Unqualified Offerings

Larison and Sully are debating attitudes. Sully:

Obviously the argument that the Tehran junta is not going away is a legitimate area of debate. But there is a glee with which the Leveretts write about this that I find somewhat callous given the suffering and deaths and torture of so many young lovers of freedom in that imprisoned country.

Larison:

This is extremely unfair. The Leveretts are not expressing “glee” or anything like it when they say that the regime is not going anywhere. They are acknowledging a reality that far too many Westerners have had enormous difficulty acknowledging.

Iraq war opponents were not gleeful when the political chaos and sectarian violence some of them predicted broke out. We were not pleased when the disaster we opposed unfolded. They were going to draw attention to the mistaken judgments of the people who up until the previous hour had denounced them as so many water-carriers for despotism and agents of foreign governments.

I agree that Sully’s critique is of a piece with anti-anti-war complaints after the Iraq conquest went sour, and that’s to his discredit. Some lessons, and Andrew has learned a lot about jingoism over the last decade, are hard ones. That said, I don’t think Larison offers a complete account of the complex of emotions involved in these kinds of disputes.

We doves got accused of glee-like emotional activities a lot from 2003-7, for the offense of demonstrating that hawks were fools and knaves. Hawks prated about “glee” because they didn’t have any better arguments. All they could do was slander their opponents. It had always been their core competence anyway.

But it would be a lie to pretend we doves never enjoyed our work. Do you think I didn’t have any fun at all explicating the absurdity of the arguments for starting and continuing the conquest of Iraq, digging into the monthly electricity statistics, cataloguing the endless examples of RSN Syndrome or explicating the government’s transparent lies about torture and treatment of civilians? People. I did that for six years. Nobody puts that much effort into something that isn’t satisfying on some level. Of course it was fun, for certain grim and bitter kinds of “fun.”

The above is the paragraph that hostile critics could excerpt out of context if such people still bothered to read me. Here’s the rest of the story. The kind of “glee” I discuss above is inescapably endemic to intellectuals, where an “intellectual” is merely someone who cares enough about ideas to bother arguing about them on a sustained basis. We do this because disputation about ideas lights up the SEEKING circuits. This has been as true for 21st-century doves as any group of people motivated enough to engage any side of any intellectual, cultural or political issue. It applied to the dispute over the New Formalism in poetry. It was as true of the hawks luxuriating in their outrage over the Madrid bombings or, before the war, spending hours upon hours assembling photo links from the aftermath of Halabja. There is nothing, nothing, quite like the combination of satisfaction and aggression that comes from being right about something you care a great deal about, and we were right. You bet your ass that was “fun.”

This is not praiseworthy, because what we were right about was human evil, folly and suffering, so our satisfaction necessarily stemmed from a record of failure and misery. In Christian terms, it’s a sin of pride. (In secular terms, it’s just obnoxious.) But it’s how intellectual work ever gets done. And it not only “isn’t the whole story,” it’s not the whole story in important ways.

The reason doves engaged this particular issue was because doves wanted to prevent war crimes and the moral degradation and human waste that attend them, and then to contain and curtail those things – to prevent an illegitimate and stupid war in Iraq; failing that, to end it and avoid repeating it elsewhere. Doves did not want soldiers to be reft from their families, civilians gunned down at checkpoints, cities gutted by artillery shells and white phosphorus, hundreds of billions of dollars wasted or stolen, millions of people displaced from their homes, one nation devastated and another manic with aggression and self-pity. All this will come to pass, doves warned, and were laughed at, and then it came to pass. The petty satisfaction of “I told you so” was real, but bitterly inadequate to the grief and rage at seeing what we’d tried to prevent, happen.

Our sin was to feel an unworthy emotion at being proven right about the full consequences of unjustified aggression. Our real opponents’ sins were to perpetrate unjustified aggression in the first place – our real opponents were always the people with actual power – and then to evade responsibility for the full consequences. Our debating partners’ sins – the people who cheered on the people in power – were to cheer on unjustified aggression early and try to evade responsibility late. In each case and at every phase both sets of miscreants based much of their case on our real and imagined inadequacies, including the fact that, like anyone else in the world, we took some pleasure in being correct.

The idea was that unless we were perfect in every emotion and attitude, we had no standing. This maneuver worked! Because the hawks in fact had the real power and controlled the discourse. That was so infuriating that it added another layer of vindictive satisfaction at seeing events show them for fools. Which was of course, more bad attitude on our part. Which just further “proved” our unseemly glee at the ruin they made of the world. Which, since they still had the actual power and still controlled the discourse, just further entrenched them. Which is, I promise you, even more infuriating. So when the same people, having devastated both ends of Central Asia and the American fisc, continue to hold fora to urge more of the same in Iran and Yemen and somewhere else next month, it galls us yet further. It’s a nice racket. I’ve seen that term before in this very context.

Lastly and most importantly, it doesn’t matter how awfully gleeful doves are or aren’t. It doesn’t matter how gleeful Larison and I were or weren’t about being right about the disaster the Iraq War became, or how happy the Leveretts are or aren’t to have the better case about the strength of the Green Revolution in Iran. It doesn’t matter exactly how much that intellectual pleasure is swamped by horror at the suffering of the victims. The premise of liberal society is that arguments stand or fall on their merits, not the state of the souls of the arguers. It is more important that the Iraq hawks were wrong then and the Iran hawks wrong now than how any of us feel about it. And it’s vastly more important that the hawks were and are wrong than how any of us in the policy argument feel about each other.