Another distinguished co-plaintiff is James Bamford, whose books on the NSA, The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, are the main public resource for knowledge of a gigantic agency which for a long time was not even known to exist. Thanks to Bamford and others, we now know that the NSA was used to spy on American civilians throughout the Vietnam War, in order to try to prove that the antiwar and civil-rights movements were being manipulated by foreign powers. Black Panthers and Quakers were targeted without distinction, and the first writer to touch upon the fact—David Kahn, author of The Codebreakers—was himself placed under an extensive watch. It was this wholesale abuse of power that led to the Senate hearings convened by Senator Frank Church, of Idaho, that contributed to the proposed impeachment of Richard Nixon, and that led to the passage of FISA in the first place. The federal court in which we have filed our suit—in the Eastern District of Michigan—is the court that first held in 1972 that warrantless wiretapping of Americans for national-security purposes was unconstitutional. This ruling against Nixon was later upheld by the Supreme Court. One wonders if a Bush-dominated Court will do the same, but when my neoconservative friends complain about my undermining of the “wartime president,” I have my answer ready: give this power or this right to any one president and you give it, indefinitely and unaccountably, to them all. The surveillance spreads like weeds, and there is no way to know if it is of you, or to get yourself taken off the watch list. Apparently even John Ashcroft could see this elementary point: I’ve heard from a friend of mine that he was opposed to a national ID card because he didn’t want a future President Clinton to have that much power. In all the recent arguments over the Patriot Act and the “national-security state,” one has often seen senior liberal Democrats take a powder, or join enthusiastically in the aggrandizement of police power (as they did when Bill Clinton rammed through the panicky Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 after the Oklahoma City atrocity), whereas certain prominent conservatives, such as Grover Norquist and former congressman Bob Barr, have been consistently libertarian. As I was getting ready to sign on for the ACLU suit, I had dinner with both of those gentlemen in the interval of a conference of the National Rifle Association. Well, Bob Barr now speaks on tour for the ACLU as well, so if the fans of the Second Amendment can be mobilized to defend the First and Fourth ones, that’s absolutely fine by me.
And what of the War on Terror as it applies to Al Jazeera? Stopped by a Daily Mirror reporter outside a Virginia church on January 8, Colin Powell (who accompanied Bush on April 16, 2004) said, “You’re asking me about a two-year-old meeting that I don’t remember.” (When contacted by Vanity Fair, Powell responded, “My quote does not confirm that I was at the meeting where such a thing may have been discussed. I was at the Blair visit on 16 April, but not necessarily [at] every conversation they had that day. I don’t have memcons to recover all this, but I never took seriously any such idea nor did the president.”) This falls some way short of a strong denial. One might think that such a conversation would either (a) stick in the mind if it had occurred or (b) appear so unimaginable that it could be roundly and affirmatively said not to have happened at all. The first response to the Freedom of Information Act request, on 10 Downing Street writing paper, confirmed that the Cabinet Office “holds information which is relevant to your request,” concerning “memos or notes that record President Bush’s discussions with the prime minister about the bombing of the Al-Jazeera television station in Qatar.” It then goes on to say that disclosure of the said information “would, or would be likely to, prejudice relations between the United Kingdom and any other state.” The Cabinet Office has the right under law to refuse to discuss the matter at all, on grounds of national security, so it is peculiar that it should implicitly confirm the story in a letter. And, of course, if there’s nothing to it, or if the president was only making a joke in very poor taste and the transcribers misunderstood, then we’ll all climb down. But in that case why are two British citizens facing a trial, which the government wants to conduct in camera?
When I wanted a picture to illustrate this article, I went with a photographer to the turnoff in Virginia where a large public sign points traffic to the “George Bush Center for Intelligence: CIA.” We managed to take a few shots before six police cars turned up, and large men kept their hands on their holsters while ordering us to keep our hands in plain sight. It was only with difficulty that we persuaded them they had no right to confiscate the film. We were on public land, on the Potomac Heritage Trail, under the blue skies of America and protected by the great roof of the Constitution, and were next to a sign which millions of motorists pass every year. And what was going unwatched while six carloads of troopers wasted taxpayer money in this way? In my experience, countries where undisguised photographers attract police attention are countries where the citizen is the property of the state. The duty of a true republican is to resist the banana republic, and perhaps some bananas Republicans, as well as bananas Democrats, so that the Bill of Rights survives this war as it has survived the previous ones. When Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made an appearance at Georgetown University Law Center on January 24, a group of students got up to unfurl a banner which read, “Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.” And, I might add, will get neither. The words are taken from Benjamin Franklin.
(Vanity Fair, April 2006)
Blood for No Oil!
Review of The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again by Peter Beinart
WHETHER INTENTIONALLY OR not, Peter Beinart sets out to challenge and annoy the American left from the first three words of his title. “The good fight” is a nostalgic, hymnal term that the mixed bag of remaining “progressives” still reserve very much for themselves; it is most commonly used to invoke the Spanish Civil War and, in particular, those Americans who went, under the ostensible banner of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion but under the effective command of the Comintern, to take part in it. And as one looks back on it now, this episode of heroism and betrayal is remarkable for one thing above all: it represents the only time in modern history that American radicals were in favor of, or had a direct hand in, any “foreign entanglement.” Their highest moral exemplar, as badly as it ended, is in fact the great exception that violates their rule.
