I was once driven up to West Point by an Army colonel who said he had canceled his subscription to The New Republic because they had supported the Iraq War. The professional soldiers, because they have some sense of the honor of the military, are often critical about what politicians do with the army. They are committed to civilian control of the army, so they don’t challenge the government, which I suppose is a good thing, but they are often critical of what politicians do.
Do you think there is a need to discern the difference between physical bravery and moral bravery when it comes to how American citizens view the US soldier?
Most soldiers in most wars are kids and they have been told by their teachers and preachers and political leaders that the war they are going to be fighting in is just – and then they go, and they fight. It’s the grown-ups who have a responsibility to oppose the war. You can’t expect an 18-year-old kid in Vietnam to oppose the war. That was our responsibility.
Do you think progressives who supported the war in Afghanistan in the name of self-defense would also have to support Guatemalans, Nicaraguans and Cubans if they had used self-defense as a rationale for bombing American military installations because of US war crimes and US-backed terrorism in their respective countries?
Had the Vietnamese been able to manage an attack against American military installations here at home, that certainly would have been justified. It wouldn’t have been terrorism, it would have been war. We were at war and when you go to war you have to accept your own vulnerability to attack. And after the Cuban invasion that we sponsored in the Bay of Pigs, I guess a Cuban response directed at the places where we were training Cuban insurgents would certainly have been justified.
You have talked a lot about progressive solidarity. How should progressives try to establish solidarity with progressive forces in other countries like the Rojava Kurds, the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq or the Local Coordination Committee in Syria?
You have to think first at the level of the Left and then what we want governments to do. At the level of the Left we should be providing ideological support; we should be providing political and moral support; we should be raising money for these groups to help fund them; if there was an international Left capable of this, we might be organizing an international brigade in some of these cases. Right now, the international brigades come from the Islamists, not the Left. Maybe Doctors Without Borders and Amnesty International are the contemporary international brigades for the Left. At least they defend life against people who are tyrants and terrorists who take life. That’s what the Left should be about: to give whatever support it can give.
There has been a lot of talk about Islamophobia in the press. How should progressives approach freedom-of-speech issues that are being put to the test by Islamic terrorist attacks? How do we discern Islamophobia from legitimate critiques of Islam, which, like any religion, should not be above criticism?
Well, you just said it. We oppose nativists in France or Germany or the United States who hate immigrants. The know-nothings of the 1840s and 1850s hated Catholics and now we have similar kinds of campaigns against Muslims and we have to oppose those types of campaigns. At the same time, we have to be ready to criticize Islamic fanatics. I think it’s no different from looking back to the 11th century and criticizing Christian Crusaders while acknowledging that Christianity isn’t necessarily a crusading religion.
The jihadist interpretation of Islam is one possible interpretation of Islam, just as the Crusader interpretation of Christianity was one possible interpretation of Christianity. But there are other and better interpretations of both religions and those are the ones we should be supporting. ■
BILL WEINBERG
Bill Weinberg is the editor of CounterVortex and contributing editor for Native Americas, for which he has won three awards from the Native American Journalists Association. He is the author of Homage to the Chiapas: the new indigenous struggles in Mexico and War on Land: ecology and politics in Central America.
What do you make of Noam Chomsky’s critique of humanitarian intervention?
In terms of US intervention and the notion that ‘our’ hands are not clean because ‘we’ committed all these terrible war crimes in Iraq and ‘we’ backed the Turkish government when they were killing the Kurds and ‘we’ backed the Indonesian government when they were committing genocide in East Timor… Well, yes, all that is true. The insight behind this critique is that we have to understand there isn’t any such thing as humanitarian intervention; I agree with Chomsky on that. The word ‘humanitarian’ is referring to motives and I don’t believe there is any such thing as pure motives in the realm of statecraft, and especially in the realm of geopolitics. Any intervention the US takes, whatever propaganda or even self-delusion is employed, ultimately is going to be about protecting US strategic interests. Which ultimately means the interests of the US ruling class. To me, that’s axiomatic; it goes without saying.
It isn’t merely incidental that the US backed genocide in East Timor and then it was shedding all these crocodile tears about genocide in Kosovo and Bosnia. The ‘but’ is that, for starters, you have these idiots who go to the next level and flip reality on its head and say that in situations like Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Darfur or Syria there isn’t any genocide or ethnic cleansing and the perpetrators are actually the victims and the victims are the aggressors. This is just repugnant bullshit.
But there is still another problem here, and that’s making it all about US motives. This isn’t the only question we should be grappling with. When the Kosovar Albanians say ‘Look, we’re under attack from the Serbs, our villages are being burnt down, we’re being forced to flee up to the mountains, somebody help us,’ I don’t think they have to be immediately concerned about the motives of those who are coming to help them. They can be forgiven for having bigger concerns than that.
During the Kosovo intervention, there was the critique that the US was supporting Turkish atrocities against the Kurds at the same time they were bombing Serbia to supposedly protect the Kosovar Albanians.
But if your village has been burned down and you have been forced into a refugee camp across the border, what difference does it make to you that there are Kurds in Turkey that are in a similar situation? How does that lessen your plight? The Kosovars overwhelmingly approved of the NATO intervention, while some notable anti-Milošević Serbian opposition forces did not.
I supported the nonviolent civil resistance in Kosovo led by Ibrahim Rugova. The world would not recognize their movement. People in the United States displayed no interest in knowing this movement existed except for a few lonely voices like me and my friends in the War Resisters League (and Albanian-Americans, of course). This civil resistance came under unrelenting pressure, and that’s when the hotheads prevailed and said, ‘Fuck this nonviolence shit, we’re going to form a guerrilla army’. Ibrahim Rugova’s movement was sidelined and the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army] sort of stole the show and they become part of this big imperial game where the Germans were backing them, and the Russians were backing the Serbs, and the whole thing got really, really, ugly really fast, and it ended with NATO intervention. I see this as a lesson in the criticality of solidarity. If the Left is going to oppose US military adventures, it has got to get serious about solidarity.
You’ve written movingly about the Rojava Kurds in northern Syria. Do you think we should arm the Syrian Kurds and the Iraqi Kurds? My worry is that if ISIS defeats them, they will have more weapons.
The obvious answer to that criticism is: if they aren’t armed, their defeat is going to be more likely, isn’t it? Look at the analogy of the Spanish Civil War. No-one on the Left was saying that we couldn’t arm the Spanish Republic because if they lost the guns might fall into the hands of Fascists. Conservatives in the West were saying ‘hands off Spain, it’s not our fight’, and were