this time to decry the civilian casualties from "indiscriminate" use of force by the U.S...
...In doing so, I fear, they have sullied more worthy progressive causes for years to come...
...The former increased the chances of civilian deaths by hiding among civilians...
...military action...
...Only the leadership of the Left confused its hatred of American militarism with the legitimate right—and need—for any nation to engage in self-defense...
...Christopher Hitchens branded the Taliban Islamic "fascists" early and often...
...But this suggestion ignored the fact that bin Laden was moving ahead with his publicly declared war against the infidel United States, and that we were—and are—in a race to stop him or else become victims of his next biological, chemical, or nuclear attack...
...the latter didn't...
...Not everyone on the left, it needs to be said, has been so irresponsible...
...Richard Falk courageously wrote in the Nation that this war was the first in his lifetime that he deemed just...
...And Todd Gitlin warns poignantly in Mother Jones against knee-jerk anti-Americanism...
...Moreover, they suggested that those who seek political change through violence against innocents are entitled to have their demands met—certainly a bizarre position for proponents of nonviolent change...
...The position of the Bush administration—that the best way to prevent a humanitarian disaster was to quickly oust the Taliban regime—turned out to be correct...
...Similar sentiments were expressed by Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, and various British columnists like John Pilger and Robert Fisk...
...While any civilian casualties of war are deplorable, and some of the criticisms of errant U.S...
...military...
...bombing, such as hitting a clearly marked Red Cross warehouse twice, are legitimate, the attempt to draw moral equivalence between the terrorists and U.S...
...Even if one is critical of American foreign policy, as I am, the timing and the tone of these comments were obscene, in that they reflected more sympathy for the terrorists than for the victims...
...The vast majority of women, blacks, Latinos, the elderly, and the poor all understood the purpose and justification of U.S...
...Yet, the formula was intended to suggest that any use of force was tantamount to revenge and therefore unjustified...
...Now that the first phase of the war against terrorism is over, I believe it's time for my fellow lefties to engage in a truly radical activity—serious self-criticism...
...Contrary to predictions from leftist skeptics, the Bush administration did not respond immediately with a massive counterstrike...
...This was, again, a slap at the American people...
...It took several weeks to build its case against bin Laden, to offer the Taliban peaceful ways out, and to construct a loose coalition of nations, including unlikely allies like Pakistan and Russia...
...Michael H. Shuman is the author of Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age, and was director of the Institute for Policy Studies from 1992 to 1998...
...By "justice," the Left meant that the United States should employ diplomatic tools, such as the World Court or an embargo, to press the Taliban to hand over the al Qaeda fighters...
...To ignore these distinctions seems to be but another slap at the victims of September 11...
...troops is reprehensible...
...But the vast majority of progressive opinion leaders were wrong in almost every respect...
...They predicted that American soldiers in Afghanistan would find themselves in a quagmire, unable to dislodge a tough Taliban resistance...
...While the World Trade Center site continued to smolder, a new slogan began to circulate: "Justice, Not Vengeance...
...The Left's first reaction after the September 11 attacks was to suggest that America was finally getting its just deserts...
...Indeed, strikingly little popular anger poured onto Main Street, and every responsible opinion leader, Democrat and Republican alike, condemned attacks on Arab Americans...
...They ridiculed the evidence pointing to Osama bin Laden...
...A halt to U.S...
...They warned that anti-American riots in Pakistan would topple Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf...
...civilians (and still may do so...
...Yet virtually all those progressives making this argument were largely unaware of the desperate plight of Afghan civilians before the war, and have all but dropped the issue since...
...When the bombing started, progressive commentators sounded humanitarian alarms...
...Currently circulating in progressive Internet listserves is a cut-and-paste catalogue of civilian casualties put together by Professor Marc Herold at the University of New Hampshire, who estimates that more than 3,000 Afghan civilians were killed by the U.S.-led campaign...
...Most Americans didn't want revenge...
...The former intended to kill civilians...
...Progressives, who were so unwilling to condemn the use of force by terrorists, were eager to condemn any use by the victims, before a single shot was even fired...
Vol. 7 • February 2002 • No. 22
