I Don’t Get It

by tristero

Why do people like Kurt Andersen have jobs writing for prominent outlets like New York Magazine? He’s sooooooo boring! And he’s sooooooooo wrong!

First, here’s the Dirty Fucking Hippies gambit :

The antiwar left’s conviction now that everything will be fine if we simply ship home all our troops is born of a similar impulse, a wishful naivete so convinced of its own righteousness that it refuses to imagine vast unintended consequences, let alone to anguish over them. Little thought is given to what might happen after we leave. What if, instead of 100 murdered Iraqi civilians a day, the number is in the thousands? What happens if ethnic cleansing becomes state policy? And the Saudis intervene to protect their Sunni brothers from slaughter? And Turkey invades the Kurdish provinces? What counts is the beautiful, big idea.

I don’t know anyone who supports immediate withdrawal from Iraq thinks everything would be fine. Furthermore, I don’t know anyone who supports immediate withdrawal from Iraq who thinks that means we pack up and go home the week after it’s announced. As a matter of fact, I don’t know anyone who supports immediate withdrawal from Iraq who thinks it has a chance of happening under Bush.

Contra Andersen, there’s no wishful naivete here, there’s plenty of anguish, and there’s plenty of hard-headed realism about the future. True, some of us think that with the US no longer there, a major precipitant of the violence will disappear and things could improve. But many of us have no such hopes. However, we know that Bush had no business invading, the US military presence is catastrophic, that the U.S. must withdraw as soon as possible, and that that can and will only happen once Bush is out of office and presumably sane people are in the White House again.

Anderson’s next tired cliche: The Dirty Fucking Hippies are as morally repellent as the neocons because their simplistic worldview makes it impossible for them to understand the human dimensions of war and suffering:

The neocons and the lefties have in common a shrugging callousness to the horrors their simple plans unintentionally enable in Iraq: eliminating the Baathist dictatorship uncorked a civil war, and eliminating U.S. troops may well turn it into a much bigger one- but it’s the Iraqis to blame for the chaos and murder, not us.”

Callousness to horror is a scabrous charge that is empirically false to hurl at those of us who, unlike Anderson, got Bush/Iraq correct from the beginning. Many of us opposed Saddam when Donald Rumsfeld was perfectly willing to shake his hand. Many of us worked hard to try eliminate the cruelty of the sanctions placed on Iraq in the 90’s. And all of us were sickened by the terrible, inevitable atrocities of the Kurt Andersen-supported Invasion. Finally, Clinton was booed when she suggested to liberals that it was the Iraqis’ own fault. Liberals know better to buy that bullshit. And they have no problem letting politicians know it. (Would that they would listen.)

And it’s not those advocating immediate withdrawal who are advocating simple plans. It’s Anderson’s boy, George W. Bush who’s the simpleton.

I did a little googling of Kurt Andersen’s work. He has consistently been wrong about Bush/Iraq, and his writing usually bear no relation to consensual reality, informing his readers that New Yorkers feel practically French – we don’t, actually some of us feel practically Finnish – and we’re secretly afraid that we’d have to grudgingly admit that the brutish Bush had done the right thing. (And did you notice? In this earlier article, Andersen sez we liberals are too nuanced. Here we’re too black and white. And he has the gall to ask his readers whether they are intellectually honest!)

Amongst many of the people I know in the press, there is something more highly prized than being right and that is novelty. By these standards, Bob Herbert is a bore and Paul Krugman is predictable. Kurt Anderson, therefore, must surely come off as refreshing, railing against liberals and the antiwar left right in the midst of their natural habitat.

There’s just one problem. He’s wrong, completely wrong. And there’s a glut of these refreshingly novel – actually stale and repetitious – opinion makers. And they are working overtime, not to underrstand the issues, but to deny those of us who were right from having a place at the table Respectable Opinion. Thus, liberal interventionism – the liberal hawk position – is the New Black for moderates. Slaughter, Roger Cohen who Digby discusses below, Andersen – they’re not hippies.

Or so they say. But it is they, not us, sporting the bad tie-dyes. It is not us who ever suffered from the hallucination that Bush/Iraq was a good idea. It is not we who ever, for a moment, elevated our hopes for what the world “should” be like to such heights we couldn’t apprehend the reality of the Iraq and Afghanistan disasters. The truth is that the woo-woo crowd, the pie-in-the-sky guys, they’re George Bush and Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith and Peggy Noonan and Ken Pollack and Richard Perle.

And the guys holding their joints are folks like Kurt Andersen.