Berube? Making Sense?

The injunction, critical to the 2003 debate over the invasion of Iraq, that we ought to treat with the BEST arguments of either side rather than the worst was critical to my own opposition to the war. In the months preceding the Iraq War there were tremendously bad anti-war arguments coming from some elements of the left, just as there were awfully bad pro-war argument coming from the right. A lot of the really bad left arguments had to do with a curious worship of the norm of sovereignty, a position that’s never made any sense to me. I suspect that trouble getting past this was what stopped a fair number of leftish sorts from seeing the even greater stupidity of the pro-war contingent. Berube explains…

In the wake of Kosovo, the Sovereignty Left and the Liberal Hawks produced each other. In the US, the Z/Counterpunch crew have a symbiotic relation to Berman, Hitchens, et al., just as in the UK the Galloway/Respect crowd have a symbiotic relation to the Eustonites. To this day, each needs the other. And it is in both camps’ interest to pretend that Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq were all part of the same enterprise: all three wars were wars of liberation for the Hawks, and all three were exercises in imperialism for the Sovereignty Left. The Hawks wound up agreeing, in whole or in part, with Bush’s premise that Iraq was the next logical front in the War on Terror. And the Sovereignty Left has never quite explained what American empire was established in the Balkans, and they’ve never quite explained why they opposed the Taliban from 1996 to 2001 but opposed the Taliban’s removal after al-Qaeda’s strikes against the US. But both groups share the common goal of aligning supporters of war in Kosovo and Afghanistan with supporters of war in Iraq.

Read the whole thing. I’ve never quite thought of it that way, and it makes sense. As for Michael’s more specific points about Noam Chomsky, I recall that Loomis and I had a discussion about him a while back, and to paraphrase Erik a bit (and I’ll give Erik free rein to claim that I’m misrepresting his comments), he said that he kind of wished Noam would be the next in the Horowitz/Hitchens genre; we’d be better off on the left if Noam just switched teams. I wouldn’t go quite that far, because while much of Noam’s work is awfully bad, a good portion is valuable. I also don’t think I could stand all the attention that he would receive for such a switch…

…mildly edited.