Is "the left" soft on Islamism?

Michael Walzer, a well-known theorist of just war, writes in the Winter 2015 Dissent, where Walzer is emeritus editor, on Islamism and the Left. The Dissent website features additional material, including endnotes to the article and this exchange, Andrew March and Michael Walzer, Islamism and the Left: An Exchange (Online Only) Winter 2015.

Walzer is a thoughtful guy and his article is a serious one. But processing it involves navigating the difference between the longer-term questions involved in evaluating Islamist governments and movements from a left-democratic perspective, and the short-term reality of this moment in which warmongers of both the neocon and liberal-interventionist variety are using the threat of Islamic fanaticism in groups like ISIS to promote reckless foreign and military policies.

When I read the print article, my first reaction was that his argument is too general to throw much light on the first question and therefore reads like it's encouraging the purveyors of reckless Middle Eastern foreign policy. Because the article is carefully but clearly scolding "the left" in the US and Europe for not being critical enough of Islamist fundamentalism in the world and especially not of the political variety.

Walzer argues that "the left" tends to naively view Islamist radicalism in the Middle East as opponents to Western imperialism. This produces a "reluctance to condemn Islamist crimes, and that is the great eagerness to condemn the crimes of the West"

He also argues that "the left" is somehow dogmatically unwilling to look at the significance of religion in jihadist ideology because "the left" just doesn't want to think about religion. "The left has always had difficulty recognizing the power of religion." In the view of "the left," he argues, "Religious zealotry is a superstructural phenomenon and can only be explained by reference to the economic base."

What struck me on the first reading of Walzer's piece is that what he described as that of "the left" didn't sound familiar to me from the considerable amount of reading, listening, researching and talking about such issues with people I consider progressives, mostly but not exclusively Americans.

To take one example, some of the best-informed and serious analysis of American foreign policy toward militant Islam in the last 12 years has come from Juan Cole, an expert on Shi'a Islam, the form dominant in Iran and Iraq. He opposed the Iraq War and has cautioned about new interventions in Iraq ans Syria over ISIS. He supported the US-NATO role in Libya, whose results also seem to have been largely disastrous.

I don't known whether Walzer would consider him a "leftist" of the kind he talks about in his article. Certainly, Cole has been very critical of the actions and effects of Western imperialism in the Muslim world. And he has also been a careful analyst and critic of the various forms of political Islam in the world today.

We see both of those factors in this recent post of his, 5 Surprising Ways Iran is better than Israel Informed Comment 02/27/2015. On Iran's government, he writes:

Iran's government is not one I agree with on almost anything, and it is dictatorial and puritanical. I wish Iranians would get past it and join the world’s democracies. Israel is better than Iran in most regards – for Israeli citizens it has more of a rule of law and more personal liberties. But just to be fair, there are some ways Iran's policies are better than Israel’s.

And in this paragraph, he explains how Iran's historical experience with European imperial powers shaped the Islamist movement there, including political Islam, ending with some comments about the evolution of the political movement of Zionism in Israel:

Iran and European Jewry were both treated horribly in the 19th and 20th centuries by the major European imperial countries. Obviously, proportionally Jews suffered much more than Iranians did; about a third of Jews were murdered in the Nazi genocide. But Iran also suffered significant loss of human life and property. Tsarist Russia fought two wars with it in the early nineteenth century, and annexed from it substantial territory. Britain and Russia forbade Iran from constructing a railroad in the late 19th century, robbing it of a key tool of economic advance; that probably killed a lot of Iranians if you think about its implications. The British and the Russians opposed the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911 and helped make sure Iranians did not get liberty and a rule of law. Britain backed the rise of the Pahlevi dictatorship in the 1920s, if it did not in fact simply impose it. The US overthrew the elected government of Iran in 1953 because it had nationalized the oil industry and imposed the megalomaniacal Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on that country. Ultimately Iranians, outraged at constant interference in their domestic affairs, overthrew the shah and instituted a revolutionary regime based on indigenous Iranian culture, especially religious culture. Although the Jewish response to the European genocide against Jews was not immediately religious (most Zionists were secular), over time religion has come to play a bigger and bigger part in Israeli life. In a sense, Israel and Iran are both reactions against European nationalism and imperialism, though Israel has now allied with the West, whereas Iran continues to oppose many Western policies.

