I think you omitted what may, sadly, be the best argument remaining for the Iraq war, the one keyed to the Osama speech -- which I am too lazy to google -- in which he said they wanted to hit the Americans because the US is weak; see Somalia. Iraq was supposed to show that we are not weak, that we mean business. This is related to the Airmiles Friedman argument, that we needed to show we could break something over there, in the general vicinity of Arabia.
This is why we're extra-committed now, by the President's logic. Having gone in to show our strength, we must not bail now that it's heavy going.
if it came as news to you that various terrorist groups very much wanted to kill lots of Americans, or, more broadly, that there are important Middle Eastern circles in which the US inspires much hatred, that says something unflattering about your state of information.
That is ungenerous, because people could have known about the intent, but underestimated the reach and ability. Of course, subsequent overestimation is not so good either.
True, Ogged, but-- and this is so easy in hindsight, I admit-- it wasn't as if the perpetrators of 9-11 impressed us with their great resources, cunning, or supernatural powers. I mean, wasn't the most shocking thing that it was so easy?
Or is the most shocking thing that it seemed disconnected from a realistic strategic program?
Your larger point, of course is correct. Agreement on the principle "wipe out all terrorists" does not necessitate any particular conclusion about what to do in Iraq.
It is merely an unfortunate coincidence, then, that those who do not agree with the proposition "wipe out all terrorists" are almost without exception opponents of the current Iraq policy?
Sure, but that--misjudging how easy it was, how vulnerable we are--is also different from being ignorant of how much the U.S. is hated. We better make a distinction though: I think reasonably well-informed people, and people in positions of authority in the government, knew very well that there was serious hostility in the world. The Cole and the embassy bombing had already happened, after all. But it probably was a massive shock to most Americans, which probably accounts for a lot of the overreaction.
(a) is the important point, I think. Only one vehicle can traverse the path that leads from (1) a band of mostly Saudi Islamists so radical that they consider the house of Saud infidels carries out a spectacular terrorist attack on US soil to (2) we should invade the secular socialist state of Iraq. That vehicle is "all Arabs are the same." It's a stunningly racist formulation.
It is merely an unfortunate coincidence, then, that those who do not agree with the proposition "wipe out all terrorists" are almost without exception opponents of the current Iraq policy?
That isn't the case, baa. The folks screaming "wipe out all the terrorists" aren't advocating going after the Basques or bombing Belfast. India suffered most of the world's terrorist attacks last year.
This is the point: when folks like Cap'n Ed or Charles Johnson start pounding their chests about terrorists, they are really saying something else altogether, and the implied subtext isn't pretty.
those who do not agree with the proposition "wipe out all terrorists"
I call foul. In fact, it's the same foul you decry in your second paragraph: agreeing about the ends doesn't necessitate any particular means, but the phrase "wipe out" assumes that the means--killing--are already decided. People who do not agree with the proposition "wipe out all terrorists" might nevertheless agree with the proposition "end terrorism."
Or is the most shocking thing that it seemed disconnected from a realistic strategic program?
This was not particularly news, I think. John Gray's book on Al Qaeda seemed to me to do a better job of situating their ideology, or philosophy if you prefer, in a long tradition of modernist radicalisms.
The folks screaming 'wipe out all the terrorists' aren't exactly rushing to invade Saudi Arabia either. And while invading Saudi Arabia is not exactly a sensible proposition, it seems that at least as strong an argument could have been made for Saudi Arabia as Iraq, at least from the standpoint of 9/11 'reaction'.
Oh, and about c)... that always struck me as an ex post facto justification.... it wasn't until we were already in Iraq, iirc, that the flypaper theory started to get bandied about.
I'm not even sure what "wipe out all terrorists" means. Does that mean wipe out all people who realize they haven't a hope of winning a conventional war, and so may pursue asymmetrical warfare? Or all people who have used such methods in the past? Or all people who have used such methods in the past against the US?
It's a meaningless phrase; the real question is what it covers.
I think perhaps the most annoying thing is Bush's refrain, "they hate our freedom." I do believe his frequent repetition of that phrase has people thinking that 1) there are a bunch of bad terrorists out there 2) terrorists hate freedom and 3) they are willing to come here and kill us in an attempt to destroy freedom. Therefore, of course, the only response is to "wipe 'em out" because there's no other means of dealing with people who simply are driven to genocidal rage by the idea of a liberal society.
Reading baa's linked article, the first analogy seems judiciously flawed. There's a difference between looking for similarity between you and an other while assuming a common immanent experience and trying to divine an other's character based upon superstition.
Apostropher, I share your position. If it takes a nation of millions to simply hold them back, what would it take to wipe them out? Only Shinseki knows.
it is absurd for us to look for the so-called "root" causes of terrorism in poverty, lack of education, a lack of democracy, etc. Such factors play absolutely no role in the creation of a fantasy ideology. On the contrary, fantasy ideologies have historically been the product of members of the intelligentsia, middle-class at the very least and vastly better educated than average.
Poverty etc. may play no role in the creation of ideologies that support the propaganda of the deed, but they might play a role in the spread of such ideologies.
The disease metaphor itself betrays the limits on a "wipe out" strategy -- we have wiped out smallpox, true, but not AIDS; we have made ourselves essentially immune to diphtheria, but not to tuberculosis, etc. Poisonous radicalisms are the same. Stamp out one, you'll get another.
Pursuing the disease metaphor further, one might accept that we should quarantine and eradicate the disease, but one might also say we should furthermore address the 'so-called "root causes"' precisely because that would prevent the spread of disease, much as sanitation does.
This is quickly becoming one of those threads - a fact I can only blame myself for. To clarify, I took FL as pointing out, correctly that even if one already stipulated:
a) The correct conlusion from of 9/11 was to initiate a war on islamic terrorism
b) A war on islamic terrorism primarily means killing terrorists and bringing unprecidented pressure on state sponsors
even so this does not yield definitive policy guidance on how to approach Iraq. That's the concession: it is false to imply that "hawk" conclusions about 9/11 necessarily support the administrations policy on Iraq.
As it happens, most mainstream democrats did draw hawkish conclusions from 9/11 and do agree to a and b (that's why they all supported toppling the Taliban, or so I hear). So hence my (I think) defensible snark about the almost perfect corrleation between opposing a and b and opposing the war in Iraq. It's an interesting fact.
Slolernr, I am not sure that it's so obvious that the "fantasy ideology" explanation is true. I offered it in the spirit of a hypothesis to be considered. It certainly is a more unnerving hypothesis than an Al Queda seeking more easily understandable and redressable aims.
My thoughts on this are scattered, and they have been evolving slowly over time, but here goes.
More irksome than the idea that the Bush administration went into Iraq "without a plan" is the idea that they went into Iraq certain of victory. There was no shortage of people on the left (and some on the right) warning that "victory" would be hard to achieve in an occupation scenario, but we were ignored. This mentality still holds; "Failure is not an option" is a dangerous and naive notion, but one that is repeated everywhere without a thought to what would constitue a success at this point (Billmon has an excellet post on this today). Of course failure is an option; Vietnam was a failure. The United States is capable of failure, and those failures have consequences that last generations.
It's infuriating that the first response from many on the right is a blustery, "Well, what's your plan for solving the Iraq problem??" I'm sorry, but I don't have one, and neither does anyone else. The only sensible plan was not to invade. It's as though we sent a team of astronauts to Mars in a rocket that holds enough fuel to get them there, but not enough to get them back, on the assumption that they'd figure out some source of fuel on the planet itself (it's not a perfect analogy, but you get the point). The sensible plan would have been to not send them in the first place, but now they're there, and the architects of the plan demand to know what we, the plan's original opponents, propose to do to get them home. Well, it seems as though those astronauts are fucked, just as we are, no matter how angry it may make those who put their faith in a miracle.
