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Thursday is American Street day!

That’s right, dear readers, I’ve been invited to join the mighty gang of bloggers over on The American Street, and Thursday is my day to post.  So now it is Thursday!  And that means it is my turn!  My very first effort is somewhere on the alternate side of the street-- actually, right over there by the double-parked blue Impala with the whitewall tires.

Drop by and tell ‘em I sent you!

Posted by on 09/23 at 10:53 AM

  1. This doesn’t make sense. You’re a liberal academic. Don’t they know how unamerican that makes you?

    Posted by PZ Myers  on  09/23  at  03:11 PM

  2. Michael, (or Prof. Berube, if you prefer),

    I post the comments below on the American Street site, but I think I was a bit late, I missed the disussion. I’m rather proud of my little rant, and being that I so respect your blog and its readers (no sarcasm), I figured I’d post here as well (with soem grammatical corrections):

    Despite having the same knee-jerk repulsion to the “dumbass hippie” crowd, and despite being a big fan of Michael’s writing, I’m gonna have to go with the “hard-left” on the issue of Afghanistan. I don’t think that the “terrorist intelligentsia” actually believes that America is weak or “shuns war”. In fact they count on our warlike nature. Terrorism is completely different ballgame, with little or no relevance to wars of the past. The terrorists have no set address, and as soon as a country is invaded they hightail it elsewhere, leaving only a few dupes and the civilian populace to face the wrath of their targets (which only serves to swell their ranks). The point of terrorism is to gain attention and new recruits, and how better than an invasion by the Great Satan to popularize their fanaticism.

    Now imagine that instead of declaring war after 9/11, we declared that we were going to turn our vast resources towards solving the problems that create the anger and desperation that drives people into the arms of extremists. Imagine that we used our tremendous political leverage not to expand global corporate interests, not to secure more resources for ourselves, but to pressure national leaders to give their people more rights and more say in their own governance. Imagine that we decided to lead the world in convincing the Israel and Palestine to make a final lasting peace (and enforcing their cooperation by cutting off all aid to both parties - from us or anyone else). We would have actually become the great shining light of freedom and peace that we now pretend to be. And what would the Muslim terrorists do if the Palestians got their own autonomy and were no longer dying by Israeli hands? How would they gain recruits when people could see that America was fighting for the little guy? Who would sacrifice their lives or their children’s to attack someone who was obviously working to make their life better? In time regimes like Saddam’s and the Taliban would begin to fall of their own accord, as their support systems collapsed, as people saw the changes in neighboring countries, saw that they would receive global support even though they didn’t practice the same religion or have the same skin color or own anything of value. And if, at that point, if these governments were to attempt to brutally suppress their own citizens, and together the rest of the world stepped in to stop them, who would object then? As long we did it consistently across the board - as long as we sanctioned Likud as harshly as Hamas, were as intolerant of the right-wing dictator as we were of the left-wing revolutionary, I cannot see how such an approach would fail. And in the end we would all be safer, freer, and richer for it (with the exception of arms manufacturers and other purveyers of war - and I sure wouldn’t weep to see their tables overturned…).

    Posted by  on  09/23  at  03:21 PM

  3. Hi, Dallas, and thanks for the critique.  (No sarcasm!) I have no special claim on the truth of these matters, and was initially torn about whether to support that war, especially since it was being waged by an administration chock full of madmen.

    Though I have to say, by way of clarification, that I never predicated my support for war in Afghanistan on the argument that the “terrorist intelligentsia” thought we were we weak.  I argued, instead, that (a) we did not have the luxury of waiting around for the Taliban to fall (to whom?) or for our own government to change hands before destroying their terror-training camps and that (b) some of the hard-left arguments against that war (not all-- just the “silent genocide” / “crime against humanity many times greater than 9/11” ones) were not only substantively wrong, but (because of their wrongness, and the stridency with which they were advanced) were tantamount to propaganda gifts to the right.  I also believe that such arguments drove some progressives and liberals away from the left’s more plausible post-9/11 arguments, some of which you’ve mentioned here and most of which I still agree with (particularly with regard to Israel and Palestine).

    And I’m sure it’s not too late to chime in over on The Street!

