Date: Tue, 07 May 2002 18:54:55 +1200
From: Margaret Trawick <trawick-AT-clear.net.nz>
Subject: Re: Battle on the Left,  Hitchens vs. Ali


It seems to me that the debate between Hitchens and Ali is something of a
red herring, since Hitchens has virtually divorced himself from the left in
his responses to the events of September 11, which are indistinguishable
from far-right reactionary responses to same.  To claim, on the basis of
this one debate, that the left is divided in its response is just silly.
And why should people who identify themselves as leftists not disagree among
themselves?  Why is it necessary for them to put forward some unified
statement?  The American left is not an organization, after all.  It is many
people and many organizations with many different points of view.  What they
all have in common, I think, is opposition to oppression and exploitation of
the relatively powerless by the relatively powerful.

For the sake of discussion, and just to give my personal answers (for what
they are worth) to Anita's questions:

> 1. Is a declaration of war ever justified?

Yes.  If one nation attacks another nation by the use of armed force, then
the attacked nation is justified in responding with counter-force. Or, if
some one organization (say a government) is violently destroying some
relatively defenseless group of people, most of whom are not attackers, then
armed intervention is justified.  But the aim should always and only be to
stop or repel the attack, non-violent means to stop the attack must be
employed in the first instance and wherever possible, and the lives of
innocents should not be put at greater risk than they are already at.
Taking revenge for the sake of revenge, or for the sake of making a display
of force, is counter-productive.

The issue is not, however, declaration of war, as there have been many
undeclared wars in the last century, and some of them are ongoing.
Undeclared wars are no more or less bad and destructive than declared wars.
The issue is war, what it is, what it means, and why is it waged.

> 2. When can a nation, especially a superpower, use military force?

You ask, when "can" a superpower use military force.  The answer is,
whenever they feel like it and think they can get away with it.  If you
mean, when *should* a superpower use force, my answer would be, only under
the conditions stated above.

But the real question is, should there be a superpower at all, given that
there are few checks against its use of force to attain its own ends,
whatever they may be.  If the very existence of a global superpower is
inherently bad and destructive, what can be done about this?  And if
acceptance of the reality of a superpower is necessary, what can be done to
ensure that this superpower acts for the well-being of all humanity, and not
just in the interests of a few.

> 3. How should the U.S. have ideally responded to Sept.11?

An intensive search for the people behind the attacks should have been
mounted. Suspects should not have been alerted. Afghanistan should not have
been bombed.  A review of US intelligence services should have been carried
out immediately, and appropriate corrections of shortcomings should have
been made.  Airplane security should have been improved, with trained
personnel on each flight capable of disarming and controlling potential
attackers on board.  The number of flights should have been permanently
reduced and alternative means of transportation should have been encouraged
and funded.  The American people should have been told that a terrible
breach of security had occurred, and that a small group of young men armed
only with box-openers and easily available flight training courses had
carried out the destruction.  The President should have taken full
responsibility for the breach, should have issued a public apology to his
people, and should have stepped down from his office.

MT







Anita Palathingal <palata01-AT-yahoo.com> wrote:

> Unfortunately, Tariq Ali, eloquent as he is, seemed
> unable to answer the public's genuine questions about
> the war.
>
> 1. Is a declaration of war ever justified?
> 2. When can a nation, especially a superpower, use
> military force?
> 3. How should the U.S. have ideally responded to Sept.
> 11?
>
> The Left has to be able to honestly address these
> questions to itself and to the people on the other
> side in order to be an effective force for justice
> rather than be seen as a mere banners-and-candelight
> brigade.
>
>
> --- Salil Tripathi <salil61-AT-hotmail.com> wrote:
> > >Christopher Hitchens debates Tariq Ali.
> > >
> > >http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i34/34b01301.htm





The Chronicle of Higher Education

The Chronicle Review


>From the issue dated May 3, 2002


  Ali vs. Hitchens: Battle on the Left
By MICHAEL BERUBE

Over the past five years, I've begun to catalog and dissect all the myriad
divisions on the left -- between intellectuals and labor, identity
politicians and aging New Leftists, Judith Butler and Martha Nussbaum, In
These Times and Social Text. In fact, just as I was deciding that I had to
write my next book on the topic, the endgame of the 2000 presidential
election pitted Naderites against Goreans, and I began to hope that Nader
would pull 5 percent of the national vote and qualify for matching funds in
2004. Not because I supported Nader, but because I wanted to see the Green
Party hold a national convention, so I could watch the vegan-macrobiotic
wing and the Mumia Abu-Jamal wing tear each other apart over health benefits
for same-sex partners of replacement workers or some such thing.

