BLOODIED DISCOURSE: LIBERAL HAWKS, JUST WAR, AND NEOLIBERALISM Roy Scranton

On January 15, 2007, Second Lieutenant Mark Daily was killed by a roadside bomb in the city of Mosul, Iraq. 1 Three other soldiers and an Iraqi translator died with him. Lieutenant Daily was twenty-three years old, a UCLA grad, and an avowed liberal. Remembered by his friends and family as a feisty, idealistic, honorable young man, Daily had been a vocal champion of animal rights, the environment, democracy, and tolerance, and just as vocal a critic of fascism, racism, totalitarianism, and hate. He’d been a vegetarian and a member of the Green Party, he’d read Chomsky, and was registered as a Democrat. Raised in Orange County, California, born on the Fourth of July, smart, athletic, earnest, and proud, Mark Daily seems, in brief, to offer an incontestably heroic image: a good American who died for his ideals. That these ideals should lead to this death—that there is a line from Noam Chomsky to leading soldiers through the streets of Mosul—may strike some as a puzzle, a tragic paradox, or even a sad confusion. But Lieutenant Daily knew what he was doing. In a statement posted to his MySpace page, Daily explained to his friends and family why he was going to war and what it meant to him. His decision was explicit and principled: “If you think the only way a person could bring themselves to volunteer for this war is through sheer desperation or blind obedience then consider me the exception (though there are countless like me).” 2 In his statement, Mark Daily argues that “many modern day ‘humanists’ who claim to possess a genuine concern for human beings throughout the world are in fact quite content to allow their fellow ‘global citizens’ to suffer under the most hideous state apparatuses and

2 conditions,” and tells us that “their excuses used to be my excuses.” He castigates the “fragile moral ecosystem” of contemporary American liberalism for choosing purity and “philosophical masturbation” over “effective action.” He dismisses “peace vigils” for their lack of impact, asserts that “Americans will always have a responsibility for the oppressed,” and insists that “Often times it is less about how clean your actions are and more about how pure your intentions are.” “I simply decided that the time for candid discussions of the oppressed was over,” he concludes, “and I joined.” 3 Lieutenant Daily was a soldier who believed in the civilizing mission of American foreign policy and the responsibility of military power. He saw it as his duty to advance liberal democratic values and to uphold the honor of the US military. “I genuinely believe the United States Army is a force of good in this world,” he said, and he meant to instill in his men an ethical integrity that would prevent a “failure of leadership” like the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib. 4 There is no question he was a young man committed to his values and beliefs. The story of Lieutenant Mark Daily brings into sharp focus a larger phenomenon, because he was an active exemplar of the ideals and arguments put forward by a contingent of well-known American intellectuals who have advocated the “use American military power to serve goals like human rights and democracy.” 5 These are the liberal hawks, what George Packer calls “the Bosnia consensus,” a group of public intellectuals who came to prominence in the 1990s, during the debates about intervention in the Balkans, by articulating “the case for American engagement—if need be, military engagement—in the chaotic world of the post-cold war.” 6 The arguments of these liberal hawks are predicated not on state interests, geopolitics, or a critique of American power, but on a belief that American power can and should be used to spread liberal democratic ideas throughout the world. The terrorist attacks of September 11 and

3 the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq brought these concerns to the forefront of public debate in new and unsettling ways, splitting the left into two “camps,” one characterized by “automatic hostility to any American military intervention” and the other “veer[ing] toward an embrace of American expansionism.” 7 In the words of Michael Walzer, “The radical failure of the left’s response to the events of last fall [i.e., 9/11] raises a disturbing question: can there be a decent left in a superpower? Or more accurately, in the only superpower?” 8 The American left has yet to resolve this question—despite widespread disappointment with the US occupation of Iraq— and the liberal hawks’ ideological and discursive foundations remain unshaken. These liberal hawks are active, experienced, rhetorically-skilled writers and thinkers, and while they are not quite philosophers they are certainly something more than demagogues. They function in that most troublesome arena of the public sphere, where mass media propaganda, impassioned rhetoric, and rational argumentation compete to sway the decisions of voters, policy makers, and intellectuals alike. Their arguments have real effects, legitimating the decisions of the powerful, swaying the minds of the undecided, and sending young idealists to their deaths. Mark Daily’s choices show the powerful impact of these liberal hawks: “Writings by author and columnist Christopher Hitchens on the moral case for war deeply influenced him.” 9 It would be specious to dismiss the liberal hawks as hypocrites, fools, and thugs, craven to suggest that Lieutenant Daily was naïvely swayed by their rhetoric, and blindly smug to think that the issue of liberal intervention is put paid by problems in Iraq—the liberal argument for war in Iraq demands an accounting, both on its own terms and in a wider context. I intend in this essay to discuss the liberal hawk case for the invasion of Iraq, what it can tell us about liberal justifications for war, and what it might mean for liberalism generally. First I will consider the Iraq War liberal hawks themselves, looking at the overall context and general

4 arguments but focusing mainly on just a few figures, especially Paul Berman and Christopher Hitchens, in order to bring out some of the ideas, beliefs, and assumptions that lie implicit behind their arguments for war. Following that, I intend to take them on their own terms and consider whether or not they in fact made a case for just war within the liberal tradition. To do this, I’ll have to look at the context in which this case was made, then review the ideas of liberalism and just war. Relying upon Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars (among other works), I’ll evaluate the liberal hawks’ case in the terms of liberal values—showing that, in fact, they had no liberal case for just war. What I hope to expose in this maneuver, however, is not that the liberal hawks were wrong or hypocritical, but rather that liberal arguments fail within the context of neoliberal ethics. By showing that the liberal hawks’ arguments are not consistent with a liberal theory of just war, I intend to raise two questions. First, why are they “liberal” hawks? Second, what sort of ethos would be consistent with their interventionism? The answer I suggest is that they are not “liberal” hawks at all but neoliberal hawks in liberal plumage. That is, if we take the hawks’ arguments for the invasion of Iraq within a neoliberal ethos rather than a classically liberal ethos, we find that their arguments are ethically coherent—and also, problematically, we find that we lose the capacity to make coherent critiques from a liberal basis. Relying especially on Wendy Brown and Thomas Lemke’s work with Foucault’s analysis of neoliberal governmentality and David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism, I will in the final section of this essay suggest that the Iraq War portends the end of liberalism and the success of neoliberal imperialism, that the liberal hawks’ arguments are an example of activist liberal ideologues covering neoliberal ethics in liberal discourses, and that whether our perspectives are historical, theoretical, or political, we must come to grips with the fundamental changes in discourses and worldviews

5 wrought by neoliberalism. Things have changed, and we will remain unable to understand, critique, or change our twenty-first-century world so long as we persist in a nineteenth-century worldview.

I. LIBERAL HAWKS

In 2002, not yet fully a year after the attacks of September 11, the liberal stronghold of The Nation was abandoned and publicly scorned by one of its most active and popular writers. Christopher Hitchens, a British-born journalist and “a valued asset of the American left,” famous for his columns, literary reviews, rhetorical panache, and “contrarian” aggressiveness against figures as diverse as Henry Kissinger and Mother Theresa, gave up his monthly column “Minority Report” and quit himself of the left. 10 He became an eager supporter of the Iraq war and a vigorous critic of the anti-war left, and now publicly identifies with neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz. Hitchens’ “apostasy” can be explained in various ways, whether by referring to his self-avowed “contrarianism,” to what has been called “right-wing envy,” or to his reputed vanity for public acclaim, but Hitchens was not alone in apostasy and deeper explanations must be sought.

11

“[M]ight the departure of Christopher Hitchens signify something more than the

latest twist in the political outlook of Christopher Hitchens?” asked Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. “Might it be true, as has been argued, that more traditional leftwing commentators in the US have been hamstrung in the face of Islamic extremism, unable to square their commitment to multiculturalism and tolerance with the condemnation of doctrines that reject everything for which they have previously fought?” 12 Perhaps, Burkeman suggests to the left, the fault lies not in our Hitchens but in ourselves.

6 Certainly many august voices would agree. The coterie of the Iraq War liberal hawks is large and prestigious. Beside Hitchens, “columnist for Slate and Vanity Fair and bestselling author,” stood “Thomas Friedman, columnist for the New York Times and bestselling author; Peter Beinart, contributor to Time, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and celebrated author; Paul Berman, distinguished writer in residence at NYU and celebrated author; George Packer, correspondent for The New Yorker and celebrated author; Jeffrey Goldberg, correspondent for The Atlantic, formerly of The New Yorker and celebrated author; Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate and future celebrated author;” Michael Ignatieff, Canadian MP and writer; Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic; “Roger Cohn… the former foreign editor of The New York Times, now editor at large of the International Herald Tribune, author of its ‘Globalist’ column, international writer at large for the Times and frequent guest columnist for its op-ed page,” former US Senator Bob Kerrey; British novelist Martin Amis; and a host of other intellectuals, academics, writers, and public figures who supported George Bush’s invasion of Iraq from a distinctly liberal perspective. 13 It was not enough for many of these writers to push for war—it was part of their central argument that the left had somehow failed to respond to September 11. Michael Walzer’s question as to the “decency” of the left was elemental to the liberal hawk position. Vituperative infighting and self-castigation are common enough features of leftist debate, but many of the liberal hawks took these arguments to a new level, opening up on their compatriots with a strident derision and angry contempt that seem shocking even today. 14 Susie Linfield’s essay “The Treason of the Intellectuals (Again),” from George Packer’s collection The Fight is for Democracy, offers a representative attack on what she sees as the left’s “long-term failure… to make certain kinds of judgments in the political realm,” castigating liberal intellectuals for their

7 supposed inability to make moral, ethical, or value-based political decisions. 15 Noam Chomsky is a favorite target of these critiques; he stands as the representative “intellectual” anti-Imperialist leftist against whom the liberal hawks define themselves. 16 Wallace Shawn’s essay “The Foreign Policy Therapist,” from The Nation, cartoonishly illustrates the anti-imperialist position the liberal hawks themselves sought to caricature and critique: America on the couch, undergoing therapy to understand the attacks of September 11, is told that the problem is America itself. In the format of a “foreign policy therepist” advice column, “America” writes in asking for help on how to deal with feelings of insecurity and depression arising from “a terrible problem” that “began several weeks ago when I lost several thousand loved ones to a horrible terrorist crime,” and which has remained unresolved despite having “succeeded in finding and killing many young soldiers” who were protecting the terrorists. Shawn’s therapist answers back: “In psychological circles, we call your problem ‘denial.’ ” He then goes on to describe how the real problem is the unjust misery and suffering caused by global economic inequality, supported and maintained by the United States. He tells America that the problem can be solved “through a radical readjustment of the way you think and behave,” but warns that “If the denial persists, you are sure to continue killing more poor and desperate people, causing the hatred against you to grow, until at a certain point there will be no hope for you.” 17 Shawn’s essay, due in no small part to its shallow argumentation and breezy style, inadvertently illustrates the liberal hawk caricature of the anti-imperialist position: it blames America for the actions of its enemies; it uses therapeutic language to turn difficult geopolitical decisions into issues of personal growth; and it argues that the best response to violence is to turn inward and change “the way you think and behave.” In liberal hawk critiques, more sophisticated anti-imperialist arguments are

8 typically reduced to such simplicities, then attacked on that basis. Articles like Shawn’s only helped them make their case. Some liberal hawks offered calm, reasoned arguments, while others relied on ad hominem attacks and belligerent insistence. Some spoke from hope; others from fear. I have no desire to tar all these people with the same brush, but I do intend to draw out some of the general themes that shape their various positions and approaches. I will focus here mainly on a few figures, not because they offered the most cogent or compelling cases for war but because they bring out what I consider to be the most salient forces at work behind the arguments: ideology, passion, romanticism, and fear. To begin, I will briefly elaborate the general liberal argument for the war, then I will look in turn at some of the writings of Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens, Peter Beinart, and others, in the hopes of illuminating how ideology, passion, romanticism, and fear served to make their arguments rhetorically compelling. The general liberal argument for the invasion of Iraq was as follows. First, the invasion of Iraq was seen in the context of the Global War on Terror, which the liberal hawks consistently argued was a war in defense of liberal ideals. Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were grouped together on the side of “the forces of reaction,” “totalitarianism,” “fascism” and “Islamofascism,” and were said to oppose American foreign policy as fiercely as they opposed the idea of America itself as the embodiment and champion of secular liberal democracy. In fact, argued some of the hawks, these “totalitarian” forces were opposed to life itself—they were utter nihilists, part of a “cult of death and irrationality” motivated by “a single, all-consuming obsession, which was a hatred of liberal civilization.” 18

The Global War on Terror was

presented as all-encompassing and elemental: “The United States is now at war with the forces of reaction, and nobody is entitled to view this battle as a spectator.” 19 As to the specific reasons

