I thought hard about leaving Jonathan Chait's
column in the LA Times alone, to chalk it up to the blitherings of another lib-hawk who still can't quite let go. But the thing is, Chait caught me on both a slow news day and a high-blood-pressure day, an all-around grumpy bastard day, so we're gonna look at this little gem piece by stupid piece.
Chait begins:
We are living in an age of moral authority. It's not the strength of the argument that matters, it's the strength of the arguer. Nobody has exploited this more effectively than Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a fallen Iraq war soldier, who took command of the national agenda by camping outside President Bush's ranch and demanding to meet with him.
Everybody, of course, ought to feel horrible for Sheehan, and to honor her son's bravery. But Sheehan's supporters don't just want us to sympathize with her. They believe that her loss gives her views on the Iraq war more sway than the views of the rest of us. As Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times, "the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute."
Right from the start, Chait's got problems, seeming to mistake (although he really doesn't) moral authority with moral posturing. He accuses Cindy Sheehan of the latter while mocking the very notion of the former, that such a thing as moral authority might actually exist. He does this because he's very cool, but also because he thinks he has a point to make about how war is a necessary evil for a country as powerful and manly as ours, and that when people like Jonathan Chait are finally allowed to run this country, we'll choose our wars more judiciously.
In the second paragraph, which is primarily concerned with getting in a dig at Maureen Dowd, Chait projects his own nervousness with the "liberal fringe" onto Sheehan and her supporters.
I consider myself a supporter of Cindy Sheehan. I do not believe that her "loss gives her more sway than the views of the rest of us." I'm a supporter of Cindy Sheehan because she has the guts to say no, and because Camp Casey is the first time the news media has ever bothered to notice the fact that an anti-war movement actually does exist in this country.
The media, the congress, and Jonathan Chait largely ignored the anti-war protests of the winter of 2003, especially when ridiculously undercounting the A.N.S.W.E.R. rally in February of that year. They have largely ignored all anti-war rallies since. For whatever reason--that she has a compelling personal narrative, that she's articulate and forceful without being butch, that Camp Casey is small enough to actually capture on TV, or, as I suspect, the plummeting poll numbers are giving the media the courage to finally cover what's been there all along--Cindy Sheehan has gotten the media's attention and she has done something with it. Her argument's the same as mine: we can't win in Iraq; we know this; and so we shouldn't let people keep dying there while we try to find some face-saving way to get out.
As for whether or not Jonathan Chait "sympathizes" with Cindy Sheehan or anyone else, I don't give a fuck. And if Camp Casey were only about asking people to "sympathize" with Cindy Sheehan, then it would be grotesque. Camp Casey is not about sympathy, as Sheehan herself has said. It's about getting the answers to questions that people like Chait and the rest of the strategic class are too sophisticated to ask. But Chait can't see beyond his own tendencies to sentimentalize to understand this very basic fact.
Chait continues (so we must as well):
The right's response is equally telling. For the most part, conservatives are not arguing that Sheehan's tragedy tells us nothing about the merits of her views on Iraq. Instead they are trying to discredit her as inauthentic, a Michael Moore pal who left her 2004 meeting with Bush pleased and grateful. As Rush Limbaugh declared, "Her story is nothing more than forged documents."
The conservative counterattack is pathetic. (The family did not voice its objections to the handling of the war in its meeting with Bush in deference to the occasion, according to a news article.) But aside from the dark comedy of the conservative machine going negative on a grieving mother, the mere fact of the response suggests that the right has bought into the premise peddled by Sheehan and her supporters: If Sheehan is a genuine war mother radicalized by her son's death, then that is somehow an indictment of Bush and his policies.
First of all, there is nothing that is "equal" in any way, in "tellingness" or otherwise, when comparing the responses of the left and the right to Cindy Sheehan. The left, largely, has embraced her as a figure of courage and determination (others on the ostensible left, like Chait, have dismissed her as a hippie moonbat). The right has investigated her past, exploited her family, invented seedy innuendos and outright lies about her character, has repeatedly had the gall to both read the mind of and speak for Sheehan's dead son through the voice of Michelle Malkin, and has at least twice put her and her supporters in danger of physical harm.
Second, Chait again viciously and purposefully misrepresents the "premise peddled by Sheehan and her supporters": Sheehan, while she is indeed a "genuine war mother" (whatever the hell that means), was not, by her own testimony, "radicalized" by her son's death (whatever the hell that means--since when did being for peace become a "radical" position in the Democratic Party?). She was "radicalized" by the 9-11 Commission Report, by the Downing Street Memos, the Senate intelligence report, the Duelfer Report, all of which came out since her son was killed, and she was also radicalized, I would just guess, by the president's childish and insulting and tasteless behavior at their "meeting at the White House" in June 2004, and his continued arrogant indifference and idiotic ineptitude in prosecuting this war since then. And, as Sheehan said in her August 12 appearance with Olbermann:
June of 2004 is a lot different than August of 2005. For one thing, in June of 2004, I was--had buried my son nine weeks before the meeting. I was a woman in a deep state of shock, in a deep state of grief. And you know what? I am still in a deep state of grief. And thanks to George Bush, I will be in a deep state of grief for the rest of my life.
