War for War's Sake

Shorter Roger Cohen: Because US policy in the Middle East before 2003 was in some respects unsatisfactory, the invasion of Iraq must be considered a good thing independently of its actual consequences.

This business where "Totalitarian hell - malign stability - holds no hope" whereas "violent instability is unacceptable but not hopeless" and therefore the invasion is great is just moronic. The Iraq adventure was, among other things, massively costly both in dollars and in American lives. Once you start thinking about whether or not we should engage in massive expenditures for humanitarian purposes it makes sense to hold ourselves to a higher standard -- we might ask, for example, that our massive humanitarian expenditures have some clear benefits and not result in large-scale death and destruction.

On the Cohen standard, by contrast, if we take any bad situation and just render it very chaotic that counts as a good idea. So that, maybe, a massive preemptive nuclear first strike on Beijing would be a good idea because, hey, it would hold out "hope" of democratic change in China. Sure it would probably result in mass death and chaos leading to more mass death, but if we use a little "imagination" we can see that it might all be okay in the end.

Defense Department photo by Staff Sgt. Dennis J. Henry Jr., USAF.

Comments

> On the Cohen standard, by contrast, if we take
> any bad situation and just render it very
> chaotic that counts as a good idea.

PNAC has quite explicitly endorsed the "stir the beehive" theory of what US policy should be in the Middle East. Given that the "impose US-friendly government by force" plan didn't work out, I think the neocons and Radical Right are quite happy to have chaos throughout the Middle East.

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | June 25, 2007 10:46 AM

...and to think that we all used to laugh our asses off at Adam Yoshida. We now have 'respectable' wankers like Richard Cohen and Norm Podhoretz advocating lunatic courses of action and saying, "sure lots of people will die, but in the end it will be worth it."

Posted by r€nato | June 25, 2007 10:54 AM

Also, make sure there are sufficient flower shops and the residents know where to find them.

Posted by Douglas Watts | June 25, 2007 10:55 AM

A hypothetical first strike on Beijing, nothing. They were assuring Taipei through back channels that they would back any level of declared independence, which was the necessary for triggering a conflict with Beijing. These are adolescents playing Risk, and we're the pieces.

Posted by MarkC | June 25, 2007 10:59 AM

you wouldn't really think that cost-benefit analysis was such an obscure concept, but apparently it is.

Posted by howard | June 25, 2007 11:00 AM

We now have 'respectable' wankers like Richard Cohen and Norm Podhoretz advocating lunatic courses...

This was by Roger Cohen. The only lunatic course that Richard Cohen has advocated recently is the pardoning of Libby. Richard was pro-Iraq war, but in a jokey quoting "Fiddler on the Roof" kind of way (he actually used quote from Fiddler on the Roof as his main reason for supporting the way, I'm not making this up).

Posted by TomT | June 25, 2007 11:05 AM

When is someone going to drop a fucking bomb on Roger Cohen (and Richard "therapeutic violence" Cohen while we're at it) and see if that doesn't offer the hope of improvement.

Posted by Alan in SF (In Paris) | June 25, 2007 11:08 AM

Cohen is exactly correct. Take the Spanish Inquisition, for example. If it hadn't happened we wouldn't have had the Monty Python sketch about it. That was a very funny sketch, so the Inquisition was really an improvement over the status quo. QED.

Only liberal, back-stabby, elitists would argue otherwise.

Posted by DMonteith | June 25, 2007 11:10 AM

richard was pro-Iraq war, which is certainly a reason to consider him untrustworthy, on both a moral and intellectual sense. I recently read his column praising Powell's presentation at the UN; let me just say that it didn't age well, and wasn't worth sh*t when it was fresh.

Posted by Barry | June 25, 2007 11:12 AM

What does the photo have to do with the post?

Posted by Emphyrio | June 25, 2007 11:20 AM

In future could you "left wing liberals" please include the much more "massive cost in lives" that the Iraqi people have sustained, or are we still using the Old Testament standard of 10 of yours for one of mine? Yeeesh, talk about liberal myopia.....

Posted by Les Izmore | June 25, 2007 11:21 AM

The Iraq adventure was, among other things, massively costly both in dollars and in American lives.

