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A reader responded to an excerpt of a Bush speech I posted (soimething I did without comment, save my pithy 'right on'). Below is the full reader response. Notice the oh-so-damn-clever switch-out Bush's mentions of 'enemy' with, instead, references to (surprise!) the US gov't and the Bush administration. If you like, read my original entry here. From ze reader:

But this is no less true!

"Like the ideology of communism, our new [government] is elitist, led by a self-appointed vanguard of [Christian] militants that presume to speak for the [American] masses. Like the ideology of communism, our new [Government] teaches that the innocent can be murdered to serve a political vision. Like the ideology of communism, our new [Government] pursues totalitarian aims. Like the ideology of communism, our new [Government] is dismissive of free peoples, claiming that men and women who live in [co-operation] are weak and [useless]. And like the ideology of communism, [Neo-con Fascism] is doomed to fail.

"It will fail because it undermines the freedom and creativity that makes human progress possible and human societies successful. The only thing modern about our [Government's] vision is the weapons they want to use against [anyone w/ oil]. The rest of their grim vision is defined by a warped image of the [present], a declaration of war on the idea of progress itself. And whatever lies ahead in the war against this ideology, the outcome is not in doubt: Those who despise freedom and progress have condemned themselves to isolation, decline, and collapse. Because free peoples believe in the future, free peoples will own the future."

Your walking a very thin line there. Don't wake up in 10 years and realize you were a "good german".

Me: Wow, if debate about foreign policy were only that easy, anyone could do it! In this person's view, apparently there can't be disagreement without amateurish, name-calling insinuations. The absurb reductionism here speaks for itself. Hello, is there an argument in the room? Bueller? Bueller?

I usually don't post reader responses to current events topics unless the responses actually forward an coherent argument of some kind. Mind you, disagreement is not a problem with me. Disagreement fuels, at least, intellectual progress through the ages, and much more. And lord knows there is a wee-little bit of disagreement about Iraq. Only an idiot in my position would post on this topic and not know that, what, at least half of my readers are going to disagree. Whatever. Really—a blog that doesn't challenge reader assumptions is a waste of everyone's time. Y'all know what I mean?

That this response ends in such an alarming insult is by turns noxious and funny. And troubling, too, because it wreaks of so much of the rhetorical trash that passes for debate on the left. Mind you, I wish the left had a legitimately intellectual position that was coherent and nuanced. The real anti-war arguments worth studying came not from the left, but from within circles on the right. Which makes sense because pretty much all the debate worth note is happening on the right, while the left hasn't gotten over it's own obsession with hypocrisy and uneasiness with realities of political power. Notable exceptions are Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan, Mayor Daley, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and even Barack Obama (though I'm a little concerned about some of his recent rhetoric).

Anyway, the reason I'm giving this triffle airplay on my blog is not to make cheap points at the expense of poor reasoning, but rather towards my more general complaint of the lack of class, dignity, and openmindedness on the part of many (not all) of the American left. It is sorely missing a coherent narrative to underpin its positions. I use the term 'arguments' loosly because so often with the left, an appeal to reason is ignored in favor of appeals to emotion, appeals to populist rah-rah no deeper than 'damn the man', appeals to naive "let's just think 'peace' and the world will be a better place", and then, as with this response, appeals to personal insult and name-calling.

The lack of perspective, differentiated reasoning, historical analysis of totalitarian regimes, or even working definitions of 'conservativism' and 'liberalism' that account for the fact that everyone—no exceptions—is conservative about what they know best, apparently aren't important when it is so much easier to not think and then call someone a name. I find this hideous even though I have a thick skin, and even though I remind myself to consider the source. And over the internet taboot! What did the person expect, that such a lazy argument and absurd insinuation is going to change my opinion on, fuck, anything? Maybe on that person, but trust me, nothing else.

The bar ought be set a helluva lot higher than it currently is for discourse and debate about politics. Everyone has their own opinions about everything, politics included, but if wisdom is knowing what to ignore, then we need more wisdom, to go along with minimum standards. If an argument doesn't rise to at least this bar, then we ignore it as so much trash.

Which is what, I guess, most people in a position to effect change in political policy do, as well as those people who aren't policy wonks, but simple citizens, yet still wouldn't deign to make such a low-quality political argument as this reader. My feeling is that even though, in practice, the trash is ignored, we still need to talk more about how and what to ignore, as well as what this standard bar might be, so that we can more talk about politics without the obstacles that are posed by poor argumentation.

And there are obstacles here, not in the actual argument (or lack thereof), but in the fact that in a media-drenched culture as ours, name-calling is serious business. It is so easy to taint reputations, taint livelihoods, and taint human beings when skin-deep intellects have the same social tools (internet, email, web software) as our professional policy makers and regular citizens of high integrity. A cybernetic 'Scarlet Letter' is easier than ever to force people to wear, due to nothing more than disagreement.

Intelligent use of these very powerful tools requires near-constant restraint. It is just that simple. For truly developed intelligence itself realizes just how delicate the threads are that hold, well, everything together. Our culture, our social systems, our networks, our institutions, our reputations, our livelihood, our emotions, on and on down to the most delicate thing we have—our breath-force, itself. Operating with intelligent restraint, we realize we can do or say almost anything we want, but, frankly, we should not do or say most of it, unless substantially tempered by actual experience.

On politics, that means clam up unless you have earned the right not to. Or in lieu of that, make points of observation, rather than grand conclusions, and then see if others agree with that observation. When the right to disagree or agree is truly earned, by all means take advantage. But not before, if you want to be response-able, decent, moral, and humble. There are two areas of life where people very cognitively intelligent nonetheless exhibit strikingly low development. One is politics. The other, aesthetics (but I mean to change that one).