There are no good options left, it seems. We're going to withdraw our troops now or later, and it's going to be very unpleasant however it happens. We need to face the possibility that there is no magic plan that will save us; that we've gone too far and there's no way to avoid the consequences for our rash actions. This is what is most difficult, especially for the American people, just as it was for the German people in World War I. We demand military dominance of our country. We will not tolerate failure.
The most frustrating thing, though, is that politically speaking, opposing any war is always a loser, and supporting any war is always a winner, especially when the supporters/opponents hew to a neat right/left divide. If the war goes well, the opponents look like fools. If it goes badly, the opponents get the brunt of the criticism for "undermining", and the supporters can plunk every jingoistic key on the piano. If we pull out of Iraq (when we pull out), it won't be Republicans who suffer political damage; it will be Democrats, because our position is the most difficult -- some oppose the war, some support it, some bend over backwards to "support the troops" while still opposing the war -- and the Republican line is much more simple and consistent. There is no reward for being right in this case, only punishment. And there is no punishment for leading the nation into a bloody quagmire; only political victory.
A more cynical observer might conclude that this was primarily a political maneuver in the first place.
Going after the Taliban was obviously the right thing to do. I don't know why we couldn't have limited our military action to just Afghanistan, and concentrated our efforts on rebuilding it as a real beacon to democracy.
Obviously, oil has a lot to do with this also, and I don't mean that in a conspiracy-theory way. Establishing (as Kunstler puts it) a permanent police station in the most volatile (and oil-rich) region in the world is a laudable goal in theory, but it's worked out horribly in practice, since those police can't even control their own neighborhood right now, much less the neighborhoods around them.
So hence my (I think) defensible snark about the almost perfect corrleation between opposing a and b and opposing the war in Iraq. It's an interesting fact.
Why is that terribly informative? There are lots of reasons for opposing a and b. It seems a stretch to imply that because that same group also doesn't support invading Iraq that it's because... c) they acknowledge that Iraq is the same as al-Qaeda but d) are too pacifist/wimpy/apologetic/whatever to do anything about it....
Is that what's being implied here? That everyone recognizes that Iraq sponsors terrorism, and the same arguments that led some to cry against invading Afghanistan are the same arguments against Iraq?
It is merely an unfortunate coincidence, then, that those who do not agree with the proposition "wipe out all terrorists" are almost without exception opponents of the current Iraq policy?
I agree with the criticisms made of this in 7, 8, and 12 (and probably other posts). Look, terrorism is a tactic that various groups have used throughout history when they couldn't achieve their goals through conventional military ends. Nothing we are likely to be able to do is going to make terrorism unavailable as a tactic. We could, possibly, "wipe out" every person who has ever used or abetted terrorism, but no one appears to be seriously advocating "wiping out" abortion clinic bombers, or Basque separatists, or doing anything particular about Sri Lanka.
When people say "wipe out all terrorists" they appear to mean, in context, something more like "Kill all Arab terrorists, whether religious or secular, and all other Middle Eastern Muslim terrorists, and overthrow any governments that we believe contribute to ME terrorism, so long as they aren't Saudia Arabia," and that's a little less forcefully principled, don't you think?
Actually I think the reason baa's snark was uninteresting (er, hi, baa) is that, if you opposed a and b, it's not that unexpected to oppose the Iraq war, is it? If I thought we shouldn't fight Al Qaeda and terrorism in general, would you really expect me to be gung-ho about invading Iraq? It's not really like snarking about how none of those vegans seems to enjoy a steak, but I couldn't really see the point of it.
What would be interesting is if there was a group of people who were fine with letting Al Qaeda be but still wanted to be in Iraq, say for political or economic reasons.
What I find frustrating about all the 9/11 references is the fact, mentioned earlier, that America is not the only country that has problems with terrorists.
I think this is American exceptionalism at its worst -- an unwillingness to take seriously the experience of others in the world and to learn from them and see our own experiences in context.
Apostropher correctly identifies the strong element of racism involved in the rhetoric about Iraq but I think it goes beyond that.
The quoted section from Captain Ed implies that determing the proper methods for responding to terrorism is not an empircal question but a identifiable a priori.
There was endless mocking of John Kerry's comment that dealing with terrorism is closer to police work than military action (a correct statement IMHO). What is frustrating is that non of the critics acknowledged that both methods have been tried in the past and there is a history of success and failures to be learned from. I wouldn't mind a criticism based on arguing that Kerry misinterpreted the historical analogies, but I just don't hear that.
what baa is saying is: all people of X category (those who were against invading Afganistan) are also in Y category (those who are/were against the Iraqi war). But he admits that all people in Y category were never in X. As he must -- I and many of you are Ys and not Xs.
So how is that at all surprising? People who were Xs tended to be pacificists. They are unlikely to support most wars. It doesn't say anything about the reasonableness or unreasonableness of the justification for being in the Y category. An extra justification (pacifism) does nothing to remove the adequacy of the primary justification (that the war was costly, stupid, and provides us with little benefit).
No, NickS, I think Kerry got them right, he just didn't express himself well.
Much of what Harris said in the essay bass linked sounded to me like an unknowing gloss of John Gray's intellectual history of AQ. So I had to go look it up. Gray argues, "the belief that a new world can be hastened by spectacular acts of destruction" has its roots in the Enlightenment.
Anyone who doubts that revolutionary terror is a modern invention has contrived to forget recent history.... The gas chambers and the gulags are modern.
This is what I take Harris to be saying when he compares AQ's fantasy ideology to others of the recent past. And thus, as with Nazism and Communism, they must be stamped out. The 'so-called "root causes"' need no addressing.
Of course, waging the Cold War we did two things. (1) implacably oppose Soviet expansion, seeking to make the USSR crumble from within; (2) combat poverty, disease, etc. in the non-aligned world to prevent the spread of communism.
So, on the historical analogy: if only (1) had been necessary, Harris's scorn for addressing 'so-called "root causes"' would be warranted. But (2) was necessary too. Ordinarily our policy did not fight poverty in Russia (and does not in Cuba). But it did in the non-aligned countries where we sent the Peace Corps. There seems to be no modern analogy to (2).
1. It's worth noting at this point that, though baa is clearly a minion of the Devil (whether the Devil is the Administration or the Celtics), he is an open, honest, decent devil. These issues make many, many people furious (me!), and engender responses that confuse opposition to the Administration with opposition to baa.
2. Text and Wolfson are clearly right that baa doesn't mean correlate; he means the set of people who disagree with (a) and (b) are subset of the people who disagree with the war in Iraq. But there are others. I believe, in fact, that the official position of many Democratic officials was to agree with (a) and (b), but disagree with the war in Iraq.
3. I think we ignore something important when we don't acknowledge that our positions on policies might change with the people who implement the policies. I think the Administration is either incompetent or filled with liars, so I'm inclined not to follow them when not following them has no serious consequences.
Many bellicose elements on the right claim that the wussy lefties don't take terrorism seriously. Those right elements claim that they are, and we should be, really, really worried about another attack. At the same time, the chief culprit, Osama, hasn't been on the radar screens in quite awhile. Further, I haven't seen any evidence (though it could be out there) that there is any campaign on the right efforting to get more attention of Osama. Absent this action, how are we to take the right's claims of 1) seriousness and 2) worrying about attacks? Perhaps the right simply trusts the government to bring him in eventually, though that seems skechy, given the failure up till now.
It baffles me how Cap'n Ed could think Saddam Hussein was a serious threat, but apparantly isn't giving any thought to Osama. Further:
It showed us the folly of appeasement in exchange for the illusion of stability.
What's the "it"? Have we ceased tolerating brutal regimes and no one sent me the memo?
which really meant the consignment of tens of millions of people to brutal tyrannies that produce radicals willing to die for no other reason than to kill innocents to promote their ideology.