Massively costly in American dollars and Iraqi lives.

Posted by Mithras | June 25, 2007 11:27 AM

Wow, in this thread, I certainly didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition.

Posted by Glenn | June 25, 2007 11:30 AM

'So that, maybe, a massive preemptive nuclear first strike on Beijing would be a good idea because, hey, it would hold out "hope" of democratic change in China'

Please don't give them any ideas. Please.

Posted by JohnTh | June 25, 2007 11:52 AM

If it's insane, if it involves death, destruction and debt, if it's utterly evil, they've ALREADY THOUGHT OF IT, JohTh.

Ah gah-ron-TEE it.

Posted by Daddy-O | June 25, 2007 12:09 PM

This is just yet another attempt for a writer to rationalize a criminal war of adventure based on lies without have to admit as such. This is just the "war can have splendidly serendipitous results" trial meme.

Posted by Douglas Watts | June 25, 2007 12:12 PM

"On the Cohen standard, by contrast, if we take any bad situation and just render it very chaotic that counts as a good idea."

The idea that revolutionary chaos is, in and of it self, a good thing is basic to mainstream neocon thought -- not to mention some of the more extreme examples of Maoist thought. Liberal interventionists, being weak of both will and mind, have been amazing prone to be be seduced by the neocons, just as a generation of campus radicals was led down the garden path by the Maoists.

Roger Cohen meet the Gang of Four. Gang of Four, Roger Cohen. Charmed I'm sure.

Posted by Peter Principle | June 25, 2007 12:31 PM

Wow, in this thread, I certainly didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition.
Posted by Glenn

The Bush Administration motto:
Our two weapons are: fear, and surprise, and a ruthless efficiency

Posted by CapMidnight | June 25, 2007 12:52 PM

Reminds me of the creationists' looney argument against evolution (and in favor of *cough cough* 'intelligent design')--that if a tornado hits a junkyard, it will never leave a brandy-new Boeing 747 in its wake. I wonder why they don't believe the same thing when it comes to foreign policy.

Posted by Deadeye Dick Cheney | June 25, 2007 1:04 PM

To MarkC

To extend your Risk analogy a little further, the right-wingers seem to believe that if you are losing the game, you just need to upset the playing board, as chaos is better than actually losing.

Posted by Deadeye Dick Cheney | June 25, 2007 1:07 PM

The Atlantic actually pays you to write this Yglesias?

Where can I sign up for the mediocre commentary gravy train?

Posted by Chaos | June 25, 2007 1:11 PM

The truth, and the numbers, reveal the exact opposite.

Life under a brutal, murderous, and at times unpredictable tyrant is objectively better than batsh*t warlord chaos hell.

It was true in Afghanistan before Iraq. Soviet-linked Afghanistan was both a subjectively and objectively better society than the chaotic hell we left them with.

The USA was better off, too, with two World Trade Centers in New York and no fundamentalist muslim terrorist attacks from those directly arising out of the warlord chaos hell our foreign policy establishment created in Afghanistan.

Posted by El Cid | June 25, 2007 1:11 PM

The idea that revolutionary chaos is, in and of it self, a good thing is basic to mainstream neocon thought -- not to mention some of the more extreme examples of Maoist thought.

The source is Trotskyism, though, not Maoism. Many of the leading neocons were formerly Trotskyites...but I don't know of any former Maoists.

There can be no doubt that Trotsky's idea of "permanent revolution" is part of the neoconservative mindset. I'm not sure they'd even deny this -- they'd deny it came from Trotsky, but I think they'd admit they believe in the value of "permanent revolution."

Posted by TomT | June 25, 2007 1:13 PM

El Cid, why don't you shove that nonsense up your ass where you got it from?

Afghanistan in a civil war or under the Taliban was objectively better than now. What a riot. What do you base that on? Opinion polls? Mortality rates? Education? Starvation? What?

Iraq under Saddam was objectively better than Iraq now. Why don't Iraqis believe that? Why do they consistently say they're better off now? How deep does your racism go, El Cid? It's a common tactic among you guys to ignore the opinions of the non-white people when those opinions don't mesh well with your ideological paradigm.

