Max has clearly and consistently supported the U.S. military action against Afghanistan, including in the face of dissent from his fellow lefties. He might be fusing the Iraq and Afghan wars (though more likely, simply ignoring the Afghan case), but definitely not for the reasons you cite. It could be because his support for the Afghan war makes him closer to the “sensible lib” and netroots-Dem-following interventionists than is comfortable for the fight he’s waded into.

BreakingNewsBreakingNewsBreakingNewsBreakingNewsBreakingNews

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Ladies and Gentlemen, this is a special bulletin!

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For the temporally challenged ….

According to my calendar, for which I paid $12.95 (plus tax) it’s 2007.

The 1960s ended 37 years ago.

Deal with it.

There are no Dirty/Clean/Moderately Grungy Fucking/HappilyMarried/Celibate Hippies roaming the streets of San Francisco with, or without, flowers in their hair.

We realize it is hard, and maybe even life shattering, but we have only the best of intentions for you, the gentle reader.

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This has been a BreakingNews Special Report.

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(Poor Max Sawicky is crying for help and, thus, I offer him validation in the form of a hug and wet slobbery kiss: (((smmeeeeee-york))) There Max. Feel all better? Now for God’s sakes quit huffin’ glue and get a grip.)

Does he? I’m not sure. I don’t. I get what you mean, I think, though. Yes, the pacifists totally objected to Afghanistan. Another hefty section of the authentic Left was deeply suspisicous of Afghanistan, even paranoid. And rightly so. I think most of the DFHs insisted on a police action and quick withdrawl, with the aim of bringing OBL to justice as well as avoiding an imperialistic/ looting occupation. While things didn’t turn out just as DFHs supposed, I think you have to agree that they were right about being paranoid, and that paranoia especially served them well when Iraq came up.

The war against Iraq was more vigorously opposed by the ever-nebulous “center left� than the war in Afghanistan, but as Max points out, it was hardly universally opposed. Why not? Was it really because of some failure of ideology, as he suggests?

Or was it, perhaps, because the center left, and everyone else, for that matter, was lied to?

Lemme stop trying to speak for Max and speak for myself instead. The Sensible Liberals were *never* paranoid enough of Bush. They sneered at the Left’s paranoia of Bush’s Afghanistan operation, of course — and much too quickly. I assumed Bush was lying because I thought his character was obvious — he carries his stupidity and depravity on his sleeve, he recieved more corporate money for his campaign than any in history, and he stole a fucking election. Max’s DFHs of the 70s rightly assumed that Nixon and Johnson were horrible horrible liars, terrible people, devious in intent, never to be believed. This was the right attitude to have, and more perceptive people, if I may say so, should have assumed this attitude to Bush. But they couldn’t because to them it was grim choice — side with DFHs or side with Bush, and, bluntly, they loathe and distrust hippies more than they do wingnuts. Period.

None of the arguments mattered. Saddam Hussein didn’t matter. The point was whether one thought the Bush government was trustworthy and decent or not. Idiots thought it was — or that it might be. DFHs knew the truth.

It’s true this is more a judgement of character than ideology, but ideology matters with regard to structure. Andrew Sullivan posted yesterday something that illustrates the point; he thinks the anti-War Left was wrong and he isn’t so much to blame for his stupidity, because as a default position, the burden of proof is on the anti-war side. A Sensible Liberal couldn’t have put it better. A strong Left means that the default position would be where it should be — that an immense burden of proof rests on the pro-war side. Always. It should be *difficult* to go to war. And though this can be seen as a conservative concept (backed-up in the Constitution’s demand that The People alone can declare war), it’s Leftist in the sense that it counters the wingnut propensity for knee-jerk warmongering, wingnuttia’s long-time goal of a Spartan society that is armed to the teeth and belligerent to the core.

Secondly, the war the the hero gets into is unlike the media representation (no, really?). He goes to the aliens’ planet expecting to find hideous, ravening beasts, and finds aliens just living their lives like other sentient beings, and being slaughtered for no reason.

Well, HLG, Bob Heinlein actually served in the American military, if not quite as glamorously as he would later imply. There is a thesis waiting to be written on the devolution of post-WWII Sci-Fi once the pulp editors decided that its target audience was no longer average-American adult male geeks (most of whom, in that generation, would have seen military service or at least grown up with relatives who had seen military service). Once the people buying the stories decided that the Golden Age of SF really was (age) Twelve, their target market became resentful adolescent male geeks whose most vivid imaginings tended towards embroideries on the theme of “Gosh, if I only I had a really big photon-lazer cannon, then those guys in the locker room would find out just how terrible was my vengeance! Plus, I could ask that cheerleader to the prom, and my mighty photon-lazer cannon would impress her so much I might even get to second base!…” Editors bought fewer stories from veterans & family heads like Vonnegut, Kornbluth, Kuttner (& Moore), and early Heinlein while encouraging the revival of simple earnest Burroughs-type BEM-huntin’, booby-leerin’, nuance-hatin’ Space Knights (most of what Campbell published in the 1960s, not excepting later Heinlein).

