Context
Nation and Narration
Michael Bérubé
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
polls 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? 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. 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.
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 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.
