http://www.centerforbookculture.org/context/no10/berube.html

Nation and Narration

Michael Berube

Imagine the 43rd Presidency without Osama bin Laden, the year
2001 with an uneventful

September 11.

It's January 2002, one year after Bush's controversial inauguration,
and the White House is a shambles. Having passed the tax bill
that was the only rationale for his Presidency in the eyes of
his financiers, George W. Bush is in deep doo-doo. The post-New
Economy recession is in full swing, and working Americans have
discovered to their dismay that the $300-$600 rebates they received
back in 2001 will cover a couple of heating bills and winter
clothes for the kids, and that's it; over the next fifteen years
they'll see another $15 from the tax cut, having no capital gains
or estate tax relief to look forward to, while the executives
at Halliburton look to pick up $15 billion each. The same holds
true for the executives of Enron and their $60 million severance
packages (severance packages for CEOs having been exempted from
taxation by a little-noticed rider to the bill), except that
Enron's spectacular collapse has fired one House investigation
into Bush's and Cheney's financial interests in deregulation,
one Justice Department investigation into Enron's role in crafting
Bush/Cheney energy policy, and another broader Senate investigation
into corruption and influence- peddling in the new administration.


All three investigations have been denounced by Rush Limbaugh,
William Kristol, and the Wall Street Journal as "a monkey wrench
in the very engine of prosperity," but nobody is listening to
these toadies anymore. They've been discredited not only by their
unflagging support for Enron but also by their earlier denunciations
of the review of the Florida election returns, which, though
ambiguous in many respects, indicated beyond all doubt that more
Floridians intended to vote for Gore than for Bush in November
2000--and that Florida Republicans, knowing well in advance that
they were in for a dogfight, deliberately struck thousands of
black voters from the rolls while filling out fraudulent absentee
and military ballots months before the election. And since more
Americans voted for Gore than for Bush nationwide in the first
place, the new President's legitimacy hangs by a thread. The
Electoral College is soon to be abolished, and sweeping reforms
in voter registration and voting tabulation systems are being
enacted in every state of the union. It doesn't help matters
that 84 percent of Americans think that Bush "isn't working hard
enough" as President, largely because he has not yet returned
from summer vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. As for
Bush's cabinet . . . what cabinet? O'Neill and Rumsfeld have
made early departures, as predicted by Beltway insiders from
day one; Gale Norton has resigned under pressure after having
been discovered clubbing baby seals off the coast of Alaska;
and attorney general Ashcroft is widely criticized for continuing
to hold his controversial "prayer breakfasts" in which he calls
on Jesus Christ to "smite the unbelievers."I think it's safe
to say that the events of September 11 changed everything, don't
you?

* * *

Like the deadly particulate matter floating in the air of lower
Manhattan, the political fallout from September's terrorist attacks
will have immeasurable toxic effects for decades. The narrative
of that fallout remains to be written--indeed, it remains to
be lived and experienced. But it's already becoming possible
to see several important story lines taking shape in U.S. political
culture.

The early days now seem like days of hysteria: there was the
justifiable hysteria of New Yorkers who feared that the bridges
and tunnels were the next targets, and there was the ugly hysteria
of right-wing pundits for whom the attacks changed nothing but
the volume of their daily screeds. One unwittingly ludicrous
example was provided by the celebrated hack Shelby Steele, who
was writing an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal denouncing the
UN conference on racism when the planes hit, and merely tweaked
it into a September 17 column denouncing global crybabies in
general--some of whom were apparently flying those planes, although
the connection wasn't made quite clear. (News flash: advocates
of reparations for slavery kill 6000 in New York!!) More dangerous
were the early responses of people like Andrew Sullivan--and
Ann Coulter and Rich Lowry of the National Review; Coulter went
so far as to lose her job at the Review, less for the content
of her written work (according to editor Jonah Goldberg's October
3 column) than for her public demeanor after her incoherent follow–up
essay was spiked. And Goldberg's postmortem has the ring of truth,
for Coulter's now-infamous line, "We should invade their countries,
kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," was after
all not terribly different from Lowry's plan for "identifying
the one or two nations most closely associated with our enemies,
giving them 24 hours notice to evacuate their capitals (in keeping
with our desire to wage war as morally as possible), then systematically
destroying every significant piece of military, financial, and
political infrastructure in those cities."

