Treason of the intellectuals?
Oct 4th 2001
From The Economist print edition

The anti-war movement is growing. It could do the left more harm than good

BACK in Vietnam days, the anti-war movement spread from the intelligentsia into the rest of the population, eventually paralysing the country's will to fight. At first sight, the danger of the same thing happening now looks slim. The overwhelming majority of Americans are solidly behind George Bush. Yet the drumbeat of opposition, already fairly deafening in parts of the European left, is building up in America.

At first Susan Sontag was almost alone in going public with her view that the terrorists were merely offering a critique of America's foreign policy. But last weekend saw peace protests in Washington, New York and San Francisco that took up her theme. Ralph Nader has asked people to put themselves “in the shoes of the innocent, brutalised people of the third world”. Op-ed articles brimming with peace or appeasement (according to your taste) have begun to migrate from the Guardian and Le Monde to those of the Los Angeles Times. Howard Zinn, the author of “The People's History of the United States”, says that he is “horrified and sickened” by all the talk “of retaliation, of vengeance, of punishment”.

Such voices will grow louder when people are killed. The television news already shows harrowing pictures of Afghan refugees. If Mr Bush's war is a drawn-out affair, it will impose great demands on the patience of a not very patient people.

In the 1960s, the anti-war movement struck a chord because many Americans, rightly or wrongly, thought it was saying something substantial. What about its successor? The peace movement starts off with the assumption that Americans need to understand why so many Muslim fundamentalists hate them. There is nothing wrong with this (and many people who are not remotely pacifists are looking at the same thing). But all too often, the pacifists leap to another argument—that the tragedy of September 11th was the inevitable result of America's arrogant and imperialist foreign policy. As the cliché of the moment has it, America is now reaping what it has sown.

This is woolly thinking at best. Perhaps the critics of America's foreign policy are referring to its interventions in Kuwait, Bosnia and Kosovo, when it was trying to help the local Muslims? These actions were as close to altruistic as you can get in the real world (which is why so many people on the left supported them at the time). Even in the areas where American policy has been less successful—for instance in the still unsolved Israel-Palestine tangle, or the effects of sanctions in Iraq—there is a worrying confusion between (legitimate) explanation and (unwarranted) justification of last month's terror. And there are few signs that America's withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol played much part in Mr bin Laden's calculations.
A muddled message, though, would not necessarily limit the success of the peace movement. During the Vietnam war, protesters said a lot of things that now seem silly. This time, though, it will be harder for the anti-war left to hold its troops in line.

The problems begin with the nature of the enemy. Islamist fundamentalists don't object to the things that campus leftists dislike about America. They object to the things that they like, such as freedom of speech, sexual equality and racial diversity. Ho Chi Minh's communists had a sort of revolutionary chic. The Taliban's penchant for throwing acid in the faces of women who fail to wear veils and its lively debate as to whether the proper way to deal with homosexuals is to hurl them from tall buildings or bury them alive does not endear it to Berkeley.

This has already divided the left. Groups such as the Feminist Majority Foundation were among the first to condemn the Taliban regime. Some of the fieriest polemics against “Islamic fascism” have come from left-wing luminaries such as Christopher Hitchens and Ms Sontag's son, David Rieff. Even the area of Arab grievance that has received most succour on the European left—Israel's heavy-handedness—finds much less sympathy among American liberals. The New Republic is unlikely to call Ariel Sharon a war criminal, at least in this century.

In the 1960s, the arguments between anti-war campus radicals and pro-war trade unionists introduced bitter splits into the Democratic Party, which contributed to its catastrophic defeat in 1972. This time, the workers seem even more solidly behind the troops—not least because the homeland is under far greater direct threat. Canvassers from the AFL-CIO, originally dispatched to drum up support for the anti-globalisation cause, are now collecting donations on behalf of the terrorism victims instead. On Capitol Hill, some of the left's fiercest firebrands, including Marcy Kaptur, the congresswoman from the rust-belt city of Toledo, in Ohio, have become the Democrats' leading hawks.

The question of the flag may be an indicator of the gulf between intellectuals and the rest of a frightened and increasingly patriotic country. The people who spontaneously bought the American flag to show their solidarity with those who were killed probably do not share the worry of Barbara Kingsolver, a leading feminist, that it “stands for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder”; and they may not empathise with one writer at the Nation when she frets about her daughter wanting to hang a flag out of the living-room window.

The widespread fear of more domestic attacks that underpins this patriotism also points to the biggest weakness of the anti-war movement. Even if things go badly for Mr Bush, the pacifists' lack of any plausible answer to the challenge of terrorism will surely limit their effectiveness. With Vietnam, the left could argue that, if America withdrew, the war would be over. That is not true this time. The terrorists are likely to strike again regardless of whether America retaliates or not. Terrorism has escalated from the mid-1980s onwards, despite the fact that America's response has either been feeble, non-existent or symbolic. The true comparison is not with 1969, but with 1939.