Juan Cole has never struck me as afflicted by any problem of not being able to walk and talk at the same time when it comes to political Islam.

And that tends to be true of the writers, analysts and activists with which I have some experience. Of course, people who consider themselves in some way "left" can and do criticize aspects of Islamist politics and of Islamic religious practices. And most of those people seem to also be able to look at international conflicts and conflicts within countries involving religious-political parties and make some kind of realistic, practical distinction among them. I can't remember when if ever I've seen someone I identified as part of "the left" may the argument: "Religious zealotry is a superstructural phenomenon and can only be explained by reference to the economic base."

Walzer's article struck me as trying to say that anyone on "the left" who is critical of militarist foreign policy on the Middle East or terrorism more generally should spend a lot of their time and energy echoing the anti-Islam rhetoric of those who advocate such policies.

Andrew March frames his discussion of Walzer's essay this way:

We can hear in Walzer himself the voice of the anguished and disappointed critic. He is not speaking to the demagogues of Fox News or to the even more belligerent purveyors of anti-Muslim racism. He is speaking to the tribe he still claims as his own—the global left. But his alienation from that tribe is much more palpable than his connection. Walzer is addressing the left, but neither sharing in its anxieties nor moving with its moral and emotional rhythms.

He also argues that Walzer's approach itself criticizes Islamism in an essentially ideological, non-empirical manner. "Is it really helpful to speak about 'the left's' attitude toward Islamism in such general terms, without looking at specific left debates about Syria, Turkey, Tunisia, or Iran?"

March also thinks, as I did, that Walzer sounds like he's making a demand of "the left" that can never actually be satisfied:

Worse, the charge that one does not denounce enough is notoriously slippery. Like demands for Muslims to—finally!—speak out and condemn terrorism, for American Jews to condemn Israeli settlements, or for black leaders to condemn inner city rage, Walzer’s essay suffers from both confirmation and selection bias. ... The problem is that no amount of contradictory evidence is ever good enough. The one who has moved first can always reply, “Well, yes, there are these exceptions, of course, but I still don’t have enough comrades declaring Islamist zealots our primary enemies.” This response is as slippery as it is disappointingly parochial.

Walzer's rejoinder to March's criticism is not without a touch of bitterness.

Interestingly enough, it's Walzer rather than March who relates this controversy to the endless Cold War game of non-Communist left activists and writers demanding that anyone protesting against misdeeds of their own government in the United States that they fall all over themselves also screeching about every real and imagined misdeed of the Soviet Union. It was kind of hard for anyone then to point out how official anti-Communist ideology was used to inflate threats foreign and domestic, if they themselves were simultaneously howling, "The Commies are everywhere and they're out to get us!! Aieee-eeee!!!"

Here's a tip. Anyone who goes on, say, a news program to caution about getting involved in an unnecessary war based on bad assumptions and unrealistic optimism about outcomes is not going to make their point very credible if in the same appearance if they do a Lindsay Graham imitation and hyperventilate about how the ISIS super-terrorists will be killing us all in our beds any moment now. Lindsay Graham on ISIS: "This President needs to rise to the occasion before we all git killed back here at home."

Sam Seder reported on Sen. Chicken Little's careful analysis in this 09/15/2014 YouTube video:

Anyone who claims to be a liberal or progressive or part of the "the left" is not going to make any successful antiwar argument if they couple it by echoing Graham's pants-wetting hysteria. All they will do is make themselves part of the prowar argument in the form of "Even the liberal so-and-so says that ISIS could murder us all tomorrow."

Walzer near the end of rejoinder makes it clear that he basically favors the necon/liberal-interventionist argument of the moment. He isn't just interested in the larger critique. He likes Lindsay Graham's position, though he doesn't quite reach the Senator's level of squawking fear in these pieces. Walzer writes:

For the America he excoriates is right now the only force effectively opposing or, at least, containing, the power of ISIS and therefore the beheadings and the mass executions and the enslavement of Yazidi girls. ... They require more than disgust; they require a political response. And the left should be actively engaged in advocating such a response and in talking about its agents, its methods, and its limits.

