Leftist opposition to the war in Afghanistan faded in November and December of last year, not only because of the
success of the war but also because of the enthusiasm with which so many Afghanis greeted that success. The
pictures of women showing their smiling faces to the world, of men shaving their beards, of girls in school, of boys
playing soccer in shorts: all this was no doubt a slap in the face to leftist theories of American imperialism, but also
politically disarming.

Hmmm, so, the oppressed people of a totalitarian regime are happy to be freed?

And this is news to anyone?

But the world is a bit more complicated than that.

Earlier, we were willing to deal with the Taliban as long as oil was the subject.

Why didn't we care about their actions then?

There was (and is) still a lot to worry about: refugees, hunger, minimal law and order.

Like I said, the world is a very complicated place.

But it was suddenly clear, even to many opponents of the war, that the Taliban regime had been the biggest obstacle to any serious effort to address the looming humanitarian crisis, and it was the American war that removed the obstacle.

Please note that it was also the US that supported the Taliban in the first place.

History is so much simpler if you skip it.

It looked (almost) like a war of liberation, a humanitarian intervention.

Yep. Almost. As long as you skiped history.

But the war was primarily neither of these things; it was a preventive war, designed to make it impossible to train terrorists in Afghanistan and to plan and organize attacks like that of September 11.

No. It was a "feel good" war. A war to show that we're tougher than those terrorists. A war to show that we can bring the battle to them.

Except that they weren't there anymore.

We let them escape.

So we re-phrased our "war" on "terror" to a "war" to "free Afghanistan from the evil Taliban".

And that war was never really accepted, in wide sections of the left, as either just or necessary.

How long have we been fighting? How much money have we spent? And we >STILL< don't have ObL? Wasn't ObL the primary target of the "war"? But when we lost him, we decided to fight what we could "win".

Recall the standard arguments against it: that we should have turned to the UN, that we had to prove the guilt of al-Qaeda and the Taliban and then organize international trials, and that the war, if it was fought at all, had to be fought without endangering civilians.

Instead, we have a war that is killing innocents without proof of their guilt. That's something to be proud of.

The last point was intended to make fighting impossible.

Nope. But if they kill civilians and we kill civilians, what is the difference between us?

Oh, the civilians >WE< kill die for a "good" cause?

I haven\ufffdt come across any arguments that seriously tried to describe how this (or any) war could be fought without putting civilians at risk, or to ask what degree of risk might be permissible, or to specify the risks that American soldiers should accept in order to reduce the risk of civilian deaths.

Killing innocent civilians is what the terrorists did. So, how are we different from them?

The truth is that most leftists were not committed to having a coherent view about things like that; they were committed to opposinf the war, and they were prepared to oppose it without regard to its causes or character and without any visible concern about preventing future terrorist attacks.

Let's break that down, shall we?

"...without regard to its causes..." - ORIGINALLY, we were going in to get ObL. We didn't get him and the focus of the "war" changed. Now, you don't hear ANYTHING about ObL. He doesn't seem like much of a target. The "cause" of the "war" is "cause we're bigger than you". Anyone claiming anything else needs to explain why we were willing to support and deal with the Taliban BEFORE the attack.

"...without regard to its ... character..." - Again, ORIGINALLY, the "war" was about something else. Now it has changed to meet what we can accomplish. That is "character"?

"...without any visible concern about preventing future terrorist attacks." - The terrorists were SAUDI ARABIANS! Killing Afghanistans won't stop Saudi's from attacking us.

At the moment, most of the numbers are propaganda; there is no reliable accounting.

Strange, isn't it? How we just can't seem to figure out how many civilians we've killed. Even plus or minus a hundred.

But the claim that the numbers matter in just this way, that the 3120th death determines the injustice of the war, is in any case wrong.

They kill civilians, we kill civilians. What's the difference?

It denies one of the most basic and best understood moral distinctions: between premeditated murder and unintended killing.

WRONG!!! Putting a bomb into an occupied building is in NO FUCKING WAY OR SHAPE "unintended killing".

And the denial isn\ufffdt accidental, as if the people making it just forgot about, or didn\ufffdt know about, the everyday moral world.

Ah, now we get to the "moral" positions. Well, everyone already knows that I'm a moral relativists so.....

The denial is willful: unintended killing by Americans in Afghanistan counts as murder.

YOU FUCKING PUT A BOMB IN AN OCCUPIED BUILDING!!!!! How "unintended" can THAT be?!?

Once again, filtering. Make the words work for what you WANT them to believe.

This can\ufffdt be true anywhere else, for anybody else.

A man opens fire at a school recess. Shooting into a crowd of children. Unintended?

A man opens fire at work. Unintended?

A gang-member opens fire at a school in a drive-by. Unintended?

The radical failure of the left\ufffds response to the events of last fall raises a disturbing question: can there be a decent left in a superpower?

"Failure"? Failure in what? How?

Maybe the guilt produced by living in such a country and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics.

Maybe.

Or, maybe the old saw about power corrupting is true? When no one can strike back at you, your "morality" is automatically superior to their's.

The logic of the bully.

Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger, and self-hate are the inevitable result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power.

Maybe.

Or maybe it is an attempt to show just what America (shouldn't that be "The US"? "America also contains Canada and South America) is accomplishing with its power. Supporting dictatorships around the world. Then killing their citizens in "just" wars (sounds sort of like "holy" wars, doesn't it?) when that regime doesn't match our goals.

Certainly, all those emotions were plain to see in the left=s reaction to September 11, in the failure to register the horror of the attack or to acknowledge the human pain it caused, in the schadenfreude of so many of the first responses, the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved.

Hmmmm, ever wonder why so many klansmen wanted to elect a black woman as grand dragon? Please try to stick to facts.

Many people on the left recovered their moral balance in the weeks that followed; there is at least the beginning of what should be a long process of self-examination. But many more have still not brought themselves to think about what really happened.

And I'm sure that >YOU< are the one who KNOWS what the "right" "moral balance" should be.

We might begin to worry about this question by looking at oppositional politics in older imperial states. I can\ufffdt do that in any sustained way (historians take note), only very sketchily.

Really? Let me help you.

Vietnam

Korea

For wasn\ufffdt France the birthplace of enlightenment, universal values, and human rights?

Huh?!?

Why shouldn\ufffdt the American story be like these two, with long years of healthy oppositionist politics, and only episodic resentment?

In a word, "education". We know see the atrocities we ACTIVELY support.

Wasn\ufffdt America a beacon of light to the old world, a city on a hill, an unprecedented experiment in democratic politics?

One of the last nations to give up slavery? Where women were not allowed to vote until when? When blacks were not allowed to vote until WHEN? Segregation? Or, more recently, where you could legaly be fired for being gay?

I grew up with the Americanism of the popular front in the 1930s and 1940s; I look back on it now and think that the Communist Party=s effort to create a leftist pop culture, in an instant, as the party line turned, was kitchy and manipulative--and also politically very smart.

So, "leftist" == Commy stooge?

I think I should end this rant on that note.