And we've all seen how occupation has completely changed this: no more killing at all now. Walking in, overthrowing a nasty dictator, and installing democracy is a nice thought, a Fantasy Ideology you might call it. But reality doesn't appear so agreable to this fantasy.
I would like to see your evidence supporting that notion that the Adminstration's policies are driven by racism and that those of us who support them (to one extent or another) similarly are racist. Like comparing people to Hitler, calling people racists rarely promotes reasonable discourse; indeed, if you have to get to that point, you must not have much in the way of reasoned argument to support your position.
To address the merits of your point that "wipe out terrorism" is not a nuanced and complete policy: sure, it's not, it's an easy shorthand, the reality is much more complex. The same, of course, could be said for all such shorthand statements of position. Are you for ending the war in Iraq? If you say yes, do you really mean end it today, dropping our weapons and flying away right now? No transition, nothing, like training or infrastructure development continued, even in the short run?
1. The problem isn't that, "'wipe out terrorism' is not a nuanced and complete policy." It's that it isn't a policy at all. Whatever we might mean by "leave Iraq" (not a position I fully support), there are a variety of reasonable options that fall properly under that rubric without having to bizarrely redefine terms. There is no set of actions that falls under "wipe out terrorism" that has the same sort of characteristics. The phrase misconceives something important.
2. I've never fully understood why, precisely, people arguing that racism might play a part in something have the onus of offering substantial proof. Surely there is evidence that it has often, in the past, played a part? Why is the default that our conceptions of race (or gender, or sexuality, etc.) don't enter our decision-making process. (I'm sure it's even a bad thing, always, if they do.)
I agree that I don't think our policy is based on overt racism, or even conscious racism. It may not even be racism; it could be jingoism. But pretending that we react the same to news that innocent Afghani cab drivers are being beaten to death and innocent Wall St. lawyers are being beaten to death strikes me as naive.
I can look for specific evidence of racism but I do think that the "wipe out terrorism is shorthand" position only works if, at some point they've articulated a more complex policy position.
As far as I can tell I don't know what the administration's objectives are (other than "wipe out terrorism") how the administration will know when they're complete or whether the administration thinks that we're succeeding or failing in those objectives.
Also I would say that while I explicitly agreed with the charge or racism my criticism was not based on the charge of racism. So I your criticism, "if you have to [call people racist], you must not have much in the way of reasoned argument to support your position." directly applies to my #27.
I'd further say that, while I don't know that our policies are significantly motivated by racism, I am sure that the idea represented in many people's mind by "wiping out terrorism" (insofar as they would react to, say, a mention of abortion clinic bombings or Basque separatists being obviously not what they're talking about) is a racist one. It's a lazy conflation of terrorism motivated by religious extremism (e.g., Al Qaeda) and secular nationalism (e.g., the PLO), where the primary link between the various groups is their ethnicity.
Poverty etc. may play no role in the creation of ideologies that support the propaganda of the deed, but they might play a role in the spread of such ideologies.
Poverty does not make poor people into terrorists and murderers. Yet poverty, weak institutions, and corruption can make weak states vulnerable to terrorist networks and drug cartels within their borders.
Idealist, let me tighten my language a bit and offer an analogy. Suppose a Colombian drug cartel set off a bomb that blew up the Capitol building and we responded by invading Venezuela. Now, the obvious reason would be that we don't like Chavez and that isn't motivated by racism. However, if the rationale repeatedly offered is that we have to wipe out those freedom-hating South American narcoterrorists, while we occupy a wholly unrelated South American country, then yes, that's racist. It plays on Americans' famously poor knowledge of geography and peoples outside of the continental 48 and inflates the specific problem of Colombian-based narcoterrorism with South Americans generally, in order to drum up opposition to whatever SA regimes we don't like.
Ergo, while the administration's rationale may not be racially-driven, the way they are selling it to the folks back home is undeniably so. In his address on Tuesday, Bush went right back to the "we're in Iraq because of 9/11" meme, which is ludicrous on its face to anybody not infected with Laurie Mylroie's swamp fever. I don't think they are over there because of racism, but to aver that they aren't using others' racism to justify it is myopic, at best.
I agree that charges of racism aren't generally helpful and tend to obscure more than they reveal, but sometimes things are what they are. I don't imagine that you or baa support the war (assuming either of you do) out of any racist motives, but let's not fool ourselves: an awful lot of Americans just fucking hate Arabs and Muslims generally and it isn't hard to whip up the fervor among that crowd.
However, if the rationale repeatedly offered is that we have to wipe out those freedom-hating South American narcoterrorists, while we occupy a wholly unrelated South American country, then yes, that's racist.
an awful lot of Americans just fucking hate Arabs and Muslims generally and it isn't hard to whip up the fervor among that crowd.
How do we know this? I spent most of my adult life surrounded by pretty conservative people, including six months in the desert in the middle east, which is more than enough to put people in a bad mood toward both their enemies and their hosts, and I never heard anyone say that they hated Arabs. I do not remember a civilian conservative acquainance ever saying that they hated Arabs. Who are these supporters of the war who hate Arabs?
Are there right-winger who are motivated by racial or ethnic animus? Of course. Just as there are left-wingers who DO hate America. It's not very productive to talk about the extremes on either end.
All that being said, there is something to the claim that people get confused over who the players are and that some support for the war likely was based on a mistaken belief that Iraq's support for terrorism and opposition to American interests was the same as the Taliban's. But being ignorant of geography and international affairs does not make you a racist.
There are a lot of views that end up falling under the badge of racist, and I think you are addressing only one. "I hate black people, and hope the die," is clearly racist. I hope this isn't a particularly prevalent view, even in the South. But I'd argue that "Jim Crow (or slavery) might be bad, but it's just the burden we have to bear for states' rights," is also racist, in that it depends on asking a population distinguished only by its race to bear a burden we would never conceivably ask another population of the dominant race to bear.
That's the racism that I worry about most, and it is of a piece, I think, we the Republican Party's inability to even attempt to address the issues of a tyranny of the majority. I think this inability to address such issues, along with the actual leadership of the Party (Southern) is the reason the Republican Party continues to have the taint of the party of racists.
You might well be right that we should be very, very careful about using words like "racist," because people react strongly and defensively to such words. That seems fair, and it's advice we on the other side should heed. But it's also like saying, "Don't call someone's mother a whore, because people react badly to it." Probably true, but it doesn't mean X's mother isn't a taking cash for sex.
All that being said, there is something to the claim that people get confused over who the players are and that some support for the war likely was based on a mistaken belief that Iraq's support for terrorism and opposition to American interests was the same as the Taliban's.
And if the rhetoric used to sell the war was calculated to exploit that confusion, that rhetoric was racist. Doesn't necessarily mean the people using that rhetoric had racism in their hearts, no one can possibly ever know that, or anything else, about another person, but the tactic is a racist one.
Well, I can't say how *we* know this, but *I* know it because I've lived my whole life in the South and, believe me, that sentiment doesn't take much digging to find. Hell, just pick a LGF comment thread at random and watch the eliminationist rhetoric about "vermin" fly. Oh sure, they make a point of pointing out a difference between "good" and "bad" Muslims, but it smacks of the differences I heard pointed out repeatedly when growing up between the "good coloreds" and the "niggers".
being ignorant of geography and international affairs does not make you a racist
Of course not. It just makes you ignorant of geography and world affairs. Playing on that ignorance to promote such lovely notions as "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," on the other hand, while perhaps not technically racist per se, is trafficking in the very rankest sort of bigotry.
I fear this is degenerating into a terminological dispute. You can have the term 'racism'; I am inclined to think that using the term will cause more problems that it will solve. ('You mean the liberal elite thinks everyone who wanted to go to Iraq are racists like the KKK?')
