http://www.gnn.tv/articles/3118/Love_Me_I_m_A_LiberalBy Sam Urquhart
A review of Stephen Marshall's Wolves in Sheep's Clothing
GNN co-founder Stephen Marshall is an activist, writer, film-maker, a Canadian moonlighting as an American as well as a traveller of the globe. And just like its author, Marshall’s new book, Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: The New Liberal Menace in America, is many things at once. The posing of the question “what drives 60s radicals into supporting military action to promote liberal ideals?” leads Marshall to explore issues stretching from corporate-led globalization, the historical importance of the American frontier, the theoretical virtues of apolitical centrist government and the troubled aftermath of a previous liberal intervention.
Above all else though, the book is an enquiry into where America is taking the world. Can America allow the world to simply “be?” Can it begin its retreat from empire and seek to restore (or create) viable multilateral international relations, without the ever present threat of interventions, be they military or financial?
Unfortunately, as I read it, Marshall’s answer is no. At least not now. If Americans want to project a humanistic liberalism which fights for equality, individual fulfilment and peace, then they will have to fight for it themselves.
Globalization and terror have implanted the idea of intervention into both the American press and political system. Isolationist conservatives or multilateralist liberals have been relegated to the op-ed pages of second rank newspapers, samizdat web-sites and John Stewart’s desk. Since 9/11 an elite consensus has arisen around the need for an aggressive and pre-emptive U.S. military, despite widespread anti-war sentiment. The stage remains set for military interventions, and, Democrats are at least as likely to launch them as Republicans. Public sentiment has not morphed into effective opposition.
What Wolves does is, if not a first, then a rarity. Marshall interviews some of the most prominent liberal hawks with a serious eye and ear, taking them at their word and tracing their “Damascene conversions” to pro-war positions. Resisting polemical rebuttals of their positions, he then goes further, drawing out some of the aspects of American intellectual life and history which situate these conversions in a wider context, that of the American frontier and the deceptively “flat” world of economic prophet Thomas Friedman.
In the end, it is for the reader to decide whether the interventionists make sense, given the context in which Marshall places them, opening up the text to the reader and encouraging them to form their own interpretations. With an almost lawyer-like instinct, Marshall leaves the “wolves” to damn themselves with their words.
Along with its serious subject matter, Wolves is also an exhilarating read. Marshall succeeds in fusing travelogue with political analysis, making the book more accessible than most in the same genre. It’s also not wholly pessimistic. Marshall describes the hegemony of interventionist ideas, but he also presents their flip-side. Peace in the future and continual war are both seen as very real possibilities. The activist in him allows Marshall to generate hope, but the journalist in him presents a formidable body of opinion that the anti-war movement will continue to confront as the Bush era winds down and, as Wolves reminds us, a probable Democrat administration kicks off.
Su-Berman and the flattening of the world
At a recent debate, Democrat presidential candidate Mike Gravel produced a small epiphany for the anti-war liberal left. “You people scare me” he said, calling out Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in particular for their willingness to consider military action against Iran. Clinton, runaway leader, expresses “total support” for Israel and fondles the nuclear button on the Iranian threat.
In a climate of fear, with rumors of war, there is an urgent need to confront such liberal hawks and to create leverage points to draw the Democrats back towards the left. Wolves takes on several of these hawks and provides more then enough ammunition to neutralize their rhetorical influence.
Paul Berman, for example, could be the archetypal liberal hawk: from 60s hellraiser, to Sandinista sceptic, to Gulf War booster and now, doom-mongering prophet of clashing civilizations. Still though, he tells Marshall, he claims to be a socialist.
The problem for Berman, is that by coming out all guns blazing against “Islamo-fascism” he has allied himself with the boosters of free-wheeling globalization, a globalizing capitalism which is fragmenting societies and creating room for extremist ideologies to thrive. High profile (and eloquent) liberal writers have chosen to adopt a marriage of convenience with conservative militarists, seemingly out of the hope that the actions of such allies will eventually produce liberal outcomes. But it’s a Faustian bargain.
Marshall notes that liberal hawks have been all but silent over the more illiberal interventions of the Bush administration or, indeed, the Clinton administration as well. When it became public knowledge that the U.S. government had closely assisted at least one covert attempt to topple the Chavez government in Venezuela, the Paul Bermans of this world were not quick to assert their antipathy towards such attacks on elected governments.
Similarly, and this is a point made forcefully by Marshall, liberal interventionists rarely couple their impassioned defense of regime change with a similarly committed advocacy of global economic justice. The deeply regrettable elevation of arch neo-conservative Paul Wolfowitz to the helm of the World Bank symbolizes this perfectly. The architect of a disastrous war lifted by nepotistic means to dispense “aid” and financial assistance to developing countries, a position which – predictably – he has used to enrich corporate contractors and to continue a long tradition of not helping the global poor.
Marshall brings in Samir Amin, Mark Engler, Naomi Klein and John Perkins to buttress his case, and it’s a well made case. He points out that where liberal interventionists play the pioneer role – smoothing the way for military action – neo-liberals invariably follow. It’s engrained within the system. As Engler tells him, even while arguing against the contention that the Iraq war was fought primarily for economic goals, “once they’ve taken over the country, they’re going to bring in a capitalist economy.”
Where Engler disagrees with Naomi Klein is on the question of necessity. For Klein, as for Amin, ventures such as the Kosovo and Iraq wars are the systemic product of neo-liberal capitalism – the imperial center opening up markets with, what Thomas Friedman memorably called, “the hidden fist”
http://www.gnn.tv/articles/3118/Love_Me_I_m_A_LiberalA ruthless analysis of the "so-called" liberals. First their embrace of neo-liberal economic globalization policies and now their tranformation into war hawks. This book should start some sparks and it's about time.
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