Of course, the backlash to this revival would give us some of what is now considered the best sf (Slaughter-House Five, The Left Hand of Darkness, even the post-artery-hardened Stranger in A Strange Land, *sigh*) just as the political backlash to post-war McCarthyism gave us the Dirty Stinkin’ Hippies. But the lure of the simple wish-fulfillment Bildungaspaychipromanz stories continues to contaminate our fiction (Neo, in the Matrix: “First, we’re gonna need guns. LOTSA guns!!!”) as well as our politics.

as a DFH* I propose we barter bro… “how about a pound of some yummy organic sunflower seeds for some hentai vids? or an alpaca poncho?” groovay!

*actually I am more of a centrist than a DFH – but i’m not pro-war in anyway (who is?). tho I support a well defined invasion and plan to capture Al Qaeda in Afghanistan – f*cking up Iraq on the other hand had little appeal to me – tho Saddam was a real big f*ckstick and the Iraqis deserved to be relieved of the a-hole

The problem I have with your explanation, or rather, I suppose, with the argument that Max has put forward, is that it is ahistorical. Not in any of its discussion of the American politics of 40 years ago, but in its assumptions about more recent events. The biggest problem is that Max writes, as the Bush administration speaks, of “The War.”

America fought two wars in the early 21st century.

By this I do not mean to make some distinction between that execrable rhetorical device, the “War on Terror,” and real wars— I refer only to two actual wars, the war against the Taliban and the war against Saddam Hussein. I also use the past tense deliberately, because the present military activity in each country is not war, but occupation. But how is this relevant to Max’s argument?

The Bush administration speaks of the two wars as “The War” because it wants to obliterate the distinction between attacking Afghanistan and occupying Iraq. Max, I am afraid, seeks the same muddying of the waters, though of course for very different reasons. The Bush administration would have us believe the occupation of Iraq is indisputably necessary, while Max wants us to believe that the attack on Afghanistan was indefensible, and preventable through some application or recognition of “True Left” ideals.

There are, in fact, a great many of these centrist liberals Retardo so despises (and whom Max considers so gulled) who had different positions on America’s two wars in this century. This is due to the fact that while Saddam Hussein did not attack America, did not sponsor terrorists, and did comply with demands that were made of him in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, it is also true that Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda did attack America, that the Taliban did sponser them, and that Mullah Mohammad Omar refused to cooperate in the apprehension of Bin Laden &co in the run-up to the invasion of Afghanistan.

I am being perhaps overly pedantic here, but I feel it is justified, given that both Left and Right seem to have some interest in obscuring these distinctions.

I certainly do not mean to belittle the purest sort of pacifism here when I say that those who opposed the invasion of Afghanistan on the grounds that all war is immoral can not be regarded as the “True” or “Real” left, certainly not in the historical sense Max presents, as he is at pains to note (if only to deplore) the many branchlets of mid-century American leftism that did in fact advocate the use of violence.

There are many sorts of leftist thought that conditionally justify, if not advocate, war. The relevant condition, in this case, is the defense on the part of sovereign states against aggression. And while one can complain that it was strategically unsound, or disproportionate (but when has war ever been proportionate?) there is and was a reality-based case to be made that the invasion of Afghanistan was, in fact, a tactically sound defense against an act of foreign aggression.

There is also an argument to be made (though I have little interest in defending it) that the failure of this tactic, insofar as the Taliban and Al Qaeda are both still alive and operational within Afghanistan, can be laid at the door of America’s second war of this century.

The war against Iraq was more vigorously opposed by the ever-nebulous “center left” than the war in Afghanistan, but as Max points out, it was hardly universally opposed. Why not? Was it really because of some failure of ideology, as he suggests?

Or was it, perhaps, because the center left, and everyone else, for that matter, was lied to?

This is why the WMD question still matters. The case for the invasion of Iraq was made by extension of the causus belli for the invasion of Afghanistan, which large numbers of leftists had accepted, and many still accept. America was told that Saddam Hussein had the means to conduct horrifying attacks against the US, and it was taken as a given that he had some motive to aid such attacks, or even conduct them himself.

If you go back and examine the arguments of the “left hawks” (a term that lumps together those who opposed the inavasion of Iraq but not Afghanistan, and those who opposed neither, and those who actually advocated one or the other or both, be it on Bush’s terms or not, etc etc) in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, you will find that many or even most of them were questioning Hussein’s means, and advocating further inspections, prior to the infamous tapestry of lies delivered by Colin Powell to the UN. And there was some questioning of Hussein’s motives— arguably not enough, but would any invigorating injection of some imagined “pure” or “true” leftist ideology have prompted such questioning, in those historical circumstances? Perhaps, to some extent. But would such ideological invigoration have been enough to counter the incontestably illiberal history of Hussein’s regime, on top of Powell’s fabrications?

