an open letter to Juan Cole on Libya

Dr. Cole,

These are strange times. I would not have thought it possible, given recent history, but your open letter to us on the left, on Libya, demonstrates that you are ultimately indistinguishable from the neoconservatives and liberal hawks who ostracized and attacked us in the run-up to the Iraq war. What Jonah Goldberg was once to you, you are now to us. I wonder: does this inspire pride, in you? Is it nice to have the shoe on the other foot? Is it appealing to be the redbaiter, rather than the redbaited? Your letter was quoted approvingly today by Jeffrey Goldberg, a man whose inaccurate and biased reporting helped push us into war in Iraq, and who never missed an opportunity to attack opponents of that war. I don't know; perhaps such temporary alliances please you.

Despite the length of your open letter, you have advanced one and only one argument against us: that anyone opposed to war on Libya is indifferent to Qaddafi and his crimes. This is an argument that even the most noxious neoconservatives take pause in arguing-- because it is libelous, because it is the worst kind of appeal to outrage, because it is flatly untrue. It is, again, hard to believe that I've just read it. But here it is:

The arguments against international intervention are not trivial, but they all did have the implication that it was all right with the world community if Qaddafi deployed tanks against innocent civilian crowds just exercising their right to peaceful assembly and to petition their government.

And again:

If we just don’t care if the people of Benghazi are subjected to murder and repression on a vast scale, we aren’t people of the Left.

To be on the left in America is to operate under the conditions that movement conservatives claim to operate under: it is to be marginalized and assumed out of polite conversation before the conversation even begins. In these conditions, you have to hold onto the most important right a free people can have, the right to the absolute and inviolate possession of one's own opinions. I operate in a culture and a larger political conversation that dismisses my beliefs at every turn. I'm happy to do so. But I own the content of my beliefs, and neither you nor any other person will dictate to me what I have to believe. And I am here telling you that I most certainly care about murder and repression, that it is not all right with me if innocent civilian crowds are attacked by tanks, and yet I oppose military intervention in Libya.

I have written why many times, but it boils down to a simple calculus: I neither trust that my righteousness and my knowledge are so great that they are sufficient to dictate to Libyans the future of Libya, nor believe that I would have any right to do so even if my knowledge and benevolence were perfect. I believe in the inviolate right of self-determination. Even when it hurts to respect it.

Do you know what might be the single greatest humanitarian effort in history, if we were to attempt it? I'll tell you: annex Haiti. Here you have a very geographically close nation living in desperate poverty, filled with a kind of human suffering and need so great and so persistent that I can barely imagine it. We could do it. The military impediment would be trivial, perhaps less difficult than our current war against Libya. And while things would never be perfect in Haiti, they most certainly would get better. Such an annexation might seem like an absurd hypothetical, but I confess that I am so naive that I thought more American military adventures in the Middle East, in the near future, would be impossible. Intervention in Haiti is possible and would surely help.

So, Dr. Cole: why don't you care about the Haitian people? Do you not care about children starving to death? Are you totally callous towards the plight of those dying in the streets? Is it all right with you if thousands die from AIDS in Haiti?

You spend a lot of time dancing, when you consider the question of "why Libya," but you don't dance your way out of the questions. You are insisting that refusing to intervene in humanitarian crisis is the same as not caring about the crisis in the first place, as I've quoted above. So what about Darfur? This country could intervene in the Sudan. We have that capacity. So why don't you care? About Syria? Bahrain? Cote d'Ivoire? About the homeless man down the street from you, who you are most certainly capable of helping, but aren't? It's a funny thing about humanitarianism. Once you divide the world between those who want to DO SOMETHING and those who just don't care, you'll find that there is no ending to it.

I'll let one of your own commenters make the comparison to your feelings about Iraq:

At the core of opposition is the sense that we embrace warmongering principles, and the fact that it may be a little more reasonable here than elsewhere does not undermine this objection. Saddam was a far greater tyrant to his people than Qaddafi, and that war was purportedly justified based on the humanitarian wonderfulness of getting rid of that dictator. Why this does not give you pause here when advocating war with Libya is surprising.

You could not possibly have thought that Saddam would ever cease oppressing and waging violence against his people. And yet, somehow, you came to a position against the US assault on Iraq. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but perhaps then you understood that we were not in unique possession of right or of truth; that we have no right to project our preferences, no matter how obvious they seem to us, around the globe; that there is a great distance between our intention and our ability; that every person in the Middle East, even those fighting for revolution, is not some quasi-American yearning to break free and create a republic exactly like America and in keeping with our values. Those are all lessons that, if you indeed knew them back then, you have forgotten since.

An open letter, of course, is written to people who you know have little or no chance of responding. You don't think that the left will respond, because as you know we have no voice to respond in this country. Our voice has been systematically and intentionally eliminated from mainstream political conversation. Why? Because, of course, of efforts like yours. Despite your attempts to dress up your open letter to us, it has one and only one goal: to vilify and to silence us. Your repeated and baseless insistence that thinking people can either support lobbing cruise missiles on Libyans or else be "all right" with murder has and can have only one consequence, which is to censor those who oppose intervention. You are well aware of that fact; you lived through it, after all. That you could have so forgotten the power relations that are burning underneath the text of your letter, or that you have ceased to care, is ultimately what disappoints me most.

yours,

Freddie deBoer