This is strong stuff--so strong, in fact, that in response to
Sullivan's vile suggestion that Gore voters would form a "fifth
column" of decadent leftists in university towns and on the coasts
(you know, where a lot of those decadent Oscar Wilde types live),
any rational person could've replied that throughout September
and October, you couldn't do better recruiting work for Al Qaeda
in Muslim nations than to distribute free copies of the National
Review.

Of course, some of the right's hysteria was understandable: remember,
they excoriated Arab terrorists for days after the bombing in
Oklahoma City, only to be compelled to swallow hard once the
white kid with the crewcut emerged as the perp. Think of their
tension, their long-unfulfilled desires to rage, rage against
the backward cultures of Islam: by September 11, 2001, the right
had been waiting more than six years to vent, and some of them
simply lost control.

Interestingly, though--and devastatingly for the left--they reined
themselves in; after the first few queasy weeks, there would
be no more talk of crusades and conversions and infinite justice.
For who knew, until September 11, that Grover Norquist, longtime
tax nut and conservative organizer extraordinaire, had been cultivating
Arab-American voters for the GOP? (So assiduously, it turned
out, that he'd had his President lunching with some Hamas and
Hezbollah supporters, as Franklin Foer pointed out in the New
Republic.) And who knew that the hard right would scotch its
plans for systematically destroying the capitals of Muslim nations
the minute they realized that they couldn't get to Afghanistan
without going through Pakistan?

Prevented by their own President from conducting a hate campaign
against Arabs, the harpies of the culture-war right turned to
a safer domestic target--students and professors. In a remarkably
crude, incompetent pamphlet, the Joe Lieberman- Lynne Cheney
outfit, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, combed college
campuses for seditious statements like "ignorance breeds hate,"
"hate breeds hate," "our grief is not a cry for war," "an eye
for an eye leaves the world blind," "knowledge is good," and
"if Osama bin Laden is confirmed to be behind the attacks, the
United States should bring him before an international tribunal
on charges of crimes against humanity." (All but one of these
are actual statements cited by ACTA as evidence of insufficient
patriotism on U.S. campuses. Afficionados and adepts will recognize
the last item as the words of Joel Beinin, the antepenultimate
item as the words of Mahatma Gandhi, and the penultimate item
as the motto of Faber College in Animal House.) Lynne Cheney
has not commented on the pamphlet, and may in fact be in a secure
undisclosed location for all I know; Lieberman's office has issued
one of those "distancing" statements that stops short of taking
the Senator's name off the letterhead.

Meanwhile, even as the New Republic continued to publish the
work of liberal writers, the editorial staff collectively staged
what Stuart Hall once called the Great Moving Right Show, and
kept right on moving until they passed the National Review. Think
I'm kidding? Count the number of times each magazine has criticized
Ariel Sharon since September 11, and you'll get some sense of
why I respect the National Review's Middle East coverage more.
Or read every post-9/ 11 editorial signed by the editors, like
the October 29 clarion call to "weaponize" our courage. (In his
bunker in Baghdad, a shaken Saddam Hussein looks up from his
copy of TNR: "Nothing would please me more than to fight American
armed forces in the daughter of the mother of all battles--but
I cannot face the fearsome senior editors of this weekly magazine.")
Or look at their vicious attacks on Colin Powell, who is apparently
unfit to run the State Department and should be replaced by someone
wiser, someone with a firmer grasp of the perfidy of Arabs, perhaps
someone who has attended the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced
International Studies, like editor Lawrence F. Kaplan.

