The rewriting of history by the power
elite was painfully evident as the nation marked the 10th anniversary
of the start of the Iraq War. Some claimed they had opposed the war when
they had not. Others among “Bush’s useful idiots” argued that they had
merely acted in good faith on the information available; if they had
known then what they know now, they assured us, they would have acted
differently. This, of course, is false. The war boosters, especially the
“liberal hawks”—who included Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Al Franken
and John Kerry, along with academics, writers and journalists such as Bill Keller, Michael Ignatieff, Nicholas Kristof, David Remnick, Fareed Zakaria, Michael Walzer, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, George Packer, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Kanan Makiya and the late Christopher Hitchens—did
what they always have done: engage in acts of self-preservation. To
oppose the war would have been a career killer. And they knew it.
These apologists, however, acted not only
as cheerleaders for war; in most cases they ridiculed and attempted to
discredit anyone who questioned the call to invade Iraq. Kristof, in The
New York Times, attacked the filmmaker
Michael Moore as a conspiracy theorist and wrote that anti-war voices
were only polarizing what he termed “the political cesspool.” Hitchens
said that those who opposed the attack on Iraq “do not think that Saddam
Hussein is a bad guy at all.” He called the typical anti-war protester a
“blithering ex-flower child or ranting neo-Stalinist.” The halfhearted
mea culpas by many of these courtiers a decade later always fail to
mention the most pernicious and fundamental role they played in the
buildup to the war—shutting down public debate. Those of us who spoke
out against the war, faced with the onslaught of right-wing “patriots”
and their liberal apologists, became pariahs. In my case it did not
matter that I was an Arabic speaker. It did not matter that I had spent
seven years in the Middle East, including months in Iraq, as a foreign
correspondent. It did not matter that I knew the instrument of war. The
critique that I and other opponents of war delivered, no matter how well
grounded in fact and experience, turned us into objects of scorn by a
liberal elite that cravenly wanted to demonstrate its own “patriotism”
and “realism” about national security. The liberal class fueled a rabid,
irrational hatred of all war critics. Many of us received death threats
and lost our jobs, for me one at The New York Times. These liberal
warmongers, 10 years later, remain both clueless about their moral
bankruptcy and cloyingly sanctimonious. They have the blood of hundreds
of thousands of innocents on their hands.
The power elite, especially the liberal
elite, has always been willing to sacrifice integrity and truth for
power, personal advancement, foundation grants, awards, tenured
professorships, columns, book contracts, television appearances,
generous lecture fees and social status. They know what they need to
say. They know which ideology they have to serve. They know what lies
must be told—the biggest being that they take moral stances on issues
that aren’t safe and anodyne. They have been at this game a long time.
And they will, should their careers require it, happily sell us out
again.
Leslie Gelb, in the magazine Foreign Affairs, spelled it out after the invasion of Iraq.
“My initial support for the war was
symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy
community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to
retain political and professional credibility,” he wrote. “We ‘experts’
have a lot to fix about ourselves, even as we ‘perfect’ the media. We
must redouble our commitment to independent thought, and embrace, rather
than cast aside, opinions and facts that blow the common—often
wrong—wisdom apart. Our democracy requires nothing less.”
No comments:
Post a Comment