But there also was no ISIS before 2003, when the Cheney-Bush Administration invaded Iraq justifying their invasion with both fear-mongering hysteria and high-sounding moral and political justifications.

After all, since the Second World War, America only goes to war against Hitler, again and again. Our motives are always the best. And our enemies are always the worst. And anyone who opposes those wars is always accused by some of the war's supporters, not all of them as literate as Michael Walzer, and being "apologists" for the Evil Ones.

Michael Walzer on killing children in war

Michael Walzer is the editor of Dissent magazine a leading neoconservative and a Princeton philosopher who is known for his scholarly work on Just War theory. Unlike the academic work of some neocons, Walzer's is widely respected outside the neocon fraternity. (Update: Walzer's arguments in the main article I'm discussing here is very similar to those of the neoconservatives; but he did oppose the Iraq War and it would be misleading to characterize him as a "leading neoconservative" as I did initially.)

The new Spring 2009 issue of the Army War College's Parameters features an article by Walzer, Responsibility and Proportionality in State and Nonstate Wars. It's perspective seems very different, even contradictory, to a current piece that he co-authored with Avishai Margalit, Israel: Civilians & Combatants New York Review of Books 05/14/09 edition.

The New York Review piece is a commentary on the article "Assassination and Preventive Killing" by Asa Kasher and Amos Yadlin SAIS Review of International Affairs (Winter-Spring 2005). Kasher was an adviser Israeli Defense Force (IDF) College of National Defense, and Yadlin the military attaché of the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Though their article includes the disclaimer that they were not speaking in an official capacity, they focus particularly on the Israeli context. And they make what boils down to an argument that the IDF shouldn't worry about enemy civilian casualties in its wars and military actions.

Margalit and Walzer sort through their argument, which looks to me like cynical sophistry. And while they aren't quite that dismissive, they clearly refute the ethical argument being made. Their bottom line is:

This is the guideline we advocate: Conduct your war in the presence of noncombatants on the other side with the same care as if your citizens were the noncombatants. A guideline like that should not seem strange to people who are guided by the counterfactual line from the Passover Haggadah, "In every generation, a man must regard himself as if he had come out of Egypt."

And they argue:

There is nothing unusual in this demand, and nothing unique to Israel. When soldiers in Afghanistan, or Sri Lanka, or Gaza take fire from the rooftop of a building, they should not pull back and call for artillery or air strikes that may destroy most or all of the people in or near the building; they should try to get close enough to the building to find out who is inside or to aim directly at the fighters on the roof. Without a willingness to fight in that way, Israel's condemnation of terrorism and of the use of human shields by its enemies rings hollow; no one will believe it.

Yet in the Parameters article, Walzer makes an argument that sounds more like the Kasher-Yadlin position. His Parameters article sounds like a general justification for not worrying too much about the number of civilians killed in combat zones. And he also puts it in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which heavily influences the thinking of many American policymakers toward the Middle East and counterinsurgency - and just just the neocons.

He frames his Parameters argument in more characteristic neocon terms with pompous sneering at those who complain about civilian deaths:

The difficulty with an argument against conflict is that it can be made against any conflict, whether it is a war of aggression or a war of self-defense, whether it is fought to conquer another people or to rescue them from conquest, whether its purpose is to defend an empire or stop a massacre. Children die in all these wars. The only exceptions are wars that consist entirely of tank battles in the remote desert or naval battles on the high seas, but there are not many conflicts like that. And some of the wars that are not as limited and precise as those are "just wars," which means that one side is fighting rightfully. From a moral standpoint, perhaps, this is a war that should be fought—because of the character of the enemy, whose success is a prospect more fearful than war itself. What if stopping the conflict now means victory for a conquering army; or the triumph of a government bent on mass murder; or the brutal repression of religious minorities; or the survival-in-strength of a militarist or terrorist force that fully intends to renew the fighting? Should we still be persuaded by the pictures? [my emphasis]

The argument that naturally flows from this pitch is, yeah, hell, don't worry about the damn children, Our Side stands for goodness and justice and they're better off being killed by us than by somebody who would probably kill them later anyway. He actually starts early in the article trashing the notion that we should bother ourselves about those enemy children:

Children have an obvious, palpable, insurmountable innocence. The easiest way to impress upon society the awfulness of war is to show pictures of the children killed in its course.