9 that Iraq should have been invaded, the liberal hawks relied on the Bush case but added their own humanitarian bent. First, Hussein was an unstable nihilist who had been working to build WMDs and would likely do so in the future, thus threatening regional and global stability, and, by proxy terrorist attacks, American national territory itself. Second, Hussein was a genocidal tyrant who had gassed his own people, was responsible for widespread human rights abuses, and maintained his power through brutal repression. Third, Iraq offered an opportunity to promote democracy and liberal values in the Middle East. Other arguments buttressed these main ones. Hitchens argued that Iraq was going to collapse anyway and that the US was “already at war” with Iraq, thus making invasion a fait accompli. 20 Thomas Cushman argued that the invasion would strengthen internationalist structures and correct the failures of the United Nations:

Coming to the rescue and aid of a people who had been subjected to decades of brutality and crimes against humanity is entirely consistent with the basic liberal principle of solidarity with the oppressed and the fundamental humanitarian principle of rescue. The war can be seen as morally legitimate on grounds of basic human rights as embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is the ethical basis for the international world order. This body of moral principles was ignored by the United Nations Security Council in the case of the Iraqi people in favor of adherence to statutory international law. 21

As well, various hawks argued that the antiwar position was incoherent or weak, and looked to the invasion of Iraq to revitalize “liberalism’s historical traditions of armed antifascism.” 22 Overall, the liberal case for war differed not a great deal from the neoconservative case, an irony which Anatol Lieven points out in his perspicacious critique of the liberal hawk position, “Liberal Hawk Down”: “What is strange and well-nigh surreal is that the liberal hawks profess to believe that the gospel of muscular liberal democracy represents a radical alternative to the

10 publicly expressed strategy of neoconservatives and the Bush Administration.” 23 Why this might be so I hope to bring out at the end of this essay. First, I want to bring to light some of the implicit foundations of the liberal hawk position. The liberal hawk position is avowedly ideological. In describing what brings together the essayists in his anthology The Fight is for Democracy, George Packer cites “an attachment to the ideals of American democracy, a dissatisfaction with current practice, and a belief that we are engaged in a war for world opinion, a war of ideas.” 24 Paul Berman, whom Packer elsewhere calls “The Idealist,” has consistently expounded the ideological argument for liberal military action, and taking a closer look at his book Terror and Liberalism will help us illuminate that ideology. As mentioned above, Paul Berman is a celebrated author and a distinguished member of the NYU faculty. He has written eight books, including the much-lauded A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968. He has “been awarded a MacArthur, a Guggenheim, the Bosch Berlin Prize, a fellowship at the New York Public Library’s Center for Writers & Scholars, and other honors.” 25 Given his credentials, it is hard to credit the sophistry, shallowness of thought, simplicity, and outrageous lack of intellectual integrity that characterize his book Terror and Liberalism. 26 The book is essentially an argument for an aggressive, interventionist foreign policy based on “liberal” ideals, or what Berman calls “war with ‘progressive goals.’ ” 27 He opens with a discussion of the first Gulf War, recalling how he found himself aligned with Nixon in support of the war, but vehemently opposed to his reasons: “My reasoning wasn’t Nixon’s… In my analysis, there were wars and wars. Idealistic wars, and cynical wars. Pragmatic wars, and wars that are hopelessly wrong-headed. And Nixon’s war and mine were not the same.” 28 While it seems here that Berman is trying to position himself as both

11 idealistic and pragmatic, in contrast to the “cynical” and “hopelessly wrong-headed” Nixon, his position is against “realism” in foreign policy and for “liberalism” and “progressivism.” 29 These terms are not clearly defined, but he comes closest to doing so in his chapter titled “Armageddon in its Modern Version,” where he lays out the basic theoretical structure of his thought. In attempting to understand Berman’s reticence when it comes to clarifying his terms, his argument, or his presuppositions, the best explanation would be to read Terror and Liberalism not as a rational argument made to convince on the basis of evidence, but rather as pure polemic, even propaganda, that relies upon rhetorical technique instead of substantive argumentation. This is shown in what follows, and what it exposes is the power of ideology at work in Berman’s thought. Berman sees history as the triumphant march of moral, material, democratic, and scientific progress, reaching its clearest expression in the nineteenth century, and powered by an “all-powerful, all conquering principle”:

It was the recognition that all of life is not governed by a single, all knowing and allpowerful authority—by a divine force. It was the tolerant idea that every sphere of human activity—science, technology, politics, religion, and private life—should operate independently of the others, without trying to yoke everything together under a single guiding hand. It was a belief in the many, instead of the one. It was an insistence on freedom of thought and freedom of action—not on absolute freedom, but on something truer, stronger, and more reliable than absolute freedom, which is relative freedom: a freedom that recognizes the existence of other freedoms, too. Freedoms consciously arrived at. Freedom that is chosen, and not just bestowed by God on high. This idea was, in the broadest sense, liberalism—liberalism not as a rigid doctrine but as a state of mind, a way of thinking about life and reality. 30

12 Reducing the history of the Enlightnment, the Industrial Revolution, and the political thought of the last two hundred years into an “all-powerful, all conquering principle” is one of Berman’s grossest warpings of history to meet his needs, but his flattening the inner contradictions, conflicts, and dynamics at work in this “principle” of “liberalism” is nearly as crude. What are most striking are first, his bald-faced march through his definitions of “freedom” without pausing to consider the tension between individual freedom and social constraint, and second the selfcontradiction at work in a universal ideal of anti-universalism. This level of discussion would slow and perhaps cripple Berman’s argument, however, and he has his point to make. His liberalism “was an idea of progress toward ever more freedom, ever more rationality, and ever more wealth,” spread across the world by American and European empires that “postulated human progress as [their] goal.” 31 In Berman’s history, the imperialism of the nineteenth century brought hope to all the world: “For liberal civilization belonged to all mankind, and people around the world looked on liberal ideas as their proper heritage, and tried to claim what was theirs. And, around the world, hearts pounded with excited anticipation at the achievements to come.” 32 Liberalism, for Berman, is opposed by totalitarianism, which he sees as an expression of mass nihilism. Fascism and communism were the first manifestations of this mass nihilism, different “tentacles of a single, larger monster from the deep—some new and horrible creature of modern civilization, which had never been seen and never been named but was, even so, capable of sending up further ghastly tentacles from sinister depths.” 33 These political forms and the motivations they expressed were “irrational, authoritarian, and insanely murderous,” they sought only “mass death,” they had “no logic,” and were, most importantly, “anti-liberal.” 34 It doesn’t take much of Berman’s excessive language to realize he’s presenting us with “Evil,” which

13 seems to him to be a cognate for “irrational.” His “Liberal vs. Totalitarian” story is constructed with a certain compelling rhetorical power, but it is a rhetoric detached from the contingency, specificity, and complexity of history: it boils history down to a simple tale of Good versus Evil. Having drawn his pocket history of Liberalism vs. Totalitarian Nihilism, it’s a simple step for him to interpret Terrorism—in whichever Muslim guise—as the new Totalitarianism. The greater part of the rest of the book is given over to a short history of Islamic terrorism, with special emphasis on Sayyid Qutb, essentially arguing that Baathism and Islamism are “two branches of a single impulse, which was Muslim totalitarianism—the Muslim version on the European idea.” 35 Berman describes the spread of Islamism (conveniently divorced from any substantial consideration of the legacy of colonialism) as “the politics of slaughter—slaughter for the sake of sacred devotion, slaughter conducted in a mood of spiritual loftiness, slaughter indistinguishable from charity, slaughter that led to suicide, slaughter for slaughter’s sake. It was the flower of evil.” 36 Throughout the book, Berman’s reasoning is sloppy, repetitive, and dogmatic, his writing lurid, lofty, and pompous, his evidence tainted by tendentiousness, and his arguments themselves little better than rank propaganda. There is a breathless fervor in his writing when he rails against the “titillations of murder and suicide,” and his furious insistence on the incomprehensibility of evil seems frankly to be the product of an unbalanced mind. 37 He consistently uses extreme language and lurid comparisons to heighten the dramatic force of his arguments, as when, in discussing his support for Bush I’s military campaign to liberate Kuwait, he describes the military situation in 1991 like it was the opening of World War 2: “The entire situation had the look of Europe in 1939…” 38 He effects to dismiss opposing positions by caricature and simplification, then justifies his own position with nonsensical quips: “A ‘realist,’ like a Marxist,

14 is someone who, no matter what bizarre events may take place around the world, will profess not to be surprised. This is ‘realism’s weakness, though. Wisdom consists of the ability to be shocked.” 39 He cites Camus as distilling five hundred years of European international military conquest, genocide, colonialism, and imperialism to “a few anomalies in world progress,” and although he points out that “Camus’s [sic] references to these events… were thoroughly inadequate,” he informs us that he’s “not going to make up for his inadequacy here.” 40 He certainly doesn’t, because he then goes on to explain how “the sort of thing [Camus] had in mind,” such as Belgian atrocities in the Congo and German brutality in Southwest Africa, were the product of “an irrationalist cult of death and murder” which spread across Western Europe until it finally took over in the “unpredicted…. [and] unpredictable” catastrophe of World War I, a tide of “European irrationality and mass murder” that obeyed “no logic.” 41 His story of the “cult of death and murder” then explains the rise of fascism and World War 2 with yet more generalizations, conflations, simplifications, and fervid drama:

The old Romantic literary fashion for murder and suicide, the dandy’s fondness for the irrational and the irresponsible, the little nihilist groups of left-wing desperadoes with their dreams of poetic-death—those several tendencies and impulses of the nineteenth century came together with a few additional tendencies that Camus never bothered to discuss: the dark philosophies of the extreme right in Germany and other countries, with their violent loathing of progress and liberalism; the anti-Semites of Vienna and their mad proposal to cleanse Vienna of its most brilliant aspects; the demented scientists of racial theory. All this, which had once been small and marginal, began to metastasize and spread. 42

Blaming the rise of Nazism on Romantic poetry is strange enough, but to suggest that antiSemitism was somehow something “small and marginal” in European history is flabbergasting.

15 There is more. Berman dispenses with the complex question of the appeal of Communism in the twentieth-century, specifically in third-world or postcolonial nations, by couching it in terms of the joy of totalitarianism: “[T]he whole point of joining a Communist Party anywhere in the world was to embrace the universal Communist doctrine, which meant that, in every country, Communists celebrated the same cult of German philosophy and worshipped the same founding father… and pursued the same partisan goals and belonged to the same network…” 43 One doesn’t have to be a Communist—or even a Marxist—to find the tendentiousness of this simplification not only irritating but offensive. His sloppiness often obscures his argument, as when, in discussing Sayyid Qutb’s criticism of the role of religion in liberal society, he tells us “The whole purpose of liberalism was to put religion in one corner, and the state in a different corner, and to keep those corners apart. The liberal idea arose in the seventeenth century in England and Scotland, and the philosophers who invented it wanted to prevent the English Civil War… from breaking out again.” 44 It is impossible to know if this is Berman’s view or Qutb’s, and in either case we are presented with a careless simplification that isn’t only wrong, but works against Berman’s own argument. If the “whole purpose” of liberalism is the separation of church and state, then Berman’s whole book is founded on a misconception. Berman doesn’t really mean what he says, however, and doesn’t seem terribly concerned with the question of whether or not that matters. At times it even seems as if his point isn’t even to make a point, but merely to vent his spleen, such as when he explains away international support for Palestinian rights by saying people find “suicide terror” exciting: “Violence attracts,” he writes. 45 He argues by citing Google hits. 46 He asserts that 9/11 presents “all the evidence in the world… to conclude that Islamism in its radical version of the present poses every imaginable danger.” 47 He presents bad arguments poorly, relying on slovenly rhetoric and table-pounding assertions to push through

16 half-baked reflections. Terror and Liberalism, opened to any random page, will almost never disappoint a desire for nonsense. What is important here is the position Berman takes and the underlying attitudes he espouses. Berman is neither alone in his view, nor is he revolutionary. In Lieven’s words, “The style of messianic and muscular national liberalism [that Berman and the liberal hawks] represent has deep roots both in the history of the Democratic Party and in American political culture.” 48 In looking for the deep roots of this ideology, we can see that American exceptionalism, Protestant eschatology, and Wilsonian internationalism meld with commercial expansion and economic imperialism to shape a uniquely American crusade, at once Christian and Capitalist, at once Democratic and Monopolistic. 49 In some ways, the self-contradictions in this tradition of American liberalism are exactly what define it. In the words of political philosopher Ronald Beiner, in his book What’s The Matter With Liberalism?: “The distinctiveness of liberalism is not, I think, refuted by its tendency to invade and overrun other ways of life, for the dialectic of liberal existence encompasses both diversity and sameness, pluralism and uniformity, privatization and planetarization.” 50 Beiner also suggests that liberalism has a “particular vision of the good, namely, that choice in itself is the highest good.” 51 This ethos of choice is coherent with Berman’s position and gives us the through-line that connects the liberal hawks with their antecedents. The particular ideological narrative of liberalism vs. totalitarianism that Berman relies upon goes back to World War II, a point which we’ll consider when we come to discuss Hitchens, but in a sense it goes much further back—to the very idea of democratic revolution against monarchical tyranny, to the very idea of America itself. We don’t need to revisit Tom Paine or even D-Day in order to see this narrative in action, however, or to see its emotional appeal. We need only go as far back as the Cold War.

