Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [21]
The role of the liberal class in defending the purportedly good intentions of the power elite was on public display in 1985, when Foreign Affairs published a tenth-anniversary retrospective on the Vietnam War. The liberals in the magazine, writers such as David Fromkin and James Chace, argued that the military intervention in Vietnam was “predicated on the view that the United States has a duty to look beyond its purely national interests,” and that, pursuant to its “global responsibilities,” the United States must “serve the interests of mankind.” In moral terms, in other words, the intent of the military intervention was good. It was correct to oppose “communist aggression” by the Vietnamese. But the war, these liberals argued, was ultimately wrong because it was impractical, because “our side was likely to lose.” The liberal class critiqued the war on practical but not moral grounds. They were countered by the militarists who argued that with more resolve the North Vietnamese could have been defeated on the battlefield. The virtues of the nation, even in an act of war, are sacrosanct. The liberal class cannot question these virtues and remain within the circles of the power elite.16
The same scenario was played out in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, and Bill Keller, a columnist for the New York Times and later the paper’s executive editor, along with Michael Ignatieff, the former director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard and current head of the Labor Party in Canada, joined Leon Wieseltier, along with academics such as Jean Bethke Elshtain of the University of Chicago Divinity School, Michael Walzer of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Anne-Marie Slaughter at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, to become self-described “reluctant hawks.” The New Republic’s Peter Beinart, joining the calls for war by the liberal class, wrote a book called The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.
At the start of the war, Slaughter, then dean of the Woodrow Wilson School and president of the American Society of International Law (as of this writing, she is now director of Policy Planning for the U.S. Department of State), wrote in Foreign Affairs that “the world cannot afford to look the other way when faced with the prospect, as in Iraq, of a brutal ruler acquiring nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction”:Addressing this danger requires a different strategy, one that maximizes the chances of early and effective collective action. In this regard, and in comparison to the changes that are taking place in the area of intervention for the purposes of humanitarian protection, the biggest problem with the Bush preemption strategy may be that it does not go far enough.17
Ignatieff told the Guardian newspaper at the start of the war:I still think that Bush is right when he says Iraq would be better off if Saddam were disarmed and, if necessary, replaced by force. . . . Ideology cannot help us here. In the weeks and years ahead, the choices are not about who we are or what company we should keep nor even about what we think America is or should be. They are about what risks are worth running, when our safety depends on the answer, and when the freedom of 25 million people hangs in the balance.18
Ignatieff, defending the invasion on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross in March 2003, laid out the classic arguments of the liberal class. He insisted that war was a humanitarian action, that he supported the war with a heavy heart, but that there was no other option. This humanitarian and moral coloring to war, the insistence that the motives of the war-makers is virtuous, is the primary function of the liberal class, the reason the power elite tolerates its existence.
The liberal class played