Tell me, why is it that the opinions of non-white people only matter to you guys when those opinions are "We hate you because you're imperialist!" Then we have to listen to them, nod our heads, accept that its our fault or otherwise we're warmongers. But when they say something that your ideologically-based preconceptions don't agree with, they might as well have been shouting into a vacuum.

Posted by Chaos | June 25, 2007 1:16 PM

Uh, Chaos, you maybe missed the Soviet-linked part.

Posted by Ed Marshall | June 25, 2007 1:21 PM

Chaos, you may not read the points you hysterically mis-respond too, but others do.

Please note, first of all, the use of the term "objectively." This has many meanings, but certainly some people with heads understand this to imply things that are measurable -- numbers, facts, data -- things other than the type of "information" pulled out of propagandists' asses.

So, Iraq under Saddam was objectively better off than Iraq now. By the numbers. In terms of those being killed. In terms of mortality. In terms of health. In terms of infant mortality. In terms of length of life. In terms of education. In terms of industry. In terms of income.

Do you have any way of disputing that? Would you like to condemn numbers to racism?

Now, sure it would have been better had Iraqis been able to retain all those things until Saddam died, or was replaced, etc., such as has happened in many other nations. Chile's return to democracy after Pinochet's brutal and incompetent tyranny did not require being blown apart into a land of chaotic warlord hell.

But perhaps you would prefer it that way, because your small-minded fantasies imagine you and Sgt Rock blasting your way to freedom, and anyone who doesn't share your comic book rejection of reason and reality somehow becomes "racist".

And as has yet been pointed out, my reference to Afghanistan was pre-Taliban, pre-civil war, pre-mujahedeen.

Again, go back to the numbers, which will temporarily require you pull your cowardly head from your enormous and over-worked ass.

Posted by El Cid | June 25, 2007 1:27 PM

When we were adolescents playing Risk, we had a more sophisticated understanding than these bozos.

It amazes me that Cohen can bemoan the vile cynicism of our past support for Saddam and other Mid-east oppressors, while defending a more cynical, and far more lethal, power projection currently in progress. Our invasion of Iraq was not 'humanitarian intervention', as anyone could see from Rumsfeld's response to the looting in Baghdad.

Please, Paul Krugman, come back from vacation. SOON. I can't read too many more of these.

Posted by biggerbox | June 25, 2007 1:30 PM

Of course, it should be pointed out that what hawk morons really hated about Iraq were not the oppressive aspects of the society -- that's why they were so eager to aid him for so many, many decades -- but the parts of its nationalist course which actually developed its citizenry.

Now they have achieved the best of both worlds: they have retained societal oppression, though now Iraqis face cellular warlord thuggery instead of a unified tyranny; yet the hawks have destroyed the developed aspects of Iraqi life which they hated so much.

Posted by El Cid | June 25, 2007 1:31 PM

Why do they consistently say they're better off now

In fairness, you're asking the ones who aren't dead and who haven't fled.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | June 25, 2007 1:45 PM

Spreading chaos on purpose in the hopes that something good will result from it is most certainly not part of Trotskyism, and is unrelated to the theory of permanent revolution; I also don't see how it's connected to the Mass line and Maoism (that's not to say some ultra-left groups didn't advocate such a strategy). I really wish people would stop blaming Trotskyism for neoconservatism, or other variants of imperialism.

The thing I don't understand is this: I agree with Cohen and others that it was a really bad idea to support numerous bloody dictatorships. In fact, I think it's still a bad idea. So why not stop doing it instead of trying to clean up in the manner of an insane sorcerer's apprentice after the regimes we supported previously? You know, get ahead of the damn curve for once? The fact that this isn't up for discussion is a pretty strong indication that supporters of "humanitarian intervention" by and large don't really give a shit about brutal oppression. Where's Cohen and friends calling for a stop of support to Ethiopia? Or even, dare I mention it, Israel? Or Morocco's occupation of the West Sahara? And so forth.

