WHAT THE LEFT NO LONGER SAYS

I thought it might be worth linking to this essay from September 24, 2001 by Susan Sontag. It is remarkable in that it defies the political correctness of the 9/11 aftermath. She wrote:

The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgement that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed super-power, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards.

This article, I believe, provided the basis for Andrew Sullivan's "Sontag Award Nominee" series on his blog, where he scoured the internet for people voicing sentiments resembling Sontag's and linked to them to angrily mock them: a feisty self-appointed inquisitor.

Yet I think everything in Sontag's paragraph was pretty much right.

Sentiments like Sontag's have been strangely scarce in the past three years; or rather, they have been strangely confined to a left fringe. Is this because (as some would say) Bush led the right in insisting that the actions were a result of an evil enemy and were in no way blowback, and forced Sontag's idea out of mainstream public discourse? Maybe, but it's interesting that mainstream Democrats also came to avoid Sontag's formulation. If there was an inquisition, mainstream Democrats were complicit in it. Now Kerry echoes much of Bush's rhetoric.

I may seem like a paradox: I agree with Sontag and yet ardently support Bush in the so-called war on terror.

But that's not quite it.

I agree with Sontag and other marginalized lefties that the 9/11 attacks were blowback for particular, iniquitous American policies. Bush's first response to 9/11, "evildoers," "axis of evil," "our enemies thought we would splinter in fear and selfishnes... they are as wrong as they are evil," "let's roll," and so on; and this became his trademark, his public persona. George "War on Terror" Bush.

I wonder if he regrets that now. Like those musicians who have one early hit that tags them for the rest of their lives, which they think is mediocre and soon start to hate, yet they have to play it over and over again for the crowds.

In general, the concept of the "war on terror" gives me the creeps. It has an Orwellian ring to it. But I like the war on terror in George Bush's hands because in practice it's been a war to neutralize the world's most totalitarian regimes. The war on terror has given way to a forward strategy of freedom. It's almost as if Bush thought about it a little more and came to agree with Sontag that 9/11 was blowback for bad policies, and set out to change those policies. He pulled the troops out of Saudi Arabia. He advocated a Palestinian state. He ended the sanctions and bombing of Iraq, by ending the regime that needed to be sanctioned and bombed. More broadly, he increased funding to fight AIDS in Africa, and much more.

The scars of the anti-Sontag inquisition remain with us. The blowback question has not been adequately dealt with: the right and the center ignore it because it's politically incorrect, and the left is marginalized (in general, rightly so, of course). The debate goes on between those who say that we were wrong to invade Iraq because it was a diversion from the war on terror, and those who say we were right to invade Iraq because Iraq had actual and potential ties to terror. No one says that we were right to invade Iraq because the vile way we were treating Iraq gave the terrorists a just cause for attacking us. No one says we were right to invade Iraq because the terrorists had a point.