17 George Packer’s introduction to The Fight is for Democracy clearly illustrates the emotional power of muscular liberalism, its relation to September 11, and its heritage in the Cold War. The introduction begins with a brief but touching narrative recounting the mood of New York in the days after the September 11 attacks. Through this narrative, Packer claims for 9/11 a transformative and even redemptive potential, which he suggests offered the possibility for a rebirth of civic spirit, a Whitmanesque democratic surge: “The embarrassment of strong emotions felt by sophisticated people in peaceful times dropped away, and strangers looked at one another differently. We became citizens.” 52 In effect, Packer avers, we became citizens because we felt like citizens. This concern for democratic sentiment, or passion, sounds in Packer’s touchstone reference to Arthur Schlesinger’s The Vital Center: “Why does not democracy believe in itself with passion? Why is freedom not a fighting faith?” 53 This question is interesting. It equates passionate belief with the desire to fight, which we might call the crusading spirit. It also suggests that “democracy” is a unitary identity, and “freedom” a coherent “faith.” Packer refers to Schlesinger to make a rhetorical point, to assert that democracy should be a passion, and freedom should be a fighting faith. What is interesting about this quote is that when we read it in context, we can see that Schlesinger, while advocating a robust liberalism, isn’t making a rhetorical point at all but asking a serious question. This is worth quoting at length:

Why does not democracy believe in itself with passion? Why is freedom not a fighting faith? In part because democracy, by its very nature, dissipates rather than concentrates its internal moral force. The thrust of democratic faith is away from fanaticism; it is toward compromise, persuasion and consent in politics, toward tolerance and diversity in society; its economic foundation lies in the easily frightened middle class. Its love of variety discourages dogmatism, and its love of skepticism discourages hero-worship. In

18 place of theology and ritual, of hierarchy and demonology, it sets up a belief in intellectual freedom and unrestricted inquiry. The advocate of free society defines himself by telling what he is against: what he is for turns out to be certain means and he leaves other people to charge the means with content. 54

For Schlesinger, the conflicts bred by democracy are problematic but essential. What he advocates is a certain tolerance for conflict, a willingness to accept dissension and contradiction within democratic society, for as he says, “The crisis of free society has assumed the form of international collisions… but this fact should not blind us to the fact that in its essence this crisis is internal.” 55 This is, of course, the exact opposite of the liberal hawks’ position, for they are focused on the primacy of our external enemy, in the war against whom they are willing to squash all dissent, all the piping Chomskys and disagreeable anti-imperialists. In this way, they are akin to Schlesinger’s “totalitarians [who] regard the toleration of conflict as our central weakness…,” which toleration is in fact democracy’s great strength. Schlesinger’s “new radicalism,” his hoped-for liberal progressive spirit, “derives its power from an acceptance of conflict—an acceptance combined with a determination to create a social framework where conflict issues, not in excessive anxiety, but in creativity. The center is vital; the center must hold.” 56 This social framework is sustained by those willing to question, to frame arguments, and to discuss—not by those who resort to bullying and passion. At the same time, the agonistic struggle for democracy portrayed in Schlesinger’s book is not without its passionate and aggressive overtones. Robert Dean, in his article on the politics of masculinity in the Kennedy presidency, perspicuously addresses how Schlesinger’s positions shaped and were shaped by a masculinist ideology of elite combat. He writes:

19 The Vital Center placed the ‘new virility’ of liberal anti-communism at the heart of his narrative of political heroism. Sometimes allied with a ‘tougher breed’ of aristocrat, the manly pragmatic liberal avoided on the one hand the appeasement and the ‘emasculate[d] political energies’ of the ruling ‘plutocracy’ (that is, businessmen of new entrepreneurial wealth) and the utopian sentimentality of left-wing progressive on the other. 57

As Dean illustrates, Schlesinger was writing within the context of “a competitive political arena where the legitimacy of leadership was tied to gender along the polarities of ‘strength’ and ‘weakness…’ ” and specific “cultural narratives of imperial manhood” that shaped both ideology and policy at the time. 58 Schlesinger’s appeal to liberal hawks like Packer is no doubt partly due to their desire for a rhetoric of manly struggle, yet while Schlesinger does provide that, his position tends to be more nuanced that Packer makes its seem. Packer’s use of Schlesinger can be compared with Peter Beinart’s rewriting of The Vital Center in The Good Fight, where he gives us Cold War liberalism à la mode. Beinart is equally critical of the anti-imperialist left, and relies heavily on Schlesinger to make his points, creating continuity with Cold War liberal hawks, but Beinart attends to the material with an integrity that Packer fails to show. Packer, Berman, and Beinart all want to see their ideology motivated by passion, and while passion can be a stumbling block in reasonable deliberation, it is salutary to desire the vigorous defense of values. But at a certain point the passion for an ideology can overcome the reasoning it supposedly serves—when this happens, we’ve entered the realm of fantasy and romanticism. I myself would like to rely here briefly on Schlesinger, in his discussion of how totalitarianism exceeds its rationality and turns mad: “What argument survives in fascism is somnambulistic: it is argument in terms of myth, psychosis and blood.” 59 When Berman inveighs against monsters from the deep, when Jeffrey Herf asserts that Saddam Hussein was more evil than Stalin and Mao and “a more irrational and thus [more] dangerous figure than the

20 communist leaders of the Soviet Union and China had been during the coldest decades of the Cold War,” when Christopher Hitchens says “sternly” to Islamic fundamentalists, “If you wish martyrdom, we are here to help…,” it is impossible to ignore the strains of violence, crude propaganda, and raw mythology in these writers’ works. World War II looms large for the liberal hawks. Fascism and Hitler are the most common referents for these ideologues, much more so than Communism and Stalin. The Cold War offers a certain heritage, but it is a romanticization of World War II that really provides the narrative and mythological template. Christopher Hitchens, whom Packer calls “The Romantic,” presents the most striking embodiment of this romanticization. 60 As discussed before, Hitchens is a problematic figure: in his striking post-9/11 conversion, he both represents and differs from the hawkish strain of post-Cold War leftism. What Hitchens brings to particular light is the romance of revolution. In his personality-piece on Hitchens from The New Yorker, Ian Parker quotes Peter Hitchens, Christopher’s brother, offering an illuminating interpretation: “He’s a Trotskyist, really, not in terms of being a Bolshevik revolutionary but in that he is an idealist and he is impressed by military command.” 61 In light of this interpretation, the following comments by George Packer on Hitchens take on a suggestive weight: “When I suggested that since Sept. 11 he has gone back to the 18th-century [sic], when the struggle between the secular liberal Enlightenment and religious dark-age tyranny created the modern world, Hitchens readily agreed. ‘After the dust settles, the only revolution left standing is the American one,’ he said. ‘Americanization is the most revolutionary force in the world.’ ” 62 What exactly “Americanization” means and whether or not it is beneficial, Hitchens is absolutely right that it is “revolutionary,” and it is absolutely clear where Hitchens stands on the issue. Parker’s essay on

21 Hitchens offers several thoughtful insights that, while psychologizing his subject, open up valuable critical opportunities.

He recalled flying out of Iraq the day before the deaths, in July, 2003, of Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay. When Hitchens described the celebrations that followed, you could hear a man struggling to transform a secondhand report into a firsthand one by force of will power alone: “I could have been there—it kills me! That night, the entire cityscape was a blaze of weapons being fired in celebration. It was like ten million Fourth of Julys…” 63

He could have been there, reveling in the spectacle of violence (as a spectator, of course), much as he reveled in his “role” as a proponent of invasion: “To have had even a small share in this historic event is a pleasure and a privilege…”64 The clearest explanation for Hitchens’ bombastic frat-boy militarism comes from his wife, Carol Blue:

[Carol] said that her husband, who was brought up in an English military family in the years following the Second World War, had an aspect of “those men who were never really in battle but wished they had been. There’s a whole tough-guy, ‘I am violent, I will use violence, I will take some of these people out before I die’ talk, which is really key to his psychology—I don’t care what he says. I think it is partly to do with his upbringing.” The Second World War was “the entire subject of the conversation” when Hitchens was growing up, he told me: “I didn’t know films were made out of anything else.” Every Boxing Day, the family would toast the sinking of the German battleship Scharnhorst…. His father also said that “the war was the only time when he knew what he was doing.” 65

Paul Berman was born in the early fifties. George Packer was born in 1960. Christopher Hitchens was born in 1949, Michael Walzer in 1935, Michael Ignatieff in 1947. Nothing definitive can be drawn from these dates except to say that the liberal hawks are predominantly

22 of the so-called “baby boom” generation who grew up in the shadow of what Eric Hobsbawm called the “greatest event in human history,” World War II. They came of age during the Cold War and the 60’s, but for these figures World War II occupies a psychic and mythological space that far overwhelms the Cold War, an historical shadow adumbrating their worldview. Perhaps it is too much of a stretch to read the liberal hawks in their relation to Stephen Spielberg (born 1946), the director who gave us both E.T. and Saving Private Ryan, but there is something in the “passionate liberalism” of Spielberg’s worldview that comes to light in the writings of these intellectuals, something that seems to be a discursive possibility most significantly in those countries that won World War II, Britain and the US. The liberal hawks show a tendency toward Manichean, apocalyptic narrative and a comfort with the language of violence, war, and aggression that can be illuminated by considering how these American “fighting” intellectuals differ from Continental intellectuals in their view of World War II. To Continental intellectuals like Michel Foucault and Theodor Adorno, engaged in a critique of the Enlightenment and instrumental reason, World War II (together with World War I before it) represented the failure of rational Western bourgeois liberalism. If it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, then how much more barbaric would be a patriotic “fighting faith” in universal ideals of rationality? Yet this is precisely the faith espoused by Berman, Hitchens, and the liberal hawks. Their “war of ideas” is sometimes characterized as a clash of civilizations, but more often they try to avoid the suggestion of racism lingering in such an idea and argue instead that, as Packer summarizes Berman, “it is a conflict of ideologies and they come down to the century-old struggle between totalitarianism and liberal democracy.” 66 We can speak of a contrast here between a Continental critique of instrumental rationality, and an Anglo-American celebration of the same. As well, we can refer to elemental

23 psychological and historical differences. European critics of Enlightenment discuss World War II as an event typified by defeat, the rise of fascism, the Holocaust, destruction, complicity, refugees, and appeasement, while American proponents of Fighting Liberalism discuss World War II as an event exemplifying the successful defense of ideals by force of arms. The difference is between guilt and glory. America suffered little in the war, physically or morally, compared to the cataclysmic devastations wrought upon the whole of continental Europe and to a lesser degree England. Moral concerns about Allied terror tactics like the firebombing of Dresden and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima are overwhelmed for these American intellectuals by a general sense of righteousness and victory. World War II for them is the war of John Wayne, not Martin Sheen, the war of James Jones, not Kurt Vonnegut—more aptly, the war in which their fathers were victorious, not defeated, righteous, not complicit, and virtuous, not guilty. Perhaps Berman and the other liberal hawks were so fiercely opposed to Vietnam not because it was a war, but because it was a “bad war,” a war that—on their TV screens and in the unrelenting news reports—seemed so wrong and awful compared to the crusade of World War II. They are not pacifists, these liberals. They are the children of righteousness. They are idealists, they value passion over reason, and they are romantics in love with violence. The aggression that these writers let loose in their prose, their violent attacks on the narcissism, cowardliness, effeminacy, and schadenfreude of the anti-imperialist left, have an important gendered aspect as well. This issue is well-illustrated by Susan Faludi, in her book Terror Dream: “Beneath the press’s incessant fretting lurked anxious questions that all seemed to converge on a single point: would a feminized nation have the will to fight?” 67 Faludi vividly describes the phenomenon of “deranged” and cartoonishly masculine posturing from a range of public figures in the months after 9/11, including writers like Jonathan Alter at Newsweek,

24 Charles Krauthammer at Time, Steve Dunleavy at the New York Post, Thomas Friedman at the New York Times, and even Christopher Hitchens:

In [an] issue of Vanity Fair, columnist Christopher Hitchens slid seamlessly from praise for “the burly, uncomplaining stoic proletarian defenders, bursting their sinews in the intractable and nameless wreckage and carnage of downtown” to the pronouncement that he wouldn’t be caught dead at a “gender-specific” ceremony on 9/11. Not that anyone had asked him to attend such an event: his outburst was occasioned by an invitation to a memorial honoring British, not female, victims of the World Trade Center collapse. 68