Posted by christian h. | June 25, 2007 1:52 PM

The preference of many people for strong rule over anarchy and Hobbesian violence is actually pretty strong. Russians love Putin because they credit him for bringing order to the post-Soviet Russian state after the chaotic Yelstin years. This is why 1/4 of Russians still love Stalin even if they aren't communists. In democratic Japan for about forty years, the majority of voters opted for the LDP soft authoritarian democracy because they feared the results of letting another party get a shot. Part of the reason the Chinese chose Mao over Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) was the belief he was more competent (and nationalistic) than Jiang and would re-unify China and end inflation. Since Tiananmen, the government has successfully used the Chinese fear of baoluan (chaos) to justify its crackdown and its control of civil society. The Chinese might not like seeing innocent students killed, but they hate the idea of their country once again torn to shreds even more. The German hyperinflation led to Nazism and the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Just about the only exception is Cambodia under Pol Pot, which was probably the worst hell on earth post-WWII, and thus a bit of an outlier. In addition, the responses to views on the American invasion inside Iraq break down along sectarian lines. There is a reason anarchism went out of fashion everywhere except Sex Pistol cover band concerts.

Posted by Reality Man | June 25, 2007 1:53 PM

"I really wish people would stop blaming Trotskyism for neoconservatism, or other variants of imperialism."

Then tell neocons and their friends to stop praising Trotsky amongst themselves. William Kristol was rather honest about this. Fukuyama has documented it and he was a bona-fide kool-aid drinker. If I'm less lazy later I can post the link from an article published not too long ago by the National Review that praised Trotsky throughout. Trotsky's combination of international revolution, state terror and the militarization of labor led to mass chaos. He might not have been an anarchist, but he (and to an extent, Lenin) needed and helped ferment anarchy to reach their goals.

Posted by Reality Man | June 25, 2007 1:59 PM

Well, in another hideous case of humans driven to choose unifying tyranny over chaos -- the desperate and starving rural Cambodian population was driven into the hands of the lunatic (and once in power, genocidal) Khmer Rouge murderers by almost a decade of nightmarish carpet bombing from the US hawks, 1965 - 1973.

http://www.yale.edu/cgp/us.html
Map of US bombs dropped on Cambodia. Does not include more recent USAF bombing survey declassified data which reveals far more massive bombing during LBJ administration than was assumed by earlier scholars and historians.

Desperate and frightened people make these choices. In this case I'd say that the rural populace chose wrong, but it's crazy to portray the situation as favoring reasoned decision-making.

Yet it's never too soon for supposedly wise foreign policy mavens to always act shocked, shocked that when aggressive attacks by a major power destroys a society, that the new leaders who emerge from the rubble are often really not nice people.

Posted by El Cid | June 25, 2007 2:04 PM

Neocons praise Trotsky, therefore neoconservatism is a variant of Trotskyism. Nice logic.
I'm also curious where anything Trotsky did led to anything, given that he was kind of, you know, on the run rather soon after the Russian revolution (and yes, of course there's chaos while a revolution is going on, that is usually unavoidable - but it is completely different from creating chaos for its own sake in the hopes that it will result in something good just on its own accord.)

Posted by christian h. | June 25, 2007 2:09 PM

Hey Jewish liberals... can you call up your cousins and tell them to call up their cousins and their cousins and so on until you've reached all the Jews in this country, and beg them to STOP searching for the pony? I swear to god, if it's not a Cohen, its a Podhoretz, a Goldberg, a Kagan, a Krauthammer, a Lieberman, a Horowitz, a Kristol, an Abrams, a Peretz, a Steyn, a Perle, a Feith, a Wolfowitz, or a Witmann. Seriously, what is UP with all the Jewish people pushing for more mass death in Iraq?

Posted by Roberto | June 25, 2007 2:18 PM

Neocons praise Trotsky, therefore neoconservatism is a variant of Trotskyism.

Presumably you're too much of a moron to reason with, but is not reasonable to assume that if a group of people used to be Trotskyites and continue to hold certain beliefs that are similar to some tenets of Trotskyism, that these beliefs might have grown out of their earlier flirtation with Trotskyism?

Are you really so dim that you don't see the logic here? Does the Weekly Standard use a special ink that gives its readers brain damage?