Sometimes these pictures are used to persuade us to condemn a particular conflict, one that is currently under way - one that should be stopped, right now, because these children have been killed and many more like them remain at risk. Everyone has seen pictures like that, designed to influence the viewer. They were plentiful during the 2006 Lebanon war and more recently during the conflict in Gaza. Curiously, we are rarely shown pictures of dead or wounded children from Afghanistan, though the war against the Taliban is not entirely different from the wars against Hezbollah and Hamas; again, civilians have been killed. Those pictures make the best possible argument for stopping the fighting; nothing can be more persuasive. [my emphasis]

This is an interesting kind of whine, apparently meant to suggest that those bad liberals talk about dead children in Israel's wars but not in the AfPak War that liberals consider to be a good war. Of course, one of the biggest news items about the AkPak War for weeks has been the anger in both countries over civilian deaths from NATO air strikes. Whatever. Neocons aren't in the habit of letting facts get in the way of a good whine. Maybe he wrote the article months ago when the news reports on that were less frequent.

And what would a neocon article be without a Munich analogy coupled with a sneer at all those contemptible pussies who wanted to avoid another world war? I have a hard time avoiding sarcasm over this kind of argument, because this cavalier attitude toward war and civilian casualties did such incredible damage during the Cheney-Bush administration:

Often, it is morally necessary to fight; and then it may also be necessary, this time in the sense of “inevitable,” that civilians will die, and those who are fighting on the side of right will do some of the killing.

For very good reasons, this prospect is difficult to accept. There was too much killing in the twentieth century. One could learn any number of lessons from this fact, but the dominant lesson that has been learned is that we should avoid killing altogether, if there is any way to do that. Following World War I, a kind of pacifism, the pacifism of exhaustion and fear, spread throughout Western Europe, and since World War II a fierce aversion to war - indeed, to the use of any type of force - has played a prominent role in the politics of most European nations. In the United States, media coverage of recent conflicts brought their savagery into brutally clear focus. Even Hollywood, which once only provided movies about heroic soldiers fighting in sanitized battles, has turned to stark realism and now forces us to view the actual, unbearable carnage of war. We have learned to be skeptical of military glory. [my emphasis]

One of the lessons that much of the officer corps and the entire Republican Party took from the Vietnam War is that seeing television news about the war made people turn against it, one of the mainstreams of the Republican Party's "liberal press" dogma. And they decided the way to handle it is to do more effective propaganda and media management. We see the results now: a village is bombed or rocketed by an American aircraft; lots of people die; the locals say civilians were killed; the military says it was only "terrorists"; more investigation shows that lots of civilians were killed; the military admits a few were but most of them were "terrorists"; they say that anyway it's all the terrorists' fault because they use local people as human shields; if the reports persist and the host government is insistent about it, the military then says their careful investigation shows that some civilians were indeed killed. Reset. Repeat.

It would have been very beneficial if they had integrated what they thought they were learning about TV coverage of wars with a recognition that the fabled "credibility gap" of the Vietnam War days also had to do with the fact that persistent lying makes people not believe what you say.

But Walzer's article isn't focused on media management, except to the extent he's offering arguments to use in the later stages of the process described when the military is forced to admit civilians were killed. He particularly focuses on arguments that object to the number of civilians killed was disproportionate to the military necessity involved.

Since proportionality is a key concept of his specialty, Just War theory, it's an odd argument. But the marketing of excuses for killing civilians requires updating the packaging. So his new packaging proposal is: let's say that proportionality doesn't matter nearly so much as responsibility and The Terrorists are the ones responsible for putting civilians at risk so killing a bunch of children and adult noncombatants is all good. He doesn't put it quite that crassly. But I believe that's a fair rendering of his argument.