This is an important aspect of the liberal hawk position, illuminated by Faludi and others, but one that I cannot elaborate on here. Faludi’s point about national anxiety and shame, however, shows how closely the passion and romanticization of violence inhering in the liberal hawk position are related to the final factor we need to address to paint our picture: fear. The case for war was built on fear-mongering: threats of WMDs, mushroom clouds, global terrorism, etc. This seems incontrovertible. The effect of this widespread fear on the left and the way this fear was used by the liberal hawks to make their case is worth considering. Peter Beinart, reflecting ruefully on his early support for the war, puts it well and succinctly:

September 11 had made worst-case logic seductive: the world had supposedly changed; the United States could no longer afford patience or tolerate risk; problems like Saddam needed to be solved once and for all. But in the case of Iraq, worst-case logic became a filter, preventing war supporters like myself from seeing the evidence mounting around us. Apocalyptic thinking represented a break with the cold war liberal tradition, and a grave mistake. 69

25 We can see throughout that the easy dualities, the insistence on polarized debate, the hysterical and hyperbolic language, the painting of Saddam Hussein in the most lurid colors, the real threat of terrorism to ostensibly civilian populations, and the drumbeat of apocalyptic, end-ofcivilization narrative—shaded by the terrifying power of the edge-of-the-abyss mythos of World War II and the memory of the Cold War’s nuclear threat—both helped shape the views of the liberal hawks and were used by them to form their arguments. In Herbert Simons’ brief study of the rhetoric of this period, he writes that “The events of 9/11 in particular seemed to cry out for a hyperbolic, decontextualized account of what had occurred, akin to cowboy westerns and children’s fables.” 70 He offers a platitudinous lesson from his survey, that “We should be wary, then, of crisis rhetoric constructed on simplistic melodramatic binaries. We should be wary too of cultural predispositions toward assuming our inherent moral superiority.” 71 We ought to be wary, indeed, and wary of those who would motivate us by fear. But it is not enough to be wary of demagogues, because with the next crisis masses and intellectuals both will once again swoon with fear, passion, the romance of violence, and the simple power of ideology. We must remain critical and we must remain alert. In the next section, I will consider what it means to be critical of the liberal hawks’ position on its own terms. According to Hitchens, “The motion before the house is this: Is this a just and necessary war or is it not?” 72 This is very question I intend to address.

II. JUST WAR & THE LIBERAL TRADITION

As mentioned, the liberal hawk position grew out of what Packer called “the Bosnia consensus,” shaped by the failure of American policy to respond to Balkan genocide. This position, however,

26 was almost equally informed by the debacle of the Vietnam War: most of the liberal hawks advocating military intervention in the early nineties had come of age opposing it a generation before. Advocacy for humanitarian intervention was measured against concerns for just war, and no one has been better placed to gauge these concerns than the man who “wrote the book” on just war, Michael Walzer. In this section, I will consider Michael Walzer’s position on the Iraq war, and use his carefully nuanced discussion in Just and Unjust Wars to help illuminate whether the liberal hawks did, in fact, have a case for just war within a liberal ethos. First, however, I want to sketch the historical context of the debate and the major policy positions within it, then briefly discuss what we mean by liberalism and just war. After clearing that ground, as it were, I will then turn to Walzer. Laura Secor’s essay “The Giant in the House” offers a clear and concise discussion of the problems of humanitarian intervention and American power at the end of the twentieth century, problems that came to a head in the post-Cold War world when Yugoslavia disintegrated into various warring ethnicities: “The debate over humanitarian intervention, which emerged as the major foreign policy challenge of the 1990s… centered on the Balkans, [yet] was not centrally about the Balkans. It was about the United States’ role in the post-Cold War world” 73 Laura Secor identifies “three distinct American foreign policy positions” that arose in the post-Cold War intellectual arena: a “muscular, interventionist liberal idealism,” “conservative realism,” and “left anti-imperialists.” 74 This is still roughly the field of debate over American foreign policy, as long as we correct for one position Secor addresses later and two other positions that Secor overlooked. These are muscular, interventionist neoconservative idealism; aggressive globalist neoliberalism; and nativist isolationism. Considering these six positions and

27 their relative importance will help us see the discursive field and distinguish liberal hawks from their opponents on the left and right. Liberal Interventionism: This position sees American power as creating a responsibility to act for human rights. This is the liberal hawk position, more or less, that we have been concerned with throughout. This was a liberalism that had repudiated pacifism and also, strikingly, viewed state sovereignty as a secondary concern. Other states, in this view, maintained their sovereignty only under the moral judgment of the United States and the West: “Sovereignty naturally accrued to the members of the Security Council; but elsewhere in the world, the internationalists saw it as a fluid concept, one that could be granted and revoked on the basis of a state’s behavior.” 75 This position is essentially an advocacy for benevolent imperialism. It sees the responsibility of power to be a civilizing mission: “American domination of other countries and peoples was not in itself a bad thing—not, at least, if it became the vehicle for the distribution of American wealth and freedoms to the formerly oppressed. The job of the liberal elite was then to pressure not against empire building but for the building of a committed, benevolent empire that would disseminate American goods and democratic values.” 76 This position is subtly different from the argument advanced by Michael Walzer in Just and Unjust Wars on the topic of humanitarian intervention, a point to which we will return. Conservative Realist: “The conservative realist tradition views military engagements with great caution, sanctioning them only in cases where strategic, security, or economic interests are distinctly imperiled, and even then only rarely.” 77 The tradition of Kissinger, Bismarck, and Machiavelli, conservative realism (also known as “neorealism”) sees politics in terms of interest values rather than moral values. This position is highly materialist and often pessimistic, and many on the left consider it to be cynical. It reflects a Hobbesian or anarchistic

28 view of the world, in which there is no geopolitical “community,” nor normative universal values, but rather a “war of all against all.” 78 Left Anti-imperialists: “Left anti-imperialists object to the notion of an unrestrained right of intervention as fiercely as they object to the self-interested pursuit of power.” 79 This position is often identified with Noam Chomsky, who argues that claims for humanitarian ideals are in fact little more than rhetoric used by conservative realists, whose interests are not even necessarily tied to the people of the United States, but serve only power and wealth. Sometimes pacifist but more often simply conservative, this side of the left argues from a view that power corrupts, and that any use of power, especially for violence, ought to be critiqued. This position can easily be questioned about its lack of a positive program and its tendency to devolve into constant criticism, but it offers the most consistent moral position available. Democracy is about decentralizing and redistributing political power downward to the people, and no form of imperialism, however benevolent, can promote democracy through imposition. Neoconservatives: As Secor writes, “the grand foreign policy debate would undergo a tectonic shift after September 11, 2001.” 80 One of the results of this was that “a fourth-foreign policy position has assumed significant sway…. These policy thinkers, like their counterparts in liberal circles, eschew the situational ethics of realism in favor of a campaign to extend American values throughout the world…. And they share the belief that American military might can bring democracy, human rights, and prosperity to benighted corners of the globe…” 81 The main distinctions Secor makes between the neocons and the liberal interventionists are two. First, while the liberal interventionists believe that US power should be used to promote the good, the neocons believe that US power is good in and of itself, and “that in promoting itself, the United States does promote the good.” Second, the liberal hawks are more conservative in their

29 advocacy while neocons are more radical. 82 In effect, the difference between neocons and liberal interventionists seems to be one of degree rather than of kind, a fact highlighted by Christopher Hitchens’ avowed admiration for and identification with neoconservatives like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. Neoliberalism: The foreign policy side of neoliberalism has been examined by writers like David Harvey, Naomi Klein, and others. In some ways, the Iraq War is the most important contemporary example of neoliberal foreign policy, and it shows the salient characteristics by which we can identify it: the active pursuit of privatization, deregulation, and free trade in the effort to accumulate and concentrate wealth and power, couched in a rhetoric of individual freedom and the deployment of market forces. David Harvey describes it as follows:

The assumption that individual freedoms are guaranteed by freedom of the market and of trade is a cardinal feature of neoliberal thinking, and it has long dominated the US stance towards the rest of the world. What the US evidently sought to impose by main force on Iraq was a state apparatus whose fundamental mission was to facilitate conditions for profitable capital accumulation on the part of both domestic and foreign capital. I call this kind of state apparatus a neoliberal state. The freedoms it embodies reflect the interests of private property owners, businesses, multinational corporations, and financial capital. 83

To say that neoliberalism is a merely economic or domestic phenomenon is naïve and dangerous. Neoliberalism promotes a hegemonic foreign policy that works to weaken states and democratic movements in favor of transnational capital’s increased freedom. It works toward “governance” (in David Harvey’s phrase) or “governmentality” (in Foucault’s), a situation in which the state works to support capital markets and the marketization of every sphere of human life, wherein direct rule over subjects is secondary to a ruthless self-regulation inspired by brutal market competition. Neoliberalism is a “political project to re-establish the conditions for capital

30 accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites,” characterized by the surrender of state sovereignty to “the global market,” “strong limits on democratic governance,” a reliance on “undemocratic and unaccountable institutions,” and a “porous” boundary between state and corporate power. 84 Examples of neoliberal foreign policy at work include the ministrations of organizations like the IMF, the WTO, and the World Bank; military, paramilitary, and covert operations by core states undertaken to influence economic and political structures in other countries, such as the “regime change” affected by the US in Iraq in 2003 and in Chile in 1973; state-supported international economic policies that spread neoliberal marketization, such as US support for the decisively undemocratic privatization of the Russian economy and the authoritarian economic liberalization of China; and the propagation of market ideology through political and diplomatic pressure. 85 Clintonian foreign policy can be usefully described as neoliberal. Neoliberal policy works in uneasy alliance with neoconservatism and conservative realism and, I will later argue, functions comfortably under the rhetoric of liberal interventionism. Nativist Isolationism: This is less a coherently argued political position than it is a reaction in the body politic. Essentially populist, this position views foreign policy as entangling and troublesome. This is a turning away from any foreign policy action that doesn’t immediately and unquestionably gratify an idealistic sense of America and its mission (mainly through quick victories). Secor thinks it fascinating “that the American populace requires the tug of conscience in order to accept military action,” but as she points out, this reflects “what’s best and worst about our political culture—its beneficence and its narcissism.” 86

31 Secor points to what she considers to be an “historic shift” in foreign policy resulting from the debates about the Balkans: “During the debates around the Balkans in the 1990s, the liberal interventionists took the classic moral questions of American oppositional politics and turned them on their head. They focused not on actions—what evil is our government doing abroad, and how can we stop it?—but on omissions.” According to Secor, the responsibility that liberal interventionists saw as adhering in the vast, “uncontested” power of the US after the Cold War created a moral problem that “was profound and insoluble.” 87 It is within the context of this “profound and insoluble” problem and the debates over its resolution that the liberal war hawks advanced their case for just war. In order to understand what is at stake here, and what these arguments mean, I need to discuss what the terms themselves mean. What is liberalism? And what is a just war? Liberalism is best understood as a historical development of Western Enlightenment thought that has become one of the fundamental ideas of modern political theory. Liberalism is a loose doctrine of ideas that range from social democratic progressivism to strict libertarianism, but it is centrally about the freedom of the individual. It is predicated on three main “pillars”: limitation of state power, citizen rights, and constitutional law. 88 We can distinguish economic from political liberalism (although they are closely related): as Wendy Brown describes, economic liberalism in “its classical version refers to a maximization of free trade and competition achieved by minimum interference from political institutions. In the history of political thought, while individual liberty remains a touchstone, liberalism signifies an order in which the state exists to secure the freedom of individuals on a formally egalitarian basis.” 89 If we fold corporations and businesses into the category of “citizen,” as has happened in the US and elsewhere, we can see how closely economic and political liberalism are connected.

32 Liberalism can be distinguished from other positions such as conservatism, socialism, or communitarianism primarily by its central privileging of the individual and individual rights. 90 Because of this privileging of individual autonomy and individual rights, liberalism necessarily “undermines traditional communal attachments.” 91 “The idea of the rights of man came into existence precisely to challenge the authority of traditions… It was at the expense of their culture that European individuals gained, one by one, all their rights.” 92 “At the expense of their culture” may be a step too far, because liberalism can be seen as the development of a culture, and as Beiner points out, every society has an ethos—even if that ethos is a “lack of ethos.” 93 Yet it is clear that liberalism has an ambivalent and perhaps destructive effect on society and social cohesion. The close connection between liberalism and capitalism I cannot here elaborate on, or on the connection between liberalism and “rationality.” Some aspects of these relationships will come out more in my discussion of neoliberalism. What is worth pointing out is that for all the liberal hawks’ insistence that liberalism is antitotalitarian to the point of necessitating international intervention, two central tenets of liberalism contradict the practice of international intervention: First, human autonomy means the right to decide one’s own fate, no matter whether “nihilist” or “Muslim,” no matter how disagreeable that fate may be to the ideals of liberalism, and one agent has no right to impose upon another any set of values, even liberal ones. Second, within a liberal model, state autonomy necessarily mirrors individual autonomy, because state sovereignty flows from the collective sovereignty of its people, whether democratic or not; therefore state agents have no right to impose upon other state agents. There are exceptions to be made here, and a more nuanced discussion is necessary. It is at this point that we must turn to Walzer and the concept of just war.