Let's instead call it uninformed prejudice (which amounts to the same thing, but whatever); the idea because the people are far away, have a religion that you don't understand, are kind of darker than you, whatever, makes it easy to conflate terrorism and a regime that doesn't seem to be supporting terrorism but ain't all that friendly.
Now maybe the average American buying into this conflation is guilty only of ignorance; I fear the same cannot be said for the leaders, for whom ignorance cannot be a plausible defence.
At what point does one bear the responsibility to go out and inform yourself, rather than make generalizations?
I do not remember a civilian conservative acquainance ever saying that they hated Arabs.
I have, but, as you say, that's beside the pont because we should ignore the extremties. I also know of a guy down here who, a block off campus, at a block-party, got beat nearly to death before he escaped and lost an eye (broken bottle) because he was arab. (the police refused to investigate. Took awhile to convince the poor guy to go to the DA. I, unfortantely, don't know how it turned out.)
Anyway, what I meant to say is that racism takes different forms. A classic distinction here in the South is between gut hatred of blacks, and "intellectual" dismissal of them as equivalent. The latter was, if I understand history correctly, much more dangerous. Those people don't "hate" so much as they view the other as inherently less than themselves, and calculate rights and expectations accordingly. There's no reason to hate, or even dislike, arabs, to think of them as lesser.
However, I also don't think this is simply racism, even the "intllectual" kind. A poor understanding of others also, I think, contributes to seeing them as less-than-ourselves. Simply, racism is a belief that others are not similar to ourselves, but a hazy understanding of the other produces the impression that the other is not similar to ourselves.
Cala, this seems like a terminological dispute worth having, because--following up the excellent comments from a bunch of folks--we can assume that most people aren't racist, and abhor racism, but if they can be shown that a particular policy that they support _amounts_ to racism, we're all back in the same moral universe, and can take it from there. In other words, precisely because we know that Idealist and many of his fellow soldiers aren't racist is it worthwhile to argue with them about whether what we're doing in Iraq is racist.
I dunno, ogged. I think Cala and Idealist convinced me on the importance of being parsimonious with the word "racism."
My one concern is that an agreement to be careful with such charges allows Republicans to hide behind different meanings of "support." I think "support" can mean either "endorse" or "take actions to make such results more likely." I agree that most Republicans do not "support" racism in the first sense; I'm less sure about the second. Or, because I think this is a clearer case, I can easily believe that very few Republicans "support" torture in the first sense; I think they pretty clearly do "support" torture in the second sense. There might be cases when such (second sense) support is justified; I don't think it is here.
49: ogged, in case it wasn't clear, I agree that the sweeping generalizations made by a lot of people (due to misinformation or whatever) do qualify as some form of racism. (i.e., not agreeing with Idealist, just granting him the word because he seemed to be stuck on it.)
It may be a good way to get good people who aren't racists to recognize that their actions are tantamount to racism by calling it that and maybe some of them will reflect upon it.
Or, it might just piss them off and close off the discussion. For example, a feminist might argue that Western society promotes a culture of rape. And she might do that in order to convince good men to reflect about how they treat women and their role in society. And some might.
Others may be so incensed by the word 'rapist' that they refuse to engage in further dialogue. In any case, the discussion gets sidetracked as everyone scrambles to clarify that they didn't mean that all men were rapists in the dark-alley-sense, but in the patriarchy-beneficiary-sense.. that Republicans were racists-in-the-cross-burning-sense, but in the intellectual-institutionalized-sense-borne-out-of-ignorance sense.
I'm a bit late to the thread, but on the terminological dispute:
If you take the definition put forward by George Fredrickson in Racism: A Short History (and in his other writings) full-blown racism requires a belief that some racial groups are inherently and biologically superior or inferior to others. So under this definition, which may be too strict, but to my mind is more manageable than one that is too loose, racism is about innate, essential, and immutable characteristics.
Fredrickson specifically distinguishes racial conflicts from religious ones, and in his epilogue wonders if religion will replace race as the major dividing line of the 21st century. I suspect he would see the war in Iraq as having to do more with religion and culture than with race.
On the flip side, the belief that all groups can potentially become equals can have disastrous results in policy, just as racism can. Much US Indian policy, even into the 1920s, was motivated by a belief that Indians were not innately inferior and that they could become equals with Americans through assimilation. But this required the replacement of extended family structures with ones resembling the American middle-class ideal, the transformation of property ownership and the reorginization of landholdings, boarding schools, etc.
The Iraq war, carried out in part to tranform Iraq into a democratic country and to assimilate it, so to speak, into the democratic world seems to resemble the latter situation more than one in which racism, strictly defined, was a guiding belief.
Just as there are left-wingers who DO hate America.
Is this true? And, if so, how is that related to leftism? I mean, "America" is an awfully big thing to hate. Are there "leftists" out there who sincerely wish for all Americans to die or something? I've just never seen any evidence of this. Certainly people exist who hate Bush and such, but that's quite different from hating America. And there are those who hate certain actions which Politicians have undertaken, and there are those who hate certain aspects of American culture...but, to hate the whole thing? Never seen this, myself.
And, since the analogy was "left wingers who hate America = right wingers motivated by racial or ethnic animus," it's worth pointing out that the right-wing constituency that's motivated by something approaching racial or ethnic animus is MUCH bigger than the left-wing constituency that's motivated by something approaching America-hatred. Trent Lott is poised to reenter the GOP Senate leadership while Cynthia McKinney is a backbencher (who's only back in Congress because the woman who beat her in a primary ran for Senate). Last I checked over 30% of Republican Senators had refused to sign on to the apology for lynching, including both from the state (Texas) that basically runs the party. The modern GOP was basically made by Nixon's "Southern Strategy," which was a conscious attempt to appeal to racism. etc. etc. etc.
Or, if the topic is really right-wingers motivated by animus against Muslims, or people who sort of resemble some Muslims: Sue Myrick, John Cooksey, Saxby Chambliss, off the top of my head.
pls understand I'm not saying all or most conservatives/war supporters are racists or motivated by ethnic animus or anything close to that. I'm not married to the term, for the reasons quoted above, and I think 45 really gets at the heart of it. But we shouldn't minimize the amount of honest-to-goodness racism going on (or prejudice, since this may not fit Frederickson's definition).
I'm going way back into time for this but it has to be pointed out. Ben was looking for "a group of people who were fine with letting Al Qaeda be but still wanted to be in Iraq, say for political or economic reasons." I would argue that anyone who says that he isn't really concerned with where Osama bin Laden is falls into that category.
It's more than interesting that there is a group of people like this, Ben. It's happening, it's important, and it's driving our foreign and military policy. That group of people is the Bush family.
I think you omitted what may, sadly, be the best argument remaining for the Iraq war, the one keyed to the Osama speech -- which I am too lazy to google -- in which he said they wanted to hit the Americans because the US is weak; see Somalia. Iraq was supposed to show that we are not weak, that we mean business. This is related to the Airmiles Friedman argument, that we needed to show we could break something over there, in the general vicinity of Arabia.
This is why we're extra-committed now, by the President's logic. Having gone in to show our strength, we must not bail now that it's heavy going.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 9:25 AM
if it came as news to you that various terrorist groups very much wanted to kill lots of Americans, or, more broadly, that there are important Middle Eastern circles in which the US inspires much hatred, that says something unflattering about your state of information.
That is ungenerous, because people could have known about the intent, but underestimated the reach and ability. Of course, subsequent overestimation is not so good either.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 9:29 AM
True, Ogged, but-- and this is so easy in hindsight, I admit-- it wasn't as if the perpetrators of 9-11 impressed us with their great resources, cunning, or supernatural powers. I mean, wasn't the most shocking thing that it was so easy?