And one might think that a specialist in Just War theory might not want to encourage people to dismiss the whole concept. But it's hard to read this any other way:

Historically, just war theory was meant to be an alternative to Christian pacifism; now, for some of its advocates, it is pacifism’s functional equivalent — a kind of cover for people who are not prepared to admit that there are no wars they will support.

He doesn't offer any specific examples of this alleged phenomenon. And it should be obvious to anyone vaguely familiar with the concept of Just War doctrine that if the doctrine is seen as primarily a contemptible excuse for contemptible pacifist cowards and appeasers and girls, then it has no practical value in deciding whether a war one's own country is considering to wage is just or not.

The crux of Walzer's argument here comes very close to the Kasher-Yadlin argument he and Avishai Margalit criticize in the New York Review. In Parameters, Walzer says:

But if the number of likely civilian deaths is always disproportionate to the value of destroying the rocket launcher and its operatives, or the cache of rockets, so that Israel would be prohibited from responding in any fashion to the rocket attacks, then the prohibition associated with counterattacking collapses. Now even “disproportionate” counterattacks are justified and, assuming the Israelis exercise the necessary care, responsibility for civilian deaths falls solely on Hezbollah and Hamas. It is a central principle of just war theory that the self-defense of a people or a country cannot be made morally impossible, and so the more successful Hezbollah and Hamas are in hiding among civilians, the less useful the proportionality argument is—or, to be more precise, the less limiting it is. The more civilians are used as shields, the greater the danger to which they are exposed, and responsibility for that exposure falls on the people who are using them. We now recognize that this is a common strategy utilized by nonstate fighters. It does not really matter, from a moral standpoint, whether the civilians agree to be used by these fighters or resent the position into which they are forced. In Lebanon and Gaza, it is obvious that some civilians fell into both categories. That is probably also the case in Afghanistan. [my emphasis]

Cut through the thin layer of sophistry and the argument is pretty simple: go ahead and kill all the civilians you want as long as you can claim there's a terrorist somewhere in the same country.

Morally repugnant doesn't always equate to impractical. But it's well worth noticing that Walzer is drawing his examples primarily from the IDF's battles with Hamas and Hizbullah. Israeli policymakers of recent years have not been seeking to win the sympathy and support of the civilian population in the West Bank, Gaza and southern Lebanon. Israel also isn't going anywhere. The nation has existed in a hostile neighborhood since its War of Independence in 1948 (61 years ago) and the Six Day War of 1967 (42 years ago next month). Their policymakers are very much aware that they could be facing decades of recurrent military conflict in those areas.

But in the Iraq War and the AkPak War, most Americans presumably have a notion that they will lead to a decrease in violence with something close to peace and stability resulting. And that all or most of the American troops will be removed from those areas when that goal is attained. We've already been fighting six years in Iraq, though we now have an official goal of 2011 to get our troops out. We've been fighting in Afghanistan for seven and a half years with no end in sight.

How long are we willing to continue in those places in a state of permanent war? Eight more years? Forty-two? Sixty-one? If we want to see some exit earlier than those time frames, then killing a lot of civilians probably isn't conducive to that goal.

One last thing from the Parameters article. It's an accepted part of US military practice that we use heavy firepower to minimize the loss of the lives of US soldiers. It's widely accepted in the military and among politicians of both parties. Rarely specified is that this often means causing a large number of civilian deaths on the other side. Their relatives don't vote in American elections. But whether attempting to fight the AkPak war by killing and displacing large numbers of civilians is a practical policy is still a relevant question. And one which has its own relation to the number of American casualties incurred in a war, as distinct from a single battle. Walzer gets cute in the following paragraph, which one the face of it seems to be an argument for attempting to minimize civilian casualties even if it risks more of Our Side's soldiers' lives in an individual operation:

