If I May · 31 October 2002
I direct your attention to Stand Down, a group web site comprised of writers from all political camps who oppose the invasion of Iraq, started by the terribly sane economist Max Sawicky. It is the first communal site in which I’ve ever asked to participate.
I have great hopes for it becoming a reliable source of comment and information freed of the sentimental histrionics and pre-emptive ridicule of any opposing view germane to warblogs, most of which have gone from licking each other’s wounds following 11 September 2001, to taking grim pleasure cataloguing every atrocity carried out in the name of Islam, to forming – with a sort of shuddering inevitability – into a lockstep neoconservative mosh pit in which the most cynical predictions of last fall – about those who would dare to advance a political agenda on the back of inconceivable human tragedy – have become not only true, but somehow above criticism.
Conversely, I expect Stand Down to be free of the gloomy handwringing that characterizes some sites on the left, among whom, now and again, a flurry of concern arises over What Must Be Done about whatever bile currently poisons the postings and comment sections of other sites. It shouldn’t be in the least surprising that xenophobic idiots driven by bloodlust and malformed patriotism are sharing their opinions every chance they get. Yes, there is unchecked hate speech. Great crimson swathes of it. Same as it ever was. Let them rant and screed and ‘fisk’ and bleat. As with any echo chamber, no one outside it is listening.
What will be made evident, I hope, is that opposition to the invasion of Iraq is not a reflexive ideological matter, born out of party allegiances, ‘anti-Americanism’, or what colour underwear one prefers. It is rather awareness that the world is being sold a bill of goods: one that is apparently having some success convincing people the invasion has anything to do with the restoration of democracy anywhere, or the war against al Qaida, or revenge for the attacks of 11 September, or weapons of mass distruction, or the protection of Israel, or some sort of effort at modernizing Islam, or, most gallingly of all, ‘regime change’ for the good of the Iraqi people.
As opposed, let’s say, to it being about natural resources, domestic politics, or about salvaging at any cost a presidency that has been, from every imaginable perspective, an unmitigated disaster.
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