#3: "I'm Keeping a Distance from my Leftie Friends"
I feel ambiguous about the "peace" movement and the war. I went on the
peace rally here in NYC on the 15th and found myself getting in arguments
with people and wondering just how much in common I share with these so-
called “lefties.”
I supported the war in Afghanistan even thought I would've liked to see the
U.S. spend more money and energy rebuilding the country. Getting rid of
the Taliban seemed a worthy cause but most of my fellow protestors were
against it; I thought the fall of Milosevic and the protection of Kosovo (again
even though more careful regulation of Kosovo ethnic rivalries would be
recommended) was also justified but they were likewise against such
American “imperialism.”
At the rally I searched in vain for a speaker to condemn Saddam’s regime
or to at least advance an argument about how we should get rid of the guy
(not because of WMD but because he's a monster who's killed millions of his
own people). But most of the speeches were pitiful (and having Al Sharpton,
the shakedown artist par excellence, as one of the speakers didn’t help
matters).
A number of the people I walked with had a naiveté ("What did Saddam
ever do to us?", which is hardly an internationalist position for the left to
take and surely would not have been a very effective position to take
against Hitler) that bordered on the ridiculous.
If there was international coalition committed to fight the war but more
importantly committed to building the democratic peace afterwards (and all
that this entails), then I might be persuaded. Since that’s not the case, I'm
against the war because I do think it will make things worse. But I am
keeping a wary distance from some of my leftie colleagues these days.
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