About Those Dirty Hippies
Andrew Sullivan describes how uncomfortable he felt in the presence of anti-war demonstrators because of "reflexive hostility to American power, partisan hatred of Bush, and blindness toward Saddam's atrocities." This is all being discussed in the context of "who was right" about Iraq back then. Most of us on the left have argued that the dirty hippies were right all along, whereas the serious journalists argued that they were courageous for recognizing evil. And the neocons, well, they were never wrong (Bush fucked it up!).
Here's what I think, if anybody cares. I agree that the antiwar demonstrators were not making cogent arguments in the streets. But when have protestors ever done so? A protest is about emotion, solidarity and sending a message. Unfortunately, the message most people got was that we were suddenly back in 1968. "No blood for oil" is not a sophisticated argument against the Iraq war but protests are not arguments, per se. So while I understand where Sullivan is coming from, I think he misses the fact that there were cogent arguments being made against the war but no one noticed either because they were in awe of Bush, terrified of the false connections the administration made between Iraq and al Qaeda, or convinced that the dirty hippies were the sole voice of the antiwar movement. I knew at the time (hell, I even wrote about it) that no protest on earth (and they were worldwide) was going to stop this war. I knew Bush did not care about world opinion, just like he does not care about world opinion today. So I supported the protests even though I knew they had neither substance nor influence because stopping the war was (is) my goal.
There are valid criticisms to be made of the antiwar left. It is true that they are reflxiveky hostile to American power, as Sullivan claims, but they don't suffer from BHS and they weren't "blind" to Saddam's atrocities (don't you see how evil he is!?). I think the protestors were wrong in describing the motivations of the Bush administration (empire, oil) but that is a moot point given no one knows why the hell we are in Iraq. I certainly don't. WMDs? Nope. Ties to terrorism? Nope. Spreading democracy? Nope. battling Islamic fanaticism? Nope. I doubt even Bush knows why he's in Iraq. I would surmise that a bunch of previously unrelated interests jelled after 9/11 that made regime change in Iraq desirable. It satisfied personal vengence for Bush (Saddam took a shot at my daddy!), intellectual hubris for the neocons, and political ambitions for the GOP. I believe these people truly believed their own bullshit. I think they honestly thought they would be greeted as liberators, free markets would flourish, tyrants everywhere would shake in their boots, and the Middle East would be on its way to democracy and peace. If you read some of what the principle proponents of the Iraq war wrote at the time, they were unequivocal on these points. They really believed it. The criticism, as many pointed out before being drowned out by the drums of war, was that this was pure fantasy. I knew you couldn't just remove the dictator that was holding an artificial country together by force and expect a Jeffersonian democracy to flourish. I knew you couldn't privatize economy before using the government to modernize it. And I knew that chaos was going to ensue in the Middle East as a result.
As I've said before, I take no pleasure in having been right about these things. It makes me sick that this war was essentially unpreventable (particularly after the one man who might have stopped it, Colin Powell, forever ruined his legacy by feeding bullshit to the UN). And it's not as though one had to perfectly, accurately predict the consequences of invading Iraq. I think the spectre of those consequences were enough to make any rational person think twice about this adventure. But people didn't think twice. They took Bush at face value as he lied to the world. The scar of 9/11 was exploited most cynically. I remember when Bush gave his ultimatum speech two days before "shock and awe" and the channel I was watching jumped to Times Square after the address. The camera dispassionately watched two fratboys whoop after the speech and say something like "go get 'em W!" before heading off to debase themselves somewhere. That was the environment we were in. The reason the hippies get singled out is because they were making an unsophisticated argument at a time when unsophisticated arguements for the war were in vogue. No one listened to the nuanced, serious arguments against invading Iraq because the Bush administration had made factuality a subjective experience and independent thought tantamount to treason. The hippies were and still are a scapegoat for the opposition. That was the world we lived in back then. And despite popular opinion turning decidedly and permanently against this president and against this war, our national conversation is shockingly slow to catch up, nearly four years later.