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 9:33 AM
Or is the most shocking thing that it seemed disconnected from a realistic strategic program?
Your larger point, of course is correct. Agreement on the principle "wipe out all terrorists" does not necessitate any particular conclusion about what to do in Iraq.
It is merely an unfortunate coincidence, then, that those who do not agree with the proposition "wipe out all terrorists" are almost without exception opponents of the current Iraq policy?
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 9:39 AM
Sure, but that--misjudging how easy it was, how vulnerable we are--is also different from being ignorant of how much the U.S. is hated. We better make a distinction though: I think reasonably well-informed people, and people in positions of authority in the government, knew very well that there was serious hostility in the world. The Cole and the embassy bombing had already happened, after all. But it probably was a massive shock to most Americans, which probably accounts for a lot of the overreaction.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 9:39 AM
(a) is the important point, I think. Only one vehicle can traverse the path that leads from (1) a band of mostly Saudi Islamists so radical that they consider the house of Saud infidels carries out a spectacular terrorist attack on US soil to (2) we should invade the secular socialist state of Iraq. That vehicle is "all Arabs are the same." It's a stunningly racist formulation.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 9:41 AM
It is merely an unfortunate coincidence, then, that those who do not agree with the proposition "wipe out all terrorists" are almost without exception opponents of the current Iraq policy?
That isn't the case, baa. The folks screaming "wipe out all the terrorists" aren't advocating going after the Basques or bombing Belfast. India suffered most of the world's terrorist attacks last year.
This is the point: when folks like Cap'n Ed or Charles Johnson start pounding their chests about terrorists, they are really saying something else altogether, and the implied subtext isn't pretty.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 9:45 AM
those who do not agree with the proposition "wipe out all terrorists"
I call foul. In fact, it's the same foul you decry in your second paragraph: agreeing about the ends doesn't necessitate any particular means, but the phrase "wipe out" assumes that the means--killing--are already decided. People who do not agree with the proposition "wipe out all terrorists" might nevertheless agree with the proposition "end terrorism."
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 9:46 AM
Or is the most shocking thing that it seemed disconnected from a realistic strategic program?
This was not particularly news, I think. John Gray's book on Al Qaeda seemed to me to do a better job of situating their ideology, or philosophy if you prefer, in a long tradition of modernist radicalisms.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 9:49 AM
The folks screaming 'wipe out all the terrorists' aren't exactly rushing to invade Saudi Arabia either. And while invading Saudi Arabia is not exactly a sensible proposition, it seems that at least as strong an argument could have been made for Saudi Arabia as Iraq, at least from the standpoint of 9/11 'reaction'.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 9:53 AM
Oh, and about c)... that always struck me as an ex post facto justification.... it wasn't until we were already in Iraq, iirc, that the flypaper theory started to get bandied about.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 9:55 AM
I'm not even sure what "wipe out all terrorists" means. Does that mean wipe out all people who realize they haven't a hope of winning a conventional war, and so may pursue asymmetrical warfare? Or all people who have used such methods in the past? Or all people who have used such methods in the past against the US?
It's a meaningless phrase; the real question is what it covers.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 10:03 AM
baa, that's a very interesting essay.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 10:04 AM
I think perhaps the most annoying thing is Bush's refrain, "they hate our freedom." I do believe his frequent repetition of that phrase has people thinking that 1) there are a bunch of bad terrorists out there 2) terrorists hate freedom and 3) they are willing to come here and kill us in an attempt to destroy freedom. Therefore, of course, the only response is to "wipe 'em out" because there's no other means of dealing with people who simply are driven to genocidal rage by the idea of a liberal society.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 10:06 AM
I am definitely not down with wiping out all the terrorists.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 10:11 AM
Reading baa's linked article, the first analogy seems judiciously flawed. There's a difference between looking for similarity between you and an other while assuming a common immanent experience and trying to divine an other's character based upon superstition.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 10:12 AM
Apostropher, I share your position. If it takes a nation of millions to simply hold them back, what would it take to wipe them out? Only Shinseki knows.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 10:16 AM
To elaborate on the "wipe out" analogy problem:
Poverty etc. may play no role in the creation of ideologies that support the propaganda of the deed, but they might play a role in the spread of such ideologies.
The disease metaphor itself betrays the limits on a "wipe out" strategy -- we have wiped out smallpox, true, but not AIDS; we have made ourselves essentially immune to diphtheria, but not to tuberculosis, etc. Poisonous radicalisms are the same. Stamp out one, you'll get another.
Pursuing the disease metaphor further, one might accept that we should quarantine and eradicate the disease, but one might also say we should furthermore address the 'so-called "root causes"' precisely because that would prevent the spread of disease, much as sanitation does.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 10:19 AM
This is quickly becoming one of those threads - a fact I can only blame myself for. To clarify, I took FL as pointing out, correctly that even if one already stipulated:
a) The correct conlusion from of 9/11 was to initiate a war on islamic terrorism
b) A war on islamic terrorism primarily means killing terrorists and bringing unprecidented pressure on state sponsors
even so this does not yield definitive policy guidance on how to approach Iraq. That's the concession: it is false to imply that "hawk" conclusions about 9/11 necessarily support the administrations policy on Iraq.
As it happens, most mainstream democrats did draw hawkish conclusions from 9/11 and do agree to a and b (that's why they all supported toppling the Taliban, or so I hear). So hence my (I think) defensible snark about the almost perfect corrleation between opposing a and b and opposing the war in Iraq. It's an interesting fact.
Slolernr, I am not sure that it's so obvious that the "fantasy ideology" explanation is true. I offered it in the spirit of a hypothesis to be considered. It certainly is a more unnerving hypothesis than an Al Queda seeking more easily understandable and redressable aims.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 10:21 AM
My thoughts on this are scattered, and they have been evolving slowly over time, but here goes.
More irksome than the idea that the Bush administration went into Iraq "without a plan" is the idea that they went into Iraq certain of victory. There was no shortage of people on the left (and some on the right) warning that "victory" would be hard to achieve in an occupation scenario, but we were ignored. This mentality still holds; "Failure is not an option" is a dangerous and naive notion, but one that is repeated everywhere without a thought to what would constitue a success at this point (Billmon has an excellet post on this today). Of course failure is an option; Vietnam was a failure. The United States is capable of failure, and those failures have consequences that last generations.
It's infuriating that the first response from many on the right is a blustery, "Well, what's your plan for solving the Iraq problem??" I'm sorry, but I don't have one, and neither does anyone else. The only sensible plan was not to invade. It's as though we sent a team of astronauts to Mars in a rocket that holds enough fuel to get them there, but not enough to get them back, on the assumption that they'd figure out some source of fuel on the planet itself (it's not a perfect analogy, but you get the point). The sensible plan would have been to not send them in the first place, but now they're there, and the architects of the plan demand to know what we, the plan's original opponents, propose to do to get them home. Well, it seems as though those astronauts are fucked, just as we are, no matter how angry it may make those who put their faith in a miracle.
There are no good options left, it seems. We're going to withdraw our troops now or later, and it's going to be very unpleasant however it happens. We need to face the possibility that there is no magic plan that will save us; that we've gone too far and there's no way to avoid the consequences for our rash actions. This is what is most difficult, especially for the American people, just as it was for the German people in World War I. We demand military dominance of our country. We will not tolerate failure.
The most frustrating thing, though, is that politically speaking, opposing any war is always a loser, and supporting any war is always a winner, especially when the supporters/opponents hew to a neat right/left divide. If the war goes well, the opponents look like fools. If it goes badly, the opponents get the brunt of the criticism for "undermining", and the supporters can plunk every jingoistic key on the piano. If we pull out of Iraq (when we pull out), it won't be Republicans who suffer political damage; it will be Democrats, because our position is the most difficult -- some oppose the war, some support it, some bend over backwards to "support the troops" while still opposing the war -- and the Republican line is much more simple and consistent. There is no reward for being right in this case, only punishment. And there is no punishment for leading the nation into a bloody quagmire; only political victory.