Seeing the title, I had hoped that Beinart would open with a challenge to the myth of “premature antifascism” and would point out that otherwise during that period the American left had made common cause with the isolationists and even, for a while, with the idea of a formal military pact between Stalin and Hitler. Trace elements of this mentality survive to our own day: both Gore Vidal and Patrick J. Buchanan still revere the figure of Charles Lindbergh, whose influence was so inadequately captured, from the traditionally wearisome New Jersey Jewish keyhole, in Philip Roth’s Plot Against America. (The moving spirit of today’s Antiwar.com, a preening figure named Justin Raimondo, is also given to paeans in favor of Lindbergh’s charismatic manliness and authority.)
Instead, Beinart opens the story with the Henry Wallace campaign of 1948—the setting of another Philip Roth novel, this time I Married a Communist. In that year, a strategic majority of the American left worked hard for a man who would have given Eastern Europe to Stalin (and perhaps some of Western Europe, too) with the same insouciance that—until Stalin himself had been attacked—it had allowed the region to be given to Hitler. Had the Wallace campaign done as well as had been predicted, the chief domestic effect would have been to throw the election to Thomas Dewey. But as it was, the era of the tough-minded “Cold War liberal” had begun. Beinart’s book locates the crucial step in this evolution at the founding of Americans for Democratic Action, or ADA, in the Willard Hotel in Washington in January 1947. Present for this event were Hubert Humphrey, Walter Reuther, Eleanor Roosevelt, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., David Dubinsky, and—Beinart’s personal hero—Reinhold Niebuhr.
It is e
asy to summarize what attracts Beinart to this group: in a breathtaking moment of reactionary parochialism and insularity, Henry Wallace had declared against Marshall aid for Europe but supposedly in favor of civil rights and the rights of labor. By assembling a distinguished group that endorsed Marshall aid and had seen through Communism, but that took a forward position on New Deal programs and the emancipation of black Americans, the ADA had echoed Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, who in the Willard Hotel almost a century earlier had “sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat.” Beinart gives due credit to the unjustly forgotten Bayard Rustin, who was perhaps the true genius of the civil-rights and democratic-socialist movements, but his emphasis on Niebuhr is what truly informs the book, because this solemn old Protestant theologian provided a constant warning against American hubris.
Beinart’s aim is to refashion this tradition for the war against jihadism, and to reposition American liberals as the friends of democracy and equality at home and abroad. The Truman administration presents a rough pattern of what he admires, from its desegregation of the US armed forces to its willingness to confront Communism in Greece, Turkey, and Korea while relying, where it could, on local democratic forces rather than on regional oligarchies. He seeks to represent the upward curve of domestic reform, especially the amazing burgeoning of the civil-rights movement, as intersecting nicely with “containment” overseas and the demonstrated willingness to employ force—even annihilating thermonuclear force—as well. Result: prosperity at home and “peace through strength” abroad.
This retrospective optimism is in many ways too neat. In the first place, the Allied victors in 1945 had decided to leave fascist despotism in place in Spain and Portugal, and to recruit Hitler’s spies and rocket scientists, from Reinhard Gehlen to Wernher von Braun, into a new “national-security state.” In the second place, there were always leftists, notably I. F. Stone, who understood that the Wallace campaign was a fellow-traveling fiasco. In the third place, there were more-centrist liberals who voiced grave concern over Washington’s policy in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Lebanon in 1958 (all these episodes are omitted by Beinart), and elsewhere, and who did not think that the Cold War was a license for imperialism. Finally, there has probably never been a more hubristic rhetoric—or practice—than during the time of the New Frontier (which so memorably featured the rhetorical skills of Schlesinger). Within a decade and a half of the Willard Hotel meeting, the Camelot darling of American liberals had risked global catastrophe over Cuba and committed the United States to the degrading role of successor to the French Empire in Indochina, all the while dragging his feet on the only idea whose time actually had come: Rustin’s beautiful scheme for a march on Washington. There’s no mystery about the rise of the New Left. John F. Kennedy was more of a sellout in terms of the ADA’s guiding principles than even the most credulous liberal should have been prepared to accept.
This does not excuse those who reverted to post-Vietnam isolationism and who regarded the later advent of the “KKK” (the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, and the Khalq faction of Stalinism in Afghanistan) as nothing more than an invitation for America to “come home.” And it has been demonstrated in more than one case that a crisis ducked by liberals will recur as an opportunity taken, or even seized, by conservatives. Without the American Right (and “vital center”) there might have been no shah or Somoza to be overthrown in the first instance. Easy propaganda points can be made to the effect that the United States’ ruling establishment is often the author of its own misfortunes. But this does not exempt the citizens of the country, confronted with chickens from whatever roost they may originate, from deciding whether or not these birds of ill omen should be shot down. And on this visceral point, as Beinart eventually concedes with infinite regret, the Right appears to speak with less ambiguity.