In early 1943, the Allies discovered that the Germans were operating a heavy-water plant in Vemork, Norway, an operation vital to the Nazis’ effort to produce an atomic bomb. It seemed—realistically enough — critically important to destroy this plant. The plant was, unfortunately, located in the center of a small Norwegian town and could not be attacked from the air without endangering Norwegian civilians. The Germans had not deliberately built the plant there; that just happened to be where it was. The proportionality argument would readily justify an air attack; indeed, if every civilian in the town were killed, the toll would not have been "disproportionate to" the value of stopping the Nazis from acquiring atomic weapons. But the Allies felt that it was their responsibility to avoid civilian deaths, and so they decided to send commandos to destroy the plant. The first commando raid failed, with the loss of 34 British soldiers; a second attempt succeeded — to everyone’s amazement, without loss. The responsibility argument is a bit easier in this example, since the inhabitants of Vemork were friendly civilians; still, it is important that responsibility, in the eyes of Allied decisionmakers, clearly trumped proportionality. Later in the war, heavy-water production at the plant was restarted and security tightened. Following debates in London, the decision was made to bomb the plant; 22 civilians were killed. It is doubtful that the Allies paid reparations to the families of the civilians killed, which would have been the responsible thing to do. But what is most impressive about this example is the acceptance of responsibility that led 34 soldiers to give their lives in an effort to avoid the air-raid. [my emphasis]

Most American readers of this article are likely to draw the conclusion, not that the British were admirably responsible, but that obviously they should have just blown the facility up and not worry about the civilian deaths. Because we use firepower to save the lives of our soldiers, the argument goes, and the civilians 22 civilians killed in the later air attack would just be "collateral damage". After all, as the second raid showed, the 34 British soldiers died to spare the lives of "only" 22 civilians.

This is an odd story on other levels. It's worth noting that under the rules of engagement followed in the air war in the Second World War, such a facility was a legitimate target for bombing. And the British were nominally less scrupulous than the Americans in their concern for civilians during bomber attacks. Britain adopted an explicit strategy of using bombing to damage the morale of the civilian population. But since both British and American bombers were lucky to hit the right city in their bombing runs in that war, much less a particular building, I'm not sure how much different the results were. And speaking of that lack of precision, I wonder if the decision to run two commando raids on the Vemork facility didn't have more to do with a concern for precision than scruples about civilian casualties, especially after the first run failed at the cost of 34 lives.

That example serves in the Parameters article as an argument for "responsibility" which Walzer uses to say (pretty much explicitly) that The Terrorists are responsible for any civilian casualties Israel or the United States may cause in fighting The Terrorists in Gaza, Lebanon or Afghanistan. He does say that the "free fire zones" that were used in the Vietnam War, in which any human being there was considered to be a legitimate target for lethal force, aren't morally acceptable. But, then, that's safe enough to argue now, because that experience isn't being used prominently as a justification for current practices by the US or Israel. And Walzer's own argument effectively declares Gaza, Lebanon and Afghanistan free-fire zones for the US and Israel.

It really makes me wonder why he wrote the article with Avishai Margalit at around the same time. Because he is really making a very similar argument to the one he an Margalit are refuting in their piece for the New York Review. Although I was surprised in reading the NY Review piece that Walzer was one of the co-authors; I was thinking at the time that he seems to be changing his outlook. But the Parameters article suggests otherwise.

For another article critical of Walzer's perspective, see Michael Walzer's Tortured Ethics by Mark LeVine 07/26/06. That was during the last Israel-Lebanon War in which Walzer was defending Israel's most controversial military practices in that conflict.

Tags: just war doctrine, michael walzer

Remembering 1968: Opposing wars, then and now

Protesting the Vietnam War in Oakland, 1967

The Dissent magazine symposium on 1968: Lessons Learned in the Spring 2008 issue includes a number of contributions. I discussed Michael Kazin's in an earlier post.

Another essay in the group brings up an interesting comparison between public opposition to the Vietnam War in the 1960s and opposition to the Iraq War today.

