Enquiry

One unfortunate fact of this era is the way the Bush Administration, and many other conservatives, tend to stereotype dissenters as unpatriotic sympathizers with the enemy. This is an unscrupulous attempt to deflect legitimate criticism.

Yet there is a kernel of truth in every stereotype, as evidenced at The Heathlander, a hard left blog I came across via the WordPress portal. Its author, Jamie Stern-Weiner (can that be a real name?), explains “resistance to the occupation of Iraq is legitimate. It has the support of the majority of the Iraqi people, and by and large it does not target civilians.”

I’m not going to fault him for being unpatriotic (he’s apparently British, but of course Britain has been supporting the US in Iraq). I reject patriotism and nationalism. One should analyze the rightness or wrongness of policies logically and without prejudice. If the invasion of Iraq was wrong (not merely unwise, but morally wrong), then violent resistance to the occupation could be justified.

But I will fault his logic in defending the insurgency. He projects his own values onto the insurgents, defending them not as they are, but as they would be if he were leading them.

Though he responds with great verbiage to criticism of the insurgents, there is one quoted criticism I did not see him address. It is by Thomas Friedman who says of the insurgents, “They are killing us so they can rule Iraqis.” His point is to consider the insurgents with respect to their objective. Stern-Weiner notably neglects the purpose of the insurgency (hence its likely outcome should it succeed), and he focuses just on its intrinsic morality as an action.

For a simple thought experiment, imagine a bank robbery in progress. To make my experiment more palatable to leftist readers, let’s say most of this bank’s customers are working class residents, and the robber is part of a criminal syndicate set up by Republicans to skirt campaign finance laws. So there should be no sympathy for the robber. Hell, let’s just call him Karl Rove.

Distracted by the bag of money the bank teller just handed him, Rove is suddenly disarmed and knocked out by an adroit customer. Without giving the teller time enough to breath a sigh of relief, the customer picks up the bag of money and the gun and shoots three people on his way out the door.

If we analyze only the use of force against Rove, the customer’s resistance could seem justified. But once that resistance is understood in a larger context, where it is not to right a wrong, but to perpetuate another wrong, its moral color changes.

It’s cliché that the ends don’t justify the means. But nor do the means — the act of resistance against a wrongful use of force — automatically justify the ends. The goals of the insurgents, as far as I can tell, are not to set up some sort of pleasant democracy. To the extent they are influenced by Baathism, Islamism, or naked lust for power, the outcome of their success would almost certainly be despotism.

The current US-installed government is not looking too good to me right now, but if it were violently overthrown by people with no democratic or (small-l) libertarian credentials, I expect things would get much worse. Thus I don’t support the insurgency, even while I am opposed to the war. The latter, of course, does not require the former.

Update: Jamie Stern-Weiner is male, so I corrected pronouns in this post. My apologies for that. I’ve known female Jamie’s and guessed the wrong way.