And today is one of those times that, for me, renders pretty much all attempts to create a yes/no, good/bad dichotomy frankly rather shallow. I have watched the Libya arguments back and forth among my fellow lefties for months, a bitter feud rife with accusations of amorality, immorality, poor historical knowledge, poor understanding of US hegemony, inconsistency, purity, nationalism, isolationism – coming from everywhere, on “both” sides of the arguments. If you suspect I might be talking about you, you are fairly likely to be right. I don’t suspect this writing will make me any friends here today.
So today, I watch a group of people wrest control, via violence, from another group of people. I do so with as complex a set of feelings as I’ve had since the beginning of what is now known as the Arab Spring. I do so with mixed feelings to tepid, watchful, careful support for NATO intervention; support I developed while watching the Libyan government’s tanks roll toward Benghazi with explicit threat of massive violence to the population of the town. But that support is not solace and is not grounds for celebration, and any possible action that could have been taken by anyone outside of Libya is not a solution nor is it without its own moral failings and practical problems.
Before the feathers start flying, let me clarify a few things. I understand American imperialism, colonialism with its large number of meanings, hegemony, the history of US and European military and paramilitary conflicts in support of business and maintenance of the current economic, racial, and political power structure. I do not view the geopolitical goals of America as either morally pure or usually historically defensible. I have seen and know that many of our moral arguments for entering military conflict have been essentially constructed to provide political support for far more self-serving purposes; generally, fighting for the freedom of other people, always a paternalistic endeavor in the first place, is neither successful nor morally strong if the only approach used is to shoot them.
I protested the Iraq war vehemently, both on practical grounds and on philosophical ones; it was a war we chose to enter, with no signs of clear and impending tragedy, under completely false pretenses of American safety, quite obviously to galvanize American public opinion and to further the political aims of an American political party. The entire purpose of the Iraq war, as far as I’m concerned, can be summed up in a video feed of a triumphant, strong President strutting from a plane on an aircraft carrier, costumed in a codpiece fantasy of the Tough American Standing Masculine and Tall for Freedom. In my view, we peripherally went to war for oil, for business, for bases, and for control in Iraq, but we fundamentally went to war for image and for control in America. In my view, some in the GOP watched the collapse of two buildings in New York City – an attack on American soil, that killed American people, live on the television and with images most of us will remember until we die – as a means to solidify their own political power. Doing so well required a war, a clear enemy with which to unite the psychologically vulnerable American people behind a strong authority, branded GOP, that the people would henceforth grant more power indefinitely. All for our own good, of course.
I’m also painfully aware that if the Iraq war had gone exactly according to their plans, if we had indeed been able to “pacify” the population without American losses in the newspapers, they would have probably succeeded in their drive for power here that would allow them unfettered pursuit of hegemony elsewhere. For our own good, and for the good of all, especially if by “all” we mean the very wealthy business interests to whom America itself largely pledges allegiance.
I am not a dupe.
I am also not omniscient, I am also not equipped – none of us are – for the impossible task of knowing what’s best for anybody else. I watched events unfold in the Arab world this spring with a real sense of concern – after Tunisia and Egypt, the people of many other countries, people who are as complex and varied and with as many varied viewpoints as any other humans on the planet – themselves tried to rise against governments that have oppressed average citizens for decades or longer. And watched a hair-raising dynamic, one that has always had some truth but that is more and more true in the modern world with multimillion dollar military tools – those governments with the most willingness to crush their people began to do so, and with much success. This happened in far more countries than Libya, and I watched it all unfold, read all sorts of differing viewpoints from all sorts of Arab voices, read all sorts of Arab history to give me context. Grappled and struggled.
Philosophy is not simply an academic pursuit, and moral consistency is not necessarily purity. Philosophy builds our entire world, our ways of thinking that filter into our actions and relationships with real people in real ways. Moral consistency is what comes of strength of motivation, of seeing both a fundamentally ethical approach and a practical, longterm means for making it real. But neither philosophy nor moral consistency are enough, by themselves, to grapple with everything we face. People are not philosophical constructs, and they are not characters in morality plays. People are themselves, each individual with individual lives and struggles. Each situation, while it may have parallels with others or recurring philosophical issues, is also only itself and occurs in its own context with its own unique forces at play. And individual people – not faceless masses – are the real world stakes.
So while I can tell you all about American hegemony, American military imperialism, and the many, many failures of military interventions – both moral and practical – I can also tell you that none of that frankly makes one tiny bit of difference to the civilians in Benghazi who, on a day several months ago, stood watching their government send tanks to destroy them. Benghazi had hosted peaceful protests against the Gaddafi government, and the reaction of the government was to shoot them. I’ve seen many, many people on the left, in various places on the internets, argue that there was no proof that slaughter was about to occur; such arguments make me honestly and sincerely wonder whether they were paying any attention at all before NATO decided to intervene, because my view is that there have been few situations as clearly moving toward slaughter in most of modern history. Had we stood and watched, I see no grounds for any doubt that Gaddafi’s explicitly stated goal was about to be fulfilled.