Posted by TomT | June 25, 2007 2:28 PM

By the way, I agree it is unfair to "blame" Trotskyism for neoconservatism, the same way it's unfair to blame the White Album for Charles Manson's murder spree. But I think that the neoconservative's love of chaos -- I'm sure they have some other name for it, "creative destruction" or God knows what -- is rooted in some twisted variant of some Trotskyite tenet.

If a bunch of people who used to believe in one revolutionary philosophy now believe in another, it's only reasonable to assume that there's some connection there, no?

I might also point out that if any of you are unlucky enough to have Trotskyite acquaintances (as I am), you will be shocked at how much they sound like neoconservatives. Change "corporatism" to "Islamofascism" and you won't be able to tell one from the other. I wish I was kidding here.

Posted by TomT | June 25, 2007 2:34 PM

Neocons praise Trotsky, therefore neoconservatism is a variant of Trotskyism. Nice logic. I'm also curious where anything Trotsky did led to anything, given that he was kind of, you know, on the run rather soon after the Russian revolution...

Who on earth said that the neo-Khans preferred role models who succeeded? Judge their tree by their fruit, and you see that's an unnecessary assumption.

But you don't have to carefully evaluate Trotsky's historical role to understand that the neo-Khans don't care about such things. Trotsky was a successfully persuasive intellectual who obtained loyal followers who were in turn committed to his revolutionary vision and ideology.

It literally matters zero to energetic neo-Khans whether Trotsky had been enormously successful in the on-the-ground results of his strategies, or an empirical failure.

What else would neo-Khans want out of their internal sense of Trotsky other than the model of committed intellectual revolutionist reactonism which they believed would win them their insane goals?

Posted by El Cid | June 25, 2007 2:35 PM

Neo-conservatives came out of the Right Shachtmanite camp and that's way, way, more important to explaining their mindless bellicosity than anything you can tease out of the road backwards to Trotsky.

Posted by Ed Marshall | June 25, 2007 2:45 PM

El Cid:

"The USA was better off, too, with two World Trade Centers in New York and no fundamentalist muslim terrorist attacks from those directly arising out of the warlord chaos hell our foreign policy establishment created in Afghanistan."

Wrong as wrong could be. We completely utterly abandoned Afghanistan to become a failed state after using it to bleed the Soviets.

Some want us to abandon Iraq too. If there's another major terrorist attach they will conveniently blame it on the foreign policy establishment again.

Posted by Peter K. | June 25, 2007 2:55 PM

Peter K., you can keep arguing for maybe another decade on how building up a terrorist mafia force in Afghanistan really did good for everyone and the problem was only that we walked away (as if had the US attempted to continue meddling in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden and his forces would not have found other cause to find frustration with the US, despite his declarations that he had US abandonment issues), but the fortunate fact is that view is fading along with much other nonsense justified by hawkish Cold War mythmaking.

So, right as right could be, but I do respect you guys for your tenacity in trying to keep that mujahedeen fire alive.

Posted by El Cid | June 25, 2007 3:09 PM

"I'm also curious where anything Trotsky did led to anything, given that he was kind of, you know, on the run rather soon after the Russian revolution."

You're compressing the timeline here. Trotsky actually had a rather impressive amount of power and influence under Lenin. Even after he died, he was still one of the big three along with Bukharin (how the hell is his name in Firefox's spell check?) and Stalin. Stalin first made it clear that he was going to win before Trotsky left. That left Trotsky a decent amount of time for him to do a lot of damage and kill a lot of people. Helping to implement War Communism can do that. The Cheka was in part a part of his legacy before he took flight.

Posted by Reality Man | June 25, 2007 3:39 PM

Is Roberto kidding or is he just creepy? After all, Jews were the religious group most against the war. PNAC State of Principles signatories like Steve Forbes, Francis Fukuyama, Jeb Bush, Zalmay Khalizad, Dan Quayle, Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney aren't Jewish and it hasn't been Jewish presidents who implement their policies and it hasn't been Jews who vote those presidents in in the first place.

(On a sad side note, I was going to use Robert Kagan as an example of a non-Jewish prominent neocon, but according to Wikipedia, he is Jewish.)