    Posted by Michael  on  09/23  at  03:40 PM

  4. Damn, damn, damn!  I’ve been so impressed with eloquence and intelligence of this site (including the Comments), I was a bit intimidated to post myself, but finally worked up the nerve.  Sure enough, I blew it with a bunch of spelling/grammatical errors (both here and at the American Street site, doubly embarassing myself).  People will look past this, I hope, but it still tends diminish one’s attempt to be brilliant when one can’t even manage to spell ‘some’ correctly…

    Posted by  on  09/23  at  03:44 PM

  5. Good points, Michael.

    In regards to (a), I’m not convinced that the war adequately achieved either of those goals (removal of the Taliban or destruction of terror camps), while it did manage to squelch the world’s sympathy for 9/11, and further anger and polarize the Muslim community (not as much as Iraq, granted, but still…). Besides, that was a treatment of the symptoms and not the disease (and the treatment itself may actually kill the patient).

    In regards to ‚Äòb‚Äô, I find myself torn as well.  On the one hand I appreciate the argument that Progressive idealism - particularly in regards to Pacificism - needs to make some compromises to gain any purchase with the larger public, while on the other I fear that such compromises is what ultimately dooms it to failure.  It is compromise that has drawn this county steadily to the Right over the last several decades.  Visionaries like Jesus and Gandhi did not compromise (which is a big part of what made them visionaries).  They never said it was OK to hit back if the offender really, really deserved it (because of course the concept of ‚Äòjustified‚Äô violence opens a floodgate of rationalization, and you‚Äôre right back where you started).  Of course, one could legitimately debate the ultimate success of Jesus and Gandhi, as Christianity has come to represent the precise opposite of Jesus‚Äô teachings, and Pacifism has hardly been adopted as the standard of liberation for oppressed peoples of the world.  But is that failure a result of actual human nature, or just assumptions about human nature?

    Posted by  on  09/23  at  05:03 PM

  6. And a fine volley in return, Dallas.  You’re right that the jury is out on nonviolence, if we’re talking about mere consequentialist arguments (i.e., Christ and Gandhi have the moral high ground without question, but one has been hijacked and the other betrayed, while their righteous follower Martin Luther King, Jr. was simply silenced by a bullet).  Anyway, about the removal of the Taliban and the destruction of the terror camps:  I happen to agree (which also means that I admit I spoke too soon when I spoke of the “routing” of the Taliban in fall 2002).  But my agreement doesn’t mean that I don’t support an effective routing of the Taliban and destruction of the terror camps.  It means only that one should never trust the Bush administration with anything, anything at all, no matter how important or how trivial.  You shouldn’t even hand them a jelly jar with a tight lid-- Christ only knows how they could go about shredding the domestic economy and our foreign alliances with an unopened jelly jar.

    Posted by Michael  on  09/23  at  05:29 PM

  7. what have you done to your fonts?!  I can barely read it!

    Posted by  on  09/23  at  06:08 PM

  8. Hey, Cybelle, that’s one of the New and Improved features of this Expression-Engined version of the blog:  the font actually changes when you ask your browser to increase the type size.  I set mine on “medium,” and things look pretty good that way--

    Posted by Michael  on  09/23  at  06:34 PM

  9. I was disturbed by the fact that in Afghanistan the world’s only superpower, backed by nearly every other nation on earth, would demand the Taliban turn over sovereignty in 24 hours or else.  That showed exactly what was going to happen in Iraq (and I believe that war was a foregone conclusion when Bush was annointed the candidate in ‘99).  The runnup to that war was so transparent, so full of past-its-sell-by-date Cold War rhetoric that the only excuse I can accept for supporting it was the belief there must be something behind it all which could not be said publicly.  By the time one reaches higher education he really has to ask if he’s defined by a teeshirt, however dorky.

    I understand these fine young fellers grew up with simplistic, politicized, even sanitized, versions of Vietnam, but at their age it’s time to check some footnotes, read that bibliography, and start questioning their own assumptions.  Iraq was a disaster from its inception.

    Posted by  on  09/23  at  07:14 PM

  10. Thanks for the instructions.  I can read your site now.  I really panicked there for a bit.

    Posted by  on  09/24  at  05:52 AM

  11. welcome to the street, michael!

    Posted by skippy  on  09/25  at  06:53 PM

  12. Thanks, Skippy, and thanks for giving me a big hello on your blog, too--

    Posted by Michael  on  09/26  at  08:56 AM

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