For some reason, when I wanted to post a comment to this post at Reading A1 it was forbidden, so I’ll post it here. First, some context.
Michael at Reading A1 took to task Marc Cooper, yet another pseudo-Democrat who was wringing his hand on the lack of “viable alternatives” coming from the anti-war movement for the mess in Iraq. Michael correctly pointed out that it’s not the anti-war movement’s job to do this: we’re not in power,
we’re not listened to by Bush and co anyway and the only way that we can get any traction on this issue is to keep on calling loudly to get the troops out. So what is the motive for Cooper to criticise the anti-war movement for being too shrill as well as having the wrong elements in it?
Reading A1 hints at the answer in the last part of the post, which is what set me off:
Check out the update Marc Cooper thoughtfully added to his post, if you want to see a more unmediated version of his real politics:
Some of the more delusional responses [to the Juan Cole essay] predictably enough come from the
Idiot Right who accuse Cole of being a traitor. And, yes, also from those who want immediate,
unconditional, un-thought-out withdrawal on the Unrepentant Idiot Left. One of the more prolific buffoons from that corner — Louis Proyect the self-described “Unrepentant Marxist” — can offer no better response than to compare Cole with Dick Nixon and then further suggest I undergo a lobotomy for having linked to Cole and to cure what he diagnoses as my incipient Hitchens Syndrome (Ahh.. for the good old days of the Show Trials when prosecutor Vishinsky would end his feverish closing statements with a call to “Shoot these mad dogs!”). Oh well… I suppose every day that political Neanderthals like this have their mitts far, far, far from any levers of power is, at least, an OK day. For that I give thanks.Still fighting the anti-Communist battles of the fifties, I see. And how are those “Neanderthals” (I make no endorsement of Proyect, by the way) any closer to power than you yourself are, Marc? And how close to power do you really think gloating over their lack of it is going to get you, or the people you endorse?
Of course, Proyect is right in saying that any sort of managed withdrawal of the sort Cole proposes and Cooper endorses is making the same mistake as the US did in Vietnam. Vietnam should’ve taught us that there are times when even the US cannot go against the tide of history: exactly the outcome it feared happened, only with many more lives lost than if it had not interfered.
Since Cooper is yet another beltway flack, this is of course far beyond his ken as none of these people has any sense of history or any desire to learn from it.
And it’s not even that his wishes for socalled “viable alternatives” is correct but mistimed, it’s that they’ve been wrong from the start and still wrong in their analysis of this war. Again this is from a lack of historical insight and a dependency on Beltway wisdom rather than real critical analysis.
What it all comes down to is that policy is nothing without ideology and people like Cooper have long let go of even their watered down version of liberalism for a misguided “realism”. This is the greatest disease afflicting the Democrats right now: the party’s elite no longer beliefs in anything but electability. Which is how abominations like the war on Iraq happen.