Posted by Reality Man | June 25, 2007 3:46 PM

What else would neo-Khans want out of their internal sense of Trotsky other than the model of committed intellectual revolutionist reactonism which they believed would win them their insane goals?

You nailed it.

And this spreading Democracy with a sword stuff really is not traditionally conservative. As much as I don't like George Will or Patty Patty Buke Buke, say, it's not their bag (baby). I have no special love for old-school righties but I don't think they ever would have dreamed up the neocon lunacy on their own. They're just not that creative.

All this garbage about "clashes of civilizations" and "metrics for progress" -- that's all faculty club stuff, not country club stuff.

Posted by TomT | June 25, 2007 4:15 PM

"Peter K., you can keep arguing for maybe another decade on how building up a terrorist mafia force in Afghanistan really did good for everyone and the problem was only that we walked away (as if had the US attempted to continue meddling in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden and his forces would not have found other cause to find frustration with the US, despite his declarations that he had US abandonment issues),"

blah blah blah Longest. Sentence. Ever.

From Wikipeida: "As part of a Cold War strategy, in 1979 the United States government (under President Jimmy Carter and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski) began covertly to fund and train anti-government Mujahideen forces through the Pakistani secret service known as Inter Services Intelligence (ISI)."

Even with the benefit of hindsight, to this day Brzezinski still believes it was the right thing to do!

Wikipedia:
"Following the removal of the Soviet forces, the US and its allies lost interest in Afghanistan and did little to help rebuild the war-ravaged country or influence events there."

In a multilateral manner we should have helped rebuilt Afghanistan, just like we should help rebuild Iraq. Because we didn't, Afghanistan became a terrorist safe-haven. Fact.

Posted by Peter K. | June 25, 2007 4:38 PM

blah blah blah Longest. Sentence. Ever.

From Wikipeida: "As part of a Cold War strategy, in 1979 the United States government (under President Jimmy Carter and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski) began covertly to fund and train anti-government Mujahideen forces through the Pakistani secret service known as Inter Services Intelligence (ISI)."

Even with the benefit of hindsight, to this day Brzezinski still believes it was the right thing to do!

Certainly everyone from now until The Future will make their judgements on history based on uninformed snippets from Wikipedia and the views of Zbigniew Brzezinski.

After all, if Brzezinski and other people involved in creating and carrying out their terrorist fundamentalist Afghan mafias still believe they are right today just like they believed they were right the first time who could disagree?

God knows that those responsible for war always and forever look back with 100% clear and unchallengeable hindsight. Of course they do.

All the same, I'll tape a $20 bill to the closet door and check back in a decade to see if the mujahedeen fans still hold their nutty sway.

Posted by El Cid | June 25, 2007 4:46 PM

Glenn: a little late in the thread, but:

"No one expects the Spanish ... oh, buggah!"

Posted by reverter | June 25, 2007 4:59 PM

TomT, I may be "too much of a moron to reason with" - who knows - but at least I can read. You, apparently, can't.
In response to my complaint about the tired "neocons are really just Trotskyites" "extreme left to extreme right, that's not far to move" nonsense, Reality Man argued that neocons praise Trotsky. I pointed out that that proves absolutely nothing.
Your believe that the "neocons love for chaos" must have grown out of some "Trotskyite tenet" is based on what exactly? Faith? As Ed Marshall remarked, the founders of neoconservatism were Shachtmanites who took pretty much one thing from Trotskyism: its enmity to Stalinism (in other words, we are talking cold war liberals here). There seems to be a misconception that neoconservatism somehow originated in radical seventies-style Trotskyism, but that's just not the case. My advice: get some information before spouting off on things you don't understand. Jeez.

As for war communism: indeed, there happened to be a war on. The communists tried to win it. What a shock. Of course, war communism was pretty much the opposite of intentional chaos, it involved centralization of control as opposed to Workers Councils etc. (the Cheka, well-known purveyors of anarchy...). Try again.

In reality, the neoconservative foreign policy prescriptions are simply an especially insane tactical variation on good old liberal imperialism.

Posted by christian h. | June 25, 2007 5:34 PM

I'm sorry I called you a moron, christian h.

