When I re-read my blogging for the first three years or so, between 2003 and 2006, I can really see just how much the post-9/11 wars drove my fairly naive vision of what the job of an online public sphere ought to be. I was a bit like a teenager trying to prove to the blustering men at the dinner party that he belonged with them in the argument.
I can also see how pointless that expectation was. Not because the Bush Administration and its various defenders were determined to do what they wanted to do whether or not anybody objected, not because there were already online writers on the right as fully committed to lies and distortion as their present-day counterparts.
No, the worst problem were well-established writers and intellectuals who decided that abandoning any pretense of skepticism or independence was a patriotic duty. I’m not talking about the feeling that 9/11 warranted some sort of military response—I felt that way too. Had it been kept narrowly to the hot pursuit of the planners of the attack and the destruction of their secure bases, I am sure that the world today would be a very different place.
I’m talking about the men who were either playing out their Boomer-specific regrets over the Vietnam War or who were simply trying to show the people in power that this time, you could count on liberals to be patriotic and loyal.
I have never shaken the memory of watching Leon Wieseltier debate Mark Danner at Swarthmore about the war. He was so confident and relentless in his certainty that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that global liberalism was at its crossroads and that this was the time to finally unseat tyrants that I kept wondering if I was right to think that this was inevitably going to turn quickly into an imperial occupation and become more illiberal and destructive than what it replaced. I read now and I see myself get pushed into that defensive crouch that a lot of mainstream liberals have never gotten out of: no, look, this isn’t partisan! Really! I was yearning to find some way to have a conversation, to get people who thought it was right to go to war to take the doubts and questions and problems as seriously as any democratic thinker has to. Danner was in the same defensive situation all night at that debate, grasping at whatever he could to make the audience stick with some basic skepticism about the evidence for WMDs or about the Bush Administration’s already-aggressively unreal understanding of what the war would lead to.
Bill Keller pushed skeptical stories out of the New York Times to show that he was a loyal American. Men who thought themselves tough guys like Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman yearned to finally prove that liberalism could be muscular enough to go to war in defense of its values, and finally prove how squishy and incoherent the rest of the left were. If you insisted that the history of hegemonic wars followed by state-building occupations was nothing but grim folly, some asshole invariably parroted something they’d read (poorly and cynically) about the British in Malaysia or worse yet said “Well, what about West Germany and Japan after World War II? Huh? I see, you must have Bush derangement syndrome or otherwise you’d credit that it can be done.”
And really almost no one in that vast wasteland of enabling has ever had to reckon with it. Sure, Hitchens got himself waterboarded and agreed it was torture. Such magnanimity! Sure, Keller eventually wrote a quick self-absolution and then went back to public life. Sure, George Packer wrote a book saying “Wow, did I get it wrong” and then went back to being churlish in public discussions of the war, when he deigned to talk about it all.
All those people dead and for what? If our online public sphere has turned into an endless series of deceptions and abuse, and self-reflection has been largely banished, the discursive formations around the Iraq War had a lot to do with that. Some of the people who today most piously wring their hands about fake news or viewpoint diversity now were the people least interested in the skeptical pursuit of truth or crediting the validity of opposition then.