33 A just war, according to Walzer in his seminal work on the subject, Just and Unjust Wars, “is one that does not violate the rights of the people against whom it is directed.” 94 Walzer’s argument is built on two main ideas: what he calls the war convention and the rights of political communities. His fine analysis of just and unjust military actions takes place within the discourse defined by these two ideas. Since we are on the topic of the rights of political communities, and rights are so central to both liberalism and just war theory, it is worthwhile quoting Walzer at length:

The rights in question are summed up in the lawbooks as territorial integrity and political sovereignty. The two belong to states, but they derive ultimately from the rights of individuals, and from them they take their force…. When states are attacked, it is their members who are challenged, not only in their lives, but also in the sum of things they value most, including the political associations they have made. We recognize and explain this challenge by referring to their rights. If they were not morally entitled to choose their form of government and shape the policies that shape their lives, external coercion would not be a crime; nor could it so easily be said that they had been forced to resist in self-defense. Individual rights (to life and liberty) underlie the most important judgments that we make about war. How these rights are themselves founded I cannot try to explain here. It is enough to say that they are somehow entailed by our sense of what it means to be a human being. If they are not natural, then we have invented them, but natural or invented, they are a palpable feature of our moral world. States’ rights are simply their collective form. The process of collectivization is a complex one. No doubt, some of the immediate force of individuality is lost in its course; it is best understood, nevertheless, as it has commonly been understood since the seventeenth century, in terms of social contract theory. 95

One point is worth making before we move on. The right to sovereignty is in a concrete way the right to territory: the right to occupy a certain area, the right to be a nation. National sovereignty, dependent on national territory, derives in this understanding from individual sovereignty, which

34 may well be dependent on private property. Walzer writes that “The right to territory might be derived… from the individual right to property.” 96 This illustrates an interesting connection between national sovereignty and economic rights, and suggests something about how closely capitalism and liberalism are connected. 97 Turning now to the war convention, Walzer defines this as “the set of articulated norms, customs, professional codes, legal precepts, religious and philosophical principles, and reciprocal arrangements that shape our judgments of military conduct…” 98 Walzer admits that our judgments are “socially patterned, and the patterning is religious, cultural, and political, as well as legal,” but still assumes that there is a universal, trans-historical “war convention”: “The rules of war, alien as they often are to our sense of what is best, are made obligatory by the general consent of mankind.” 99 Walzer depends upon a universalism of value, both in his idea of the war convention and also regarding the rights of political communities, and this universalism is distinctly liberal in nature. Just war theory has a long tradition, with roots in Augustinian theodicy. Eduardo Mendieta, in his essay “The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ and the Just War Tradition,” makes the compelling case that just war theory is a critical theory, “a discourse of self-identification in the face of an identity that is challenged or put in question by a new set of circumstances.” 100 Thought of in this way, we can see that the question of just war, and the question of the justness of the war in Iraq, are questions central to the social identity of America, liberalism, and “the West.” In a review of Michael Walzer’s recent book Arguing About War, Gary Wills brings these very questions to an unsettling point: “Since democracy is impossible without accountability, and accountability is impossible if secrecy hides the acts to be held accountable, making a just war may become impossible for lack of a competent democratic authority to

35 declare it…. Walzer has moved the concerns over just war from the periphery of political theory to the very center of our democratic dilemma.” 101 Walzer’s own position on the invasion of Iraq, established most clearly in his article “The Right Way,” was that the invasion ought to be opposed because the “system of containment and control [was] working and [could] be made to work better.” 102 Walzer is much more strongly attached to state sovereignty than most liberal interventionists, and this may be because he has consistently thought through the ethical grounding of humanitarian intervention within the context of liberalism and just war. In effect, he argues in Just and Unjust Wars, intervention can only be justified as an explicit exception to the norm of state sovereignty. The justified exceptions he offers are 1) in the defense of indigenous secession, 2) counter-intervention to balance another (unjust) external state actor, and 3) gross violation of human rights. 103 While Walzer is vague about when and how “acceptable” violations of human rights become “gross” violations, and unfortunately has to depend on “the moral conscience on mankind” to judge when humanitarian intervention is justified, he offers a clear, liberal ethic of just and unjust intervention predicated on state sovereignty. 104 State sovereignty is so important because, as discussed previously, it is intimately connected with the idea of human rights and the rights of political communities: “the recognition of sovereignty is the only way we have of establishing an arena within which freedom can be fought for and (sometimes) won…. As with individuals, so with sovereign states: there are things that we cannot do to them, even for their own ostensible good.” 105 For Walzer, this reflects John Stuart Mill’s definition of self-determination as “the right of a people ‘to become free by their own efforts’ if they can,” and the principle of nonintervention which guarantees “that their success will not be impeded or their failure prevented by the intrusions of an alien power.”

36 Corollary to this, “It has to be stressed that there is no right to be protected against the consequences of domestic failure, even against a bloody repression.” 106 Walzer explicitly describes why intervention must be an exception to the norm of sovereignty: “We need to establish a kind of a priori respect for state boundaries; they are, as I have argued before, the only boundaries communities ever have. And that is why intervention is always justified as if it were an exception to the general rule, made necessary by the urgency or extremity of a particular case.” 107 Before concluding this discussion of liberal interventionism, one point must be addressed on nineteenth-century liberal imperialism, particularly in reference to J.S. Mill. Liberal imperialism was seen as unproblematic by Mill and others because it was framed in terms of civilization versus barbarism, rather than an issue of state sovereignty. Ruling over savages doesn’t violate their rights to self-determination, because they are prima facie incapable of ruling themselves as a people. The racist arrogance of this position should be clear to us, as should its inconsistency with liberal ideals of universal human rights and value. While it would definitely be possible to draw out similarly racist and arrogant subtexts and tropes in the works of the liberal war hawks, I think we can say that however liberal may seem the pieties professed under the rubric of the white man’s burden, imperialism predicated on racial, ethnic, or cultural superiority is simply imperialism, and fails to conform to liberal values of individual freedom and self-determination, politically or economically. The comfortable cognitive split between domestic liberalism and foreign imperialism enjoyed by earlier liberal thinkers was predicated on discourses of racial superiority that are, thankfully, no longer intellectually justifiable, and as such is no longer discursively available. Without notions of racial superiority justifying a difference between savages and civilizations, liberalism must assume “civilized” standards of

37 self-rule in every case. Just as the autonomous individual is the sine qua non of domestic liberalism, the independent state is that for international liberalism. We can see, relying on Walzer’s arguments, that the liberal hawk case for the invasion of Iraq cannot stand on a liberal ethics. Saddam Hussein was a gross violator of human rights, this is true, but the most serious allegations leveled against him, such as his brutal repression of Shi’a dissidents and his genocidal gassing of the Kurds, all had to do with events long past. The argument for humanitarian intervention fails in this case, because the regime in Iraq was no longer engaged in acts “that shock the moral conscience of mankind.” As for Iraq’s “instability,” its supposed quest for WMDs, and its undemocratic government, none of these are viable liberal arguments for war. Further, the advance of liberal values is not ever, in any case, a viable liberal argument for war. Autonomy is the necessary precondition of collective freedom, and the imposition of even liberal values by force is profoundly contradictory to the liberal ethos. The deep self-contradiction in the liberal hawks’ position forces many questions, not only sending us to look for alternative explanations for why any particular liberal hawk would argue their point but also suggesting something paradoxical at the heart of American liberal ethics, especially as a foreign policy. Anatol Lieven marks this well:

The whole democratizing project, as espoused by the liberal hawks and the neoconservatives, is… inherently contradictory; and this contradiction is apparent from the very language they use. From the neocons, as Seymour Hersh has reported in The New Yorker, professed support for Arab democracy is mixed with statements that “the only language Arabs understand is force” and that they can be manipulated by sexual shame. But the liberal hawks too combine professed belief in democracy with an openly macho nationalist contempt for the opinions of every other country and its inhabitants. 108

38 The “liberalism” of the Iraq war hawks is incoherent as liberalism. Writers like Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens, and George Packer offer us not a self-critical, coherently liberal “fighting faith” in the tradition of Arthur Schlesinger and Michael Walzer, but rather a mishmash of unquestioned American jingoism, passionate sentimentality, fear-mongering, glorification of violence, and brute aggression. Taking a line from Richard Rorty, I would like to dismiss them all as mere thugs and be done with, “treating thugs as thugs and theorists as theorists, rather than worrying about which theorists to pair off with which thugs.” 109 I am concerned, however, about what this distasteful mix of thuggery and theorizing might portend. I am also concerned with the fact that the theorizing and thuggery of the liberal hawks has had real consequences. If it seems that Lieutenant Mark Daily didn’t die advancing liberalism, then what exactly did he die for?

III. NEOLIBERAL POLICY, NEOLIBERAL ETHICS

The founding figures of neoliberal thought took political ideals of human dignity and individual freedom as fundamental, as “the central values of civilization.” In so doing they chose wisely, for these are indeed compelling and seductive ideals. These values, they held, were threatened not only by fascism, dictatorships, and communism, but by all forms of state intervention that substituted collective judgements [sic] for those of individuals free to choose. 110

As discussed previously, neoliberalism is not only a domestic policy but a foreign policy; not just an economic policy but a political one. 111 In some ways, neoliberalism is difficult to distinguish from liberalism. When we consider them critically, we might see them both as political expressions of bourgeois or capitalist economic structures, opening up society to market forces in a way that degrades communal values and interests. We might think of them as political excuses

39 for the commodification of human existence in terms of an instrumental rationality that serves to organize society in brutal, mechanistic ways, ending inexorably in irrational monopolistic fascism, as Max Horkheimer thought: “Reason has degenerated because it was the ideological projection of a false universality which now shows the autonomy of the subject to have been an illusion.” 112 We might think of them as political irrelevancies, no longer offering a reliable picture of reality, as Christopher Lasch argued: “Liberalism, the political theory of the ascendant bourgeoisie, long ago lost the capacity to explain events in the world of the welfare state and the multinational corporations; nothing has taken its place. Politically bankrupt, liberalism is intellectually bankrupt as well.”113 Yet there is a difference between neoliberalism and liberalism and it might just mean the world. The difference is not to be found in discussions of human rights, autonomy, and world view—the difference is in economics. In the words of Wendy Brown: “Neo-liberal rationality… involves extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action, even as the market itself remains a distinctive player.” 114 Wendy Brown’s essay in Theory & Event, “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” offers a troubling, lucid, and compelling picture of a social sea-change that seems to explain not only the liberal hawks, but much else besides. 115 In essence, she argues that “We are not simply in the throes of a right-wing or conservative positioning within liberal democracy but rather at the threshold of a different political formation, one that conducts and legitimates itself on different grounds from liberal democracy even as it does not immediately divest itself of the name.” 116 Elsewhere, she identifies this form as being “organized by a combination of neoliberal governmentality and imperial world politics, contoured in the short run by conditions of global economic and global security crises.”117 Three central points from her discussion need to be briefly explored: 1) Neoliberalism is a “governmentality”; 2) Neoliberalism has absorbed and

40 superseded liberalism; and 3) Liberal democracy cannot survive against neoliberalism. These three points are related, and after exploring them, we will see how they relate to the Iraq War and the liberal hawk case for intervention. “Governmentality” is a term developed by Michel Foucault to designate what Brown calls “techniques of governing that exceed express state actions and orchestrate the subject’s conduct toward him or her self.” 118 Governmentality would include social, discursive, and political norms that constellate the limits and orientations of selfhood, identity, and meaning within a political body. The point seems to be that since the Enlightenment, “governments” have taken a greater and greater interest in ruling not the bodies of their subjects but rather their “mentality.” From pedagogy to propaganda, the subjects of the contemporary state are controlled less by overt authority than by internalized rules and behaviors. This is central to the neo-liberal agenda as discussed by Foucault and Thomas Lemke, here explained by Brown:

This [neo-liberal] mode of governmentality… convenes a ‘free’ subject who rationally deliberates about alternative courses of action, makes choices, and bears responsibility for the consequences of these choices. In this way, Lemke argues, “the state leads and controls subjects without being responsible for them;” as individual “entrepreneurs” in every aspect of life, subjects become wholly responsible for their well-being and citizenship is reduced to success in this entrepreneurship (201). Neo-liberal subjects are controlled through their freedom—not simply, as thinkers from the Frankfurt School through Foucault have argued, because freedom within an order of domination can be an instrument of that domination—but because of neo-liberalization’s moralization of the consequences of this freedom. This also means that the withdrawal of the state from certain domains and the privatization of certain state functions does not amount to a dismantling of government but, rather, constitutes a technique of governing. 119

41 That is, under a neoliberal order, the state no longer functions as a locus of political power, but rather serves only to protect and defend the political economy of marketization. It does this in traditional ways, with laws and police and guns, but it also does this by supporting a market ideology, wherein all values are subordinated to economic ones. We are completely free within the market, and thus we are wholly responsible for our own fates. Further, the whole functioning of society depends on our many individual efforts to succeed, achieve, and consume. If we fail to succeed or provide for ourselves or our families, we are not only failures but immoral as well, both because we’re clearly not working hard enough and because the market depends on us to keep it going. It is our very freedom itself that demands that we keep working, submitting our lives to market values, “selling” our “labor,” “investing” in ourselves, and so on. This is what Brown means by neoliberalism’s “moralization.” In effect, neoliberalism represents the ideological-social triumph of capitalism. Brown main points about the function of neoliberalism are: 1) The political sphere (and every other sphere) is submitted to market rationality. 2) Free market norms must be established and supported by state and social structures specially constructed for them, so that the state supports market needs, market values become “the measure of all state practices,” and economic growth is “the basis of state legitimacy.” 3) Individual morality is superseded by rational costbenefit calculation. Homo Economicus is the new higher man. “The neo-liberal citizen is calculating rather than rule-abiding.” And 4) Neoliberalism transforms the very idea of what “good social policy” means. 120 This transformation in values and marketization of society have resulted or will result in neoliberalism absorbing and superseding liberalism. As Harvey pointed out in the citation prefacing this section, neoliberalism is presented in strongly liberal terms. Whether or not this is

42 chicanery or whether this suggests that neoliberalism is an evolution of liberalism, there can be no argument that the consequences are profound: “[N]eo-liberalism entails the erosion of oppositional political, moral, or subjective claims located outside capitalist rationality but inside liberal democratic society, that is, the erosion of institutions, venues, and values organized by non-market rationalities in democracies.” 121 Words like equality, freedom, autonomy, dignity, independence, responsibility, and democracy have been absorbed by neoliberalism and redefined in terms of market capitalism. “Translated into neo-liberal terms, ‘democracy,’ here or there, does not signify a set of independent political institutions and civic practices… but rather, indicates only a state and subjects organized by market rationality.” 122 We can usefully compare this with a statement from Paul Berman:

The experience in Iraq ought to remind us that democracy is not just a system of procedures and a matter of institutions. Democracy is, in addition, a worldview, and this worldview needs to be expounded: a worldview based on rationality, criticism, respect for individual rights, and so forth. Democracy, in short, requires liberalism, and liberalism is, after all, an ism, and isms need to be presented, clarified, popularized, and defended. 123

In making this statement, Berman distinguishes democratic procedures and institutions from a democratic “worldview,” and assets that the democratic “worldview” necessarily requires the individualist ethos of liberalism. In asserting that because democracy is a worldview it “requires liberalism,” Berman asserts the primacy of democracy as a “worldview” over democracy-asinstitutions, and also predicates this worldview on the individualistic ethos of liberalism. By asserting the primacy of “worldview” over institutions and procedures, Berman undermines the materialist concerns of legal equality, economic justice, and structural security that are

43 existentially necessary for the practice of democracy as a form of social organization, and submits them to an ideological orientation called “democracy.” In predicating this “worldview” on the individualistic ethos of liberalism, he moves the focus entirely from governing institutions to individual rights, thereby wholly surrendering the field to market values: once the debate is framed in terms of individual rights, the proponents of neoliberal market values are able to include, subsume, and subvert democratic institutions and procedures to their own ends far more easily than the democratic “worldview” can include, subsume, and control market forces. What this brings out is how easily “liberalism” can stand for “neoliberalism,” how easily “democracy” can stand for “market capitalism,” and how hard it is to make a critique of neoliberalism from a liberal point of view. As Brown avers, “…the politically exploitable hollowness in formal promises of freedom and equality has largely vanished to the extent that both freedom and equality have been redefined by neo-liberalism.” 124 If we were to redefine the liberal interventionist argument as a neoliberal interventionist argument, then some things begin to clear up. A neoliberal war hawk doesn’t have to worry about state sovereignty, because the main concern is the spread of liberal market values. National self-determination is only applicable insofar as it functions within a global market economy. As David Harvey writes, “The free mobility of capital between sectors, regions, and countries is regarded as crucial…. State sovereignty over commodity and capital movements is willingly surrendered to the global market.” 125 From such a point of view, military intervention in Iraq is wholly coherent—since the nation was unavailable to global market forces, because of both Saddam’s national socialist Baathism and international sanctions, it makes complete sense to open it up through militarily forced regime change. And as Naomi Klein, Pratap Chatterjee, and others have argued, this was precisely the intent. 126 Profiteering has gone from being an

44 unsavory side-effect of war to its primary motivation. As well, once we consider Iraq in these terms, the “success” or “failure” of the adventure must be re-evaluated: “[E]ven as the Bush Administration fails to come up with WMDs in Iraq and fails to be able to install order let alone democracy there, this is irrelevant to the neo-liberal criteria for success in that military episode.” 127 Democracy and human rights are only worthwhile in a neoliberal ethos when considered in terms of consumer choice, freedom for capital accumulation, and private economic development—that is, only insofar as they express the right of an individual or corporation to operate in a market economy. What this suggests is that once we lose the capacity to attack neoliberalism from a liberal perspective, we lose liberalism itself. Brown argues that “Liberal democracy cannot be submitted to neo-liberal political governmentality and survive. There is nothing in liberal democracy’s basic institutions or values… that inherently meets the test of serving economic competitiveness or inherently withstands a cost-benefit analysis.” 128 Not only does liberalism fail to pass neoliberalism’s market-value test, but it fails to serve as a secure foundation for oppositional critique. In discussing various challenges to neoliberalism, Harvey notes that its opposition has shown a tendency “to accept many of the basic propositions of neoliberalism,” specifically the ethical primacy of “individual rights and freedoms.” 129 As he later explains:

Undoubtedly, the neoliberal insistence upon the individual as the foundational element in political-economic life opens the door to individual rights activism. But by focusing on those rights rather than on the creation or recreation of substantive and open democratic governance structures, the opposition cultivates methods than cannot escape the neoliberal frame. Neoliberal concern for the individual trumps any social democratic concern for equality, democracy, and social solidarities. 130

45 In a dialectic between liberalism and neoliberalism, the latter effects a sublation of the former that leaves the ethical tenets of neoliberalism unshaken while undermining liberalism’s democratic, humanistic traditions. Liberalism within a neoliberal ethos is purely vestigial, which means that within a neoliberal ethical framework, there is no meaningful argument for truly democratic institutions, social welfare, worker solidarity, economic parity, or equality of opportunity. It also means that citizens’ regard toward each other and their government is going to be one of suspicion, competition, and disdain: everything in society will be seen as either “in the market,” and thus viewed primarily as a product, competitor, buyer, or seller, or it is an impediment to the market process. Anything that retards market forces will have to be dispensed with, including such problems as unions, regulatory bodies, reformers, consumer advocacy groups, public utilities and services, legislative oversight, and nationally-owned industries. Democratic institutions and structures that disperse power, social welfare institutions that redistribute income and equalize opportunity, and liberal institutions that protect and defend values than cannot survive market competition are nothing more than obstacles in neoliberalism’s drive toward a political economy of centralized power and concentrated wealth. Put simply, neoliberalism means the end of liberal democracy.

IV. CONCLUSION

When Christopher Hitchens first found out that he may have inspired Mark Daily to go to war, he waxed first pompous, then elegiac, and finally repentant. Hitchens’ article detailing his reaction, “A Death in the Family,” is a distasteful, self-absorbed bloat of a piece that Hitchens kicks off by comparing himself to W.B. Yeats, and that focuses on Hitchens’ delicate

46 sensibilities as he went about trying to do honor to a young man whom he helped send to his death. With this article, Hitchens dishonors himself, Mark Daily, and the Daily family; the use he makes of the Dailys as actors in his psycho-historical narcissistic drama comes across as sordid, tawdry, and shameful. However, one passage toward the end of the article almost but not quite redeems it: Hitchens casts Mark Daily as a young idealist in a dirty war, giving him the role of George Orwell in Spain. This reflects, again, the importance of World War II in the mythology of the war hawks, and it is also interesting psychologically, because Hitchens usually reserves the role of Orwell for himself. If Mark Daily is like Orwell, and Hitchens is like Orwell, then perhaps Hitchens gains in stature by being a little like Mark Daily—at least, so he might see himself. The tragic tone Hitchens takes toward the end of the essay hits a real note after pages of false melody:

Orwell thought that the Spanish Civil War was a just war, but he also came to understand that it was a dirty war, where a decent cause was hijacked by goons and thugs, and where the betrayal and squalor negated the courage and sacrifice of those who fought on principle. As one who used to advocate strongly for the liberation of Iraq (perhaps more strongly than I knew), I have grown coarsened and sickened by the degeneration of the struggle: by the sordid news of corruption and brutality… and by the paltry politicians in Washington and Baghdad who squabble for precedence while lifeblood is spent and spilled by young people whose boots they are not fit to clean. It upsets and angers me more than I can safely say, when I reread Mark’s letters and poems and see that—as of course he would—he was magically able to find the noble element in all this, and take more comfort and inspiration from a few plain sentences uttered by a Kurdish man than from all the vapid speeches ever given. 131

The reason why Mark Daily was able to find “the noble element” in “all this” was that he believed he was fighting for human dignity and individual freedom. The sickening fact is that the

47 “freedom” he was fighting for was the freedom of the market, the “liberty” he worked for was the liberty of transnational corporations to privatize industry and public services, and the “democracy” he died for wasn’t “a set of independent political institutions and civic practices… but rather… a state and subjects organized by market rationality.” 132 There are many differences between the Spanish Civil War and the Iraq War, and Hitchens’ facile comparison serves his own interests far more than it serves truth. Where Hitchens and the liberal war hawks are especially wrong is that Iraq was not a just war “hijacked by goons and thugs,” but was a dirty war from the beginning, led by these selfsame thugs, and that their struggling liberal arguments in favor of freedom and liberty served as cheerleading and smokescreen for the neoliberal economic rapine that was the war’s true purpose. For these theorists to come together with these thugs offers

an alliance that much of the world is bound to see as highly reminiscent of the alliance between Christian missionaries and Western imperial soldiers in the nineteenth century. Despite their often genuine idealism and good intentions, the missionaries in the last resort depended on the soldiers, and had to abide the colonial orders that the soldiers created, however much these conflicted with Christian ethics. 133

Human rights in the hands of idealistic hawks become “swords of empire,” and the fact that the hawks believe their pious justifications does not excuse them. 134 Richard Rorty wrote that “We social democrats who are also theorists need to keep our tactics… flexible.” 135 Being tactically flexible, however, differs from being ethically loose, and any self-described liberal who sees aggressive war as a morally acceptable option no longer stands within the liberal ethos. From a liberal democratic point of view it is equally as reprehensible to support a “theoretically just” war led by thugs as it is to advocate violence for its

48 own sake. So-called intellectuals like Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman bear a double guilt: first for being wrong, intellectually sloppy, and incoherent in their support for war; second for obscuring the real issues at hand with their nineteenth-century jingoism. We live in a complex, dangerous world, and those of us who value human dignity, liberty, and the structures of free society need to keep our vision clear of clouding passions, and be sure who our enemies are. “The central question dividing liberals today,” writes Beinart, “is whether they believe liberal values are as imperiled by the new totalitarianism rising from the Islamic world as they are by the American right.” 136 As of 2007, the United States was responsible for 48% of the military spending in the world, and has the largest single economy (unless the EU is counted as one economy, in which case the US comes in second). 137 A graphic illustration of American military power can be seen in the example of US aircraft carriers: the United States has eleven supercarriers, each one carrying dozens of the most technologically advanced interceptors and bombers in the world, capable of launching sustained, continuous strikes against any country anywhere. The rest of the world combined has none. Not one. The struggles of the United States Army in Iraq should not deceive us as to the strength of American military power. As the invasion in 2003 illustrated quite clearly, the United States has the capacity to unleash enormous, unparalleled, and uniquely immense destructive power, against which stands no equal. The story propagated by the liberal hawks (and others), describing how liberal democratic traditions in this unequaled global power-center are threatened more by criminal terrorist networks, far-away regional armies, and angry, impoverished foreign masses than they are by domestic corporate and political interests who have publicly avowed their intentions to dismantle democratic government, replace liberal values with market values, centralize power, and redistribute wealth upwards is a story that is patently farcical. If it is true that the anti-imperialist left has failed to