But I`m not in shock anymore.
I suspect a similar set of emotions is driving a good bit of the recent and dramatic shift in national opinion on this war. Some people are nobly slow to believe that an American president would lie to them to the extent that President Bush has lied to the American people about this war, that an American president would lie about a war, period. But the shock is wearing off, not just for Cindy Sheehan.
Back to Chait:
One of the important ideas of a democratic culture is that we all have equal standing in the public square. That doesn't mean stupid ideas should be taken as seriously as smart ones. It means that the content of an argument should be judged on its own merits.
The left seems to be embracing the notion of moral authority in part as a tactical response to the right. For years, conservatives have said or implied that if you criticize a war, you hate the soldiers. During the Clinton years, conservatives insisted that the president lacked "moral authority" to send troops into battle because he had avoided the draft as a youth or, later, because he lied about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
So adopting veterans or their mourning parents as spokesmen is an understandable counter-tactic. It was a major part of the rationale behind John Kerry's candidacy. The trouble is, plenty of liberals have come to believe their own bleatings about moral authority. Liberal blogs are filled with attacks on "chicken hawk" conservatives who support the war but never served in the military. A recent story in the antiwar magazine Nation attacked my New Republic editor, Peter Beinart, a supporter of the Iraq war, for having "no national security experience," as if Nation editors routinely served in the Marine Corps.
Here we're getting around to the real point of Chait's argument, finally. He doesn't like the fact that he and the other war hawks at The New Republic are losing authority, moral or otherwise, within the Democratic Party. Despite the fact that Beinart parlayed his belligerence into 6-figure book deals and talking head status, the lib-hawks can read the blogs just like everyone else. They can see the comments, the commitment, and most of all the numbers. They see Howard Dean elected to the party chair, whose moral authority to speak on the Iraq War really is absolute, since it quite possibly cost him the presidency for the simple reason that he was ahead of everyone else in coming to the viewpoints that (a) the President of the United States was full of shit, and (b) that his war in Iraq was an epic disaster that the country would be paying for for generations. Beinart and Chait and Peretz and Wieseltier and the rest of them are now officially in a panic, not that Democrats will continue to be perceived as weak on defense, but that Democrats aren't listening to them anymore. Their 2004 collective mea culpa was a lot more mea than culpa, and unlike President Clinton, who kept getting hectored into redos on his apologies by the media and the Republicans' moral authority crowd, no one's asking The New Republic to clarify their position any longer.
Mostly people just don't care--they've made up their minds what they think about this war--and they're trusting their own moral judgment now. This leaves Chait, Beinart, et al irrelevant--if Democrats are going to start rallying around some woman from Vacaville, California, whence the strategic class? Sitting around in 2008 writing editorials wondering why no one wants Joe Biden to be president, that's where.
Chait can't understand that Sheehan and the response to her vigil transcends "tactics" because he thinks only in terms of tactics. This is why he mocks "moral authority"--he's bought into the conservative version of political truth and the peculiarly conservative postmodernism that says that nothing is genuine except for electoral victory, and all else is mere perception. But the whole point of Cindy Sheehan (not just her point but the point of the whole damn thing) is that this is not about tactics--it's about anger: genuine, righteous anger.
Does it do tactical good? Maybe, but only because it's an expression of one side's determination, finally, to do the right thing, the thing they were too lazy or afraid or frustrated to do, the thing they were ignored in trying to do, coupled with the other side's inability to understand that the majority of the country is no longer buying in to their manufactured reality, even if they can comfort themselves that Jonathan Chait still does.
And is Sheehan a tactical or political naif, exploited by moveon etcetera to further their "radical fringe" agenda? Absolutely not--she knows full well the spot she's put the president in, she intends to hold him accountable, and she's controlled the agenda at Camp Casey. The reason this tactic is successful, again, is not because of Sheehan's "moral authority." It's because Sheehan is right and strong and brave. And these are very different things, though you can't expect the strategic class to know the difference.
Back to Chait:
The silliness of this argument is obvious. There are parents of dead soldiers on both sides. Conservatives have begun trotting out their own this week. What does this tell us about the virtues or flaws of the war? Nothing.
Or maybe liberals think that having served in war, or losing a loved one in war, gives you standing to oppose wars but not to support them. The trouble is, any war, no matter how justified, has a war hero or relative who opposes it.
Sheehan also criticizes the Afghanistan war. One of the most common (and strongest) liberal indictments of the Iraq war is that it diverted troops that could have been deployed against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Are liberals who make that case, yet failed to enlist themselves, chicken hawks too?
I don't want to rehash everything I've already written, but again, it is not merely the fact that Casey Sheehan was killed in Iraq that makes Cindy Sheehan's argument powerful. What makes Cindy Sheehan's argument powerful is that she has, on her own dime and at great expense, both financial and personal, done what the media and the Congress and the Democrats should have been doing two-and-a-half years ago, what they failed to do then, and incredibly, in light of all the evidence and the clear message that the American people want them to, have continued to fail to do ever since: she has gone to Crawford to ask the president why we are fighting in Iraq.