Sadly, No.

Postscript: If I wrote comments like this more than once a month at best, I’d have a blog, and I would put this there. If you have a blog, and like this comment or some contiguous snippet thereof, go ahead and post it. If you have a blog and don’t like this comment, and would rather do that thing where you chop it up into a hundred snippets and add a comment of your own after each, instead of composing a cogent and readable argument of your own, well, I’d prefer you didn’t, but I suppose I can’t stop you. If you want to know why Retardo thinks I am a “twit” on “economics” (he means international trade), then you’ll have to ask him how he thinks the people of the world ought to go about exchanging goods and services.

And you gave us John Kerry too. Thanks a lot for that one.

It wasn’t the moderate libs who said “both these guys look pretty much the same to me!”

Please stop running away from the Left.

That goes both ways. Deriding liberals as at best impediments to progress instead of allies is a tradition as ollld as the left itself.

We won’t hurt you. We sort of want the same kinds of things, in a general way, for America. The Republicans have made a total career out of pandering to the most reactionary, fascist elements of the Right imagnable, and it hasn’t hurt their careers any.

Well, giving away free crack instead of governing works for awhile.

You may think the country is on some sort of rightward swing, but I guarantee you that has more to do with the way you’ve let our own homegrown Nazis get into bed with the Republican party without you once ever having said a word against it. And why should the Republicans *stop* doing it when they get no pushback for it and it keeps winning them elections? Here’s a hint: if it wins elections for them, there’s no reason why it can’t win elections for you.

Crack is bad for you, child. Anyway, we just won a big election without it.

Try this: look at what would happen for you in the Democratic party if, for the time being, you simply write off certain states in this country as unwinnable, and concentrate on improving your margins in the states which might still be winnable for you (here’s a hint: there’s a census coming up in three years). What you’ll end up doing is increasing your margins of dominance in the House and Senate, as well as increasing your number of governorships and your voice in state governments.

Waitaminit, that’s what the fuck the Dems had been doing for years and we were getting our asses beat. The success we had in November was partly because we did challenge them in places we had previously written off as unwinnable. What the fuck. Ever heard of Howard Dean?

Using my magic powers of prediction, I magically predict that suddenly, the whole country will start to look like it’s suddenly taken a leftward turn, as opposed to a rightward turn. Isn’t that magic?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is ass-backwards from reality as described above.

And let me tell you, you Libs and Dems have done a good job of alienating what should be your base by pandering your party line in a slant toward those who will never vote for you anyway. Are you really that codependent? Have you considered therapy? Please stop kissing the asses of people who think you are wimps just because you hope that in doing so, they will stop giving you swirlies. Perhaps if you had gone to public schools, you’d realize that this doesn’t really work.

Who the fuck are you talking about? 99% of fucking liberals and Democrats went to public school. We’re also more pissed than you about the branch of the party that has been pandering to the Republicans. Get it straight: liberal and Democratic voters are not the same as the Lieberman crowd or the “liberal” Washington elites.

So go ahead, do it: say something nice about Noam Chomsky or Michael Moore in public. And when some gibbering rightwing pundit starts giving you grief for it, tell them to shut the fuck up. Be sure to put the emphasis on “fuck� when you say it. Don’t worry: they will screech like a bad set of car brakes for about fifteen minutes afterward, but then they will actually shut up. Because they are a bunch of bullies, and you have let them steal your lunch money for far too long now.

I’m an old punk, sweetness. I was telling people to shut the fuck up when you were learning your ABC’s.

Being a dirty fucking hippie just doesn’t pay. Hitchens learned this. Ezra instinctively knows this. And so to declare that representative democracy has been utterly destroyed by the concerted effort of ratfuck power-fetishists to drive the U.S. into a consumer-fascist-warporn third-rate dystopian-knockoff village of idiots is to forsake the paycheck.

And all those Democrats in Congress are just waiting to knife each other in the back for that next “promotion.”

So congrats on the water-carrying, Sensible Liberals. Good thing we know never to ask you to actually take a stand. Because the further up you go, the less deviation is tolerated. Have fun, insensiate meat puppets!

The right-wing response to Clinton’s successful, popular presidency was to ratchet up the ratfucking and build the smear machine into an unstoppable powerhouse. They have done this with brutal efficiency. This is why the Clintonesque “Third Way” Sensible Liberal style of politics really does not work anymore. The Left needs to play hardball just like the ratfucking Right plays hardballl, but the Sensible Liberals araen’t willing to do it. They’re not willing to CALL BULLSHIT and SCREAM BLOODY MURDER when the ratfucking starts. Kerry, Obama, H. Clinton and way too many other prominent democrats have been extremely disappointing when it comes to fighting back against the lies of the Right.

