Blood in the Sand: Imperial Fantasies, Right-Wing Ambitions, and the Erosion of American Democracy

Notes

185 Notes 7. Dub’ya’s Fellow Travelers 1. Note the responses in the Nation (November 29, 2004) to Anatol Lieven, “Liberal Hawk Down,” Nation (October 25, 2004), 29–34, a stinging critique of a truly awful anthology, The Fight Is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World, ed. George Packer (New York: Perennial, 2003), which highlights the ignorance and prejudices of Paul Berman and other prominent contributors when it comes to the Middle East. 2. Michael Walzer, “Can There Be a Decent Left?” Dissent 49, no. 2 (Spring 2002). A Hitchens article on September 28, 2001, suggested that journalist John Pilger and playwright Harold Pinter were inclined to express such glee. The next month, the Guardian apologized to both men, who suggested nothing of the sort. 3. Michael Tomasky, “Between Cheney and Chomsky: Making a Domestic Case for a New Liberal Foreign Policy,” in The Fight Is for Democracy , 21ff. 4. Adam Shatz, “The Left and 9/11,” Nation (September 23, 2002), and the searing response by Lawrence McGuire, “Eight Ways to Smear Noam Chomsky,” Counterpunch (October 9, 2002). 5. Todd Gitlin, “Varieties of Patriotic Experience,” in The Fight Is for Democracy, 109, 110, 126. 6. Susie Linfield, “The Treason of the Intellectuals (Again),” in The Fight Is for Democracy, 166. 7. The manifesto has been published as the appendix to Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 182–207. 8. Ibid.,1ff. 9. Michael Walzer, “Justice and Injustice in the Gulf War,” in But Was 186 It Just? Reflections on the Morality of the Persian Gulf War, ed. David E. Decosse (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 1ff. Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Just War as Politics: What the Gulf War Told Us about Contemporary American Life,” in ibid., 43ff., she never explicitly takes a position but warns us against triumphalism and cautions that judging the conflict is “complex.” 10. Because he was defending an authoritarian and aggressive regime, “Saddam’s war is unjust, even though he didn’t start the fighting.” By the same token, since other “measures short of full-scale war were possible . . . America’s war is [also] unjust.” What to do? “Now that we are fighting [the war], I hope that we win it and the Iraqi regime collapses quickly. I will not march to stop the war while Saddam is still standing.” Michael Walzer, Arguing War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 160–61. 11. Ibid., 162–68. 12. Clarity is achieved, or so Walzer believes, once a sense of tradition and community is introduced. That will apparently help in interpreting the degree of peril posed by the situation, since “the license of supreme emergency can only be claimed by political leaders whose people have already risked everything and who know how much they have at risk.” Ibid., 44. 13. Ibid. 138–42. See Ori Lev’s review of Walzer’s Arguing for War in Logos 3, no. 4 (Fall 2004). 14. This is the condensed version of an article that appeared in the winter 2003 issue of Dissent. It originally appeared in an on-line symposium entitled “Writers, Artists, and Civic Leaders on the War,” sponsored by OpenDemocracy.net. 15. UN bashing is mostly disingenuous or ignorant. There is usually little that the UN can do independently of the Security Council, where the United States wields its veto and its overwhelming influence. See the fine account by Linda Polman, We Did Nothing: Why the Truth Does Not Always Go Out When the UN Goes In (London: Viking, 2003). 16. See chapter 3 of this volume. 17. See the four issues of Logos constituting vol. 2 (2003). 18. Michael Lind, Vietnam: The Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America’s Most Disastrous Conflict (New York: Free Press, 2002). 19. See chapter 1 of this volume. 20. Christopher Hitchens, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writer in the Public Sphere (London: Verso, 2000), 102, 105. 21. Christopher Hitchens, “Goodbye to Berlin,” in Unacknowledged Legislation, 138–39. 22. Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). NOTES TO PAGES 109–14 187 23. Michael Ignatieff, “The Year of Living Dangerously: A Liberal Supporter of the War Looks Back,” New York Times Magazine (March 14, 2004). 24. Of his anti–Vietnam War days, marching with distasteful pacifists, Ignatieff says, “Since I was...