The Left and 9/11 (Page 3)

Unlike most Americans, leftists didn't have to ask the question "Why do they hate us?"--and not because of any glee that the chickens had come home to roost. The left press had spent the better part of the past two decades critiquing American policies that have fanned anger and resentment in the Arab and Muslim world.

Yet the attacks also placed the left on the defensive. Although bin Laden represents a grisly perversion of anti-imperialism, the atrocities posed a challenge to the sentimental Third Worldism that has been a cornerstone of the radical left since the Vietnam era. "A lot of us came up in the period when the most imperialist actions were coming from the West," says Robin D.G. Kelley, a professor of Africana Studies at New York University. "I think anyone who supports some blind Third World unity has to think again now."

The atrocities also exposed an intelligence failure on the left. For years, progressive writers had referred to terrorism in scare quotes, largely because security hawks and Israel lobbyists cynically applied the term to acts of indiscriminate violence by national liberation movements, and never to those by states. And while many feminists were decrying the Taliban long before President Bush discovered what a burqa was, some left-wing scholars had presented a sanitized image of Islamic fundamentalists as authentic populists, even as a potentially democratizing force in the Arab world. The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? was the title of one highly praised study. Guess what the answer was.

"This war is a real crisis for the left," says Katha Pollitt, "in that finally there is an enemy who has attacked us, as opposed to any enemy that's in our heads, and one that's completely unsympathetic to the goals of the left."

There was also confusion and disagreement about how to combat this new enemy, stateless and elusive as it is. "There are numerous ways of dealing with terrorism, and the military option is not the only one or necessarily even the best one," says Eric Foner, an American historian at Columbia University. "It wasn't Western intervention, it wasn't Western bomber jets...which went and got rid of Khomeini," Tariq Ali observes. "It was biology: He died. And after he died, it opened up conflicts in that society. And it was the Iranians, without the help of bomber jets, who voted out the hard-line clerics."

But Iran is a nation-state whose ambitions do not extend beyond the region; Al Qaeda is a shadowy network of cells dispersed, in clandestine fashion, throughout the world and inspired by an implacable vision of a war to the death with "Crusaders and Zionists." As Ali notes, nonmilitary policies like police work and spying may prove ideally suited to tracking down Al Qaeda terrorists and preventing future attacks: Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, was apprehended by traditional police methods. And yet there are some settings in which police methods can hardly be expected to work, like Afghanistan. "Which was the court where these guys could be summoned?" asks Todd Gitlin. "Were subpoenas to be dropped at the mouths of the caves of Tora Bora?" What's more, the call for "police work" rather than war sounded somewhat disingenuous, coming as it did from some of the same people who used to call for the abolition of the CIA, an organization to which much of the policing would presumably be entrusted. A noisy debate over the reform of the CIA rocked mainstream and conservative circles after 9/11, but, as the investigative journalist Ken Silverstein notes, the left didn't participate. "Whatever the solutions are, it's a reasonable debate," says Silverstein. "But it wasn't a debate that was vibrant on the left. When people on the left hear the words Pentagon or CIA, they immediately go into the mode of, 'Oh, they're big, bad organizations and that's all I need to know.'"

When it comes to military action, moreover, the left has been similarly hard pressed to develop an informed critique that transcends pacifist platitudes. "What we should be learning from the last couple of decades," Barbara Ehrenreich reflects, "is that there's a variety of forms of [military] intervention." Once the war in Afghanistan began and it became clear that America would rely once again on high-altitude bombing--and the assistance of ruthless local proxies--a number of left-liberal writers who supported the intervention called for ground troops. The cultural critic Ellen Willis was among them. "There's no such thing as a war without consequences for yourself," she says. "The idea that some people in the military have that America should never have any casualties is ridiculous."

But ridiculous to whom? Given the mercurial realities of American electoral politics, and given the "lessons" of Vietnam, keeping American casualties to a minimum makes perfect sense to both the American government and the American military, not to mention the American people.

When I mentioned this problem to Willis, she said: "I think it's incumbent on people to say what they think.... If you're going to be a critic, be a critic of those things that you're really critical of, and support the things that you can support." It's a reasonable argument, but it may also be a touch naïve. As Pollitt reflects, "A fundamental problem with intellectuals is that they think they're much more powerful than they are, and they find these middle paths."

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