49 offer a compelling vision for America in the post-Cold War or post-9/11 world, it is even more the case that the pro-imperial left has failed. The central issue it seems to me is a failure not of vision but of clear vision—in the attempt to secure liberal values, we have failed to see that they have been supplanted by neoliberal ones. Neoliberal discourse has reframed the debate, and to argue for “freedom” and “democracy” now is to argue for market values, privatization, and the permanent revolution of unfettered capital accumulation. Historically, we need to see the Iraq War within the context of neoliberal economic aggrandizement. The Iraq War is anything but a fiasco—for all the blood spilled and treasure wasted, factors like long-term US bases sustaining a serious military presence in the Middle East for decades, the destabilization and privatization of the Iraqi economy, and the opportunities the war has offered both financially and politically, especially for increasing executive power, have made Iraq a stunning and audacious success as neoliberal foreign policy. Moreover, being able to frame the debate in terms of freedom, democracy, humanitarian intervention, and national selfdetermination have legitimated the entire project, so that even if the “struggle” has “degenerated,” it is seen more as the failure of a good idea than the success of a bad one. Theoretically, intellectuals need to realize that the discourse has changed. Liberal ethics must be abandoned as basis for critique, because within a neoliberal ethos, liberal arguments only serve to cover economic interests. This means that the history of Enlightenment liberalism has been hijacked by the market. Intellectuals interested in non-market liberal values, like human rights, freedom of the press, equality of opportunity and so on, must find or found a new basis from which to critique the permanent revolution of neoliberalism. Perhaps this basis will have to be founded on some set of “small-c” conservative values, values that favor communal and social good over individual rights, that favor stability and tradition over choice and absolute freedom,

50 and that insist that human dignity is not inherent but has to do with our potential as social beings within a social network. On the other hand, given the tendency of social identification to slip easily into divisive politics like nationalism, racism, and so on, it may be that we need to configure a forward-looking cosmopolitan universalism based on something like species value, a reformulated and strengthened “humanism.” In any case, we must found our possibility outside of the liberal-neoliberal ethos—our possibility must be in that sense “impossible.” As Slavoj Zizek argues, the future will be utopian or there will be no future. We cannot sustain a human world of all-against-all, for to do that we must become either beasts or gods. Because liberalism’s good of choice has been co-opted and absorbed as market consumerism, serious opposition to neoliberalism must begin formulating its program at the very beginning—what is the good? Politically, people interested in a better world need to first see clearly the world we live in. The end of cheap oil, neoliberal imperialism, religious fundamentalism, the centralization of power, and the concentration of wealth are all serious threats to liberal values and institutions. “We have freedom of the press, an independent judiciary, and universities in which teachers continually urge students to combat [inequalities],” writes Rorty. “Such fragile, flawed institutions, the creation of the last 300 years, are humanity’s most precious achievements…. Nothing is more important than the preservation of these liberal institutions.” 138 In order to preserve these institutions, and the economic and political structures that make them possible, theory needs to enter the political realm. Idealistic young people like Mark Daily will fight and die for ideas—good ones or bad. We must be sure that our ideas are not only more “moral” but more carefully thought out. We need to be willing to separate the “thugs” from the “theorists,” and refuse to bullied by “muscular” ideologues or taken in by the romance of violence. Centrally,

51 we need to make sure our theories reflect empirical reality. A central issue that Harvey raises in discussing “freedom’s prospect” in our neoliberal world is that progressives everywhere, but especially in the US, have lost sight of

the crucial role played by class struggle in either checking or restoring elite class power…. In this, progressives of all stripes seem to have caved in to neoliberal thinking since it is one of the primary fictions of neoliberalism that class is a fictional category that exists only in the imagination of socialists and crypto-communists. In the US in particular, the phrase ‘class warfare’ is confined to the right-wing media (for example the Wall Street Journal) to denigrate all forms of criticism that threaten to undermine a supposedly unified and coherent national purpose (i.e. the restoration of upper-class power!). The first lesson we must learn, therefore, is that if it looks like class struggle and acts like class war then we have to name it unashamedly for what it is. The mass of the population has either to resign itself to the historical and geographical trajectory defined by overwhelming and ever-increasing upper-class power, or respond to it in class terms. 139

Harvey is absolutely right. But as he later avers, the point is not to make anachronistic calls for proletarian revolution, but to see clearly how class structures society and to admit the reality before us, that upper-class retrenchment is weakening and shrinking the middle class upon which democratic liberalism depends while at the same time further disenfranchising and impoverishing the working poor and underclasses. We need to realize that social democratic values are and must be class values, in that they depend upon the redistribution of wealth and power into secure lower and middle class bases. Money is power, and concentrations of either are fundamentally undemocratic. Finally, neoliberalism must be exposed and attacked. Market values are fine for the market, but as humans we must protect other social values as well. It is not enough to complain about the riotous banality of our consumer culture—its political dynamic

52 must be made clear. I’m not talking about what Rorty calls ideologiekritik, or “unmasking bourgeois ideology.” 140 I’m talking about fighting a political agenda that seeks to destroy the very idea of a public. Liberal democratic values and institutions are today under profound threat—not from Saddam Hussein, and not from Islamic jihad, but from a neoliberal agenda that seeks to dissolve the very social fabric that connects us to one another. If our freedoms and institutions are to survive, we need first to see and hear clearly, so that we can understand what’s really happening. Then we need to act: to expose our enemies, articulate our values, and expound a clear, compelling, and consistent defense—a defense that doesn’t rely on the liberal-neoliberal ethos of individual rights. We ought to carefully distinguish liberalism from neoliberalism, but the sad fact is that in terms of public discourse neoliberalism has won. As I hope to have shown, the liberal hawks’ case for Iraq is an illustration of this. Our freedoms and institutions cannot be defended for their own sake, because they’re predicated on a liberalism that’s been subsumed into neoliberal marketization. We must frame a new discourse. The liberal hawks have had their day, and their rhetoric has helped justify policies in Iraq that have increased the rights of the rich to make money at the expense of many thousands of lives, democratic institutions, and the economic and political power of middle and working classes both at home and abroad—let us ensure that these “liberals” no longer give moral cover to send young idealists to their deaths.

53 ENDNOTES 1

Excluding specific references otherwise, accounts of 2LT Mark Daily’s life and death are drawn from Watanabe, Theresa. “A higher calling than duty.” LA Times 16 February 2007. 14 April 2008 ; Hardesty, Greg. “Irvine soldier killed.” The Orange County Register 18 January 2007. 14 April 2008 ; and Hitchens, Christopher. “A Death in the Family.” Vanity Fair November 2007. 01 April 2008 . 2 “Mark Daily’s Letter.” UCLA Today Online 9 November 2007. 14 April 2008 . 3 Ibid. My own story, less righteous and fortunately less tragic, is relevant here: I joined the Army in April 2002, well aware of the war brewing with Iraq, not because I believed in the defense of liberal society but because I wanted to see what that “defense” looked like up close. The attacks of September 11 made me question my “kneejerk” anti-imperialism and, inspired in part by the example of George Orwell, I sought a first-hand view of American policy. I served in Iraq from May 2003 to June 2004, as a driver and rifleman in the 1st Armored Division. I came home, Lieutenant Daily didn’t; I can discuss my experiences in hindsight, Lieutenant Daily cannot. The intent of this essay is not to critique Mark Daily’s idealism, but rather to show how it was tragically overtaken by wider historical trends: Mark Daily went into a twenty-first century war with nineteenth century ideals. [For more on my own experiences in Iraq, see Scranton, Roy. “Walls and Shadows: The Occupation of Baghdad.” CITY 11.3 (2007): 277-292.] 4 Watanabe. 5 Packer, George. “The Liberal Quandary Over Iraq.” New York Time 08 December 2002. 20 March 2008 . 6 Ibid. 7 Shatz, Adam. “The Left and 9/11.” The Nation 23 September 2002. 01 April 2008 . 8 Walzer, Michael. “Can There Be A Decent Left?” Dissent Spring 2002. 20 March 2008 . 9 Watanabe. 10 Parker, Ian. “He Knew He Was Right.” The New Yorker 16 October 2006. 01 April 2008 . 11 Ibid. and Shafer, Jack. “Right-wing Envy,” Slate 29 August 2002. 01 April 2008 . 12 Burkeman, Oliver. “Nation loses its voice.” The Guardian 30 September 2002. 01 April 2008 . 13 Alterman, Eric. “The Liberal Hawks’ Lament.” The Nation 12 November 2007. 20 March 2008 . See also Packer, “The Liberal Quandary Over Iraq” and Shatz. 14 For some of the more egregiously nasty attacks on anti-imperialists see Berman, Paul, “A Friendly Drink in Time of War,” A Matter of Principle. Ed. Thomas Cushman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005; Cushman, Introduction, A Matter of Principle, 11; Hitchens, “The Case for Regime Change.” A Matter of Principle, 31-32, et al., and The Long Short War. New York: Plume, 2003. 64-65, et al.; Walzer, “Can There Be A Decent Left?” and “The Right Way.” The New York Review of Books 13 March 2003. 23 February 2008. ; Linfield, “The Treason of the Intellectuals (Again)” The Fight is For Democracy. Ed. George Packer. New York: HarperCollins, 2003; Packer, Introduction, 11-13; Just, Richard. “Liberal Realism or Liberal Idealism: The Iraq War and the Limits of Tolerance.” A Matter of Principle; and Shatz, “The Left and 9/11.” 15 Linfield, “The Treason of the Intellectuals (Again),” 165. 16 See Shatz. 17 Shawn, Wallace. “The Foreign Policy Therapist.” The Nation 3 December 2001. 9 April 2008 . 18 Berman, Paul. Terror and Liberalism. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. 42. See also Hitchens, A Long Short War, 23, 25, et al. 19 Hitchens, A Long Short War, 56.

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Hitchens, A Long Short War, 9, et al. Also Hitchens, Christopher. “The Case for Regime Change.” 31-32. Cushman. Introduction, A Matter of Principle, 2. 22 Herf, Jeffrey. “Liberal Legacies, Europe’s Totalitarian Era, and the Iraq War: Historical Conjunctures and Comparisons.” A Matter of Principle. Ed. Thomas Cushman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 39. 23 Lieven, Anatol. “Liberal Hawk Down.” The Nation 25 October 2004. 20 March 2008 . This article offers the single best critical view I’ve found of the liberal hawk position. 24 Packer, George. Introduction. The Fight is For Democracy. Ed. George Packer. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. 14. 25 Paul Berman’s NYU Faculty Home page. 04 March 2008 . See also Packer, “The Liberal Quandary.” 26 Anatol Lieven describes the book’s argument as “perhaps the most historically illiterate and strategically pernicious of all the lines advanced by liberal hawks and their de facto allies on the right” (Lieven, “Liberal Hawk Down”); Eduardo Mendieta, in his forthcoming book Philosophy's War: Logos, Nomos, Topos, describes it as “plagued by argumentative inconsistencies and by intellectual dishonesty that is patent and disconcerting” (Mendieta, Eduardo. “Liberalism’s War and the War for Liberalism.” From Philosophy's War: Logos, Nomos, Topos, forthcoming. 14. [Cited with permission of the author]). 27 Berman, Terror and Liberalism, 6. 28 Ibid., 4. 29 Ibid., 8-15. 30 Ibid., 37-38. 31 Ibid., 38-39. 32 Ibid. It seems almost unnecessary to point out the crassly ahistorical simplicity of this narrative, yet the narrative of Enlightenment Progress is a core belief in the west, among both “liberals” and “conservatives,” and is central to arguments about intervention. What seems more important is that this story ignores three fundamental trouble areas that have been consistently critiqued by modern thinkers: first, the problems posed by the dominance of rationality and technology (instrumental reason); second, the inherent contradiction between freedom and social structure (which is not dispensed with by insisting on a “freedom that recognizes the existence of other freedoms, too”); and third, the question of what basis morality can have once it is divorced from metaphysics. But never mind Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche—Berman’s liberalism is an ideal of consensual self-determination that, while deeply problematic, is certainly laudable. 33 Ibid., 23. 34 Ibid., 23, 39, 42, 51. 35 Ibid., 60. 36 Ibid., 110. Lieven characterizes Berman’s conflation of Baathism and Islamism as “disastrous, willful ignorance,” and suggests that this sort of reasoning has led to “a kind of baroque apotheosis of geopolitical cretinism” (Lieven, “Liberal Hawk Down”). 37 Ibid., 143. 38 Ibid., 5. 39 Ibid., 9. 40 Ibid., 38. 41 Ibid., 39-40. 42 Ibid., 41-42. 43 Ibid., 53-54. 44 Ibid., 79. 45 Ibid., 131. 46 Ibid., 137. 47 Ibid., 158. 48 Lieven, “Liberal Hawk Down.” 49 For interesting and illuminating perspectives on these roots, see Tuveson, Ernest. Redeemer Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968; Lieven, Anatol. America, Right and Wrong. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004; Karp, Walter. The Politics of War. New York: HarperCollins, 1980. 50 Beiner, Ronald. What’s the Matter with Liberalism? Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. 23. 51 Ibid., 25. 52 Packer, The Fight is For Democracy, 3. 21

