Seriously: Post of the year, easy-peasy. It's that effing good. Obviously I've quickly become a huge fan of John Holbo. Many thanks to Eric for showing me the way. What a great discovery. Below are some selections from Holbo's "Whig" post which I know I'll return to in the weeks and months ahead. [Do not consider this a substitute for reading the whole thing!] Plus below that I'll add some other (related) worthwhile stuff.
Holbo, quoting Louis Hartz:
"In politics men who make speeches do not go out of their way to explain how differently they would speak if the enemies they had were larger in size or different in character. On the contrary whatever enemies they fight they paint in satanic terms, so that a problem sufficiently difficult to begin with in a liberal society becomes complicated further by the inevitable perspectives of political battle."
This implies double cluelessness, through narcissism of small differences. When you get angry at your enemies - and you will - you need some sufficiently pungent philosophical vocabulary to function as vent and vehicle for your excess of affect. Unfortunately, your enemy shares your major Lockean premises. So you hallucinate it is otherwise. (To use Hartz' terms) whiggish liberals accuse democratic liberals of being socialists (or, latterly, communists; more lately, Islamofascists and traitors); democratic liberals accuse whiggish liberals of being aristocrats (or fascists.)
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Of course - being a democrat, not a whig - I am most offended by the right's recent indulgence in kneejerk pee wee hermeneutics of suspicion... Blah blah. It's a form of motivated irrationality - a tactical deployment of stupidity, shutting down inconvenient conversations; it has its psychic satisfactions, I'm sure. But just as the best laid plans that start with 'first I'll get falling down drunk' oft go astray, so tactical stupidity tends to turn strategic. Stupidity, like hope, is not a plan. (Like beer goggles: smear goggles. When you wear them, you can't tell the difference between Matthew Yglesias and a shoe bomber.)
"Pee Wee hermeneutics of suspicion"... "smear goggles"... Holbo was dealing the locutions that day! Crackin' good shots, mate.
Now, you must not neglect to read the Timothy Burke link at the end of Holbo's post. The finale is... strong.
If there is anyone who ought to be deeply, gravely concerned about unwarranted shootings at checkpoints, accidental deaths of civilians, torture in US prisons, killings of surrendered prisoners, it's the advocates of the war, at least the ones who believe in the Wolfowitz vision as it is represented by Brooks, Hitchens and others. They ought to be concerned for very functional reasons, because failures of these kinds are effectively losses on the battlefield as grave and serious as Bull Run or Gazala. They ought to be concerned also for philosophical reasons, the same way I would be concerned if the police started busting down the doors in my own neighborhood for what seemed flimsy reasons and then hauling away some of my neighbors without any real due process.
Wolfowitz and his defenders want to convince us that humanity is united by its universal thirst for liberal democratic freedoms, well then, how can they possibly fail to react to injustice or error in Iraq with anything less than the grave and persistent concern they might exhibit in a domestic US context? Where's the genuine regret, the mourning, the persistent and authentic sympathy?
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The Wolfowitzian defenders of the war want to skip Go and collect $200.00 on this one, go straight to the day two centuries hence when the innocent dead recede safely into the bloody haze of anonymous tragedy. Sorry, but this is not on offer, least of all for them. If they can't find the time, emotion and intellectual rigor to be as consumed by the case of a blameless mother and father turned into gore and sprayed on their children as they are by what Sean Penn had to say about the war last week, then their entire argument about the war is nothing more than the high-minded veneer of a more bestial and reasonless fury.
Ouch. Like hot coffee in the face.
In regards to all checkpoint/Sgrena debates, everyone involved should begin by reading this highly informative CSM article titled "What Iraq's checkpoints are like".
The essential problem with checkpoints is that the Americans don't know if the Iraqis are "friendlies" or not, and the Iraqis don't know what the Americans want them to do.
Why don't Iraqis (and others) know what to do? Read the article. Then you may carry on.