It was refreshing and certainly unexpected to see that one of our two free San Francisco newsweeklies — whose editorial positions can roughly be characterized as “Left” and “Left-er” — ran a front-page feature article the other day entitled “What the Left Got Wrong About Iraq .”
The subtitle of author Aaron Glantz’s SF Weekly piece is “Anti-war activists ignored Saddam Hussein’s horrendous crimes against ordinary Iraqis. Do they have anything — beyond anti-Bush demonstrations — to offer the oppressed in Iran and Syria?” Which question is, certainly, quite apt. (And I believe the accurate answer to the question is “not really.”)
Nevertheless, heartening as it was to see such a piece running so prominently in the SF Weekly — a piece almost certain to roil the prevailing local “anti-war” waters, — Glantz’s article managed to fall well short of the mark in many respects. The main shortcoming being that the piece provided no context regarding Iraq and the War on Terror, nor did it even so much as hint that the anti-war “movement” might have missed something crucial in giving a free pass to the global jihadist movement.
Still, Glantz succeeds in making his main point — that anti-war types often put themselves in the morally fraught position of advocating that the US and our allies refrain from “interfering” with despotic and murderous regimes.
It’s certainly poignant and more than a little amusing to hear Glantz describe the derision and scorn with which some Iraqis viewed the global “anti-war” demonstrations prior to the start of military action in Spring 2003:
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A member of a prominent Sunni family, [businessman Shanam abu Jabar] hardly had positive experiences with the old regime. His father and older brother were executed by Saddam’s government. He remembers watching U.S. and European anti-war demonstrations on television in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion.
“We said, ‘Thanks a lot, but shut up. After they get rid of Saddam, you can go ahead and have your big movement, but now just shut up,’” he told me last spring.
“They [the anti-war demonstrators] didn’t know anything,” he continued, offering me an extravagant meal of rice and lamb stew. “They didn’t live here and know the truth about Saddam. Nobody can imagine what Saddam did with his people — only the people who lived here. Maybe if we had stayed under Saddam’s regime, we would all have been killed.”
Still, Glantz falls victim to that same old problem that crops up among Leftist and other critics of the War on Terror — the failure to understand the global context of the fight that we — the Liberal countries of the World — are in. It’s why conversations that are limited only to banned weapons and the depredations of oppressive regimes — as important and relevant as those issues are, will always badly miss the point, in the end.
In the end, in order to really understand “What the Left Got Wrong About Iraq,” one needs grounding in the deeper and broader view, like the one Paul Berman provides in his excellent work “Terror and Liberalism.” I sang the praises of Berman’s book yesterday, and I even provided an extended excerpt.
Check out Berman, and not only will you understand what (much of) the Left Gets Wrong about Iraq, but you’ll also understand what Glantz — for all his laudable chutzpah — got wrong about the Left and Iraq.
Still, make no mistake — Aaron Glantz deserves big kudos for daring to so prominently challenge the local orthodoxy by asking the Leftist Establishment some of the difficult questions which it is trying so hard to avoid.
June 14th, 2005 | Global War On Terror, Jihad Watch, Misc., Politics, SF Politics & Culture