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Quoted in Packer, The Fight is For Democracy, 13. Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Vital Center. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949. 245. 55 Ibid., 244. 56 Ibid., 255. 57 Dean, Robert D. “Masculinity as Ideology: John F. Kennedy and the Domestic Politics of Foreign Policy.” Diplomatic History 22.1 (1998): 36. 25 July 2008 . 58 Ibid., 31. 59 Schlesinger, 63. 60 Packer, “The Liberal Quandary.” 61 Parker, “He Knew He Was Right.” 62 Packer, “The Liberal Quandary.” 63 Parker, “He Knew He Was Right.” Incidentally, I was there that day, driving a humvee around Baghdad on reconnaissance for suspected weapons caches. I didn’t find the constant weapons fire particularly celebratory, but no doubt that had to do with my particular perspective as a potential target. 64 Hitchens, “The Case for Regime Change,” 38. 65 Parker, “He Knew He Was Right.” 66 Packer, The Fight is For Democracy, 15. 67 Faludi, Susan. The Terror Dream. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007. 24. 68 Ibid., 75. Cf. 78, 148, 155, et al. 69 Beinart, Peter. The Good Fight. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. 152-153. 70 Simons, Herbert W. “From Post-9/11 Melodrama to Quagmire in Iraq: A Rhetorical History.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 10:2 (2007): 183-194. 13 April 2008 . 185. 71 Ibid., 190. 72 Parker, “He Knew He Was Right.” 73 Secor, Laura. “The Giant in the House.” The Fight is For Democracy. Ed. George Packer. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. 55. 74 Ibid., 56-58. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. 78 While we can certainly hope that higher moral values would prevail in the international sphere, the conservative realist position offers the most secure approach for acting in an anarchic environment, which is precisely what the geopolitical sphere is. While there have been international laws made, there is no international monopoly on force that would serve to enforce these laws. There is no global police, but rather a variety of gangs. There is one gang bigger and badder than the rest, that being the United States, but although the US has overwhelming military power it is still not omnipotent, nor, again, does it have a monopoly on the use of force. The first qualification of a regime is that it have a monopoly on force, and in the absence of a regime we have anarchy. This is the global environment, and all the many agreements and contracts between states—while laudable and necessary—do not make the world a single government. 79 Secor, 58. 80 Ibid., 59. 81 Ibid., 60. 82 Ibid., 61. 83 Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 7. 84 Ibid., 19, 29-31, 66, 69, 75-81, et al. 85 Ibid., 72-74, 92, et passim. 86 Secor, 72. I would argue that its beneficence is merely an illusion of its narcissism: although out of all the countries listed, the US contributed the most money, in dollars, to Official Developmental Assistance, it ranked twenty-first when this contribution was counted as a portion of Gross National Income (, referencing OECD statistics, accessed 28mar08). America is a nation of merchants and consumers, despite its cultural mythology of cowboys and violence, and war tends to offer more risk than return. Nativist political isolationism has been the default international position for the 54

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American people, even though there has always been a great interest in commercial intervention. It is perhaps naïve to assume that these are two different things, a fact anti-imperialists like Chomsky and Klein are at pains to point out, but even so, Americans rarely seem to support—en masse—military action to protect commercial interests. Ultimately, despite the bickering of the chattering classes—the intellectuals who think they influence policy—the American people are so narcissistic that for them all politics are personal, and the only real justification for war is an attack. This is why September 11 was such a boon to so many hawks, and also why public support for Iraq has been eroding ever since the “war” was declared over. 87 Secor, 61. 88 Mendieta, “Liberalism’s War and the War for Liberalism,” 33. 89 Brown, Wendy. “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Theory and Event 7:1 (2003). 20 March 2008 < http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tae/v007/7.1brown.html>. 3. 90 On social democrats, see Rorty, Richard. “Thugs and Theorists.” Political Theory 15.4 (1987): 564-580. 07april2008 . On liberal vs. communitarian values, see Beiner, What’s the Matter With Liberalism? 91 Beiner, 32. 92 Alain Finkielkraut, quoted in Linfield, 170. 93 Beiner 22, cf. 25. 94 Walzer, Michael. Just and Unjust Wars. New York: Basic Books, 1977. 135. 95 Ibid., 53-54. 96 Ibid., 55. 97 I have no intention here of recapitulating Marx, but it is worth asking: Where does the right to property come from? Inheritance? Conquest? The labor that converts it property into product? At a certain point, the right to territory was operative only insofar as you had the might to defend it. And however enlightened we might like to think we are, in a very real sense it is still the case that might makes rights: the first condition of lawful, legitimate government is a monopoly on violence. 98 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 44. 99 Ibid., 47. 100 Mendieta, Eduardo. “The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ and the Just War Tradition.” From Philosophy's War: Logos, Nomos, Topos, forthcoming. 8. 18 April 2008 [Cited with permission of the author]. 101 Wills, Gary. “What Is a Just War?” Review of Michael Walzer, Arguing About War. The New York Review of Books 18 November 2004. 23 February 2008 . 102 Walzer, “The Right Way.” 103 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 90-91. 104 Ibid., 107. 105 Ibid., 89. 106 Ibid., 88. 107 Ibid., 90-91. 108 Lieven, “Liberal Hawk Down.” Berman’s and Hitchens’ works are rife with comments not only denigrating the left but also foreign heads of state and anyone else who dared to disagree with them. 109 Rorty, “Thugs and Theorists,” 574. 110 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 5. 111 Cf. “Neoliberalism” previously; notes 83-85; Harvey. 112 Horkheimer, Max. “The End of Reason.” The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. Ed. Andrew Arato & Eike Gebhardt. New York: Urizen Books, 1978. 36. 113 Lasch, Christopher. Culture of Narcissism. New York: Warner Books, 1979. 18. 114 Brown, “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” 3. 115 Broadly this subject is dealt with variously as “Empire” (Hardt & Negri), “late capitalism” (Jameson, Harvey), “biopolitics” (Foucault), “globalization,” etc., and its specific formulation during the Bush II years—in my view—is best seen as a stark example of the longer-running trend. 116 Ibid., 18. 117 Ibid., 13. 118 Ibid., 7. 119 Ibid. Cf. Lemke, Thomas. “ ‘The Birth of Bio-Politics’—Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality.” Economy & Society 30.2 (2001): 190-207. 13 April 2008

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; see also the forthcoming book of lectures: Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. 120 Brown, 4-8. 121 Ibid., 9. 122 Ibid., 11. 123 Berman, Paul. “Paul Berman Response.” Dissent Spring 2007. 19 April 2008 . My italics. 124 Brown, 19. 125 Harvey, 66. 126 See Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007; and Chatterjee, Pratap. Iraq, Inc. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004. 127 Brown, op cit. 128 Ibid., 9. 129 Harvey, 175. 130 Ibid., 176. 131 Hitchens, “A Death in the Family.” 132 Brown, 11. 133 Lieven, “Liberal Hawk Down.” 134 Bartholomew, A. and J. Breakspear. “Human Rights as Swords of Empire.” Socialist Register. London: Merlin Press, 2003. 124-125. Qtd. in Harvey 178. 135 Rorty, “Thugs and Theorists,” 574. 136 Beinart, The Good Fight, 197. 137 The FY 2009 Pentagon Spending Request - Global Military Spending, The Center for Arms Control and NonProliferation. 24 April 2008 ; 2006 World GDP, Data and Statistics, The World Bank. 24 April 2008 < http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DATASTATISTICS/Resources/GDP.pdf>. 138 Rorty, 567. 139 Harvey, 201-202. 140 Rorty, 569.

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RESOURCES AND WORKS CITED 2006 World GDP, Data and Statistics. The World Bank. 24 April 2008 . Alterman, Eric. “The Liberal Hawks’ Lament.” The Nation 12 November 2007. 20 March 2008 . Bartholomew, A. and J. Breakspear. “Human Rights as Swords of Empire.” Socialist Register. London: Merlin Press, 2003. Beinart, Peter. The Good Fight. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Beiner, Ronald. What’s the Matter with Liberalism? Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Burkeman, Oliver. “Nation loses its voice.” The Guardian 30 September 2002. 01 April 2008 . Berman, Paul. “Paul Berman Response.” Dissent Spring 2007. 19 April 2008 . ———. Paul Berman’s NYU Faculty Home page. 04 March 2008 . ———. Terror and Liberalism. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. Brown, Wendy. “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Theory and Event 7:1 (2003). 20 March 2008 < http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tae/v007/7.1brown.html>. Chatterjee, Pratap. Iraq, Inc. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004. Cloud, Dana. “Beyond Evil: Understanding Power Materially and Rhetorically.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6.3 (2003): 531-538. 13 April 2008 . Cushman, Thomas, ed. A Matter of Principle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Dean, Robert D. “Masculinity as Ideology: John F. Kennedy and the Domestic Politics of Foreign Policy.” Diplomatic History 22.1 (1998): 29-62. 25 July 2008 . Faludi, Susan. The Terror Dream. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007.

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FY 2009 Pentagon Spending Request - Global Military Spending. The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. 24 April 2008 . Giuffo, John. “Why Hitchens Matters.” Rev. of Why Orwell Matters, by Christopher Hitchens. Village Voice Literary Supplement (2002). 1 April 2008 . Hardesty, Greg. “Irvine soldier killed.” The Orange County Register 18 January 2007. 14 April 2008 . Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Hitchens, Christopher. “A Death in the Family.” Vanity Fair November 2007. 01 April 2008 . ———. A Long Short War. New York: Plume, 2003. Horkheimer, Max. “The End of Reason.” The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. Ed. Andrew Arato & Eike Gebhardt. New York: Urizen Books, 1978. Karp, Walter. The Politics of War. New York: HarperCollins, 1980. Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007. Lasch, Christopher. Culture of Narcissism. New York: Warner Books, 1979. Lemke, Thomas. “ ‘The Birth of Bio-Politics’—Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality.” Economy & Society 30.2 (2001): 190-207. 13 April 2008 . Lieven, Anatol. America, Right and Wrong. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. ———. “Liberal Hawk Down.” The Nation 25 October 2004. 20 March 2008 . “Mark Daily’s Letter.” UCLA Today Online 9 November 2007. 14 April 2008 . Mendieta, Eduardo. “The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ and the Just War Tradition.” From Philosophy's War: Logos, Nomos, Topos, forthcoming. 18 April 2008 [Cited with permission of the author].

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———. “Liberalism’s War and the War for Liberalism.” From Philosophy's War: Logos, Nomos, Topos, forthcoming. 14. [Cited with permission of the author] Packer, George, ed. The Fight is For Democracy. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. ———. “The Liberal Quandary Over Iraq.” New York Time 08 December 2002. 20 March 2008 . Parker, Ian. “He Knew He Was Right.” The New Yorker 16 October 2006. 01 April 2008 . Richard Rorty, “Thugs and Theorists.” Political Theory 15.4 (1987): 564-580. 07april2008 . Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Vital Center. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949. Scranton, Roy. “Walls and Shadows: The Occupation of Baghdad.” CITY 11.3 (2007): 277-292. Shafer, Jack. “Right-wing Envy,” Slate 29 August 2002. 01 April 2008 . Shatz, Adam. “The Left and 9/11.” The Nation 23 September 2002. 01 April 2008 . Shawn, Wallace. “The Foreign Policy Therapist.” The Nation 3 December 2001. 9 April 2008 . “Should the U.S. Invade Iraq? (Week 1, 2, and 3)” Slate 27 September 2002 – 11 October 2002. 20 March 2008 , , and . Simons, Herbert W. “From Post-9/11 Melodrama to Quagmire in Iraq: A Rhetorical History.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 10:2 (2007): 183-194. 13 April 2008 . Tuveson, Ernest. Redeemer Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968 Walzer, Michael. “Can There Be A Decent Left?” Dissent Spring 2002. 20 March 2008 . ———. Just and Unjust Wars. New York: Basic Books, 1977.

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———.“The Right Way.” The New York Review of Books 13 March 2003. 23 February 2008 Watanabe, Theresa. “A higher calling than duty.” LA Times 16 February 2007. 14 April 2008 Wills, Gary. “What Is a Just War?” Review of Arguing About War, by Michael Walzer. The New York Review of Books 18 November 2004. 23 February 2008. .

Thanks to Martin Woessner for his help in revising this essay.