Then, while most of the left was still assessing the damage wrought by 2000,
the terrorist attacks of September 11 divided the anti-imperialists on ZNet
from the liberal internationalists at Dissent -- and from pretty much the
rest of the country. So, when I heard that Tariq Ali and Christopher
Hitchens would be debating "The Left and the War" at Georgetown University
in mid-April, I dropped everything and made the four-hour drive from State
College.

The Ali-Hitchens Fight! In this corner, the prolific Vanity Fair and Nation
columnist and sometime CNN welterweight, Hitchens, notorious among liberals
for his attacks on Bill Clinton, notorious among leftists for his support of
the war in Afghanistan; in this corner, Ali, the renowned New Left Review
editor, novelist, playwright, and filmmaker from Lahore via England,
weighing in with a new book, The Clash of Fundamentalisms, soon to be
notorious for its disturbing jacket images of George W. Bush as a mullah and
Osama bin Laden as a U.S. president. What better occasion to take the pulse
of the left?

The battle lines were clear from the outset: The Hitchens left is soft on
American imperialism, and the Ali left is soft on Islamist radicalism. Ali
argued that the United States should have devised "a measured and
essentially police response" to the September 11 attacks, centered on
apprehending bin Laden and the Al Qaeda leadership, but avoiding wider U.S.
military action. The current war against terrorism is really a "war to
promote terror," he said: It won't "stop the flow of young people to
terrorism," especially among the volatile middle classes of Egypt and Saudi
Arabia. It will produce blowback for decades to come, and American leftists
must protest. "What you do matters," Ali urged. "There is no other
countervailing force." A stirring conclusion, I thought, to a
not-quite-convincing speech.

Hitchens began by citing the Ayatollah Khomeini's infamous fatwa against
Salman Rushdie, and argued that American imperialism cannot be portrayed as
morally equivalent to such Islamist radicalism; that the victims of
September 11 were killed not by "subjects of empire," as Ali had written in
his book, but by "henchmen of the advocates of Shariah law"; that there is a
civil war in Islam between moderates and those who would visit the dictates
of Shariah on Muslims and non-Muslims alike; that the left can make no
compromises with the latter. In response, Ali demanded that the left support
"the power of the people to overthrow their own oppressors."

The opening statements, complete with insults, took an hour. At one point,
Hitchens insisted that there could be "no intelligent and no principled way"
to oppose the struggle against Al Qaeda, whereupon Ali replied, "If we are
talking about intelligent and principled debate, I don't intend to learn any
lessons from you." On to the questions.

One young man asked Ali an incisive two-parter. First, what about his claim
that nothing had changed in Afghanistan as a result of U.S. actions? Would
he stand by that even with regard to Afghan schoolgirls? Second, if the
United States had responded to the September 11 attacks with police action,
and failed to capture Al Qaeda's leaders, at what point, if any, would a
military response have been justified? Ali replied that the military
response has failed, so it would seem appropriate to try other means. That
didn't quite answer the second question, but the lacuna was overshadowed by
the fact that it also never addressed the Afghan schoolgirl issue.

Twice, Hitchens was challenged for slandering Islam. He made a halfhearted
appeal to the golden age of Islam, but mostly he took such criticisms as
opportunities to call the Koran a "10th-rate penal code" and to suggest
that, if the book indeed represents the word of God, "then it was a very bad
day for Him." As if to reassure everyone that he was engaged in an
equal-opportunity offend-a-thon, Hitchens opined that God was also having a
bad day when He dictated the Pentateuch and most of the New Testament.

As the evening wore on, and Hitchens combined aggressive secularism with
sublime disdain, I asked one of his friends whether Christopher might not
consider hiring media consultants from Al-Jazeera to help him with his
self-presentation. "And I say this," I whispered, "as a lifelong agnostic."