Jimmy Carter was not Henry Wallace, but Beinart’s history of liberalism during the post-Vietnam years identifies the same mentality—of wishful thinking about the Evil Empire—that gave the Right its next big chance. In this narrative, the role of the ADA is superseded by the roles of Scoop Jackson and the now forgotten Congressman Dave McCurdy, who sought a “third way” in the crisis over Central America. The eventual implosion of the Soviet system makes some of these debates appear to be further away from us than they really are. (The dispute between Paul Berman and Michael Moore, the former of whom wrote a Mother Jones piece critical of the Sandinistas that was censored by the latter, was, however, a harbinger.) Beinart understates the importance of Ronald Reagan’s abandonment of “mutual assured destruction,” or MAD, a long-standing, containment-based bipartisan commitment that was suddenly (and correctly) discovered to be unstable as well as immoral. Not only did this policy shift perform well in the world of “realism,” in that the decision to retool for strategic defense had a measurable influence upon Mikhail Gorbachev; it also had the effect of making liberal noises about a nuclear “freeze” seem tinny and irrelevant. The other great argument of the time—over the imposition of sanctions on South Africa—gave the Left the moral high ground for a year or two, but was eventually co-opted by Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as well.
If American liberalism had seriously wanted to regain its moral standing after the Cold War ended, the reemergence of the one-party, one-leader aggressive state, in the forms of Greater Serbia and Greater Iraq, should have provided the ideal opportunity. But although the first President Bush secured United Nations support, and Syrian and Egyptian troops, for the recovery of Kuwait, he did so without any noticeable help from the left of center, who were too fastidious about the oil issue to soil their hands. (We can now say, with almost 100 percent certainty, that if Saddam Hussein had kept Kuwait, he would have acquired the bomb.) In Bosnia, where there was no oil but there was genocide, a “New Democrat” administration was finally persuaded to take action, again without the support of the large and consistent antiwar wing of American politics, whose members moaned ceaselessly about quagmire. Most of the traditional Right was silent or hostile on this occasion, too. Those who pressed for solidarity with Bosnia included some leftists like Susan Sontag, a great part of the American Jewish community, and a few traditional hawks—but perhaps most notably (and in a case that did not involve the state interest of Israel) the emerging neoconservatives. As one who took part in this argument, I can testify that many on the pro-Bosnian Left had more or less to assure themselves that their demand for intervention was kosher, precisely because it did not seem to be in the immediate national-security interest of the United States. Blood for no oil!
All of this was a dismal prelude to the crisis that struck the United States in the fall of 2001. One knew, before that terrible day was out, what would be said by the academic and journalistic and Hollywood Left. Much of the rhetoric of that time has been forgotten (though not by me), and now those who never wanted a fight in Afghanistan in the first place are free to complain that the war with al-Qaeda in Iraq is a distraction from the struggle they opposed. But in some untranslatable manner, this two-faced position has communicated itself to a large number of American voters. These people may be as uninformed as Beinart complains they are (look how many of them believe that Saddam Hussein was behind the World Trade Center attacks), but they are not so stupid as to believe that the president invaded Iraq to avenge his daddy, or to swell the coffers of Halliburton, or to please General Sharon. Nor are they so dumb and credulous as to believe that there would be no jihadists in Iraq if it were not for the coalition presence. Fatuity of that kind—especially the last kind—is the preserve of the Democratic intelligentsia, not just of the MoveOn.org types but also of figures like Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer, and Al Gore. I am not a tremendous admirer of Senator Joseph Lieberman, but his expressed opinions make him a smaller figure in Democratic circles than was Henry Wallace in 1948. How can a Truman emerge from this galère?
In other words, the whole comparison with the ADA is hopelessly inexact. The hard-liners in 1948 were
principled enough to do the Democratic Party the favor of deserting it and running their own slate. They were also, one might concede, at least intelligible in their naïveté about the USSR. A thinking person could, then at least, be brought to believe that state socialism was an improvement on monopoly capitalism, and that war was to be avoided at any price. In the present case, however, not only are the hard-liners the activist and fund-raising core of the party; they also express ambivalence about a foe that does not even pretend to share the values of the Enlightenment, and that is furthermore immune to the cruder rationality of MAD. The Soviet leadership had every reason to avoid suicide, while the Islamist fanatics dream of nothing else. In this context, Beinart’s wishful and halfhearted belief that Saddam Hussein could have been contained is the one position that nobody can seriously hold. He gives himself away when he argues that a continuation of the cruel and indiscriminate sanctions could have led the Baathist regime to self-destruct. Has he even tried to imagine what Iraq would have looked like on the day that that self-destruction occurred? Let us just assume that it would not have been a Velvet Revolution. It would have more closely resembled a Rwanda or a Congo on the Gulf. Bad as things are now, they would certainly have been worse.
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