Brendan O'Neill has a point that quibbling over the precise number of Afghan civilian casualties has little to do with "principled, political argument." Whether or not the US campaign in Afghanistan was justified does not turn on whether Marc Herold's figures were inflated, or whether the numbers have been cynically undercounted by "the right" (as O'Neill quite inaccurately characterizes each and every person who supported the campaign.) The differences are not significant enough to raise the issue of "disproportionality" with regard to just war theory, nor indeed by any standard. Herold did deliberately inflate his figures, of course. He appears to have been motivated by a belief that slightly greater numbers of civilian deaths would bolster his ideologically-determined conclusion that the US intentionally targeted civilians because of its inherent "racism." It is entirely appropriate for his critics to expose the faulty stats, as well as to point out the perverse ideological motivation. But, in fact, Herold is wrong in a more general way: the inflated numbers, even if accurate, do not make his case about American evil. Innocent people die in wars-- that's tragic, but it's not exactly news. If the true motivation for US action had been a secret desire to kill "non-whites," as Herold intimated, we wouldn't just be talking thousands here. The most interesting angle on the Marc Herold study is the eagerness with which it was uncritically snapped up and trumpeted by the left wing British press, the zNet crowd, the Pilgerites, et al. Clearly, the study, despite its obvious flaws, filled some deep psychological need among determined proponents of anti-Americanism.
O'Neill is absolutely right that focusing on the casualty figures is a red herring that has been occasionally adopted by both opponents and, to a lesser extent, supporters of US action. His reasons for bringing the whole thing up are a little odd, though. "What ever happened to principled, political argument?" he asks. And here's what he means by that phrase:
What ever happened to the left opposing wars like the one in Afghanistan on the grounds that they are imperialist, that they deny people their self-determination, and that they are kneejerk attempts by America's leaders to solve their problems at home by intervening abroad? And what ever happened to the right defending wars like the one in Afghanistan on the grounds that America has the right to intervene in others' affairs, that the US military should police less democratic nations, and the might America is responsible for installing world peace?"
"What happened" to the sort of purely ideological argument for which he evinces such nostalgia is that the traditional left-wing grounds for opposition, on principle, to US policy are extremely hard to sustain when it comes to the 9/11 attacks and the war on al Qaeda. It's certainly a stretch to apply any of O'Neill's three criteria for "principled" left wing opposition to the war in Afghanistan. The first and third can't even get off the ground unless you adopt a sort of Oliver Stone, conspiracy-theory worldview as a starting point. As for "denying people their self-determination," he's got to be kidding. Or does O'Neill in fact see the Taliban regime as some kind of noble embodiment of the people's will?
I'd agree with O'Neill's implied position that America doesn't always necessarily have the right to "intervene in others' affairs": but when those "affairs" involve planning and executing attacks on US civilian targets resulting in thousands of American deaths, those involved had better be prepared for a bit of intervention. The fairly quirky contention that this particular intervention has been "an unmitigated failure since day one" is a common one among British lefties. That's largely a matter of definition: even though it failed to solve every single one of the world's problems, most would agree that, in deposing the Taliban and disrupting al Qaeda activity in Afghanistan, the "failure" has had a considerable measure of success. (And given the dire predictions of cataclysmic disaster that issued from many of the same sources before and during the campaign, it looks like a case of "defining failure down.") At any rate, the vast majority of Americans (and in fact, I believe, a substantial majority of Britons as well) supported the war in Afghanistan; this majority included a great many people who tend to lean left when it comes to practically everything else. The moral and practical imperative for a military response was, in this case, so clear and overwhelming that it (temporarily at least) demolished the crude, reliable scheme of left/anti-war vs. right/pro-war that O'Neill apparently would like to see a bit more of. The crackpot fringe, the diehard doctrinaire Leftists who feel that US military action ought to be opposed under any and all circumstances as a matter of principle and as an expression of identity, have had a hard time coming to terms with this fact. I imagine that this anxiety is partly what's behind attempts like Herold's to gin up "evidence" of moral equivalence between the 9/11 attacks and the US response to them; it may also explain the reluctance of the Chomsky-ite crowd to let go of it despite its manifest falsity. In future phases of the war on terror, O'Neill may indeed get his wish for a more predictable split where all right-thinking left-leaning souls unequivocally oppose American interests and action like they're supposed to. But all the statistics in the world, genuine or bogus, won't rewrite the history of public opinion on Afghanistan.
(O'Neill ends his post with a curious request: "now, how about some of those who hide behind the numbers come out as being either for the war, or against it?" Who is he talking about here? None of those he mentions (Glenn Reynolds, Matt Welch, Ted Rall) has made any secret of their position, nor has anyone I know of.)
UPDATE: Steven Chapman has some characteristically sharp reflections on O'Neill's post and the difference between criminal acts and acts of war. Here's his intriguing post-script:
Another rich vein for pondering: what does it tell us about ourselves when we 'criminalise' acts of war? Does the notion of living in a world of nation-states, free agents jockeying for position in pursuit of their own interests frighten us? Why? It never used to! But then, what conviction we may have once had regarding our own interests has been eroded, and in our fearfulness we pass over responsibility for the world's affairs to supranational - and, one might say given the reverence these heavenly congregations attract, supernatural - collectives in pursuit of some foolish utopian dream in which individual or local human decisions are abolished in favour of some new species of quasi-mechanical ratiocination. How feeble and frightened we have become of the world we live in!Posted by Dr. Frank at June 4, 2002 09:28 AM | TrackBack