Much of the support Hitchens lost over religion, he regained when he asked
one questioner whether anyone involved in the liberation struggles in South
Africa or Chile would crash planes full of civilians into buildings full of
civilians. "Can you imagine," he queried, picking up speed and heat as he
went, "can you imagine Nelson Mandela or Salvador Allende giving that
order?" It was easily his best moment. Then he followed it with a biting
contrast between Arab support for Palestinian suicide bombers and Desmond
Tutu's personally preventing members of the African National Congress from
"necklacing" an informer -- and suddenly, just like that, there was a split
between Hitchens and Ali on Palestine.

Hitchens condemned suicide bombers and Ali asked him incredulously how he
could support U.S. bombings in Afghanistan but not the Palestinian
resistance. Ali then worked himself into a remarkably tangled position,
first declaring that Palestinians have the right to resist Israel by any
means necessary, then insisting that he does not necessarily support the
right of Palestinians to resist Israel by any means necessary, and finally
proclaiming that the principle of resistance must be that the oppressed seek
to win over the population against whose government and army they are
fighting. Ali thus moved from Malcolm X to Mahatma Gandhi in less than five
minutes, offering in his final argument the grounds for condemning the
suicide bombers he had refused to condemn in the first argument.

An hour later, at a postdebate dinner, I ran into a similar impasse. Ali had
just finished summarizing his recent essay "Who Really Killed Daniel
Pearl?," and arguing, quite compellingly, that it was never plausible that
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency did not know who had done so.
Outraged that the United States had already exonerated both General Pervez
Musharraf and the intelligence agency, he implied that we were once again
bedding down with a corrupt client state.

I was sitting across from Ali and could not waste the opportunity. "I've
read your essay, which was terrific, and I've followed your critiques of
U.S. complicity with this and that -- most but not all of which I sympathize
with," I said. "But I wonder what would constitute an appropriate response
to Pearl's murder on the part of the United States?"

"Well," he replied, looking keenly at me, "I'm certainly not calling for
sending in fighter jets." I said I hadn't thought he was. He suggested more
U.S. pressure on Musharraf, then added the proviso that the many Taliban
sympathizers in the intelligence agency are waiting to dispose of Musharraf
the minute U.S. support is gone.

By that point in the evening, however, I had decided that the problem with
Tariq Ali's anti-imperialist left is not a lack, but a surfeit, of
principles. An oppressed people must overthrow its own dictators; the
Palestinians have a right to resist oppression, even though we may not
support specific uses of that right; the aim of resistance is to appeal to
the people whose government and army you are fighting; U.S. intervention
produces blowback, particularly when it is, as in the case of Daniel Pearl,
not interventionist enough.

Hitchens's arguments were systemically more coherent, and yet problematic in
their own way. His troubles are the troubles of the liberal internationalist
who doesn't say where his commitment to foreign intervention might end, and
on what grounds. There is no question, for example, that liberal
internationalists can find a plausible moral basis for action against
Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo. But then, there is no question that arguments
about Milosevic can also be deployed with regard to Saddam Hussein's
treatment of his nation's Kurds. Surely that is why an otherwise decent
leftist like Michael Walzer would sign up for Bush's planned invasion of
Iraq? Having set out to dispense justice around the world, American
interventionists are on a dark and unpaved road trod by many leftists,
progressives, and liberals before who believed, every step of the way, that
this time, the Force would be used for good.

Although Christopher Hitchens is not likely to do an about-face and support
Star Wars, liberal internationalism will have to think more clearly and
speak more loudly about its own limits, and its opposition to imperialism.
For if Ali is burdened by a surfeit of principles, Hitchens is burdened by a
principle without a braking system. Ali does not tell us how to proceed when
the "organic opposition" to a despotic regime turns out to be composed of
Islamist radicals; Hitchens does not tell us how to proceed when a secular
democracy turns into a unilateral global cop.

The after-debate dinner, billed as a bacchanal of loquacious leftists,
turned out to be rather a sober affair. Hitchens and Ali left shortly after
midnight, in good trim and with faculties intact; the only people left at
closing were me and three or four writers and editors -- and even we were
talking more like color commentators than combatants. But then again, I
thought as I wended my way back to my hotel, these are sobering times. After
September 11, Daniel Pearl, the Passover Massacre, and the siege of Jenin,
no one on the left feels like ordering another round of the same.

Michael Bérubé is a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University at
University Park.


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