A more cynical observer might conclude that this was primarily a political maneuver in the first place.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 10:24 AM
Ok, so that was all about Iraq, and not really about what we're discussing here. It turns out I just wanted to vent.
Carry on.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 10:29 AM
"Terrorists" didn't attack us on 9/11. Al Queda attacked us on 9/11. We don't need to wipe out terrorism; we need to wipe out Al Queda.
Posted by Joe O | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 10:38 AM
Going after the Taliban was obviously the right thing to do. I don't know why we couldn't have limited our military action to just Afghanistan, and concentrated our efforts on rebuilding it as a real beacon to democracy.
Obviously, oil has a lot to do with this also, and I don't mean that in a conspiracy-theory way. Establishing (as Kunstler puts it) a permanent police station in the most volatile (and oil-rich) region in the world is a laudable goal in theory, but it's worked out horribly in practice, since those police can't even control their own neighborhood right now, much less the neighborhoods around them.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 10:43 AM
So hence my (I think) defensible snark about the almost perfect corrleation between opposing a and b and opposing the war in Iraq. It's an interesting fact.
Why is that terribly informative? There are lots of reasons for opposing a and b. It seems a stretch to imply that because that same group also doesn't support invading Iraq that it's because... c) they acknowledge that Iraq is the same as al-Qaeda but d) are too pacifist/wimpy/apologetic/whatever to do anything about it....
Is that what's being implied here? That everyone recognizes that Iraq sponsors terrorism, and the same arguments that led some to cry against invading Afghanistan are the same arguments against Iraq?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 10:44 AM
It is merely an unfortunate coincidence, then, that those who do not agree with the proposition "wipe out all terrorists" are almost without exception opponents of the current Iraq policy?
I agree with the criticisms made of this in 7, 8, and 12 (and probably other posts). Look, terrorism is a tactic that various groups have used throughout history when they couldn't achieve their goals through conventional military ends. Nothing we are likely to be able to do is going to make terrorism unavailable as a tactic. We could, possibly, "wipe out" every person who has ever used or abetted terrorism, but no one appears to be seriously advocating "wiping out" abortion clinic bombers, or Basque separatists, or doing anything particular about Sri Lanka.
When people say "wipe out all terrorists" they appear to mean, in context, something more like "Kill all Arab terrorists, whether religious or secular, and all other Middle Eastern Muslim terrorists, and overthrow any governments that we believe contribute to ME terrorism, so long as they aren't Saudia Arabia," and that's a little less forcefully principled, don't you think?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 10:55 AM
Actually I think the reason baa's snark was uninteresting (er, hi, baa) is that, if you opposed a and b, it's not that unexpected to oppose the Iraq war, is it? If I thought we shouldn't fight Al Qaeda and terrorism in general, would you really expect me to be gung-ho about invading Iraq? It's not really like snarking about how none of those vegans seems to enjoy a steak, but I couldn't really see the point of it.
What would be interesting is if there was a group of people who were fine with letting Al Qaeda be but still wanted to be in Iraq, say for political or economic reasons.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 10:57 AM
What I find frustrating about all the 9/11 references is the fact, mentioned earlier, that America is not the only country that has problems with terrorists.
I think this is American exceptionalism at its worst -- an unwillingness to take seriously the experience of others in the world and to learn from them and see our own experiences in context.
Apostropher correctly identifies the strong element of racism involved in the rhetoric about Iraq but I think it goes beyond that.
The quoted section from Captain Ed implies that determing the proper methods for responding to terrorism is not an empircal question but a identifiable a priori.
There was endless mocking of John Kerry's comment that dealing with terrorism is closer to police work than military action (a correct statement IMHO). What is frustrating is that non of the critics acknowledged that both methods have been tried in the past and there is a history of success and failures to be learned from. I wouldn't mind a criticism based on arguing that Kerry misinterpreted the historical analogies, but I just don't hear that.
Posted by NickS | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 11:06 AM
what baa is saying is: all people of X category (those who were against invading Afganistan) are also in Y category (those who are/were against the Iraqi war). But he admits that all people in Y category were never in X. As he must -- I and many of you are Ys and not Xs.
So how is that at all surprising? People who were Xs tended to be pacificists. They are unlikely to support most wars. It doesn't say anything about the reasonableness or unreasonableness of the justification for being in the Y category. An extra justification (pacifism) does nothing to remove the adequacy of the primary justification (that the war was costly, stupid, and provides us with little benefit).
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 11:07 AM
misinterpreted the historical analogies
No, NickS, I think Kerry got them right, he just didn't express himself well.
Much of what Harris said in the essay bass linked sounded to me like an unknowing gloss of John Gray's intellectual history of AQ. So I had to go look it up. Gray argues, "the belief that a new world can be hastened by spectacular acts of destruction" has its roots in the Enlightenment.
This is what I take Harris to be saying when he compares AQ's fantasy ideology to others of the recent past. And thus, as with Nazism and Communism, they must be stamped out. The 'so-called "root causes"' need no addressing.
Of course, waging the Cold War we did two things. (1) implacably oppose Soviet expansion, seeking to make the USSR crumble from within; (2) combat poverty, disease, etc. in the non-aligned world to prevent the spread of communism.
So, on the historical analogy: if only (1) had been necessary, Harris's scorn for addressing 'so-called "root causes"' would be warranted. But (2) was necessary too. Ordinarily our policy did not fight poverty in Russia (and does not in Cuba). But it did in the non-aligned countries where we sent the Peace Corps. There seems to be no modern analogy to (2).
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 11:10 AM
(Peace Corps is still out there.) (But you're generally right -- they're not all that effective or large-scale.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 11:12 AM
1. It's worth noting at this point that, though baa is clearly a minion of the Devil (whether the Devil is the Administration or the Celtics), he is an open, honest, decent devil. These issues make many, many people furious (me!), and engender responses that confuse opposition to the Administration with opposition to baa.
2. Text and Wolfson are clearly right that baa doesn't mean correlate; he means the set of people who disagree with (a) and (b) are subset of the people who disagree with the war in Iraq. But there are others. I believe, in fact, that the official position of many Democratic officials was to agree with (a) and (b), but disagree with the war in Iraq.
3. I think we ignore something important when we don't acknowledge that our positions on policies might change with the people who implement the policies. I think the Administration is either incompetent or filled with liars, so I'm inclined not to follow them when not following them has no serious consequences.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 11:15 AM
Many bellicose elements on the right claim that the wussy lefties don't take terrorism seriously. Those right elements claim that they are, and we should be, really, really worried about another attack. At the same time, the chief culprit, Osama, hasn't been on the radar screens in quite awhile. Further, I haven't seen any evidence (though it could be out there) that there is any campaign on the right efforting to get more attention of Osama. Absent this action, how are we to take the right's claims of 1) seriousness and 2) worrying about attacks? Perhaps the right simply trusts the government to bring him in eventually, though that seems skechy, given the failure up till now.
It baffles me how Cap'n Ed could think Saddam Hussein was a serious threat, but apparantly isn't giving any thought to Osama. Further:
It showed us the folly of appeasement in exchange for the illusion of stability.
What's the "it"? Have we ceased tolerating brutal regimes and no one sent me the memo?
which really meant the consignment of tens of millions of people to brutal tyrannies that produce radicals willing to die for no other reason than to kill innocents to promote their ideology.