Yes, I am aware that the government of Bahrain has been no less oppressive and violent with its protesters. Yes, I am aware that Syria has been granted quite a long time to crush its people with little reproach from the west. Yes, I am aware that the US government – if it truly felt threatened by “revolutionaries” – would be plenty brutal and plenty shady in finding them and destroying them; we have that history to guide us, and make no mistake – the first goal of any government is to retain its power at all costs. Governments justify this to themselves through “knowing” themselves to be acting in the best interests of the people, even the ones they’re assassinating or strafing.
I also know this: Gaddafi was alienated even in the Arab world, Gaddafi made no pretenses toward any real reform, Gaddafi had proven for decades that he would remain both overtly and covertly hostile not just to Western interests but to many others as well. Gaddafi’s government was indefensible even to other Islamic and culturally Arab states, making it much more feasible to build support across other nations for intervention before the slaughter ensued. Libya had also, for better or worse, managed to build itself an organized body of rebel leadership to whom clear support could be given. These things are not all true in Syria, they are not all true in Bahrain, and they are not all true anywhere, frankly, but in Libya, right then, in that context, during a time at which decisions of foreign powers held in their hands not only the fates of masses or movements or philosophies, but of thousands of real people who were most likely about to really die, and leave behind real mourners and real losses to real communities, each individually and each with individual reactions, motivations, and pain.
I don’t argue that NATO intervention in Libya is, or ever was, a slam dunk, obvious necessity, or that it is simultaneously without its perils, its moral problems, its reasons for philosophical or ethical disgust. The people who have died from NATO bombs were individuals, the people they left behind are no less full of loss and their mourning is no less important or painful. My honest view is that there are many, many reasons to oppose such intervention, that it is just as ethical a choice to view NATO intervention in Libya as having been a moral failure and a poor choice. My honest view is also that there are plenty of motivations, many of them self-serving and many more serving the wealthy, in every American foreign policy.
My problem is that I also think moral clarity, often a powerful force for good and for change in the world, also presents a real risk. The correct answer, of course, would be to not have dictators, not have means with which they can simply crush those in their way, and at the very least to not have so many conflicting and utterly amoral, immoral, or simply craven motivations for our relationships in the world that any action we take can and should be viewed critically and with caution, not just abroad but also by all of us here who strive for a better world for real people. But none of these potential answers are options, so we’re faced instead with the impossible task of finding a way forward in a world where dictators do exist (and some are our allies for multiple reasons, though not Gaddafi), those dictators have access to massive amounts of machinery against which revolution is, though not impossible, also highly unlikely to succeed, and in which our motivations as a country have not been and still are not unquestionable, our actions not necessarily aimed at betterment for all people, and our morality strongly tilted toward the service of those already in real power both here and abroad.
We should be grappling, as far as I’m concerned. We should be troubled by these choices, and we should be hugely dismayed by war. We should be bothered by Gaddafi, we should feel cautious about the leadership of the Libyans who have fought him, we should be bothered by NATO bombs and we should be bothered by US celebration. There are no right answers here; military conflict is never a right choice. It is, unfortunately, sometimes the only action left – the world sometimes presents us with a yes/no without presenting us with the right/wrong that would make the decision clear, and when violence is begun and supported, there are rarely many choices of response that neither allow it to continue unabated, nor respond to it through further violence. The bully won’t stop hitting the geeky kid on the playground while the other kids stand aside and watch.
I have no answer. Frankly, neither do you. We’re on the same side trying to find the best ways to make things more peaceful, more fair, more liberated, and more secure for the real people with whom we all share a planet. We’re on the same side, and nonetheless the ethics and the realities we see, the means by which we feel we can get to that better world, may vary and may reflect differences of opinion on matters of fact, may reflect differences of priority, may reflect differences of ideology. None of those conflicts here happen through a lack of care about issues, and none of them happen because some of us are smarter or more ethical or more committed or more educated than others – without commenting on whether any of those things may, at any time, be true or false, they also aren’t the point.
Only Libyans can fix Libya, and its path from here is unknowable. As far as I’m concerned only Libyans can have an opinion on the conflict there that stands on its own ground and with its own complex insight through self identities, and all I can do is my best to learn and listen and think hard, as one who has never been a Libyan. And I’m sure Libyans argue about it at least as much as we do, because no group of people is ever monolithic.
I don’t know whether it was “right” to intervene on the behalf of those Libyans who asked for intervention. Neither do you. I gave it my cautious support. If you didn’t, I don’t blame you, but I do hope you grappled with it. Not because of some false equivalence, and not because it doesn’t matter – indeed, I hope you grappled because of how very much it does matter, all of it. I did. I still do.
What we can do without fail here is care, think, question, and strive to understand. What we can do is support the development of philosophical and moral certitude, while simultaneously seeing its dangers. What we can do is be self-critical enough to question our own information, our own predispositions, our own biases, all around. And work hard to come back to a place where all of the truths – philosophy, ethics, practicality, history, law, culture, and economy – are neither subsumed by, nor themselves render invisible, our drive to support the real and varied other individual selves in the real situations, difficult choices, and life or death decisions that we all face together as a world.