Dissent editor Michael Kazin Walzer is still worrying about all those scruffy hippies and the left-sectarians who carried Viet Cong flags in antiwar marches. Some people apparently will never get over the faction-fights of those days. I did think this was an interesting fact in his essay, though:

It was opposition to the Vietnam War that filled my time and occupied my mind in 1967 and ’68. I was one of the organizers of Vietnam Summer in ’67 and then of the Cambridge Neighborhood Committee on the War in the fall of that year. The CNC circulated petitions to put a question about the war on the November ballot and, after a number of legal challenges, succeeded in doing that. So the citizens of Cambridge were invited to vote for or against the war, and about 40 percent of them voted against. That was roughly the same percentage that similar campaigns achieved in Flint, Michigan, and San Francisco. Not good enough, obviously, especially since we had chosen the most favorable sites. Look at the results more closely, however, and you will see a far more serious problem with what seemed to us the most obvious kind of left politics.

... In the CNC, we didn't spell America with a "k" and we didn’t wave Viet Cong flags, but some of our allies did, and we never figured out how to distance ourselves from them. Too many leftists in those years believed in the maxim of "No enemies to the left!" And the result was that we made enemies to our right that we didn't need to make, men and women whom we needed to have as friends. (my emphasis)

(For German readers, anti-Vietnam War protesters sometimes used the German spelling "Amerika" on signs or banners.) A couple of fact-checks. For what it's worth, although "Viet Cong flag" was a common phrase and still is (obviously), there was actually no "Viet Cong flag". The flag people like Walzer are presumably talking about would have been the flag of North Vietnam, formally known as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV).

On a perhaps less picky point, his comment, "Too many leftists in those years believed in the maxim of 'No enemies to the left!'", is subjective, I suppose, in that he may mean that three or four people taking such a position were too many. But otherwise that statement doesn't make much sense. In a context like that, "left" and "right" get to be pretty darn fuzzy, especially since those who described themselves as "left" in those days tended to distinguish themselves with some passion from "liberals", and vice versa.

I don't know the exact wording of the ballot measures to which he refers. But if we can take those votes as fairly representative of actual public opinion on the war in those locations, in the fall of 2007 in what the organizers apparently considered the three the most favorable venues for such a vote in the country, only about 40% in the fall of 1967 was willing to vote against the war.

If we take spring of 1965, when Lyndon Johnson sent American troops to assume the lead combat role in the Vietnam War, to be the starting point of the war, fall of 2007 was 2 1/2 years into the war. And even the most antiwar cities were showing only around 40% against. At PollingReport.com, we can see some comparable nationwide figures from the comparable period in the Iraq War, which would be late 2005.

In a USA Today/Gallup Poll of Oct 21-23, 2005, 29% thought the Iraq War was going "moderately badly" and 28% "very badly". Only 7% said it was going "very well" (the White House/Pentagon position) and 35% "moderately well". Given the barrage of happy-talk from official sources and the wretched coverage of the war by the Establishment press, it really is striking that fully 57% thought the war was going badly.

The ABC News/Washington Post Poll of Oct 30-Nov 2 found 52% agreeing that the US should "should keep its military forces in Iraq until civil order is restored there, even if that means continued U.S. military casualties" with no time period specified on the length of the commitment. While 44% favored withdrawing from Iraq " even if that means civil order is not restored there".

A Newsweek poll of Nov 10-11 found 30% approving of Bush's handling of the war, 65% disapproving. And a Newsweek poll of Sept 8-9 found 46% saying that "the United States did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq" and 49% disagreeing.

While those are perfect comparisons to the 1967 votes Walzer cites, the contrast is striking between the percentage of people in (presumably) the most antiwar cities in late 1967 who opposed the war and the number expressing some kind of rejection of the Iraq War at the comparable period in that war. And that's dating the start of the Vietnam War from early 1965. In fact, a significant number of US troops were present in Vietnam before that, and Vietnam was one of the two main issues in the 1964 Presidential campaign, along with Southern desegregation.

And, in case you're wondering, Walzer basically concludes that the experiences of the "left" (not really defined) in the 1960s was basically ruined by those dang hippies and Vietcong flags.

Tags: 1968, culture war, michael walzer