And we've all seen how occupation has completely changed this: no more killing at all now. Walking in, overthrowing a nasty dictator, and installing democracy is a nice thought, a Fantasy Ideology you might call it. But reality doesn't appear so agreable to this fantasy.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 11:22 AM
re: 6-7, 27 (and perhaps 25)
I would like to see your evidence supporting that notion that the Adminstration's policies are driven by racism and that those of us who support them (to one extent or another) similarly are racist. Like comparing people to Hitler, calling people racists rarely promotes reasonable discourse; indeed, if you have to get to that point, you must not have much in the way of reasoned argument to support your position.
To address the merits of your point that "wipe out terrorism" is not a nuanced and complete policy: sure, it's not, it's an easy shorthand, the reality is much more complex. The same, of course, could be said for all such shorthand statements of position. Are you for ending the war in Iraq? If you say yes, do you really mean end it today, dropping our weapons and flying away right now? No transition, nothing, like training or infrastructure development continued, even in the short run?
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 11:23 AM
Idealist:
1. The problem isn't that, "'wipe out terrorism' is not a nuanced and complete policy." It's that it isn't a policy at all. Whatever we might mean by "leave Iraq" (not a position I fully support), there are a variety of reasonable options that fall properly under that rubric without having to bizarrely redefine terms. There is no set of actions that falls under "wipe out terrorism" that has the same sort of characteristics. The phrase misconceives something important.
2. I've never fully understood why, precisely, people arguing that racism might play a part in something have the onus of offering substantial proof. Surely there is evidence that it has often, in the past, played a part? Why is the default that our conceptions of race (or gender, or sexuality, etc.) don't enter our decision-making process. (I'm sure it's even a bad thing, always, if they do.)
I agree that I don't think our policy is based on overt racism, or even conscious racism. It may not even be racism; it could be jingoism. But pretending that we react the same to news that innocent Afghani cab drivers are being beaten to death and innocent Wall St. lawyers are being beaten to death strikes me as naive.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 11:35 AM
SCMT says much of what I was going to say.
I can look for specific evidence of racism but I do think that the "wipe out terrorism is shorthand" position only works if, at some point they've articulated a more complex policy position.
As far as I can tell I don't know what the administration's objectives are (other than "wipe out terrorism") how the administration will know when they're complete or whether the administration thinks that we're succeeding or failing in those objectives.
Posted by NickS | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 11:41 AM
Also I would say that while I explicitly agreed with the charge or racism my criticism was not based on the charge of racism. So I your criticism, "if you have to [call people racist], you must not have much in the way of reasoned argument to support your position." directly applies to my #27.
Posted by NickS | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 11:43 AM
Jeebus. "(I'm sure it's even a bad thing, always, if they do)" should have read "(I'm not sure it's even a bad thing, always, if they do").
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 11:55 AM
I seem to have killed a lively thread. Sorry. Please continue. Really.
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 12:06 PM
I'd further say that, while I don't know that our policies are significantly motivated by racism, I am sure that the idea represented in many people's mind by "wiping out terrorism" (insofar as they would react to, say, a mention of abortion clinic bombings or Basque separatists being obviously not what they're talking about) is a racist one. It's a lazy conflation of terrorism motivated by religious extremism (e.g., Al Qaeda) and secular nationalism (e.g., the PLO), where the primary link between the various groups is their ethnicity.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 12:10 PM
Poverty etc. may play no role in the creation of ideologies that support the propaganda of the deed, but they might play a role in the spread of such ideologies.
From the National Security Strategy of the United States
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 12:26 PM
I seem to have killed a lively thread
Sorry, long meeting.
Idealist, let me tighten my language a bit and offer an analogy. Suppose a Colombian drug cartel set off a bomb that blew up the Capitol building and we responded by invading Venezuela. Now, the obvious reason would be that we don't like Chavez and that isn't motivated by racism. However, if the rationale repeatedly offered is that we have to wipe out those freedom-hating South American narcoterrorists, while we occupy a wholly unrelated South American country, then yes, that's racist. It plays on Americans' famously poor knowledge of geography and peoples outside of the continental 48 and inflates the specific problem of Colombian-based narcoterrorism with South Americans generally, in order to drum up opposition to whatever SA regimes we don't like.
Ergo, while the administration's rationale may not be racially-driven, the way they are selling it to the folks back home is undeniably so. In his address on Tuesday, Bush went right back to the "we're in Iraq because of 9/11" meme, which is ludicrous on its face to anybody not infected with Laurie Mylroie's swamp fever. I don't think they are over there because of racism, but to aver that they aren't using others' racism to justify it is myopic, at best.
I agree that charges of racism aren't generally helpful and tend to obscure more than they reveal, but sometimes things are what they are. I don't imagine that you or baa support the war (assuming either of you do) out of any racist motives, but let's not fool ourselves: an awful lot of Americans just fucking hate Arabs and Muslims generally and it isn't hard to whip up the fervor among that crowd.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 12:44 PM
However, if the rationale repeatedly offered is that we have to wipe out those freedom-hating South American narcoterrorists, while we occupy a wholly unrelated South American country, then yes, that's racist.
Exactly.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 12:55 PM
re: 41
an awful lot of Americans just fucking hate Arabs and Muslims generally and it isn't hard to whip up the fervor among that crowd.
How do we know this? I spent most of my adult life surrounded by pretty conservative people, including six months in the desert in the middle east, which is more than enough to put people in a bad mood toward both their enemies and their hosts, and I never heard anyone say that they hated Arabs. I do not remember a civilian conservative acquainance ever saying that they hated Arabs. Who are these supporters of the war who hate Arabs?
Are there right-winger who are motivated by racial or ethnic animus? Of course. Just as there are left-wingers who DO hate America. It's not very productive to talk about the extremes on either end.
All that being said, there is something to the claim that people get confused over who the players are and that some support for the war likely was based on a mistaken belief that Iraq's support for terrorism and opposition to American interests was the same as the Taliban's. But being ignorant of geography and international affairs does not make you a racist.
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 1:02 PM
Idealist:
There are a lot of views that end up falling under the badge of racist, and I think you are addressing only one. "I hate black people, and hope the die," is clearly racist. I hope this isn't a particularly prevalent view, even in the South. But I'd argue that "Jim Crow (or slavery) might be bad, but it's just the burden we have to bear for states' rights," is also racist, in that it depends on asking a population distinguished only by its race to bear a burden we would never conceivably ask another population of the dominant race to bear.
That's the racism that I worry about most, and it is of a piece, I think, we the Republican Party's inability to even attempt to address the issues of a tyranny of the majority. I think this inability to address such issues, along with the actual leadership of the Party (Southern) is the reason the Republican Party continues to have the taint of the party of racists.
You might well be right that we should be very, very careful about using words like "racist," because people react strongly and defensively to such words. That seems fair, and it's advice we on the other side should heed. But it's also like saying, "Don't call someone's mother a whore, because people react badly to it." Probably true, but it doesn't mean X's mother isn't a taking cash for sex.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 1:15 PM
All that being said, there is something to the claim that people get confused over who the players are and that some support for the war likely was based on a mistaken belief that Iraq's support for terrorism and opposition to American interests was the same as the Taliban's.
And if the rhetoric used to sell the war was calculated to exploit that confusion, that rhetoric was racist. Doesn't necessarily mean the people using that rhetoric had racism in their hearts, no one can possibly ever know that, or anything else, about another person, but the tactic is a racist one.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 1:18 PM
How do we know this?