Nothing positive or aware of life's delicate threads was fostered by this reader's closeminded, unintelligent, completely useless argument. Nothing, that is, save whatever good points I make in this here little spiel. (And I do hope I make at least one. Or, half of one, anyway.)

Here's the truth in rant form. I'm tired of it. I'm tired of the crappy arguments forwards by the anti-war left. I'm tired of the attitudes that think it helpful to the world to put the devil's horns on puppets that are supposed to look like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Blair. I'm tired of the low-class rhetoric from people who, I know from personal experience, are on non-political topics very intelligent, nuanced people, even highly moral. I'm tired of people who don't think you need real experience with the dynamics at play in world politics before they make their insulting, populist pronouncements.

Why stop here. I'm tired of people who don't think that every person on this planet—no exceptions—ought have the same basic rights to participatory government and real estate ownership that every goddamn one of the American anti-war protestors has. And I'm tired of people who think that, at the end of the day, after all that has been problematically said and problematically done, the removal of a murderous dictator from power isn't not a very good thing for the long-term functioning of this planet. At least look at the ends if the means make you flip your lid.

I'm basically tired of what passes for the American left. Yet another reason I investigate National Review nearly everyday, if only to get my head around actual arguments that, accurate or not, are at least earned and fulfill basicaly intellectual obligation. (And spare me, I'm obviously not talking here about the Pat Robertson-, James Dobson-right. If you need a name, I'm talking about the Buckleyian right, though that, too, can be a mixed bag.)

As Prime Minister Blair (who made the most compelling cases for action in Iraq, utterly ignored or dismissed by the anti-war left for reasons I still don't understand) said in the build-up to the Iraq invasion (I'm paraphrasing): Sure, of course there are other despotic regimes that, in an ideal world, would also be removed from power as swiftly as Hussein was (and the Taliban). But in practical terms, political will only allowed the removal of these two regimes in this time and place....

Quick test for those sympathetic to the left: define 'political will' without using the word 'manipulation' and in a way that the average conservative would agree with you. Go!

...And, given the fight in the U.N., as well as on the world stage of popular opinion, the political will only barely allowed the removal of just these two! So we do what we can, what the forces and windows of the real world allow. And we expect hardship, we expect setbacks, we expect heart-aches of the worst kind, but we will must—must—follow our moral imperative, even in tempered form.

Look at the difficulties posed in dealing with the tragedies in Rwanda and Darfur. In this pluralistic world, even clear-cut cases of genocide and murder, as well as the obvious repression of human rights (as defined by Jefferson), appear ambiguous and tough cases to decide, for many. And large-scale action was not taken in these cases, and numerous others through even recent history.

But in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, political will was there to help—yes help—the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, by at least removing the poltical lids imposed by dictatorial forces. These both are at least incremental vicories towards the long-term goal of every country on this planet offering political participation, economic autonomy, and property rights to their citizens. Given that the only way the U.N. Sanctions were ever going to realistically be removed was through the removal of Hussein from power, that is another reason I'm glad for the war.

I'll close on this: I think the right distance from this mess, something only history will provide, maybe even in no less than 100 years, will show that there were three fundamental points forwarded in the case for the Iraq war. The political imperative that demanded reasonable accounting of weapons provided by Hussein to the UN. The moral imperative to protect the millions of civilians from mass-murder and ongoing denial of basic human rights. The survival imperative that demanded that the capacity for destructive weapons (nuclear, etc) not be fostered through relationships between despots whose ideological enemy is the kind of post-traditional civil rights found in North America, most of Europe, Australia, and a growing list of countries in the remaining continents.

That President Bush drew the comparison between Communism and Islamofascism on the ground of ideology is why I felt his comments were, as I pithily wrote, 'right on'. I think the lightness of my posted comment ought reasonably indicate the lightness at which I hold this comparison between these two ideologies.

By definition, to operate with a planet-centric political imperative is both to desire the protection of one's native civilization and traditions (thus the criticism of Bush/Blair/US/UK self-interest as determining factor can be rghtly ignored) as well as the health of the entire planet, to the extent that the limited contexts of the Hussein/Taliban removals can have such effects around the globe, or at least the geographic region. Both Bush and Blair pitched this latter signal on numerous occasions. Basically, though this may astonish many, guess what...I believe them. I think both spoke from their heart, and indeed most from their heart when they spoke of the moral imperative.

There is, I imagine, room for reasonable disagreement with these invasions at the fundamental level. (As well as even more room for less fundamental, but still important, criticism on issues such as prisoner abuse.) I say 'imagine' because I haven't seen critiques of this kind that were truly earned. The first bar any criticism must reach is to accurately and adequately recognize the true subject of the criticism. You gotta call what you critique by an accurate name, else you critique either something else entirely, or in fact nothing of substance whatsoever.

And that name—not egocentric, not ethnocentric, but in fact a planet-centric political and millitary action is what we have here. This is supported by a clear, dispassionate analysis of all the speeches by Bush and Blair leading up to the war, and also those after. Such a case is too long for this entry (which is too long as it is) but I encourage all to look at all the speeches by Bush and Blair on this subject. If you must, even experiment with believing their contents. Ask, 'what if I'm wrong to think each are lying at every step? What if they actually mean what they say, in a genuine fashion that seeks to help the world?'

Well, give it a try, anyway. To claim that the intentions of Bush/Blair/Coalition in the recent wars were not planet-centric is in my view to make a colossal error, one not supportable through appeals to reason. To claim that Bush, Blair, and Co were simply lying about their true intentions says more about the critic than it does of the political leader.