You write:
In reality, the neoconservative foreign policy prescriptions are simply an especially insane tactical variation on good old liberal imperialism.

I agree with you. But that doesn't mean that some of the insanity doesn't come from the Trotskyite background of the neocons, which is all anyone is trying to say.

Posted by TomT | June 25, 2007 6:46 PM

TomT, that's all right - you may have noticed I can be fairly, well, sharp in a political discussion myself (I'm one of those annoying Trotskyites myself...).
Some part of the neocon way of thinking may or may not come from certain (mis-)interpretations of Leninism and Trotskyism (for example the anti-democratic elitism they exhibit, and a tendency towards sectarianism), but I seriously don't think any penchant for chaos they may have does.

Posted by christian h. | June 25, 2007 7:01 PM

I would not be one of those arguing that the neo-Khans drew any actual or substantive inspiration from Trotsky, the historical personage, or "Trotskyism", a huge and occasionally undefined category.

It's simpler than that, I think.

I never really thought anyone was seriously arguing that the neo-Khans actually were modeling themselves on Trotsky's ideas and aims.

I thought most people were suggesting that the neo-Khans were merely aping the form and feel of the defiant revolutionary intellectual, drawing on the same categories of appeals and styles of rhetoric that once inspired many of them personally, and that one might have used in a leftist revolutionary cause, and applying it to the insane dreams they came up with.

Examples of leftists becoming radical right wing maniacs aren't unknown. Particularly when an individual wants to be the revolutionary intellectual at the center of power or close to it, urging it in their desired direction.

Mussolini knew well how to manipulate and use to an extensive degree his revolutionary Socialist background and style while transforming everything into a completely anti-Socialist fascist outlook. He very much used a gread deal of the form of revolutionary Socialism, while rejecting the substance. (I.e., his whole bit about there really being no serious class conflict within nations, rather the world being a conflict between "proletarian" and "bourgeois" nations.)

That seemed to me a similar example to what was being suggested of the neo-Khans' use of leftist revolutionary intellectual styles for quite reactionary policies.

Posted by El Cid | June 25, 2007 8:42 PM

Yeah, but the point would be that they really aren't disaffected communists, their intellectual heritage is disaffected liberals put off by communists. Their communist credentials are just awful.

Posted by Ed Marshall | June 25, 2007 8:56 PM

"These are adolescents playing Risk, and we're the pieces.

Posted by MarkC"

Thank you MarkC I've been saying that for a looooong time. Great to finally hear it from someone else. They're a bunch of pimply faced dinks playing a board game.

These are the little punks who read half way through chapter one and believed they knew the subject cold.

They were influenced by someone who, IMHO, was a raving goddamn lunatic. A mathematician who formulated his views without regard to history, culture, politics, etc. Styled himself a moralist. It's amazing that people in high places often hung on his every word especially right-wing whack jobs like Reagan. I believe that the Dr. Strangelove character was modeled on him.

Madness, total f*cking madness.

Posted by cal1942 | June 26, 2007 4:04 AM

Here's the weirdest part of Cohen's piece:

Whatever else the bungled Iraq operation has been, it marked the end of American buttressing of a poisonous Middle Eastern stasis and a murderous Stalinist regime.

Uh, I believe Operation Desert Storm marked the end of American buttressing of that particular murderous Stalinist regime. How exactly does Cohen have the US "buttressing" Saddam's regime from 1991 to 2003? It's as if Cohen's foreign policy control panel only has two buttons: "US invades" and "US does not invade". He needs to check out the onscreen menu, there's a few useful settings in between there.

Posted by mattsteinglass | June 26, 2007 4:44 AM

I remember that there was a major "issue" regarding the range of the scuds Iraq owned being greater than 100 miles which was deemed a "major" security issue. This along with the non-existant Nigerian Uranium were examples of the dire threat Iraq posed to the west. Within a week or two North Korea test fired it`s extended range missiles which ( I don`t know th exact range) but far more threatening. The real reason I am convinced is that the war in Iraq was prosecuted for the sake of Israel and not it`s "dire threat" to the U.S.A.

Posted by Robert Hennecke | July 1, 2007 3:08 PM