Well, I can't say how *we* know this, but *I* know it because I've lived my whole life in the South and, believe me, that sentiment doesn't take much digging to find. Hell, just pick a LGF comment thread at random and watch the eliminationist rhetoric about "vermin" fly. Oh sure, they make a point of pointing out a difference between "good" and "bad" Muslims, but it smacks of the differences I heard pointed out repeatedly when growing up between the "good coloreds" and the "niggers".
being ignorant of geography and international affairs does not make you a racist
Of course not. It just makes you ignorant of geography and world affairs. Playing on that ignorance to promote such lovely notions as "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," on the other hand, while perhaps not technically racist per se, is trafficking in the very rankest sort of bigotry.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 1:19 PM
I fear this is degenerating into a terminological dispute. You can have the term 'racism'; I am inclined to think that using the term will cause more problems that it will solve. ('You mean the liberal elite thinks everyone who wanted to go to Iraq are racists like the KKK?')
Let's instead call it uninformed prejudice (which amounts to the same thing, but whatever); the idea because the people are far away, have a religion that you don't understand, are kind of darker than you, whatever, makes it easy to conflate terrorism and a regime that doesn't seem to be supporting terrorism but ain't all that friendly.
Now maybe the average American buying into this conflation is guilty only of ignorance; I fear the same cannot be said for the leaders, for whom ignorance cannot be a plausible defence.
At what point does one bear the responsibility to go out and inform yourself, rather than make generalizations?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 1:26 PM
I do not remember a civilian conservative acquainance ever saying that they hated Arabs.
I have, but, as you say, that's beside the pont because we should ignore the extremties. I also know of a guy down here who, a block off campus, at a block-party, got beat nearly to death before he escaped and lost an eye (broken bottle) because he was arab. (the police refused to investigate. Took awhile to convince the poor guy to go to the DA. I, unfortantely, don't know how it turned out.)
Anyway, what I meant to say is that racism takes different forms. A classic distinction here in the South is between gut hatred of blacks, and "intellectual" dismissal of them as equivalent. The latter was, if I understand history correctly, much more dangerous. Those people don't "hate" so much as they view the other as inherently less than themselves, and calculate rights and expectations accordingly. There's no reason to hate, or even dislike, arabs, to think of them as lesser.
However, I also don't think this is simply racism, even the "intllectual" kind. A poor understanding of others also, I think, contributes to seeing them as less-than-ourselves. Simply, racism is a belief that others are not similar to ourselves, but a hazy understanding of the other produces the impression that the other is not similar to ourselves.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 1:41 PM
Cala, this seems like a terminological dispute worth having, because--following up the excellent comments from a bunch of folks--we can assume that most people aren't racist, and abhor racism, but if they can be shown that a particular policy that they support _amounts_ to racism, we're all back in the same moral universe, and can take it from there. In other words, precisely because we know that Idealist and many of his fellow soldiers aren't racist is it worthwhile to argue with them about whether what we're doing in Iraq is racist.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 2:29 PM
I dunno, ogged. I think Cala and Idealist convinced me on the importance of being parsimonious with the word "racism."
My one concern is that an agreement to be careful with such charges allows Republicans to hide behind different meanings of "support." I think "support" can mean either "endorse" or "take actions to make such results more likely." I agree that most Republicans do not "support" racism in the first sense; I'm less sure about the second. Or, because I think this is a clearer case, I can easily believe that very few Republicans "support" torture in the first sense; I think they pretty clearly do "support" torture in the second sense. There might be cases when such (second sense) support is justified; I don't think it is here.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 3:03 PM
49: ogged, in case it wasn't clear, I agree that the sweeping generalizations made by a lot of people (due to misinformation or whatever) do qualify as some form of racism. (i.e., not agreeing with Idealist, just granting him the word because he seemed to be stuck on it.)
It may be a good way to get good people who aren't racists to recognize that their actions are tantamount to racism by calling it that and maybe some of them will reflect upon it.
Or, it might just piss them off and close off the discussion. For example, a feminist might argue that Western society promotes a culture of rape. And she might do that in order to convince good men to reflect about how they treat women and their role in society. And some might.
Others may be so incensed by the word 'rapist' that they refuse to engage in further dialogue. In any case, the discussion gets sidetracked as everyone scrambles to clarify that they didn't mean that all men were rapists in the dark-alley-sense, but in the patriarchy-beneficiary-sense.. that Republicans were racists-in-the-cross-burning-sense, but in the intellectual-institutionalized-sense-borne-out-of-ignorance sense.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 3:26 PM
I'm a bit late to the thread, but on the terminological dispute:
If you take the definition put forward by George Fredrickson in Racism: A Short History (and in his other writings) full-blown racism requires a belief that some racial groups are inherently and biologically superior or inferior to others. So under this definition, which may be too strict, but to my mind is more manageable than one that is too loose, racism is about innate, essential, and immutable characteristics.
Fredrickson specifically distinguishes racial conflicts from religious ones, and in his epilogue wonders if religion will replace race as the major dividing line of the 21st century. I suspect he would see the war in Iraq as having to do more with religion and culture than with race.
On the flip side, the belief that all groups can potentially become equals can have disastrous results in policy, just as racism can. Much US Indian policy, even into the 1920s, was motivated by a belief that Indians were not innately inferior and that they could become equals with Americans through assimilation. But this required the replacement of extended family structures with ones resembling the American middle-class ideal, the transformation of property ownership and the reorginization of landholdings, boarding schools, etc.
The Iraq war, carried out in part to tranform Iraq into a democratic country and to assimilate it, so to speak, into the democratic world seems to resemble the latter situation more than one in which racism, strictly defined, was a guiding belief.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 4:04 PM
Just as there are left-wingers who DO hate America.
Is this true? And, if so, how is that related to leftism? I mean, "America" is an awfully big thing to hate. Are there "leftists" out there who sincerely wish for all Americans to die or something? I've just never seen any evidence of this. Certainly people exist who hate Bush and such, but that's quite different from hating America. And there are those who hate certain actions which Politicians have undertaken, and there are those who hate certain aspects of American culture...but, to hate the whole thing? Never seen this, myself.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 06-30-05 11:36 PM
Well, sure, they exist, but you're mostly talking about 18-year-olds that will grow out of it and RCP members who never will.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07- 1-05 4:49 AM
And, since the analogy was "left wingers who hate America = right wingers motivated by racial or ethnic animus," it's worth pointing out that the right-wing constituency that's motivated by something approaching racial or ethnic animus is MUCH bigger than the left-wing constituency that's motivated by something approaching America-hatred. Trent Lott is poised to reenter the GOP Senate leadership while Cynthia McKinney is a backbencher (who's only back in Congress because the woman who beat her in a primary ran for Senate). Last I checked over 30% of Republican Senators had refused to sign on to the apology for lynching, including both from the state (Texas) that basically runs the party. The modern GOP was basically made by Nixon's "Southern Strategy," which was a conscious attempt to appeal to racism. etc. etc. etc.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07- 1-05 7:21 AM
Or, if the topic is really right-wingers motivated by animus against Muslims, or people who sort of resemble some Muslims: Sue Myrick, John Cooksey, Saxby Chambliss, off the top of my head.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07- 1-05 7:35 AM
pls understand I'm not saying all or most conservatives/war supporters are racists or motivated by ethnic animus or anything close to that. I'm not married to the term, for the reasons quoted above, and I think 45 really gets at the heart of it. But we shouldn't minimize the amount of honest-to-goodness racism going on (or prejudice, since this may not fit Frederickson's definition).
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07- 1-05 7:38 AM
I'm going way back into time for this but it has to be pointed out. Ben was looking for "a group of people who were fine with letting Al Qaeda be but still wanted to be in Iraq, say for political or economic reasons." I would argue that anyone who says that he isn't really concerned with where Osama bin Laden is falls into that category.
It's more than interesting that there is a group of people like this, Ben. It's happening, it's important, and it's driving our foreign and military policy. That group of people is the Bush family.
Posted by diddy | Link to this comment | 07- 1-05 12:56 PM
I can't admit to having been wholly free of that thought when I wrote the question.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 07- 1-05 12:59 PM