* * *

The narrative of the left is more tangled and more somber. But
before I remark on the ways the Chomskian left has consigned
itself to the dustbin of history, let me go back to those early
days of hysteria and say a few words in defense of people I now
disagree with: it was entirely plausible, in those first few
days, to think that the United States had received some kind
of global comeuppance. Bless their hearts, the diehards of the
anti-imperialist left had always had the integrity and the conscience
to say publicly that the United States had too often acted unilaterally
and unethically in the post-1945 world, often against its own
realpolitik interests as well as against its own democratic ideals.
The anti-imperialists were right about Vietnam, they were right
about Chile, they were right about El Salvador and Nicaragua,
they were right about Indonesia in 1975 and they were right about
Iran in 1953. It was not initially unreasonable for any of them
to think, as the World Trade Center collapsed five blocks from
my best friend's apartment, son of a bitch, someone's gotten
to us at last. Such a sentiment, despite the vitriol heaped upon
it by the right, implied no sympathy with the attackers; the
anti-imperialist left, at its best, despised anti–democratic
forces no matter where they came from. It merely registered the
sorry fact that the United States had, indeed, too often given
the wretched of the earth cause to hate us.

But when the narrative of the attacks became more complex, the
Chomskian left did not. Slowly it became clear that for all its
past crimes, the U.S. government wasn't nearly as proximate a
cause of the attack as were, say, the governments of Saudi Arabia
and Egypt, U.S. "allies" who'd been dancing a dicey pas de deux
with their own Islamist radicals for twenty years in order to
keep the lid on the domestic unrest created in part by their
own corruption. And slowly it became clear that Osama bin Laden
and Al Qaeda were not animated by any of the causes dear to American
leftists: the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
were not, it seemed, symbolic strikes against U.S. unilateralism
with regard to missile defense, post-Kyoto energy policy, landmine
treaties, or the rights of children. They were not cosmic payback
for our support of Suharto or Pinochet or Marcos or Rios Montt
or Mohammed Reza Pahlevi. They were not aimed at Katherine Harris
or Kenneth Starr or William Rehnquist. Indeed, the more the West
learned about bin Laden, the more we were led down strange narrative
byways we hadn't even considered as tangents to the main event:
he was convinced by the Somalia expedition that the U.S. was
a paper tiger? He wants American soldiers, especially women,
to stop desecrating the land of the two holy mosques? He speaks
of "eighty years" of Arab abasement, harking back to the end
of World War I?

Well, that should have given anyone pause for thought. Maybe
if bin Laden had denounced the CIA's overthrow of Mossadeq, maybe
if he'd jeered at our futile attempts to play Iran off Iraq and
vice versa throughout Reagan's presidency, and maybe if he wasn't
carrying around one of those theories about the global Jewish
conspiracy, he'd have had a shred of credibility with me. But
Somalia? Somalia really was an attempt at liberal-internationalist
humanitarianism, and as for the eighty-year-old Sykes-Picot agreement
divvying up Arab provinces after World War I, there aren't that
many American leftists committed to the restoration of the caliphate,
so it's hard for me to see the appeal on that count as well.
In fact, as Chris Suellentrop of Slate observed, the U.S. doesn't
even deserve any grief about the end of the caliphate: "It would
be nice," he wrote, "if bin Laden would note that the United
States objected to the Sykes-Picot agreement as a betrayal of
the principle of self- determination, but that's probably asking
for too much." There's no doubt that our government has committed
crimes against humanity in our name. But Somalia and Sykes- Picot
aren't among them.

So, faced with an enemy as incomprehensible and as implacable
as bin Laden, much of the left checked the man's policy positions
on women, homosexuality, secularism, and facial hair, and slowly
backed out of the room. They didn't move right, as so many Chomskian
leftists have charged; they simply decided that the September
11 attacks were the work of religious fanatics who had no conceivable
point of contact with anything identifiable as a left project
save for a human-rights complaint about the sanctions against
Iraq. As Marx himself observed, there are a number of social
systems more oppressive than that of capitalism. Al Qaeda and
the Taliban are good cases in point.

For almost a month, the dispute between the Chomsky left and
the Hitchens left was largely a theoretical affair, featuring
a sweetly pointless debate in the Nation over whose condemnation
of Clinton's 1998 cruise-missile strike against the Al- Shifa
pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan was more thorough and/or courageous;
then the bombs started dropping on Afghanistan, and the camps
hardened into place, with leftists who'd denounced the Taliban
steadily for five years now denouncing a military action designed
to remove the Taliban from power. This is perhaps the most important
episode in the many narratives of September 11, because it represented
the earthquake that had been building along a fault line in the
U.S. left dating back to the first Bush Administration's operations
in Panama and Kuwait, and because it has ramifications for the
future of U.S. foreign policy for decades to come.

