Intervention and the Antiwar Left

by Lee McCracken

The most vocal and consistent opposition to war with Iraq has so far come from the political Left. With the honorable exception of Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative, most of the Right has fallen in behind President Bush’s intention to pursue “regime change” in Baghdad . Even if one counts libertarians as part of “the Right,” broadly speaking, most of the critics of Bush’s Iraq policy have come from the Left.  

However, the principles behind this opposition differ greatly depending on where one sits on the political spectrum. The Right-wing opposition to the war tends to be rooted in a general opposition to interventionism. Paleocons and libertarians believe that America should mind its own business and that intervening in the affairs of other nations is likely only to provoke more “blowback” in the form of further terrorist attacks.  

The Left, on the other hand, rarely expresses opposition to intervention per se. Given the enthusiasm of many of them for the various interventions of the Clinton administration, one is tempted to think that they only oppose interventions carried out by Republican administrations.  

This would be a mistake, however, because many of the “antiwar” critics of Bush’s position on Iraq have advocated a variety of interventions intended to “solve” the “problem” of Saddam Hussein’s regime. A recent article in The Progressive states that “Opposing War is Good, But Not Good Enough.” The piece, written by an Iraqi exile and former member of the Iraqi Communist Party, argues that, although war is a bad idea, there are a number of ways the West can put pressure on Saddam to abdicate power. He argues that Saddam should be threatened with indictment (presumably by the International Criminal Court) and that the rest of the ruling class should be bribed/threatened into ousting Saddam. The author even proposes a “mini-Marshall Plan” to rebuild Iraq ’s ruined infrastructure and encourage transition to a democratic regime that respects human rights.  

Another article at the same site also opposes war, but instead advocates that the UN send human rights monitors to Iraq to “visit Iraqi prisons and interview thousands of families whose loved ones have ‘disappeared’ over the past generation.” The UN should also “set up a special international criminal tribunal . . . to take up evidence of the top Iraqi leadership’s well-documented responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as its ongoing crimes of torture.” It seems doubtful that this will have Saddam quaking in his boots. What is the International Criminal Court going to do, issue him a sternly worded letter? Regardless of the methods employed, these Left-wingers essentially agree with George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld that pursuing a policy of regime change is a good idea, they just don’t have the stomach to send in the Marines.  

Slightly more promising is a statement put out by “The Campaign for Peace and Democracy”--a lefty outfit associated with such worthies as Noam Chomsky, Edward Said and Howard Zinn. It starts out well by calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East, ending the sanctions on Iraq, etc., but then calls on the U.S. to adopt a foreign policy of “fostering democracy” through massive foreign aid paid for by—you guessed it—the long-suffering U.S. taxpayer!

Much of the public criticism of Bush’s war policy from the Left has focused on the supposed need to seek “diplomatic solutions” to the crisis. Although what kind of diplomacy will convince Saddam to give up his weapons programs is never made clear. More crucially, though, this approach ignores the fact that any diplomacy, to be effective, has to be backed up, at least implicitly, by the threat of force. After all, what if you try to make a deal with Saddam and he still refuses to comply? Then are you prepared to go to war? And if not, why not? Once the principle of intervention is accepted, force cannot be ruled out a priori or you’ve already given away the game.

The fact is that the Left, even the “antiwar” Left, endorses many of the same principles as the interventionist Right. Neither side seriously questions that the U.S. , and the West more generally, has the right to intervene in other nations’ affairs in order to see their preferred principles of justice enshrined. For the neoconservative Right, America should intervene in order to spread “American Values.” According to the Left, we need to pursue “social justice.” The Left would prefer this intervention take place under the auspices of ostensibly international organizations like the UN, but they’ll accept American “unilateralism” when it suits them (as in the Balkans). The Left is also more eager than the Right to engage in massive economic and social intervention in order to make sure that Western social-democratic notions of “fairness” and “equality” hold sway in the unenlightened backwaters of the world.

This may be because the ideology of the Left was born in the Jacobin desire to remake society along lines prescribed by an abstract rationalist ideology. This kind of massive social reconstruction required government intervention into every area of life that led to totalitarian communism as its horrifying conclusion. The quasi-pacifist Left of today still seems to harbor many of these impulses to remake the world. The fact that much of it is queasy about the use of military force doesn’t do much to check the warmongering of those with less restraint. Once you concede that justice is on the side of intervention, you’ll have a hard time objecting when the hawks point out that diplomacy has failed and war is the only remaining option. Accept Donald Rumsfeld’s ends and you’ll soon find yourself accepting his means.

Libertarians and small-government conservatives have a more principled, and therefore stronger, reason to oppose foreign war and intervention. First, the principles of non-aggression and just war dictate that force can only be used in defense or retaliation against a previous initiation of force. Attacking someone because he might attack you sometime in the future isn’t defense, it’s aggression. Secondly, intervention abroad will inevitably result in growth of government and loss of liberty at home. The Left’s embrace of interventionism, whether domestic or foreign, will always make them unsteady allies in opposing the growth of the centralized State.