This is why DFHs are sick of Sensible Liberals. Fight back! Quit being George Bush’s fucking bitch, fer chrissakes. The Right has moved further right since 2000. What is the proper reaction to that? To move right with them, or to move left? Which preserves your precious “center” better?

The moment they got all hard (or moist) was when they started thinking about all the good they could do. They suck up to the rightards in a marriage of convenience between war porn and do-gooder porn.

Bring freedom and democracy to the middle east? Yes! Liberate the Iraqi people from a tyrant? Oh, yes! Bring Christian enlightenment to the brown people? OH GOD YES!

HOORAY! Its been a long 3 years with many thousands of deaths and tragically many more to follow.

62% against means the Bloodthirsty warmongers have LOST the rhetorical battle.
A House and Senate under the control of Democrats demonstrates how badly they LOST THE RHETORICAL Battle.

These latest “It coulda been different if the sunlight had reflected just right off that shard of glass laying in the grass and blinded our enemies” are prime examples of why they lost the rhetorical battle.

… adding only that the reason that Liberals and the Democratic Party have been devoid of new ideas, passion, or anything other than unconvincing save-my-seat windsock politics is precisely because they stopped cherry-picking ideas and talent from the Left.

That being said, Jillian, the fact that you, resident proud and unrepentant Leftist, would post your response in the form of a manifesto addressed to no one in particular tempts me to emit a king-sized “heh!”

In the days of my yoof I read a lot of science fiction (yes, DSH here), and of course one of the writers was Robert Heinlein. Now I don’t care much for a lot of his politics, and many of his books are almost unreadable now (given my tendency to shriek in outrage about the constant parade of perky-breasted females being gleeful about sex).

But a couple of things stuck in my mind. The first, of course, is that he wrote one of the bibles of Dirty Stinking Hippyhood (the latter phase, in the 70s), with Stranger In A Strange Land.

The other, which is of more moment here, was contained within a book which has recently been turned into an unspeakably vile movie. Please bear with me for a moment, as I take you on a strange journey…

If any of you have seen the film Starship Troopers, you’ll be amazed to know (no, really!) that it’s utterly unlike the book. I know, Hollywood never takes liberties, but I tell you no lies.

Because the book, friends, is strongly anti-war. First up, the society is rather different, in that only those who’ve done their stint in the army get to vote. Everyone else has to STFU. The justification is that if you’re not willing to risk your life to defend your country, you’re not entitled to have any say in how it’s run. This would obviously remove any possibility of chickenhawks.

Secondly, the war the the hero gets into is unlike the media representation (no, really?). He goes to the aliens’ planet expecting to find hideous, ravening beasts, and finds aliens just living their lives like other sentient beings, and being slaughtered for no reason.

Sounds familiar? I thought so. There’s a lot of wisdom in science fiction, if you know where to look, and avoid the spaceships and dragons.

Jillian, this is one of the things that most irks me about my home town. I mean, why do they do it? Why? There’s folks teetering on the brink, just waiting to be sweet-talked into their arms, and they abandon those for the right wing nutcases who probably think they’re DSH commiehomofascists.

And what is this abject terror of socialism? If most of them heard about the basic tenets, they’d think it’s damn fine, but because they know naught but the word, they go all freaky and shrieky and start waving crucifixes.

And mikey, I don’t know what’s to be done. I was a smidgeon too young to go to that particular abomination, although a cousin of mine was drafted and sent off. Fortunately, it was near the end of the debacle, and he came home relatively unscathed, although with a sudden interest in God and a determination to never mention the war.

But I too am perplexed as to why being compassionate is considered grounds for disqualification. Would it be better if we said “Well, okay, we don’t really care about foreign people, ‘cos they’re not really human after all, but this war is bad for us because…”? Would that have more credibility? Are we only considered worth listening to if we don’t care about anyone else?

I mean, I’ve heard, and read, a lot (a real lot) of justifications for the war on the grounds of “safeguarding American prestige”, and how significant is that, exactly, compared to lives and minds and limbs? How can anyone even consider that argument for a moment? How can anyone CHOOSE war, and still sleep at night?

It seems to me, even after winning the elections on essentially a platform against Joe Lieberman & Co, the faction that self-identifies as DFH needs to have a Sensible Bogeyman, even though there aren’t that many of them left – essentially, the Sensible Pro-War count is down to two op-ed twerps and Lieberman. It used to be the other way round, but declaring a bogeyman is the vital requirement for the great leftist tradition of Fighting for Inner Purity.

The risk is that you’ll end up with the slogan “While they SURGE, we’ll PURGE!”