A large part of the split had to do with the simple fact that
bombs were dropping. For U.S. leftists schooled in the lessons
of Cambodia, Libya, and the School of the Americas, all U.S.
bombing actions are suspect: they are announced by cadaverous
white guys with bad hair, they are covered by seven cable channels
competing with one another for the catchiest "New War" slogan
and Emmy awards for creative flag display, and they invariably
kill civilians, the poor, the wretched, the disabled. Surely,
there is much to hate about any bombing campaign.

Yet who would deny that a nation, once attacked, has the right
to respond with military force, and who seriously believes that
anyone could undertake any "nation- building" enterprise in Afghanistan
without driving the Taliban from power first? Very well, some
of my post-September interlocutors said, the Taliban must go,
but not by force. A curious answer: for why would any clear-thinking
leftist believe that the Taliban could be removed by persuasion
alone, as if, like Al Gore after the Supreme Court's supremely
corrupt decision in Bush v. Gore, they would smile wryly into
the cameras and say, "It's time for us to go"?

The arguments against military force started flooding the left-leaning
listservs. One, the link between the attacks and the Taliban
was not strong enough to justify bombing. Two, we had supported
bin Laden indirectly back when he was one of the mujahedeen fighting
the USSR. Three, the terrain and the enemy would quickly lead
us into a quagmire. Four, the bombing of Afghanistan was the
moral equivalent of the September 11 attacks--or even worse,
since the U.S. was attacking from a position of wealth and strength.
Five, there would be no "nation- building" after the ouster of
the Taliban--just more bombing, this time in some other impoverished
nation. Six, the U.S. had been a global aggressor for so long
and with such impunity that it had no moral ground from which
to operate even after being directly attacked.

These are the arguments that have insured the Chomskian left's
irrelevance to foreign policy debate for the foreseeable future,
and I confess I am not always sure why anyone would make them
in any case. Arguments three and five are relatively innocuous,
being merely predictive, but the rest range from merely illogical
(one, two, six) to morally odious (four). For instance: the fact
that a U.S. government was once foolish enough--or Zbigniew Brzezinski
was once cavalier enough--to fund the Arab "Afghanis" in the
1980s does not mean that a U.S. government is barred from opposing
any of their progeny now. The Chomskian left has been playing
this tune for some time now--today's public enemy was yesterday's
CIA darling--and while it does serve a heuristic function, in
that it reminds amnesiac Americans that baddies such as Saddam
and Noriega and Suharto didn't appear on the world stage out
of nowhere, it doesn't serve any substantive function except
obfuscation. Would the Chomskian left seriously prefer that the
U.S. stick by its totalitarian ex-clients no matter what, as
the Cold Warriors of the right once urged us to do?

The argument about our past dealings with bin Laden is thus a
smokescreen, as was Chomsky's argument in 1999 that our intervention
against Milosevic in Kosovo could not be motivated by "humanitarian"
concerns because if we were serious about humanitarianism we
would also have intervened in East Timor. Even Chomsky's fans
will recall that this argument was not a clarion call for wider
U.S. interventions around the world beginning in East Timor;
it was an argument designed to obfuscate the issue at hand in
Kosovo, namely, allegations that the Serbs were engaged in genocide.
Similarly, in addressing the question of whether the U.S. had
the right to respond militarily after September 11, Chomsky offered
more smoke: "Congress has authorized the use of force against
any individuals or countries the President determines to be involved
in the attacks, a doctrine that every supporter regards as ultra-criminal.
That is easily demonstrated. Simply ask how the same people would
have reacted if Nicaragua had adopted this doctrine after the
U.S. had rejected the orders of the World Court to terminate
its 'unlawful use of force' against Nicaragua and had vetoed
a Security Council resolution calling on all states to observe
international law." Very well; with regard to Reagan's contra
war and the mining of Nicaragua's harbors, Nicaragua and the
World Court were in the right, and the U.S. acted like a rogue
nation. How exactly does this prove that "every supporter" regards
the use of force as "ultra-criminal" with regard to September
11?