As Digby, Atrios, and many others have repeatedly pointed out, this is the question that no one--conservative war hawk, liberal war hawk, or pacifist of any stripe--has an answer for. The president doesn't have an answer for it, at least not one that will wash anymore with the American people. Which is why he hasn't asked Sheehan up to the ranch for a talk. That and because, yeah, she's flat-fuck outflanked him tactically. The truth has a way of doing that to even the most powerful lies, eventually.
Up until Chait's last two paragraphs, he was at least moderately coherent--stump-dumb and mealy-mouthed, but coherent. In the last two the rails come off, and my experience as a real live print journalist tells me that these last two grafs show the hallmarks of editorial truncation. But in any event, Chait actually allowed those paragraphs to appear under his name, so we have to deal with them.
The penultimate paragraph makes no sense: I haven't seen a single liberal say that losing someone in a war makes it impossible for you to support the war, and I challenge Chait to show me one documented instance of that sentiment appearing anywhere in print or on the internet.
The last paragraph is just petulant childishness, so I'll say this very slowly and firmly: No.
* * * * *
Lest you think Dr. Tom comes by his feelings on Chait through his own moral authority (or superiority), it's confession time.
In the fall and winter of 2003, I myself supported, with grave reservations and fears, but I supported, the war in Iraq.
My reasons were as follows:
- I believed that much of what was driving Islamic terrorism was the insult of the American troop presence in Saudi Arabia, and I reasoned that a takeover of Iraq, which I mistakenly and ignorantly believed was a much more secular country, would give the US a chance to place permanent military bases in Iraq instead of Saudi Arabia;
- I believed Colin Powell when he went before the UN and held up the vial of "sarin" and pointed to the satellite photos and made his case for war (this was also largely a result of ignorance--at the time, I didn't know about his active complicity in other vast military lies and cover-ups, his willingness to be a Good Soldier);
- but mostly, I supported the war because I abandoned my own moral and intellectual judgment. And no moment makes that clearer to me now than Powell's speech. Let me explain.
In one of my six or seven different jobs, I teach a course in beginning fiction writing at a local university. At some point early in every semester, I have to explain that dialogue is not the place for exposition or explanation. When, for example, two friends are talking in a story, and one says something like, "Hey Joe, how long has it been since you've seen your older brother Tom, who ran off to join the circus back in 1986?" I have to explain that the writer is not having the two friends talk to each other, but is using their conversation to talk to the reader. Dialogue doesn't work like this, I say--people don't talk in explanations--they talk in situational shorthand, in code, in implication and inference.
Now, to quote Zbigniew Herbert's great poem "Five Men":
I did not learn this today
I knew it before yesterday
so why have I been writing
unimportant poems on flowers
To quote the tapes that Powell played for the UN:
Powell: But they're worried. We have this modified vehicle. What do we say if one of them sees it? What is their concern? Their concern is that it is something that they should not have, something that should not be seen.
The general was incredulous: "You didn't get it modified? You don't have one of those do you?"
"I have one."
"Which? From where?"
"From the workshop. From the Al-Kindi company."
"What?"
"From Al-Kindi."
"I'll come see you in the morning. I'm worried you all have something left."
"We evacuated everything. We don't have anything left."
[Powell plays another tape, and "translates" from his script]
"They are inspecting the ammunition you have, yes?"
"Yes. For the possibility there are forbidden ammo."
"For the possibility there is, by chance, forbidden ammo?"
"Yes."
"And we sent you a message yesterday to clean out all the areas, the scrap areas, the abandoned areas. Make sure there is nothing there. Remember the first message: evacuate it."
My students write a lot better than this before they ever walk in my door.
And again--I knew this. I didn't learn it since then. I know that even evil Iraqis don't talk like this. Nobody talks like this. And still I said okay.
I take no comfort whatsoever in the following facts:
- That Powell himself has admitted to subverting his own moral judgment about his speech to the UN;
- That Powell's top aide said today that the UN speech was the "lowest point of my life."
- That in 2003 I was advocating essentially the same thing as a genius like Jonathan Chait; or
- that it didn't really matter whether I supported the war or not because I was just some yokel going to grad school in Houston, Texas, at the time. (Today, I'm a yokel with seven different part time jobs living in St. Louis, Missouri, but I still want the record cleared.)
I figured out that I was wrong very early, right about the time I saw that American soldier wrap the American flag around the Saddam statue's head. But I was wrong when it counted.
And I figured out very early why I'd went wrong: I was wrong because I wanted to be part of the strategic class and be mentally and emotionally tough enough to reduce human lives to crude and stupid political calculations that had nothing to do with me about where we could or could not have a fucking army base, and because I made the mistake of thinking that anyone with thirty-five years of movement in the highest levels of our government and military could be trusted. But I was wrong when it counted.
I was wrong because I abandoned my own moral judgment. But it will never happen again. From here on out if I'm wrong it's because I'm wrong, not because I'm trying to be as full of shit as Jonathan Chait or Peter Beinart. That kind of being wrong I can live with, as I also have to live with the other.
I'm not sure how Jonathan Chait lives with his.
The MOQUOL--I Can Save You, America!