The fissure on the left that began in 1989-90 and became visible
in Kosovo is now a chasm. In retrospect, Kosovo didn't have quite
the impact on the left it might have, partly because conservatives
also opposed that operation on the grounds that Clinton had ordered
it (by 1999, Clinton could have launched a campaign against childhood
diseases and House Republicans would've responded by declaring
measles a vegetable and bundling it into school breakfast programs),
partly because of Monica, and partly because it was shrouded
in murk from Srebrenica to Rambouillet. But many of the most
vocal opponents of the U.S.–led NATO intervention in Kosovo are
now the most vocal opponents to the U.S.–led intervention in
Afghanistan, which suggests two things: first, that the fact
of civilian deaths on U.S. soil is in an important sense immaterial
to their position on U.S. policy, and second, that on the grounds
they offer today, they will never support another American military
action of any kind. Permanently alienated by Vietnam, by Chile,
by Indonesia, or by Reagan's deadly adventures in Central America,
they're gone and they're not coming back, not even if hijackers
plow planes into towers in downtown Manhattan.

The right is just gleeful about this, of course, because it needs
the Chomskian left for effigies, hate minutes, election-year
fundraising and general vituperation. Christopher Hitchens seems
pretty happy as well, since he gets to settle a bunch of old
scores and coin acerbic new phrases like "the Milosevic left"
and "the Taliban left." But for all my sympathy with Hitchens,
I cannot share his sense of exhilaration; instead, as I watch
that shard of the left sailing away, I modulate between relief
and sorrow. Relief, because the break is decisive and clarifying,
highlighting all those who cannot use the word "heroes" without
scare quotes, all those who cannot bring themselves to utter
anything about freedom and democracy if doing so will make them
say words that might also have come from the mouth of a conservative.
Sorrow, because there will soon come a time when I am going to
miss these people, when I am going to wish they had some clout
in domestic politics. Not because I will agree with them, necessarily,
but because-- unlike liberals--they do not make compromises,
and they know how to get mad. Liberals are good at patient deliberation
and stress abatement in the Mister Rogers mode, which is why
conservatives simply tear them from limb to limb whenever anything
important--like, say, a Presidential election recount in southern
Florida--is at stake: while the liberals hold a seminar on the
lessons of 1876, Tom DeLay flies in a bunch of goons to stop
the recount by force. Liberals like that image of themselves:
so what if those firebreathing yahoos run the country? At least
we've got our sanity and our Birkenstocks. But for precisely
this reason, liberals are not very good at organizing demonstrations
and mass protests when the President announces the creation of
military tribunals or the abrogation of client-attorney privilege
in cases where the client has an Al- in his last name. How many
liberals stood up and shamed John Ashcroft when he appeared before
the Senate on December 6 and impugned the patriotism of civil
libertarians? How many liberals voted against the USA-PATRIOT
act? How many liberals took to the streets when Bush issued Executive
Order 13233, overturning the Presidential Records Act and closing
the archives on the Reagan-Bush years? Who's kidding whom? This
is just not the kind of thing liberals do these days.

But there's still plenty of mobilizing to do on the domestic
front for everyone who prefers democracy to mild totalitarianism,
and this should include everyone from William Safire to Katha
Pollitt. The narrative of that struggle will doubtless be experimental
and self-reflexive and full of postmodern historiographic metafiction
in the mode of Ishmael Reed and E. L. Doctorow, but if it's going
to be a narrative any of us will want to tell our children at
night, first we're going to have to remind liberals how to get
good and mad. And we should do it sooner rather than later--that
is, before rather than after Ashcroft sets up those new-for-2002
Preventative Detention Camps to keep track of people who show
signs of dissenting, demurring, or otherwise disparaging the
Department of Justice's good-faith efforts to ensure domestic
tranquility. Because by that time, we won't even be able to tell
our stories to our lawyers.